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.
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(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)
