“The default stance of conservation is to keep things as unchanged as possible or, alternatively, to return conditions to what they used to be, or somehow to make the Earth ‘more natural’ (which can usually be interpreted as meaning ‘with reduced human impact’). Not only are these untenable aspirations while the world’s human population continues to grow and each of us consumes more resources, but hold-the-line strategies implicitly dismiss as undesirable the continuing biological gains of the human epoch. Where is the logic in this? Attempting to prevent the establishment of ‘alien’ arrivals and to kill ‘impure’ new hybrids so as to maintain our ecosystems and species in some idealized state is not possible, nor is it obvious that the past state of the world is objectively preferable to the new state that is coming into existence.” -page 8
“Rearrangement followed by rearrangement is the norm. That is how species survive climate change. They move around. This is true even of species that are today confined to shrinking distributions in isolated mountains. They have survived because they have been able to move, even if that has only been up and down the same mountain. The greatest risk they face in the future is the possibility that they may not be able to move again.” -page 84
“Any attempt by humans to keep things just as they are is utterly pointless.” -page 84
“It seems to take somewhere between five hundred and two thousand years to convert xenophobia into love.” -page 105
“Intensive conservation efforts are lavished on the hybrid wisent. While conservationists will dismiss this hybridization as too long ago to worry about, measured against the long timeline of life on Earth, this ‘ancient’ hybridization happened at more or less the same time as the modern hybridization between the cattle and American bison. Yet our response to the two events are very different.
There seems to be a deep-seated feeling that every animal should be pure, whereas we know that, in reality, every individual of every species is likely to have at least some degree of past hybridization lurking within its genes. This attitude to genetic purity makes no biological sense, and it is not a viable way of managing the Earth. The exchange of genetic information between organisms that we usually think of as distinct – hybridization – is one of the ways in which new genetic forms come into existence and genetic fitness can potentially be increased.” -page 195
“Even if we were to remove every human from the surface of the planet today, it would not revert to what it once was.” -page 214
“The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist. Scott, as the Ithacan bard, Phemius, yells a few words and pounds a stick, but does not get to sing, tell a story or play the lyre: the most melodic note in the percussive soundtrack comes from the plucking of Odysseus’ bow (a beautiful sonic image of the archer as musician, borrowed from the poem). Nyong’o’s double part as Helen and Clytemnestra is hugely underwritten; she is given only a few minutes of screen time to perform a set of brief tableaux of female victims (the outraged bereaved mother, the abused wife, the repentant adulteress).
There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem. Homer’s Calypso has a wonderfully outraged, operatic speech about divine double standards: male gods can kidnap and rape any mortal woman they desire, but when a goddess tries it, Zeus and his cronies scupper her chances. It’s a clever and comical distortion of the mythological ‘facts’: the poem’s listeners know that it is primarily Athena (a female deity) who is taking Calypso’s mortal victim away from her (Hermes, whom she’s complaining to, is merely the messenger) – and Eos, goddess of the dawn, as we’ve been reminded only a few lines earlier, has not been prohibited by the divine patriarchy from holding on to Tithonus. Charlize Theron’s Calypso looks gorgeous, but she is never angry, never funny, not skilled in rhetoric, and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim. She’s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.
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It’s a challenge to represent deities on film without veering into Clash of the Titans silliness, so Nolan may have been sensible to leave them out. Even Zendaya’s underwritten Athena turns out to be a vulnerable victim of war, or perhaps a projection of Odysseus’ conscience – not a scheming and bloodthirsty war goddess. Other goddesses appear in cameo – Calypso, the seal-lady Sirens, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis – but there is no sign that we are supposed to realise they are goddesses. Poseidon, Hermes and Helius do not appear in person, although there are some scary storms and shipwrecks. One of my favourite moments was when Zendaya assures Damon that gods are not hard for mortals to understand: ‘Who doesn’t understand thunder? Fire?’ But the film wants to have it both ways. There are no gods, and yet shipwrecks and death are presented as the inevitable consequence of blinding the son of Poseidon and devouring the Cattle of the Sun. Zeus’ law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus. Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.
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The most obvious new spin that Nolan brings to the source material is a subplot based on a story from the Aeneid, describing the way the Trojans were tricked into taking the Trojan Horse (an invention of ‘cruel Ulysses’) into the city, thanks to the machinations of a Greek double agent called Sinon (his name means ‘harmful’). In contrast to the relatively positive representation of cunning intelligence in Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil makes Ulysses cruel and predatory; Sinon is his deceitful accomplice.
In Nolan’s movie, Sinon is played by Elliot Page, and far from being a bad guy he’s the film’s moral centre. He is recruited to the Trojan War as a plucky youngster, thanks to the evil machinations of a teenage draft-dodger, Antinous (played in adulthood by a charismatically slimy Robert Pattinson). The main emotional arc of the film concerns Odysseus’ belated realisation that he is complicit in Sinon’s exploitation because he failed to tell him the truth about the Trojan Horse plot. Once he recovers his memory, Odysseus is racked by guilt. The film doesn’t address the moral dilemmas raised by its own narrative invention, such as why it matters so much whether Batman told the whole truth to valiant Robin, given that he would be killed instantly either way – or why the sinless Sinon wants in on the scheme, if the sack of Troy was as bad as the movie wants to suggest. Odysseus’ lie to Sinon doesn’t start the Trojan War, and the Trojans would presumably have taken the horse into the city anyway – as they do in Homer’s Odyssey. This muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear.”
At least as serious is the question of what “merging” with AI would require of the human organism. Uploaded minds would have no physical body. They would exist as mere software floating in a digital ether—creatures in the form of pure information. They would never age, because software is immortal, and they could share memories, personality traits, and experiences with one another at the metaphorical click of a button. The boundaries between individuals would become porous, and everyone would meld into a giant amorphous digital hive mind. Consequently, uploaded humans would be so different from biological humans that we would classify them as forming an entirely novel species, which we can call “digital posthumans.”
As for what might happen if we don’t become digital posthumans, Altman predicted a kind of Terminator-level “conflict” that could end either with their enslavement—or ours. “We need to level up humans,” Altman told The New Yorker, “because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever. What a time to be alive!”
Altman’s account of the future is an instance of what I call “digital eschatology,” where “eschatology” refers to a belief system or narrative framed around the end of the world as we know it. Adherents of this view believe that the future will—and should—be dominated by digital rather than biological beings. It finds expression in Elon Musk’s claim that, because of AI, biological “intelligence” will soon constitute less than 1 percent of all the “intelligence” on Earth. Larry Page, cofounder of Google, has reportedly argued that “digital life is the natural and desirable next step in… cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good.” Like Altman, he imagines humans eventually “merging” with AI such that “one day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.”
In 2012, Page personally recruited Ray Kurzweil, the famed futurist and transhumanist, to work at Google. Kurzweil argues that the “singularity”—when humans merge with machines—is imminent, and that if you choose not to upgrade yourself, then “you won’t be around for very long to influence the debate.” Become posthuman or die out.
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As rank and untethered as these views are—and as much as they now serve to boost the narrative that AI is inevitable and can only be entrusted to our current tech elite—they are also an orthodox religious view within Silicon Valley. From leading scientists to young researchers, from tech CEOs to AI futurists, from AI “doomers” to “accelerationists,” nearly everyone agrees about one thing: The future will be digital. The age of biological humans is coming to an end, and the role of our species in this grand eschatological scheme is to initiate the new era of digital lifeforms—to trigger the singularity by creating superhuman AIs that usher in what Yudkowsky calls our “glorious transhumanist future.”
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To be sure, humanity has been “merging” with technology since the origins of our evolutionary genus, Homo. The first human species, Homo habilis, crafted stone tools to scrape meat from bones, among other things. These stone tools could be seen as technological “enhancements” of the human body, and consequently one could conceptualize our ancient ancestors as rudimentary “cyborgs.” Today, people have pacemakers to control their heart rhythms, electrodes in their brains to ease the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and cochlear implants to restore hearing. Many of us offload parts of our memories to computers. I doubt most people could recite their friends’ phone numbers; what’s the point of memorizing them when our smartphones can do it for us?
There is, however, a crucial difference between technologies that enhance humanity as humanity and those that would transform us into something completely different. The “merge” that Altman and other Silicon Valley extremists want to bring about would entail fundamental changes to the very nature of being human, because the ultimate goal, in Altman’s words, is to “crazy uplevel” people by reengineering them into digital posthumans.
Whereas I, and most people outside the Bay Area, advocate for technologies that improve the human condition, the tech elite advocate for technologies that would ultimately replace it with a new posthuman condition. That’s the point of “the merge”: to transition our species into a new digital era, whether you and I want this or not.
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Critical thinking is a core capacity of the human mind. It’s what enables us to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize information. By offloading such skills to AI, young people are becoming dependent on it for even simple cognitive tasks. They are essentially “merging” with AI by integrating it into their cognitive systems, alongside other brain structures like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. If AI were to become suddenly unavailable, these students might experience the loss as a serious if reversible form of brain damage. This coupling of human brains with AI is a small but nontrivial step toward Altman’s goal of radical cyborgization.
(I don’t agree that it is akin to brain damage. In fact, I think it is more similar to how students might have to learn how to use a card catalog to find materials if the internet ever went down. -gabs)
“The default stance of conservation is to keep things as unchanged as possible or, alternatively, to return conditions to what they used to be, or somehow to make the Earth ‘more natural’ (which can usually be interpreted as meaning ‘with reduced human impact’). Not only are these untenable aspirations while the world’s human population continues to grow and each of us consumes more resources, but hold-the-line strategies implicitly dismiss as undesirable the continuing biological gains of the human epoch. Where is the logic in this? Attempting to prevent the establishment of ‘alien’ arrivals and to kill ‘impure’ new hybrids so as to maintain our ecosystems and species in some idealized state is not possible, nor is it obvious that the past state of the world is objectively preferable to the new state that is coming into existence.” -page 8
At least as serious is the question of what “merging” with AI would require of the human organism. Uploaded minds would have no physical body. They would exist as mere software floating in a digital ether—creatures in the form of pure information. They would never age, because software is immortal, and they could share memories, personality traits, and experiences with one another at the metaphorical click of a button. The boundaries between individuals would become porous, and everyone would meld into a giant amorphous digital hive mind. Consequently, uploaded humans would be so different from biological humans that we would classify them as forming an entirely novel species, which we can call “digital posthumans.”