The person who wrote it works with or is connected to the charlatans at MIRI, confirming a law I've observed: take any reasonable idea and push it to extremes, then turn that into a movement, and you'll inevitably end up with strong-AI nutters, usually MIRI ones.
I think it's fairer to say you'll end up with zealots. Usually explicitly religious, sometimes not.
"Strong-AI nutters" are very specific case of "going too far with with a reasonable idea".
I'd disagree. Religions aren't built on reasonable ideas pushed to extremes, generally speaking. Religious ideas are generally involved in and compromised by social and political events, even if some involve reasonable ideas. For example, ISIS is far
less reasonable about gender equality than the Qur'an, because their society was tending that way, for reasons related to but going far beyond religion. Christian zealots don't push
Christ's ideas to extremes, they justify capitalism then go and start crusades, because they were generally going to go fight the people in the middle east...
What I'm talking about are rich people who manage to escape things like social realities, then push their ideas as far as they can, often crossing the "insane zealot" line,
then end up involved with MIRI.
It happened to Effective Altruists. It seems to have happened to a rationalist self-help group. I'm sure there are other examples.