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This is all about serious researchers and engineers working to bring science fiction to life -- and then transcend anything SF writers have imagined.

David Hanson (maker of the world's most realistic humanoid robot heads, such as Robot Einstein), Mark Tilden (inventor of BEAM robotics and the Robo Sapien) and I are collaborating on a new project aimed at using the OpenCog Artificial General Intelligence system to control humanoid robots. The medium-term goal of the project is to create a humanoid robot with the rough general intelligence of a three year old child. Our focus is embodied learning and communication. We believe we are poised to make a breakthrough in cognitive robotics and general intelligence research, over the next few years. Getting to the level of three year old child will mean we have solved the "common sense knowledge" problem, and are poised to move on to human adult level AGI and address all manner of applied problems with our technology. We have some funding from the Hong Kong government, obtained together with our collaborator Gino Yu (an AI and consciousness researcher), and are seeking additional funds via an Indiegogo campaign; see http://geni-lab.com/help ...

The Reddit guidelines say that all AMAs require proof ... my proof is that I have just tweeted the link to this AMA from my Twitter account @bengoertzel ...

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r/IAmA - I'm Dr. Ben Goertzel, Artificial General Intelligence researcher, working with roboticists David Hanson and Mark Tilden on a new project aimed at making the world's smartest robot.

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This is all about serious researchers and engineers working to bring science fiction to life -- and then transcend anything SF writers have imagined. David Hanson (maker of the world's most realistic humanoid robot heads, such as Robot Einstein), Mark Tilden (inventor of BEAM robotics and the Robo Sapien) and I are collaborating on a new project aimed at using the OpenCog Artificial General Intelligence system to control humanoid robots.

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People keep asking me for comments about OpenAI. Rather than pasting the same stuff into dozens of emails, I'll just put my reply here...
(New links regarding OpenAI are appearing online frequently so I won't try to link to the most interesting ones at the particular moment I'm writing this. Use Google and investigate yourself if you wish 😉
Generally obviously OpenAI is a super-impressive initiative. I mean - a BILLION freakin' dollars, for open-source AI, wow!!

So now we have an organization with a pile of money available and a mandate to support open-source AI, and a medium-term goal of AGI ... and they seem fairly open-minded and flexible/adaptive about how to pursue their mandate, from what I can tell...

It seems their initial initiative is toward "typical 2015 style deep learning", and that their board of advisors is initially strongly biased toward this particular flavor of AI. So they are largely initially thinking about "big data / deep NN" type AI ... This should have some useful short-term consequences, such as probably the emergence of open source computer vision tools that are truly competitive with commercial systems.

However, it is worth noting that they are planning on spending their billion $$ over a period of 10 yrs or more.

So - Right now the OpenAI leadership is pumped about deep learning NN, in part because of recent successes with such algorithms by big companies. But their perspective on AI is obviously broader than that. if some other project - say, OpenCog - shows some exciting successes, for sure they will notice, and I would guess will be open to turning their staff in the direction of the successes - and potentially to funding external OSS teams that look exciting enough..

So, overall, from a general view obviously OpenAI is a Very Good Thing.
Open source and AI Safety
Also, I do find it heartening that the tech-industry gurus behind OpenAI have come to the realization that open-sourcing advanced AI is the best approach to maximizing practical "AI Safety." I haven't always agreed with Elon Musk's pronouncements on AI safety in the past, but I can respect that he has been seriously thinking through the issues, and this time I think he has come to the right conclusion...

I note that Joel Pitt and I wrote an article a few years ago, articulating the argument for open-source as the best practical path to AI safety. Also, I recently wrote an essay pointing out the weaknesses in Nick Bostrom's arguments for a secretive, closed, heavily-regulated approach to AGI development. It seems the OpenAI founders basically agree and are putting their money where their mouth is.
OpenAI and OpenCog and other small OSS AI initiatives
Now, what about OpenAI and OpenCog, the open-source AGI project I co-founded in 2008 and have been helping nurse along ever since?

Well, these are very different animals. First, OpenCog is aimed specifically and squarely at artificial General intelligence - so its mandate is narrower than that of OpenAI. Secondly and most critically, as well as aiming to offer a platform to assist broadly with AGI development, OpenCog is centered on a specific cognitive architecture (which has been called CogPrime) created based on decades of thinking and prototyping regarding advanced AGI.

That is, OpenCog is focused on a particular design for a thinking machine, whereas OpenAI is something broader - an initiative aimed at doing all sorts of awesome AI R&D in the open source.

From a purely OpenCog-centric point of view, the value of OpenAI would appear to be mainly: Something with a significant potential to smooth later phases of OpenCog development.

Right now OpenCog is in-my-biased-opinion-very-very-promising but still early-stage - it's not very easy to use and (while there are some interesting back-end AI functionalities) we don't have any great demos. But let's suppose we get beyond this point - as we're pushing hard to do during the next year - and turn OpenCog into a system that's a pleasure to work with, and does piles of transparently cool stuff. If we get OpenCog to this stage - THEN at that point, it seems OpenAI would be a very plausible source to pile resources of multiple sorts into developing and applying and scaling-up OpenCog...

And of course, what holds for OpenCog also would hold for other early-stage non-commercial AI projects. OpenAI, with a financial war-chest that is huge from an R&D perspective (though not so huge compared to say, a military budget or the cost of building a computer chip factory), holds out a potential path for any academic or OSS AI project to transition from the stage of "exciting demonstrated results" to the stage of "slick, scalable and big-time."

Just as currently commercial AI startups can get acquired by Google or Facebook or IBM etc. - similarly, in future non-commercial AI projects may get boosted by involvement from OpenAI or other similar big-time OSS AI organizations. The beauty of this avenue is, of course that- unlike in the case of acquisition of a startup by a megacorporation - OpenAI jumping on board some OSS project won't destroy the ability of the project founders to continue to work on the project and communicate their work freely.

Looking back 20 years from now, the greatest value of the Linux OS may be seen to be its value as an EXEMPLAR for open-source development - showing the world that OSS can get real stuff done, and thus opening the door for AI and other advanced software, hardware and wetware technologies to develop in an OSS manner.

Anyway those are some of my first thoughts on OpenAI; I'll be curious how things develop, and may write something more once more stuff happens ... interesting times yadda yadda!! ...

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People keep asking me for comments about OpenAI. Rather than pasting the same stuff into dozens of emails, I'll just put my reply here... (New links regarding OpenAI are appearing online frequently so I won't try to link to the most interesting ones at the particular moment I'm writing this.

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From the outside, America's alt right is a nebulous movement based on racism, nationalism, and white supremacy. In contrast, the tech elites in Silicon Valley look like a relatively worldly bunch, despite the calls from some quarters of the valley to break away from the plebeian masses of the US.

But despite their differences, strands of the two groups share strong links to "Dark Enlightenment," an obscure neo-fascist philosophy started by a British academic in the 1990s.

The birth of a manifesto

The primary figure behind Dark Enlightenment is Nick Land, who was a philosophy professor at Warwick University until he quit academia in 1998. His work is a form of "accelerationism" (broadly speaking, a belief that the tools of capitalism and technology should be sped up and dramatically enhanced) and he was, for a time, something of a cult figure for his work on internet and cyber culture.

While at Warwick, Land was part of "Cybernetic Culture Research Unit," which explored drugs, raves, and science fiction, and was affiliated with such notable figures as the philosopher Sadie Plant and the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. Land has never been a typical academic, and that shows in his writing. His Dark Enlightenment manifesto, published online in 2012, is florid, contradictory, and opaque.

Land's writings on in his blog and twitter can read like an alt-right rant, and comment sections on the far-right outlet Breitbart are apt to mention his work. Academic writers and former students of Land's have expressed ideas that are vaguely influenced by Dark Enlightenment. Others are more outspoken: One philosopher with clearly Landian ideas, Jason Reza Jorjani, who lectures at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is co-founder of altright.com and spoke at a white nationalist meeting led by Richard Spencer.

What are the tenets of Dark Enlightenment theory? There are a few consistent themes, circling around technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism. "It's an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point," says Benjamin Noys, a critical theory professor at the University of Chichester and author of Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism.

Those who have studied Dark Enlightenment describe an almost cult-like vision of a dystopian future. "It is a worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world," says David Golumbia, a new media professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "It becomes militarized, and states break down. For some reason that's difficult to understand, they seem to think these highly weaponized feudal enclaves would be more free than the society we currently have."

Land believes that advances in computing will enable dominant humans to merge with machines and become cybernetic super beings. He advocates for racial separation under the belief that "elites" will enhance their IQs by associating only with each other.

Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed, he argues, and corporate power should become the organizing force in society. Land is vehemently against democracy, believing it restricts accountability and freedom. The world should do away with political power, according to Dark Enlightenment, and instead, society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO.

Fans in high places

Earlier this year, Politico reported that White House strategist Steve Bannon is a fan of Dark Enlightenment. Meanwhile, the major proponent of the movement other than Land is software engineer Curtis Yarvin, who blogs as "Mencius Moldbug."

And while most Silicon Valley techies are unaware of and uninterested in Dark Enlightenment, there are notable figures and ideas that seem to share intellectual heritage and connections with the movement.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is a major backer of Yarvin's start-ups and, as The Baffler reports, in 2012, Thiel gave a lecture at Stanford with distinct Dark Enlightenment themes. "A startup is basically structured as a monarchy," he said at the time. "We don't call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that's not democracy makes people uncomfortable."

Growing Silicon Valley interest in creating a small, separate state is straight out of Land's writing. Meanwhile there are growing numbers of techies who identify with Yarvin and "neoreactionary" ideas.

And, of course, both Silicon Valley and Dark Enlightenment are products of and devotees to internet culture. Noys notes that certain values in Silicon Valley are vaguely sympathetic to Land's thinking. "There's this entrepreneurial belief that you're the master of the universe," he says. "They believe they're the exception that proves the rule, that anyone can be successful."

Land says that, though he expects Dark Enlightenment micro-states to first form on islands, Silicon Valley is "bound to be involved in the process" as these societies form.

The alt right and Silicon Valley are not the only two cliques with ties to Dark Enlightenment thinking. Avant-garde art artists have also dabbled in Dark Enlightenment. A London gallery, LD50, was shut down amid protests after Land was invited to talk at the gallery, providing a platform for Dark Enlightenment ideas.

"You could argue-though I wouldn't-that the alt right and Dark Enlightenment are artistic works," says Noys. "Twenty-first century art has been interested in transgression and shock, so there's an interest in how these people have used their memes to achieve their goals."

The philosophical masters of a popular movement

US president Donald Trump, Land says, is a "symptom of crisis" and sign that the West is broken. But Land views White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as, "an unusually interesting politician."

Dark Enlightenment proponents see themselves as "the philosophical masters" of the alt-right movement, says Noys. "Land sees himself as above all that, as a Philosopher King of a movement that's too populist and grubby for this liking," says Noys. "He's part of this continuum, that's pretty clear. But he's fighting to distinguish himself from the more populist end of things."

Golumbia agrees that "He probably thinks he's smarter than all of them [the alt right], or they haven't gone far enough. But they are definitely fellow travellers."

Land himself is dismissive of the alt right, which he calls "a predictable (and predicted) development of mass democracy, as it enters its collapse-phase" in an email to Quartz. Still, he says, "Insofar as it marks the end of global governance on the basis of evangelical egalitarian-universalism, it makes space for more realistic political conversations, which have notably begun to happen."

Land also rejects the idea that Dark Enlightenment has fascist elements, writing that "Fascism is a mass anti-capitalist movement, when the word isn't (more usually) simply a childish insult." As for racial divides, he says the science is "an empirical question" but "that human population groups are significantly distinct, however, is a matter so self-evident to ordinary people that it makes for a natural default."

Land's theories sound easily dismissible, and Nick Land is still largely unknown, but his neo-fascist ideas are finding niches where they flourish.. "I think there's this emergent fringe," says Noys.

Golumbia notes that Land's work attracted plenty of impressionable graduate students decades ago. It undoubtedly helps that offensive ideas are masked with references to respected writers and philosophers: Land has his own idiosyncratic reading of the German philosopher Nietzsche, for example, and the French 2oth century thinkers Deleuze, Guattari, and Bataille. And as far as accelerationism goes, Noys traces its intellectual heritage to the Italian futurists (who had their own ties with fascism).

Despite their long lineage, the ideas fall apart under scrutiny. "To those of us who were more skeptical, it looked like it had the seeds of a disturbing belief in a superman: This kind of digital hybrid cyber-being who was a lot better than the ordinary weak people," says Golumbia. "His writing is more and more obsessed with race, Islam, echoing the things that people like Nigel Farage say. He sounds like a visionary but really he's nothing but these reactionary clichés about how minority people are to blame for all of our problems."

Land, who has long perceived himself as a visionary, firmly believes that society and government as we know it will break down and his vision for the future will come to pass. "The crack-up is obvious to everyone," Land writes. "(That's why you're doing this story.)"

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The neo-fascist philosophy that underpins both the alt-right and Silicon Valley technophiles

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From the outside, America's alt right is a nebulous movement based on racism, nationalism, and white supremacy. In contrast, the tech elites in Silicon Valley look like a relatively worldly bunch, despite the calls from some quarters of the valley to break away from the plebeian masses of the US.

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Kevin Warwick is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. Prior that he was Professor of Cybernetics at The University of Reading, England. His research areas are artificial intelligence, control, robotics and biomedical engineering. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng.) and is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineering & Technology (FIET). He is the youngest person ever to become a Fellow of the City & Guilds of London Institute (FCGI). He is the author or co-author of more than 600 research papers and has written or edited 27 books (three for general readership), as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles on scientific and general subjects. He has broadcast and lectured widely and holds various visiting professorships.

Kevin was born in Coventry and left school to join British Telecom, at the age of 16. At 22 he took his first degree at Aston University, followed by a PhD and a research post at Imperial College, London. He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle, Warwick and Reading universities before being offered the DVC post at Coventry.

He has been awarded higher doctorates (DScs) by Imperial College and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague on different scientific areas. He was presented with The Future of Health Technology Award at MIT (USA), was made an Honorary Member of the Academy of Sciences, St.Petersburg, was awarded the IEE Senior Achievement Medal in 2004, the Mountbatten Medal in 2008, the Ellison-Cliffe Medal in 2011 from the Royal Society of Medicine and in 2014 was elected as a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2000 Kevin presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled "The Rise of The Robots". He has also been awarded Honorary DSc Degrees by the Universities of Aston, Coventry, Bradford, Bedfordshire, Portsmouth and Kingston and an Honorary DTech Degree by Robert Gordon University.

Kevin instigated a series of pioneering experiments involving the neuro-surgical implantation of a device (Utah Array/BrainGate) into the median nerves of his left arm in order to link his nervous system directly to a computer to assess the latest technology for use with the disabled. The development of the implant technology was carried out by a team of researchers headed by Dr Mark Gasson who, along with Kevin, used it to perform the ground-breaking research. Kevin was successful with the first extra-sensory (ultrasonic) input for a human and with the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans. His research has been discussed by the US White House Presidential Council on BioEthics, The European Commission and led to him being widely referenced and featured in academic circles as well as appearing as cover stories in several magazines - e.g. Wired (USA), The Week (India).

The Institute of Physics selected Kevin as one of only 7 eminent scientists to illustrate the ethical impact their scientific work can have: the others being Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Nobel, Oppenheimer and Rotblat.

His work is used as material in several advanced Level Physics courses in the UK and in many University courses including Harvard, Stanford, MIT & Tokyo. His implants are on display in the Science Museums in London and Naples. As a result, Kevin regularly gives invited Keynote presentations.

Kevin's research has involved robotics and he was responsible (with Dr Jim Wyatt) for Cybot, a robot exported around the world as part of a magazine "Real Robots" - this resulted in royalties totalling over £1M for Reading University. Robots designed and constructed by Kevin's group (Dr Ian Kelly, Dr Ben Hutt) were on permanent interactive display in the Science Museums in London, Birmingham and Linz.

Some of Kevin's recent research involves a collaborative project with the Oxford neurosurgeon, Prof. Tipu Aziz, using intelligent computer methods to predict the onset of Parkinsonian tremors such that they can be stopped by means of a deep brain implant. This work was hailed in the Mail on Sunday as "the most significant recent advance in biomedical engineering".

He also led an EPSRC sponsored project in which a cultured neural network (using biological neurons) was trained to control a mobile robot platform. This work, which was reported on in a New Scientist feature article, is now being used as an exercise for high school science studies in the UK. A Youtube video of this research has been downloaded/viewed 1.9 million times.

His presentations include The 1998 Robert Boyle Memorial Lecture at Oxford University, The 2000 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, The 2001 Higginson Lecture at Durham University, The 2003 Royal Academy of Engineering/Royal Society of Edinburgh Joint lecture in Edinburgh, The 2004 Woolmer Lecture at York University, the 2005 Einstein Lecture in Potsdam, Germany and the 2006 IMechE Mechatronics Prestige Lecture in London.The Annual Science Faculty lecture at University of Leicester in 2007. In 2008 the Leslie Oliver Oration at Queen's Hospital and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, guest lecture "Four weddings and a Funeral" for the Microsoft Research Chair. In 2009, Cardiff University, 125th Anniversary Lecture. In 2010 he launched the new Research Institute for Innovation Design and Sustainability at Robert Gordon University and gave the Ellison-Cliffe Lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine in 2011. In 2012 he presented the IET Pinkerton Lecture in Bangalore.

Kevin was a member of the 2001 HEFCE (unit 29) panel on Electrical & Electronic Engineering, was Deputy Chairman for the same panel in the 2007/8 exercise and is a member of the EPSRC Peer College. He also received the EPSRC Millenium Award (2000) for his schools robot league project. Kevin's research has featured in many TV and film documentaries, e.g. Inventions that changed the world (BBC2), Late Night with Conan O'Brien (NBC), Future Scope (RAI 1) and The Making of I Robot (Twentieth Century Fox/Channel 5). He has appeared 5 times in Time magazine and was selected by Channel 4 as one of the Top 6 UK Scientists for their 2001 series "Living Science". In 2002 he was chosen by the IEE as one of the top 10 UK Electrical Engineers.

Kevin's research is frequently referred to by other authors - recent examples being in books by Robert Winston, Peter Cochrane, Jeremy Clarkson and Susan Greenfield. Kevin's implant research was selected by National Geographic International for a 1 hour documentary, entitled "I,Human" screened in 2007 - this was broadcast in 143 countries and translated into 23 different languages. Some of his TV appearances are logged on the imdb website.

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Kevin Warwick is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. Prior that he was Professor of Cybernetics at The University of Reading, England. His research areas are artificial intelligence, control, robotics and biomedical engineering. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng.) and is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineering & Technology (FIET).

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Gun Nation – America’s deadly love affair with firearms

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is inequality about to get unimaginably worse?

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Is Inequality About to Get Unimaginably Worse?, The Inquiry - BBC World Service

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A special edition with Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus.

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In Greek tragedy, hubris inevitably leads to catastrophe. Many fear that we are now enacting just such a tragedy, with the hubris of liberal western elites giving way to global meltdown.

Since 1989 elites in the west have come to believe in the " end of history" narrative, according to which liberal democracy and free market capitalism have won over all rival social systems, and the world is therefore bound to become a global community managed through free markets and democratic politics. Pockets of heresy may endure - but, because they will suffer from poverty and violence, they will eventually see the light, open their borders, and liberalise their markets and politics.

However, since the global financial crisis of 2008 people all over the world have lost faith in the liberal recipe, and in 2016 even voters in the UK and the US rejected it. No wonder western elites feel disorientated. A bit like the Soviet elite in the 1980s, they do not understand how history deviated from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism to interpret reality. Disorientation causes them to think in apocalyptic terms, as if the failure of history to come to its envisioned happy ending can only mean that it is hurtling towards Armageddon.

Yet reality is not a Greek tragedy, and at the start of 2017 even liberal elites have reasons to look around with some optimism. In Greek tragedy, catastrophe precedes awakening - when Icarus finally realises how mistaken his hubris was, he is already in freefall and can do nothing about it. By contrast, in 2016 awakening has preceded catastrophe, which gives hope of a softer landing. The cardinal fact about the world of January 2017 is that it is still in very good shape.

Over the past decades, humankind's three greatest achievements have been to bring plague, famine and war under control. Modern medicine has been so successful in its war against epidemics that today, for the first time in history, most humans live long enough to succumb to cancer, heart attacks and old age rather than dying young from infection. Even more remarkably, in 2016 famine has caused far fewer deaths than obesity. Indeed, natural famine - resulting from an objective lack of food - has almost completely disappeared. Only political famine persists. If people in Syria or North Korea still starve to death, it is not because humankind cannot produce and transport enough food to sustain them, but because some government wants them to starve.

As for war, despite horrendous conflicts in a number of hotspots, mortality from human violence is comparatively lower than in any previous time in history, with fewer people dying from war and crime combined than from suicide or from car accidents. To realise how peaceful and prosperous 2016 has been, you just need to recall where humankind was 100 years earlier.

Of course, a string of wrong decisions, combined with the growing threats of climate change and technological disruption, may well result in catastrophe. But this is not inevitable. In the second part of the 20th century humankind - and that includes the Soviets and the Chinese communists - rose to the challenge posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the coming decades humans of all cultures and political opinions could well rise to the new challenges posed by global warming and artificial intelligence.

The fact that western elites are waking up from their dream of the end of history may actually increase our chances of confronting global problems successfully. Part of that dream was the notion that these elites knew best what is good for humanity. This resulted in serious geopolitical blunders, such as the eastward expansion of Nato and the invasion of Iraq. A more humble stance in Washington and Brussels may go a long way towards fostering international co-operation.

The Big Read

As the era of globalisation ends, will protectionism and conflict define the next phase?

Finally, whereas in previous crises in the 1930s and 1960s liberal beliefs were challenged by the rival ideologies of fascism and communism, today there are no real challengers. For all the disillusionment with liberal democracy and free markets, nobody has yet formulated an alternative vision that enjoys any kind of global appeal. Russian president Vladimir Putin is not Stalin - he has no ideology that might attract unemployed Greeks, disgruntled Mexicans or starry-eyed students in Cambridge. Isis has even less appeal to anyone outside the lunatic fringes. In the absence of alternative global ideologies, then, there is less chance of global ideological warfare. Instead, the coming years might well be characterised by intense soul-searching and by attempts to formulate new social and political visions. Indeed, liberalism might yet reinvent itself, just as it did in the wake of the crises of the 1930s and 1960s, emerging more attractive than ever before.

So how should we proceed in 2017? The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom, and swap panic for bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clear-sighted. If you feel tempted to declare that the apocalypse is upon us, try telling yourself instead: "The truth is, I just don't understand what's going on in the world."

The writer lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the author of 'Sapiens' and 'Homo Deus'

Letters in response to this article:
Do not mistake Putin for a darling of the west / From Professor Mindaugas Jurkynas Institutions must tackle an environmental ultimatum / From Dr Robin Russell-Jones

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At last, liberals are waking from a long dream

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In Greek tragedy, hubris inevitably leads to catastrophe. Many fear that we are now enacting just such a tragedy, with the hubris of liberal western elites giving way to global meltdown.

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'Sapiens' author calls for world leaders and citizens to join hands in facing the future - Global Times

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When it comes to humanity, there is one thing that Israeli Historian Yuval Noah Harari thinks will never change - our desire to pursue more.

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My ancestor from 70,000 years ago was smarter than me. He knew every plant, mushroom, animal, predator, prey in a several mile radius.

He knew how to make weapons. He knew how to capture something, make it edible. I can barely order delivery. And as far as weapons, they say "the pen is mightier than the sword" but I don't think a tweet is.

My ancestor also knew how to adapt to new terrains, how to handle strangers who could be threats, how to learn who to trust and who not to trust. I wish I had his skills.

Not only that. Archaeological evidence says his brain was bigger than mine. And bigger is better.

To make things worse, another animal made the entire human race its slave. Wheat domesticated us. It forced us to stick around for the harvest, horde up for years when the harvest might be bad, go from a life of a diverse diet to basically all carbs all the time. And it turned us from hunters to farmers.

But it's not all bad. And the news is actually very good. Probably the books I've recommended most in the past five years was " Sapiens " by Yuval Harari. And not only me: it's Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg's top recommendation.

And now Yuval has a new book, " Homo Deus" - i.e. where are humans heading? If Sapiens explored the last 70,000 years of human history, " Homo Deus " takes the trends into the future. What will happen next?

The answers are fascinating. And I had even more questions. I couldn't believe I was finally talking to Yuval after reading " Sapiens" so many times and recommending it on every list and giving the book to all of my friends. And then finally reading " Homo Deus ".

What made humans the only animal to spread across the entire globe? What was special about us? How did we go hundreds of miles into empty water to find Australia for instance? I would never take that risk! And then survive and flourish in a completely new ecosystem, just like we did in North America.

"Fiction," Yuval told me, and describes in his book. "We created elaborate fictions for ourselves: 'nations', 'corporations', 'religion', 'crusades', and perhaps the most successful fiction: 'money'. So I could use a dollar and some stranger in China can use a dollar and we can trust each other enough to do a transaction."

So what's next? "Homo sapiens are going to evolve again." Yuval said, "Technology is taking us there and technology is evolving much faster than we are."

I still can't believe I spoke to him. Five years ago I took his course on Coursera. I was thinking, "how did this guy get so smart?" And now I was talking to him.

And, like I said, the news was not bad.

Here's what I learned:

1. The economy needs you to invest in yourself

"There's a change in the nature of the economy from a material based economy to a knowledge-based economy. The main assets in the past were material like gold minds or wheat fields," Yuval said. "These are the types of things you can conquer through violence."

That's how we got California. The US invaded and absorbed their wealth. But you can't invade and absorb knowledge.

China isn't going to take over Silicon Valley and absorb all the wealth. "Today, the main asset is knowledge," he said.

The only good investment you can make for your future is the investment you make in yourself today.

Hone your idea muscle, build a network and a library of mentors, make a commitment to do one healthy thing a day. Because the health of your body impacts the health of your brain.

I try to improve 1% a day. That's it. That's how I invest in myself.
2. Explore Internal realities vs. External realities
Resources today are different. They're abstract.

Yuval said, "The source of wealth in California today is knowledge, in the mind's of engineers and technicians and CEOs. And you just cannot conquer it by force."

That's one of the reason's why Yuval says, "You see a decline in international violence."

The other reason: weapons are too powerful.

"Nuclear weapons have transformed war between superpowers," he said. War today is "collective suicide, which is why we don't have such wars since 1945."

Terrorism is different. Their weapon is fear. Yuval calls it "psychological menace." But he's really concerned about them in our future.

"Terrorists function by capturing our imagination, turning our imagination against us, and causing us to overreact," he said.

"In a way, a terrorist is like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so small and weak. It cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? The fly finds a bull, gets into the ear of the bull and starts buzzing. The bull becomes so enraged that it loses its temper and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the middle east over the last 15 years," Yuval said.

"Al-Qaeda could never destroy Iraq by itself. It got into the ear of the United States and the United States went wild and destroyed the middle eastern china shop for Al-Qaeda. This is how terrorism functions. And if you want to fight terrorism you should start with your own imagination."

For me, this means understanding that ideas are currency. Becoming an idea machine, writing ten ideas a day, so you get the new 'weapons' of Sapiens, is the key.

3. We're going from "humanists" to "data-ists"

In 500 years we might not be dealing with humans at all.

Look at Amazon for example. They tell us what to buy. We don't ask our friends. We ask data.

"Given the advances of bioengineering, brain-computer interfaces and so forth, I think it's very likely that within a century or two homo sapiens will disappear and be replaced by a completely different kind of being," Yuval said.

He says bioengineering is just one possibility. Another is we start connecting brains and computers to create cyborgs.

This isn't science fiction. It's already happening.

I'm sort of scared and sort of excited. We went from tribes to villages to cities to kingdoms to empires to "isms" to...data that will unite us.

The next step in our evolution. The final frontier.
Links and resources:

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Ep. 216: Yuval Noah Harari - The Next Step in Our Evolution - Altucher Confidential

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My ancestor from 70,000 years ago was smarter than me. He knew every plant, mushroom, animal, predator, prey in a several mile radius. He knew how to make weapons. He knew how to capture something, make it edible. I can barely order delivery. And as far as weapons, they say "the pen is mightier than ...

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The technium is anything useful a mind creates. -Kevin Kelly The goal of Beijing Technium 帝都科魂 is to foster an environment where people from various fields can network and produce ideas which will lea

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Beijing Technium 帝都科魂

Beijing, CN
192 transhumanists

The technium is anything useful a mind creates. —Kevin Kelly The goal of Beijing Technium 帝都科魂 is to foster an environment where people from various fields can network and pro...

Check out this Meetup Group →

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Jeremiah Bilas

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Beijing Technium 帝都科魂

On one cold weekend in January, big ideas come to Beijing. While the most populated country's capital has no shortage of big ideas--this past weekend was something special, bringing experts and advocates of ending aging and death, to building robots that can look and act like humans. It's a dizzying trilogy starting with TEDx Beijing, followed by the penultimate event, Geek Park: Global Innovation Forum (GIF), and the finale being Future Forum. For the second year straight, these three events have occurred in one weekend.

In his presentation at Sunday's Future Forum, SENS chief science officer, Aubrey de Grey -the man who put radical life extension on the map- summed up where this is all going when he stated that these ideas are now accepted in the scientific community. Aubrey likened the human body to a car. If you replace and repair the damaged parts, it can run indefinitely. Later, Aubrey recounted how his ideas on life extension were treated like crazy talk in his first trip to Beijing, but not anymore.

Ben Goertzel, an expert on artificial general intelligence ( Open Cog) and life-like robots ( Hanson Robotics), echoed this sentiment. Now, it's the CEOs making the most hardcore statements, and that's a good thing.

[Star Wars... The imagination leads to the realization of the dream.]- Yuanqing Yang, CEO, Lenovo

[Brains of human being should be connected.]-Jian Wang, chief technologist, Alibaba

[The innovation will allow us to live forever-celebrate the innovators/scientists- Enter the hardcore technologies.]- Lei Zhang, founder, chairman and CIO, Hillhouse Capital

Last year, Google's prophetic Ray Kurzweil expressed a similar trend in his second speech in China. His first talk brought a few hundred or so attendees. Last year's GIF pulled thousands to Kurzweil's keynote speech on brain emulation and the technological Singularity.

This year, the overwhelming vibe was that this is the tipping point. From being ridiculed as dreamers yesteryear, to being called rock stars today, the vision of Aubrey de Grey's work -to allow us to live as long and as young as we want- is now catching on here in China, and all over the world. An aging population is a global problem. Aging is a disease wherever you live, however, China may have the world's worst aging problem. Dr de Grey called upon Chinese innovators to step up and help solve the aging crisis.

China has a long history of prizing longevity. It also has a great culture of respecting elders. With a fusion of big money now interested, a congress packed with engineers, limited ties to religion, and no other way out-- I'm sure China will answer Aubrey's call to defeat aging.

from left to right~ Aubrey de Grey, Jeremiah 30steps Bilas, Ben Goertzel

Join us, globally at humanity+, and locally at Beijing Technium 帝都科魂.

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"Hardcore technologies" the norm at Beijing's Future Forum

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Published on On one cold weekend in January, big ideas come to Beijing. While the most populated country's capital has no shortage of big ideas--this past weekend was something special, bringing experts and advocates of ending aging and death, to building robots that can look and act like humans.

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In China's quest to shed its reputation as a land of copycats, the world's second-biggest economy is pouring resources in to the hottest area in technology innovation: artificial intelligence.

With the goal of nurturing world-class companies that can compete with the likes of Google and IBM in building intelligent machines, the Chinese leadership singled out AI as a key area of development in a report released during the National People's Congress in March. Soon after, the country's biggest technology companies -- Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent -- announced plans for AI laboratories and projects worth billions of dollars.

Many analysts believe AI is one area China can excel. With its huge number of online consumers, the country already generates vast amounts of data that could be used to understand behavioral and consumption patterns. The market for AI-related services, from chatbots to early-stage disease diagnosis, is projected to grow to 9.1 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) by 2020, from 1.4 billion yuan ($203 million) in 2015, according to Beijing-based consultancy iResearch.

China has already made real progress. In 2015, the country surpassed the U.S. with the number of published journals related to deep learning, a branch of AI that specializes in teaching machines to learn by themselves, according to the US National Science and Technology Council.

And their companies are following. Here are three Chinese AI companies shaping up to be leaders in their respective fields.

Read More: What Is The State Of Artificial Intelligence In China?
iFlytek
Forget about Apple's Siri, or Amazon's Alexa. In China, it's iFlytek's voice assistants that are powering household devices and business software. The Anhui-based company, which specializes in voice and speech technologies, has won many international competitions in speech synthesis and in translation between Chinese and other languages. It also beats Apple in speech recognition in the Chinese language, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The achievements mean that machines may soon take over typing and real-time translation jobs in China. Back in the 1990s, such tools were far less accurate than manual typing, with dialects, slang words and background noise tripping up the software. But recent advances led iFlytek to develop a cloud-based AI system capable of translating Chinese to a dozen languages including English, German and Uyghur. It has a 97% accuracy rate, according to the company.

iFlytek also enjoys a close relationship with state-affiliated entities. It is working with a dozen local governments, police and state-run banks to develop AI-based management and customer service platforms, according to a stock exchange filing. It is a market that is near impossible for foreign firms to break into, as local governments prefer working with domestic companies out of security reasons, said Ken Xu, a partner at Shanghai-based venture capital Gobi Partners.

"iFlytek's focus on Chinese-language speech technologies, together with government's protectionist bend, means it has a lot of future opportunities," he added.

Read More: Top 10 Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies
iCarbonX
Another area AI is poised to make a change in China is healthcare, as the country faces a shortage of doctors. According to the World Health Organization, China has 1.5 physicians for every 1,000 people, compared with figures of 2 in Mexico and 3.5 in Australia. The situation means that Chinese doctors are overworked, underpaid and have experienced a string of physical attacks from disgruntled patients.

AI could help alleviate Chinese doctors' workload, as the technology can be used for analyzing medical images, building healthcare databases and developing preventative treatments. One such firm is iCarbonX, a Shenzhen-based firm that is valued at $1 billion following an investment from Chinese web giant Tencent last year.

iCarbonX's business starts from building a digital avatar for each person. By collecting biomedical samples such as saliva, proteins and DNA, the company wants to create a virtual version of yourself that could be used for healthcare tests, predict future diseases and recommend wellness programs. It is also partnering with seven biotechnology companies worldwide to analyze data, the company's founder Wang Jun during a January conference.

Such AI-related healthcare services are still at very early stages, as the firms need to collect enough data and develop a standard for the nascent industry, Xu said.

"We will not see a breakthrough in the next two to three years," he said. "But progress will definitely be made for the next five to 10 years."

Read More: What Companies Are Winning The Race For Artificial Intelligence?
Baidu
The Chinese search engine operator, dubbed the Google of China, has dramatically ramped up AI research. It spends billions of dollars in R&D every year, and has said that AI accounts for the majority of those efforts.

It is Baidu's driverless car projects that could ultimately make a difference, despite a string of recent setbacks including the of its chief scientist Andrew Ng, a top mind in AI who helped to found the Google Brain project in 2011.

The potential market for fully autonomous vehicle is huge in China. According to the Boston Consulting Group, the global market for vehicles with self-driving functions could reach as much as $77 billion by 2035, and China is expected to account for 30% of total sales. Chinese lawmakers are pushing for a unified framework of related laws too, driven by the desire to shift to a high-end economy rather than one built on investment and low-end manufacturing.

China's own complicated road conditions may give Baidu an edge over the likes of Google and Uber. Every year, more than 260,000 people die in road accidents, according to the World Health Organization. Therefore, training robots to navigate such a difficult environment may lead to better technology, said Wang Shengjin, a professor at China's Tsinghua University.

"Traffic conditions are much better in foreign countries, so their robots don't have to cope with all those erratic driving problems," Wang said. "But in China, researchers have to face these issues from the very start."
Follow me on Twitter @yueyueyuewang

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The Chinese Tech Firms Pushing Boundaries Of Artificial Intelligence

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In China's quest to shed its reputation as a land of copycats, the world's second-biggest economy is pouring resources in to the hottest area in technology innovation: artificial intelligence.

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Rutger Hauer and Blade Runner - "30 years ago I saw the future"

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Rutger Hauer arrives early at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Milan. There, a restricted number of journalists and students met the deep and glacial gaze of the legendary replicant Roy Batty, the character who went down in the history of cinema with "that" sentence that we have all said, at least once in our lifetime: "...I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...".

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Each winter, hundreds of AI researchers from around the world convene at the annual meeting of the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Last year, a minor crisis erupted over the schedule, when AAAI announced that 2017's meeting would take place in New Orleans in late January. The location was fine. The dates happened to conflict with Chinese New Year.

The holiday might not have been a deal breaker in the past, but Chinese researchers have become so integral to the meeting, it could not go on without them. They had to reschedule. "Nobody would have put AAAI on Christmas day," says current AAAI president Subbarao Kambhampati. "Our organization had to almost turn on a dime and change the conference venue to hold it a week later."

The 2017 AAAI meeting -which ultimately relocated to San Francisco-wrapped up just last week. And as expected, Chinese researchers had a strong showing in the historically U.S.-dominated conference. A nearly equal number of accepted papers came from researchers based in China and the U.S. "This is pretty surprising and impressive given how different it was even three, four years back," says Rao.

China's rapid rise up the ranks of AI research has people taking notice. In October, the Obama White House released a " strategic plan " for AI research, which noted that the U.S. no longer leads the world in journal articles on "deep learning," a particularly hot subset of AI research right now. The country that had overtaken the U.S.? China, of course.

It's not just academic research. Chinese tech companies are betting on AI, too. Baidu (a Chinese search-engine company often likened to Google), Didi (often likened to Uber), and Tencent (maker of the mega-popular messaging app WeChat) have all set up their own AI research labs. With millions of customers, these companies have access to the huge amount of data that training AI to detect patterns requires.

Like the Microsofts and Googles of the world, Chinese tech companies see enormous potential in AI. It could undergird a whole set of transformative technologies in the coming decades, from facial recognition to autonomous cars."I have a hard time thinking of an industry we cannot transform with AI," says Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu. Ng previously cofounded Coursera and Google Brain, the company's deep learning project. Now he directs Baidu's AI research out of Sunnyvale, California, right in Silicon Valley.

* * *

China's success in AI has been partly fueled by the government's overall investment in scientific research at its universities. Over the past decade, government spending on research has grown by double digits on average every year. Funding of science and technology research continues to be a major priority, as outlined by the the Five-Year Plan unveiled this past March.

When Rao first started seeing Chinese researchers at international AI meetings, he recalls they were usually from Tsinghua and Peking University, considered the MIT and Harvard of China. Now, he sees papers from researchers all over the country, not just the most elite schools. Machine learning-which includes deep learning-has been an especially popular topic lately. "The number of people who got interested in applied machine learning has tremendously increased across China," says Rao. This is the same uptick that the White House noticed in its report on a strategic plan for AI research.

Chinese tech companies are part of the infusion of research dollars to universities, too. At Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, computer scientist Qiang Yang collaborates with Tencent, which sponsors scholarships for students in his lab.

The students get access to mountains of data from WeChat, the messaging app from Tencent that is akin to Facebook, iMessage, and Venmo all rolled into one. ("With AI, they can't do it without a lot of data and a platform to test it on," says Yang, which is why industry collaboration is so key.) In return, Tencent gets a direct line to some of the most innovative research coming out of academic labs. And of course, some of these students end up working at Tencent when they graduate.

The quantity of Chinese AI research has grown dramatically, but researchers in the U.S. are still responsible for a lot of the most fundamental groundbreaking work. "The very clever ideas on changing network architecture, I see those in the U.S.," says Ng. What Chinese researchers have been very good at doing is seizing on an idea-like machine learning-and cranking out papers on its different applications.

Yet as the research matures in China, Ng says, it is also becoming its own distinct community. After a recent international meeting in Barcelona, he recalls seeing Chinese language write-ups of the talks circulate right way. He never found any in English. The language issue creates a kind of asymmetry: Chinese researchers usually speak English so they have the benefit of access to all the work disseminated in English. The English-speaking community, on the other hand, is much less likely to have access to work within the Chinese AI community.

"China has a fairly deep awareness of what's happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true," says Ng. He points out that Baidu has rolled out neural network-based machine translation and achieved speech recognition accuracy that surpassed humans-but when Google and Microsoft, respectively, did so, the American companies got a lot more publicity.

And when it comes to actually shipping new features, China companies can move more quickly. "The velocity of work is much faster in China than in most of Silicon Valley," says Ng. "When you spot a business opportunity in China, the window of time you have to respond usually very short-shorter in China than the United States."

Yang chalks it up to China's highly competitive ecosystem. WeChat, for example, has built a set of features around QR codes ( yes, really), chat, payments, and friend discovery that make it indispensable to daily life in China. American social media companies only wish they had that kind of loyalty. "Product managers at Tencent have good sense of what customers want, and they can can quickly turn technology into reality," says Yang. "This cycle is very short." And to stay competitive, they're primed to integrate AI to improve their products. Whether Chinese tech companies use the AI wave to break into the international market remains to be seen-but they're already using AI to compete for customers in China.

In the academic world, AAAI has now taken steps to make sure Chinese researchers have input on the meetings. The exact date of Chinese New Year changes every year, but it's always in January or February, when the AAAI meeting usually takes place. Can't have them conflicting again.

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Each winter, hundreds of AI researchers from around the world convene at the annual meeting of the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Last year, a minor crisis erupted over the schedule, when AAAI announced that 2017's meeting would take place in New Orleans in late January. The location was fine.

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I first read Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago's southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the spectre of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass.

At Bible school, I had studied a branch of theology that divided all of history into successive stages by which God revealed his truth. We were told we were living in the "Dispensation of Grace", the penultimate era, which precedes that glorious culmination, the "Millennial Kingdom", when the clouds part and Christ returns and life is altered beyond comprehension. But I no longer believed in this future. More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this narrative, which envisioned all of history as an arc bending towards a moment of final redemption. It was a loss that had fractured even my experience of time. My hours had become non-hours. Days seemed to unravel and circle back on themselves.

The Kurzweil book belonged to a bartender at the jazz club where I worked. He lent it to me a couple of weeks after I'd seen him reading it and asked him - more out of boredom than genuine curiosity - what it was about. I read the first pages on the train home from work, in the grey and ghostly hours before dawn.

"The 21st century will be different," Kurzweil wrote. "The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems ... and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future."

Like the theologians at my Bible school, Kurzweil, who is now a director of engineering at Google and a leading proponent of a philosophy called transhumanism, had his own historical narrative. He divided all of evolution into successive epochs. We were living in the fifth epoch, when human intelligence begins to merge with technology. Soon we would reach the "Singularity", the point at which we would be transformed into what Kurzweil called "Spiritual Machines". We would transfer or "resurrect" our minds onto supercomputers, allowing us to live forever. Our bodies would become incorruptible, immune to disease and decay, and we would acquire knowledge by uploading it to our brains. Nanotechnology would allow us to remake Earth into a terrestrial paradise, and then we would migrate to space, terraforming other planets. Our powers, in short, would be limitless.

It's difficult to account for the totemic power I ascribed to the book. I carried it with me everywhere, tucked in the recesses of my backpack, though I was paranoid about being seen with it in public. It seemed to me a work of alchemy or a secret gospel. It is strange, in retrospect, that I was not more sceptical of these promises. I'd grown up in the kind of millenarian sect of Christianity where pastors were always throwing out new dates for the Rapture. But Kurzweil's prophecies seemed different because they were bolstered by science. Moore's law held that computer processing power doubled every two years, meaning that technology was developing at an exponential rate. Thirty years ago, a computer chip contained 3,500 transistors. Today it has more than 1bn. By 2045, Kurzweil predicted, the technology would be inside our bodies. At that moment, the arc of progress would curve into a vertical line.

any transhumanists such as Kurzweilcontend that they are carrying on the legacy of the Enlightenment - that theirs is a philosophy grounded in reason and empiricism, even if they do lapse occasionally into metaphysical language about "transcendence" and "eternal life". As I read more about the movement, I learned that most transhumanists are atheists who, if they engage at all with monotheistic faith, defer to the familiar antagonisms between science and religion. "The greatest threat to humanity's continuing evolution," writes the transhumanist Simon Young, "is theistic opposition to Superbiology in the name of a belief system based on blind faith in the absence of evidence."

Yet although few transhumanists would likely admit it, their theories about the future are a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology. The word transhuman first appeared not in a work of science or technology but in Henry Francis Carey's 1814 translation of Dante's Paradiso, the final book of the Divine Comedy. Dante has completed his journey through paradise and is ascending into the spheres of heaven when his human flesh is suddenly transformed. He is vague about the nature of his new body. "Words may not tell of that transhuman change," he writes.

Dante, in this passage, is dramatising the resurrection, the moment when, according to Christian prophecies, the dead will rise from their graves and the living will be granted immortal flesh. The vast majority of Christians throughout the ages have believed that these prophecies would happen supernaturally - God would bring them about, when the time came. But since the medieval period, there has also persisted a tradition of Christians who believed that humanity could enact the resurrection through science and technology. The first efforts of this sort were taken up by alchemists. Roger Bacon, a 13th-century friar who is often considered the first western scientist, tried to develop an elixir of life that would mimic the effects of the resurrection as described in Paul's epistles.

The Enlightenment failed to eradicate projects of this sort. If anything, modern science provided more varied and creative ways for Christians to envision these prophecies. In the late 19th century, a Russian Orthodox ascetic named Nikolai Fedorov was inspired by Darwinism to argue that humans could direct their own evolution to bring about the resurrection. Up to this point, natural selection had been a random phenomenon, but now, thanks to technology, humans could intervene in this process. Calling on biblical prophecies, he wrote: "This day will be divine, awesome, but not miraculous, for resurrection will be a task not of miracle but of knowledge and common labour."

According to Kurzweil, we would soon reach the Singularity, when we would be transformed into 'Spiritual Machines'

This theory was carried into the 20th century by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and palaeontologist who, like Fedorov, believed that evolution would lead to the Kingdom of God. In 1949, Teilhard proposed that in the future all machines would be linked to a vast global network that would allow human minds to merge. Over time, this unification of consciousness would lead to an intelligence explosion - the "Omega Point" - enabling humanity to "break through the material framework of Time and Space" and merge seamlessly with the divine. The Omega Point is an obvious precursor to Kurzweil's Singularity, but in Teilhard's mind, it was how the biblical resurrection would take place. Christ was guiding evolution toward a state of glorification so that humanity could finally merge with God in eternal perfection.

Transhumanists have acknowledged Teilhard and Fedorov as forerunners of their movement, but the religious context of their ideas is rarely mentioned. Most histories of the movement attribute the first use of the term transhumanism to Julian Huxley, the British eugenicist and close friend of Teilhard's who, in the 1950s, expanded on many of the priest's ideas in his own writings - with one key exception. Huxley, a secular humanist, believed that Teilhard's visions need not be grounded in any larger religious narrative. In 1951, he gave a lecture that proposed a non-religious version of the priest's ideas. "Such a broad philosophy," he wrote, "might perhaps be called, not Humanism, because that has certain unsatisfactory connotations, but Transhumanism. It is the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition."

The contemporary iteration of the movement arose in San Francisco in the late 1980s among a band of tech-industry people with a libertarian streak. They initially called themselves Extropians and communicated through newsletters and at annual conferences. Kurzweil was one of the first major thinkers to bring these ideas into the mainstream and legitimise them for a wider audience. His ascent in 2012 to a director of engineering position at Google, heralded, for many, a symbolic merger between transhumanist philosophy and the clout of major technological enterprise.

Transhumanists today wield enormous power in Silicon Valley - entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel identify as believers - where they have founded thinktanks such as the Singularity University and the Future of Humanity Institute. The ideas proposed by the pioneers of the movement are no longer abstract theoretical musings but are being embedded into emerging technologies at organisations such as Google, Apple, Tesla and SpaceX.

osing faith in God in the 21st century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the west dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnamable sense of dread. There were days I woke in a panic, certain that I'd lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat.

At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse - drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate - were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined.

To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It's not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting that there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical to it.

What makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself has obliterated. Transhumanists do not believe in the existence of a soul, but they are not strict materialists, either. Kurzweil claims he is a "patternist", characterising consciousness as the result of biological processes, "a pattern of matter and energy that persists over time". These patterns, which contain what we tend to think of as our identity, are currently running on physical hardware - the body - that will one day give out. But they can, at least in theory, be transferred onto supercomputers, robotic surrogates or human clones. A pattern, transhumanists would insist, is not the same as a soul. But it's not difficult to see how it satisfies the same longing. At the very least, a pattern suggests that there is some essential core of our being that will survive and perhaps transcend the inevitable degradation of flesh.

Of course, mind uploading has spurred all kinds of philosophical anxieties. If the pattern of your consciousness is transferred onto a computer, is the pattern "you" or a simulation of your mind? One camp of transhumanists have argued that true resurrection can happen only if it is bodily resurrection. They tend to favour cryonics and bionics, which promise to resurrect the entire body or else supplement the living form with technologies to indefinitely extend life.

It is perhaps not coincidental that an ideology that grew out of Christian eschatology would come to inherit its philosophical problems. The question of whether the resurrection would be corporeal or merely spiritual was an obsessive point of debate among early Christians. One faction, which included the Gnostic sects, argued that only the soul would survive death; another insisted that the resurrection was not a true resurrection unless it revived the body.

Transhumanists, in their eagerness to preempt charges of dualism, tend to sound an awful lot like these early church fathers. Eric Steinhart, a "digitalist" philosopher at William Paterson University, is among the transhumanists who insist the resurrection must be physical. "Uploading does not aim to leave the flesh behind," he writes, "on the contrary, it aims at the intensification of the flesh." The irony is that transhumanists are arguing these questions as though they were the first to consider them. Their discussions give no indication that these debates belong to a theological tradition that stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Common Era.

hile the effects of my deconversion were often felt physically, the root causes were mostly cerebral. My doubts began in earnest during my second year at Bible school, after I read The Brothers Karamazov and entertained, for the first time, the problem of how evil could exist in a world created by a benevolent God. In our weekly dormitory prayer groups, my classmates would assure me that all Christians struggled with these questions, but the stakes in my case were higher because I was planning to become a missionary after graduation. I nodded deferentially as my friends supplied the familiar apologetics, but afterward, in the silence of my dorm room, I imagined myself evangelising a citizen of some remote country and crumbling at the moment she pointed out those theological contradictions I myself could not abide or explain.

I knew other people who had left the church, and was amazed at how effortlessly they had seemed to cast off their former beliefs. Perhaps I clung to the faith because, despite my doubts, I found - and still find - the fundamental promises of Christianity beautiful, particularly the notion that human existence ultimately resolves into harmony. What I could not reconcile was the idea that an omnipotent and benevolent God could allow for so much suffering.

Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient. Within months of encountering Kurzweil, I became totally immersed in transhumanist philosophy. By this point, it was early December and the days had grown dark. The city was besieged by a series of early winter storms, and snow piled up on the windowsills, silencing the noise outside. I increasingly spent my afternoons at the public library, researching things like nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.

Once, after following link after link, I came across a paper called "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" It was written by the Oxford philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom, who used mathematical probability to argue that it's "likely" that we currently reside in a Matrix-like simulation of the past created by our posthuman descendants. Most of the paper consisted of esoteric calculations, but I became rapt when Bostrom started talking about the potential for an afterlife. If we are essentially software, he noted, then after we die we might be "resurrected" in another simulation. Or we could be "promoted" by the programmers and brought to life in base reality. The theory was totally naturalistic - all of it was possible without any appeals to the supernatural - but it was essentially an argument for intelligent design. "In some ways," Bostrom conceded, "the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation".

One afternoon, deep in the bowels of an online forum, I discovered a link to a cache of "simulation theology" - articles written by fans of Bostrom's theory. According to the "Argument for Virtuous Engineers", it was reasonable to assume that our creators were benevolent because the capacity to build sophisticated technologies required "long-term stability" and "rational purposefulness". These qualities could not be cultivated without social harmony, and social harmony could be achieved only by virtuous beings. The articles were written by software engineers, programmers and the occasional philosopher.

The deeper I got into the articles, the more unhinged my thinking became. One day, it occurred to me: perhaps God was the designer and Christ his digital avatar, and the incarnation his way of entering the simulation to share tips about our collective survival as a species. Or maybe the creation of our world was a competition, a kind of video game in which each participating programmer invented one of the world religions, sent down his own prophet-avatar and received points for every new convert.

By this point I'd passed beyond idle speculation. A new, more pernicious thought had come to dominate my mind: transhumanist ideas were not merely similar to theological concepts but could in fact be the events described in the Bible. It was only a short time before my obsession reached its culmination. I got out my old study Bible and began to scan the prophetic literature for signs of the cybernetic revolution. I began to wonder whether I could pray to beings outside the simulation. I had initially been drawn to transhumanism because it was grounded in science. In the end, I became consumed with the kind of referential mania and blind longing that animates all religious belief.

've since had to distance myself from prolonged meditation on these topics. People who once believed, I have been told, are prone to recidivism. Over the past decade, as transhumanism has become the premise of Hollywood blockbusters and a passable topic of small talk among people under 40, I've had to excuse myself from conversations, knowing that any mention of simulation theory or the noosphere can send me spiralling down that techno-theological rabbit hole.

Last spring, a friend of mine from Bible school, a fellow apostate, sent me an email with the title "robot evangelism". "I seem to recall you being into this stuff," he said. There was a link to an episode of The Daily Show that had aired a year ago. The video was a satirical report by the correspondent Jordan Klepper called "Future Christ", in which a Florida pastor, Christopher Benek, argued that in the future, AI could be evangelised just like humans. The interview had been heavily edited, and it wasn't really clear what Benek believed, except that robots might one day be capable of spiritual life, an idea that failed to strike me as intrinsically absurd.

One transhumanist believes we may reside in a Matrix-like simulation of the past created by our posthuman descendants

I Googled Benek. He had studied to be a pastor at Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the most prestigious in the country. He described himself in his bio as a "techno-theologian, futurist, ethicist, Christian Transhumanist, public speaker and writer". He also chaired the board of something called the Christian Transhumanism Association. I followed a link to the organisation's website, which included that peculiar quote from Dante: "Words cannot tell of that transhuman change."

All this seemed unlikely. Was it possible there were now Christian Transhumanists? Actual believers who thought the Kingdom of God would come about through the Singularity? I had thought I was alone in drawing these parallels between transhumanism and biblical prophecy, but the convergences seemed to have gained legitimacy from the pulpit. How long would it be before everyone noticed the symmetry of these two ideologies - before Kurzweil began quoting the Gospel of John and Bostrom was read alongside the minor prophets?

A few months later, I met with Benek at a cafe across the street from his church in Fort Lauderdale. In my email to him, I'd presented my curiosity as journalistic, unable to admit - even to myself - what lay behind my desire to meet.

He arrived in the same navy blazer he had worn for The Daily Show interview and appeared nervous. The Daily Show had been a disaster, he told me. He had spoken with them for an hour about the finer points of his theology, but the interview had been cut down to his two-minute spiel on robots - something he insisted he wasn't even interested in, it was just a thought experiment he had been goaded into. "It's not like I spend my days speculating on how to evangelise robots," he said.

I explained that I wanted to know whether transhumanist ideas were compatible with Christian eschatology. Was it possible that technology would be the avenue by which humanity achieved the resurrection and immortality? I worried that the question sounded a little deranged, but Benek appeared suddenly energised. It turned out he was writing a dissertation on precisely this subject.

"Technology has a role in the process of redemption," he said. Christians today assume the prophecies about bodily perfection and eternal life are going to be realised in heaven. But the disciples understood those prophecies as referring to things that were going to take place here on Earth. Jesus had spoken of the Kingdom of God as a terrestrial domain, albeit one in which the imperfections of earthly existence were done away with. This idea, he assured me, was not unorthodox; it was just old.

I asked Benek about humility. Wasn't it all about the fallen nature of the flesh and our tragic limitations as humans?

"Sure," he said. He paused a moment, as though debating whether to say more. Finally, he leaned in and rested his elbows on the table, his demeanour markedly pastoral, and began speaking about the transfiguration and the nature of Christ. Jesus, he reminded me, was both fully human and fully God. What was interesting, he said, was that science had actually verified the potential for matter to have two distinct natures. Superposition, a principle in quantum theory, suggests that an object can be in two places at one time. A photon could be a particle, and it could also be a wave. It could have two natures. "When Jesus tells us that if we have faith nothing will be impossible for us, I think he means that literally."

By this point, I had stopped taking notes. It was late afternoon, and the cafe was washed in amber light. Perhaps I was a little dehydrated, but Benek's ideas began to make perfect sense. This was, after all, the promise implicit in the incarnation: that the body could be both human and divine, that the human form could walk on water. "Very truly I tell you," Christ had said to his disciples, "whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." His earliest followers had taken this promise literally. Perhaps these prophecies had pointed to the future achievements of humanity all along, our ability to harness technology to become transhuman. Christ had spoken mostly in parables - no doubt for good reason. If a superior being had indeed come to Earth to prophesy the future to 1st-century humans, he would not have wasted time trying to explain modern computing or sketching the trajectory of Moore's law on a scrap of papyrus. He would have said, "You will have a new body," and "All things will be changed beyond recognition," and "On Earth as it is in heaven." Perhaps only now that technologies were emerging to make such prophecies a reality could we begin to understand what Christ meant about the fate of our species.

I could sense my reason becoming loosened by the lure of these familiar conspiracies. Somewhere, in the pit of my stomach, it was amassing: the fevered, elemental hope that the tumult of the world was authored and intentional, that our profound confusion would one day click into clarity and the broken body would be restored. Part of me was still helpless against the pull of these ideas.

It was late. The cafe had emptied and a barista was sweeping near our table. As we stood to go, I felt that our conversation was unresolved. I suppose I'd been hoping that Benek would hand me some portal back to the faith, one paved by the certitude of modern science. But if anything had become clear to me, it was my own desperation, my willingness to spring at this largely speculative ideology that offered a vestige of that first religious promise. I had disavowed Christianity, and yet I had spent the past 10 years hopelessly trying to re-create its visions by dreaming about our postbiological future - a modern pantomime of redemption. What else could lie behind this impulse but the ghost of that first hope?
Main photograph by Liam Norris/Getty Images This is an abridged version of an essay from the latest issue of n+1, on sale now. To find out more, visit nplusonemag.com/subscribe.

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God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism

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I first read Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago's southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well.

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Here's what happens. You are lying on an operating table, fully conscious, but rendered otherwise insensible, otherwise incapable of movement. A humanoid machine appears at your side, bowing to its task with ceremonial formality. With a brisk sequence of motions, the machine removes a large panel of bone from the rear of your cranium, before carefully laying its fingers, fine and delicate as a spider's legs, on the viscid surface of your brain. You may be experiencing some misgivings about the procedure at this point. Put them aside, if you can.

You're in pretty deep with this thing; there's no backing out now. With their high-resolution microscopic receptors, the machine fingers scan the chemical structure of your brain, transferring the data to a powerful computer on the other side of the operating table. They are sinking further into your cerebral matter now, these fingers, scanning deeper and deeper layers of neurons, building a three-dimensional map of their endlessly complex interrelations, all the while creating code to model this activity in the computer's hardware. As thework proceeds, another mechanical appendage - less delicate, less careful - removes the scanned material to a biological waste container for later disposal. This is material you will no longer be needing.

At some point, you become aware that you are no longer present in your body. You observe - with sadness, or horror, or detached curiosity - the diminishing spasms of that body on the operating table, the last useless convulsions of a discontinued meat.

The animal life is over now. The machine life has begun.
Richard Dawkins interview: 'It must be possible to construct life chemically, or in a computer'
This, more or less, is the scenario outlined by Hans Moravec, a professor of cognitive robotics at Carnegie Mellon, in his 1988 book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. It is Moravec's conviction that the future of the human species will involve a mass-scale desertion of our biological bodies, effected by procedures of this kind. It's a belief shared by many transhumanists, a movement whose aim is to improve our bodies and minds to the point where we become something other and better than the animals we are. Ray Kurzweil, for one, is a prominent advocate of the idea of mind-uploading. "An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system," he writes in The Singularity Is Near, "would run much faster than our biological brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of 100 trillion interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the rest time of the connections is extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics." The technologies required for such an emulation - sufficiently powerful and capacious computers and sufficiently advanced brainscanning techniques - will be available, he announces, by the early 2030s.

And this, obviously, is no small claim. We are talking about not just radically extended life spans, but also radically expanded cognitive abilities. We are talking about endless copies and iterations of the self. Having undergone a procedure like this, you would exist - to the extent you could meaningfully be said to exist at all - as an entity of unbounded possibilities.

I was introduced to Randal Koene at a Bay Area transhumanist conference. He wasn't speaking at the conference, but had come along out of personal interest. A cheerfully reserved man in his early 40s, he spoke in the punctilious staccato of a non-native English speaker who had long mastered the language. As we parted, he handed me his business card and much later that evening Iremoved it from my wallet and had a proper look at it. The card was illustrated with a picture of a laptop, on whose screen was displayed a stylised image of a brain. Underneath was printed what seemed to me an attractively mysterious message: "Carboncopies: Realistic Routes to Substrate Independent Minds. Randal A Koene, founder."

I took out my laptop and went to the website of Carboncopies, which I learned was a "nonprofit organisation with a goal of advancing the reverse engineering of neural tissue and complete brains, Whole Brain Emulation and development of neuroprostheses that reproduce functions of mind, creating what we call Substrate Independent Minds". This latter term, I read, was the "objective to be able to sustain person-specific functions of mind and experience in many different operational substrates besides the biological brain". And this, I further learned, was a process "analogous to that by which platform independent code can be compiled and run on many different computing platforms".

It seemed that I had met, without realising it, a person who was actively working toward the kind of brain-uploading scenario that Kurzweil had outlined in The Singularity Is Near. And this was a person I needed to get to know.

Koene was an affable and precisely eloquent man and his conversation was unusually engaging for someone so forbiddingly intelligent and who worked in so rarefied a field as computational neuroscience; so, in his company, I often found myself momentarily forgetting about the nearly unthinkable implications of the work he was doing, the profound metaphysical weirdness of the things he was explaining to me. He'd be talking about some tangential topic - his happily cordial relationship with his ex-wife, say, or the cultural differences between European and American scientific communities - and I'd remember with a slow, uncanny suffusion of unease that his work, were it to yield the kind of results he is aiming for, would amount to the most significant event since the evolution of Homo sapiens. The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

One evening in early spring, Koene drove down to San Francisco from the North Bay, where he lived and worked in a rented ranch house surrounded by rabbits, to meet me for dinner in a small Argentinian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. The faint trace of an accent turned out to be Dutch. Koene was born in Groningen and had spent most of his early childhood in Haarlem. His father was a particle physicist and there were frequent moves, including a two-year stint in Winnipeg, as he followed his work from one experimental nuclear facility to the next.

Now a boyish 43, he had lived in California only for the past five years, but had come to think of it as home, or the closest thing to home he'd encountered in the course of a nomadic life. And much of this had to do with the culture of techno-progressivism that had spread outward from its concentrated origins in Silicon Valley and come to encompass the entire Bay Area, with its historically high turnover of radical ideas. It had been a while now, he said, since he'd described his work to someone, only for them to react as though he were making a misjudged joke or simply to walk off mid-conversation.

In his early teens, Koene began to conceive of the major problem with the human brain in computational terms: it was not, like a computer, readable and rewritable. You couldn't get in there and enhance it, make it run more efficiently, like you could with lines of code. You couldn't just speed up a neuron like you could with a computer processor.

Around this time, he read Arthur C Clarke's The City and the Stars, a novel set a billion years from now, in which the enclosed city of Diaspar is ruled by a superintelligent Central Computer, which creates bodies for the city's posthuman citizens and stores their minds in its memory banks at the end of their lives, for purposes of reincarnation. Koene saw nothing in this idea of reducing human beings to data that seemed to him implausible and felt nothing in himself that prevented him from working to bring it about. His parents encouraged him in this peculiar interest and the scientific prospect of preserving human minds in hardware became a regular topic of dinnertime conversation.

Computational neuroscience, which drew its practitioners not from biology but from the fields of mathematics and physics, seemed to offer the most promising approach to the problem of mapping and uploading the mind. It wasn't until he began using the internet in the mid-1990s, though, that he discovered a loose community of people with an interest in the same area.

As a PhD student in computational neuroscience at Montreal's McGill University, Koene was initially cautious about revealing the underlying motivation for his studies, for fear of being taken for a fantasist or an eccentric.

"I didn't hide it, as such," he said, "but it wasn't like I was walking into labs, telling people I wanted to upload human minds to computers either. I'd work with people on some related area, like the encoding of memory, with a view to figuring out how that might fit into an overall road map for whole brain emulation."

Having worked for a while at Halcyon Molecular, a Silicon Valley gene-sequencing and nanotechnology startup funded by Peter Thiel, he decided to stay in the Bay Area and start his own nonprofit company aimed at advancing the cause to which he'd long been dedicated: carboncopies

Koene's decision was rooted in the very reason he began pursuing that work in the first place: an anxious awareness of the small and diminishing store of days that remained to him. If he'd gone the university route, he'd have had to devote most of his time, at least until securing tenure, to projects that were at best tangentially relevant to his central enterprise. The path he had chosen was a difficult one for a scientist and he lived and worked from one small infusion of private funding to the next.

But Silicon Valley's culture of radical techno-optimism had been its own sustaining force for him, and a source of financial backing for a project that took its place within the wildly aspirational ethic of that cultural context. There were people there or thereabouts, wealthy and influential, for whom a future in which human minds might be uploaded to computers was one to be actively sought, a problem to be solved, disruptively innovated, by the application of money.

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Brainchild of the movies: in Transcendence (2014), scientist Will Caster, played by Johnny Depp, uploads his mind to a computer program - with dangerous results.

One such person was Dmitry Itskov, a 36-year-old Russian tech multimillionaire and founder of the 2045 Initiative, an organisationwhose stated aim was "to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual's personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality". One of Itskov's projects was the creation of "avatars" - artificial humanoid bodies that would be controlled through brain-computer interface, technologies that would be complementary with uploaded minds. He had funded Koene's work with Carboncopies and in 2013 they organised a conference in New York called Global Futures 2045, aimed, according to its promotional blurb, at the "discussion of a new evolutionary strategy for humanity".

When we spoke, Koene was working with another tech entrepreneur named Bryan Johnson, who had sold his automated payment company to PayPal a couple of years back for $800m and who now controlled a venture capital concern called the OS Fund, which, I learned from its website, "invests in entrepreneurs working towards quantum leap discoveries that promise to rewrite the operating systems of life". This language struck me as strange and unsettling in a way that revealed something crucial about the attitude toward human experience that was spreading outward from its Bay Area centre - a cluster of software metaphors that had metastasised into a way of thinking about what it meant to be a human being.

And it was the sameessential metaphor that lay at the heart of Koene's project: the mind as a piece of software, an application running on the platform of flesh. When he used the term "emulation", he was using it explicitly to evoke the sense in which a PC's operating system could be emulated on a Mac, as what he called "platform independent code".

Live forever: Scientists say they'll extend life 'well beyond 120'

The relevant science for whole brain emulation is, as you'd expect, hideously complicated, and its interpretation deeply ambiguous, but if I can risk a gross oversimplification here, I will say that it is possible to conceive of the idea as something like this: first, you scan the pertinent information in a person's brain - the neurons, the endlessly ramifying connections between them, the information-processing activity of which consciousness is seen as a byproduct - through whatever technology, or combination of technologies, becomes feasible first (nanobots, electron microscopy, etc). That scan then becomes a blueprint for the reconstruction of the subject brain's neural networks, which is then converted into a computational model. Finally, you emulate all of this on a third-party non-flesh-based substrate: some kind of supercomputer or a humanoid machine designed to reproduce and extend the experience of embodiment - something, perhaps, like Natasha Vita-More's Primo Posthuman.

The whole point of substrate independence, as Koene pointed out to me whenever I asked him what it would be like to exist outside of a human body, - and I asked him many times, in various ways - was that it would be like no one thing, because there would be no one substrate, no one medium of being. This was the concept transhumanists referred to as "morphological freedom" - the liberty to take any bodily form technology permits.

"You can be anything you like," as an article about uploading in Extropy magazine put it in the mid-90s. "You can be big or small; you can be lighter than air and fly; you can teleport and walk through walls. You can be a lion or an antelope, a frog or a fly, a tree, a pool, the coat of paint on a ceiling."

What really interested me about this idea was not how strange and far-fetched it seemed (though it ticked those boxes resolutely enough), but rather how fundamentally identifiable it was, how universal. When talking to Koene, I was mostly trying to get to grips with the feasibility of the project and with what it was he envisioned as a desirable outcome. But then we would part company - I would hang up the call, or I would take my leave and start walking toward the nearest station - and I would find myself feeling strangely affected by the whole project, strangely moved.

Because there was something, in the end, paradoxically and definitively human in this desire for liberation from human form. I found myself thinking often of WB Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium, in which the ageing poet writes of his burning to be free of the weakening body, the sickening heart - to abandon the "dying animal" for the manmade and immortal form of a mechanical bird. "Once out of nature," he writes, "I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing/ But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make."

One evening, we were sitting outside a combination bar/laundromat/standup comedy venue in Folsom Street - a place with the fortuitous name of BrainWash - when I confessed that the idea of having my mind uploaded to some technological substrate was deeply unappealing to me, horrifying even. The effects of technology on my life, even now, were something about which I was profoundly ambivalent; for all I had gained in convenience and "connectedness", I was increasingly aware of the extent to which my movements in the world were mediated and circumscribed by corporations whose only real interest was in reducing the lives of human beings to data, as a means to further reducing us to profit.

The "content" we consumed, the people with whom we had romantic encounters, the news we read about the outside world: all these movements were coming increasingly under the influence of unseen algorithms, the creations of these corporations, whose complicity with government, moreover, had come to seem like the great submerged narrative of our time. Given the world we were living in, where the fragile liberal ideal of the autonomous self was already receding like a half-remembered dream into the doubtful haze of history, wouldn't a radical fusion of ourselves with technology amount, in the end, to a final capitulation of the very idea of personhood?

Koene nodded again and took a sip of his beer.

"Hearing you say that," he said, "makes it clear that there's a major hurdle there for people. I'm more comfortable than you are with the idea, but that's because I've been exposed to it for so long that I've just got used to it."

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Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov wants to 'create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual's personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier'. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation. One morning, I was at home in Dublin, suffering from both a head cold and a hangover. I lay there, idly considering hauling myself out of bed to join my wife and my son, who were in his bedroom next door enjoying a raucous game of Buckaroo. I realised that these conditions (head cold, hangover) had imposed upon me a regime of mild bodily estrangement. As often happens when I'm feeling under the weather, I had a sense of myself as an irreducibly biological thing, an assemblage of flesh and blood and gristle. I felt myself to be an organism with blocked nasal passages, a bacteria-ravaged throat, a sorrowful ache deep within its skull, its cephalon. I was aware of my substrate, in short, because my substrate felt like shit.

And I was gripped by a sudden curiosity as to what, precisely, that substrate consisted of, as to what I myself happened, technically speaking, to be. I reached across for the phone on my nightstand and entered into Google the words "What is the human..." The first three autocomplete suggestions offered "What is The Human Centipede about", and then: "What is the human body made of", and then: "What is the human condition".

It was the second question I wanted answered at this particular time, as perhaps a back door into the third. It turned out that I was 65% oxygen, which is to say that I was mostly air, mostly nothing. After that, I was composed of diminishing quantities of carbon and hydrogen, of calcium and sulphur and chlorine, and so on down the elemental table. I was also mildly surprised to learn that, like the iPhone I was extracting this information from, I also contained trace elements of copper and iron and silicon.

What a piece of work is a man, I thought, what a quintessence of dust.

Some minutes later, my wife entered the bedroom on her hands and knees, our son on her back, gripping the collar of her shirt tight in his little fists. She was making clip-clop noises as she crawled forward, he was laughing giddily and shouting: "Don't buck! Don't buck!"

With a loud neighing sound, she arched her back and sent him tumbling gently into a row of shoes by the wall and he screamed in delighted outrage, before climbing up again. None of this, I felt, could be rendered in code. None of this, I felt, could be run on any other substrate. Their beauty was bodily, in the most profound sense, in the saddest and most wonderful sense.

I never loved my wife and our little boy more, I realised, than when I thought of them as mammals. I dragged myself, my animal body, out of bed to join them.

* To Be a Machine by Mark O'Connell is published by Granta (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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'Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun.' The road to immortality

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Here's what happens. You are lying on an operating table, fully conscious, but rendered otherwise insensible, otherwise incapable of movement. A humanoid machine appears at your side, bowing to its task with ceremonial formality.

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Blade Runner - Final scene, "Tears in Rain" Monologue (HD)

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After losing her faith, a former evangelical Christian felt adrift in the world. She then found solace in a radical technological philosophy - but its promises of immortality and spiritual transcendence soon seemed unsettlingly familiar

* Read the text version here

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God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism - podcast

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After losing her faith, a former evangelical Christian felt adrift in the world. She then found solace in a radical technological philosophy - but its promises of immortality and spiritual transcendence soon seemed unsettlingly familiar * Read the text version here

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umans must become cyborgs if they are to stay relevant in a future dominated by artificial intelligence. That was the warning from Tesla founder Elon Musk, speaking at an event in Dubai this weekend.

Musk argued that as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, it will lead to mass unemployment. "There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot can't do better," he said at the World Government Summit.

If humans want to continue to add value to the economy, they must augment their capabilities through a "merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence". If we fail to do this, we'll risk becoming "house cats" to artificial intelligence.

And so we enter the realm of brain-computer (or brain-machine) interfaces, which cut out sluggish communication middlemen such as typing and talking in favour of direct, lag-free interactions between our brains and external devices.

The theory is that with sufficient knowledge of the neural activity in the brain it will be possible to create "neuroprosthetics" that could allow us to communicate complex ideas telepathically or give us additional cognitive (extra memory) or sensory (night vision) abilities. Musk says he's working on an injectable mesh-like "neural lace" that fits on your brain to give it digital computing capabilities.

So where does the science end and the science fiction start?

Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 4, 2016

So far, brain-computer interfaces have been used for relatively simple tasks, mainly to restore motor control for paralyzed patients and enable communication for locked-in patients with brain injuries that prevent them from communicating verbally or gesturally.

These interfaces involve decoding brain signals from the surface of the skull through EEG or via implanted electrodes and then translating those signals into a motion command for a robot or cursor.

There has also been some progress made in the other direction: using external electrical signals to stimulate the brain. This happened last year with Nathan Copeland, a paraplegic man who was fitted with a prosthetic hand with two-way feedback, meaning he can not only control the hand but "feel" when it's being touched.

Although medical applications are driving the research, there are also commercially available playthings that allow for novelties such as "mind controlled" drone racing.

Still, these are a long way from Elon Musk's vision of symbiosis between man and machine, which would require a much more granular understanding of the brain network that goes beyond the basics of motor control to more complex cognitive faculties like language and metaphor.

"We have over 80bn neurons in the brain. Our tools currently give us access to an extremely small number of neurons. With prosthetics, we're maybe talking about 100 neurons. We need higher bandwidth interfaces," said Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel, which aims to augment human intelligence with AI.

Professor Panagiotis Artemiadis of Arizona State University has been trying to get more bandwidth using a 128-electrode EEG cap to allow a human to control a swarm of flying robots with their brain. "We can already decode basic concepts like closing a hand or moving an elbow, but we can't decode more complex behaviors," he said.

He has created a system that allows for a single person to control the collaborative movement of multiple drones, for example making the flock move closer together so that it can fit through a narrow pass.

He is skeptical that the rise of AI will render humans irrelevant.

"We are building these machines to serve humans," he said.

Miguel Nicolelis, who has built brain-controlled exoskeletons and a brain-to-brain interface that allowed a rat in the United States to use the senses of the other in Brazil, agrees.

Humans won't become irrelevant until machines can replicate the human brain - something Nicolelis believes is not possible.

"The idea that digital machines no matter how hyper-connected, how powerful, will one day surpass human capacity is total baloney," he told the Guardian.

Nicolelis argues that the brain - contrary to what Musk and Singularity proponents like Ray Kurzweil say - is not computable because human consciousness is the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells. "Our brains do not work in an algorithmic way and are not digital machines," he said.

"It used to be annoying to see these kinds of statements, but now it's becoming serious. It's leading to mass hysteria."

Nicolelis acknowledges that digital automation will lead to "serious unemployment" among people who perform certain "mundane functions" that can be replicated by machines. "But that doesn't mean the human species will become obsolete."

The idea that digital machines will one day surpass human capacity is total baloney

Miguel Nicolelis, neuroscientist

He agrees with Musk that if we can interface directly with machines we can produce a "quantum leap" in what digital infrastructure has produced today, but predicts that humans will retain ultimate control.

This contrasts with current automated systems, like autopilot, where the human is merely supervising the operation of a computer. Similarly, doctors are outsourcing the diagnosis of certain diseases to supercomputers. Under these circumstances human skills diminish and people become subservient to machines.

"I'm thinking about a future where we reverse this trend. We use brain-machine interfaces to enhance our ability to treat people, to improve our quality of life," he said.

Better communication between humans and machines, particularly the transmission of emotional signals from humans, will be a powerful tool for building trust in automated systems, added Artemiadis.

For example, it would allow for humans to hand over control to an autonomous car with confidence. "It's about making the machine more intuitive using brain signals to understand whether the human is distracted or tired."

Columbia's Paul Sajda agreed. "Rather than put us in a doomsday scenario, let's look at how the relationship between humans and machines can evolve."

He said that most people will be "scared to death" to sit behind the wheel of a driverless car, but if the AI were able to read our emotional state it could start to make predications about our desires and build trust.

Sajda described the mostly non-verbal communication between a team of six Navy Seals, which includes gestures, emotional cues and facial expressions as well as some dialogue.

"In the future it will be three humans and four robots," he said. "How can they ensure there are these team dynamics that allow them to operate at the same level as a human squad? It has to do with trust between them."

Mind-reading devices or implants are likely to introduce unprecedented privacy concerns. Sadja talks about the notion of freedom of thought as an extension of freedom of speech.

"All of a sudden what's in your head can be expressed and communicated. One's private thoughts are important to protect, I don't think anybody - government or any company - should be charged with protecting them."

It's a concern shared by the University of Calgary's Walter Glannon, who studies neuroethics.

"There is a risk of the microchips being hacked by third parties. This could interfere with the user's intention to perform actions, violate privacy by extracting information from the chip," he said.

As it stands, these risks are theoretical.

"We really first have to understand the network [of the brain] and how all of these processing units communicate with each other and interact with the world," said Artemiadis. "We are really far away."

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Elon Musk says humans must become cyborgs to stay relevant. Is he right?

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Sophisticated artificial intelligence will make 'house cats' of humans, claims the entrepreneur, but his grand vision for mind-controlled tech may be a long way off