What do Silicon Valley’s strange and terrifying beliefs tell us about the future of technology and about ourselves?
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.“T.S. Eliot – The Hollow Men
The Hollowest Men
Do you remember the Metaverse?
Mark Zuckerberg would probably prefer that you don’t. The Facebook founder was all-in on the idea for a couple of years, renaming his company Meta and investing more than US$80 billion in the concept, before belatedly realising that digital avatars wandering round a boxy, pixelated 3D virtual space was not, after all, the future of humanity.
Never fear, however, the company hasn’t wholly given up on virtual worlds. Indeed, the flagship product for Meta’s gargantuan AI investment is their new co-branded Augmented Reality sunglasses, combining Ray-Ban styling with a tiny hidden high definition video camera and an AI-powered heads-up display.
Despite endorsement from one or other of the endless Kardashian-Jenners, the technology has been widely derided as “pervert glasses”. The product even starred in a spoof advert on bus shelters around London thanks to an activist group named Everyone Hates Elon.
If it feels like Zuckerberg’s Metaverse dream has turned dystopian, perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, the concept, and the name “Metaverse”, are lifted entirely from dystopian science fiction.
Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash is set in a world where economic collapse has led to the replacement of nation-states with privately-owned anarcho-capitalist republics. Just as in Zuckerberg’s version, Snow Crash’s Metaverse is a 3D virtual world where users wear Virtual Reality headsets to control “avatars”.
A subculture of users are so addicted to the platform that they use it constantly, preferring the Metaverse to reality. Metaphorically blurring the boundaries between virtual and real worlds, the titular snow crash is a virus which infects avatars in the Metaverse, causing real-life brain damage to users.
It might seem odd for a major company to take this dystopia as inspiration, but Zuckerberg leaned into it:
“Obviously, the book has this whole environment around [metaverses] that’s sort of negative, but I don’t think it has to be that way.”
Mark Zuckerberg
Others noted the irony. Zuckerberg’s renaming of Facebook triggered a now viral tweet from a journalist at satirical news site The Onion, observing Silicon Valley’s disturbing tendency to view dystopian science fiction not as a warning, but as a how-to guide.
As it turns out, Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is just the tip of the iceberg. To a quite astonishing degree, science fiction has shaped the aspirations and the worldview of Silicon Valley. The leading lights of the current AI boom believe some very strange things indeed. It’s impossible to understand them, their companies, or the technology they’ve unleashed on the world without understanding those beliefs and the no limits worldview that underpins them.
Buckle up, this is about to get wild.
The Verge of the Merge
In July 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared on The Relentless, a podcast that interviews prominent Silicon Valley founders. Altman’s episode bears the somewhat bland title “How to Start a Startup“, but it hit the headlines for one remark Altman made:
“We’re now, like, in the Singularity. This is the moment…I’ve been waiting for it my whole life.”
Sam Altman
Altman is by no means alone in this belief. Elon Musk has made numerous statements proclaiming The Singularity; here he is reacting on his social media platform X to the brief wild hype about Moltbook:
Note Musk’s strange second sentence about the power of the Sun, we’ll return to that a bit later on.
Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, meanwhile, has stated on more than one occasion that “we are in the foothills of the singularity”. Here he is reiterating that bold claim:
None of these quotes are outliers; each of Altman, Musk, and Hassabis have said or written similar things about The Singularity on multiple occasions, as have many other leading figures in AI. But what exactly is The Singularity?
The term originates in astrophysics, where a gravitational singularity, for example in a black hole, marks the point beyond which normal models cease to provide accurate predictions.
In the 1950s, AI pioneer John Von Neumann was said to have referred to rapidly accelerating technology approaching a singularity beyond which humanity would be changed beyond recognition. A decade later, British mathematician and codebreaker I.J. Good coined the term “intelligence explosion” to describe the scenario of humans inventing advanced machines which can themselves invent more advanced machines.
Enter Vernor Vinge.
No, that’s not a joke. While Vernor Vinge might sound like a Bond villain, he was in fact a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author. Vinge took Von Neumann and Good’s ideas to a whole new level. The opening of his 1993 essay, The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era pulls no punches:
“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
Vernor Vinge
Vinge went on to outline how that might happen, including the creation of super intelligent computers, large computer networks spontaneously becoming conscious, and computer-brain interfaces combining the best of man and machine.
Vinge’s paper might have remained an obscure footnote, had it not been for futurist Ray Kurzweil. His bestselling 2005 book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, predicted The Singularity would arrive within forty years. Crucially, however, he didn’t just see it as AI replacing humans, but as AI merging with humans, as nanotechnology, biotechnology, and brain-computer interfaces all improved.
In 2024, Kurzweil released a follow-up, The Singularity is Nearer. He broadly reiterated his previous predictions that AI more intelligent than humans would arrive by 2029, with the full merge happening by 2045. The subtitle of the book says it all: “When We Merge With AI”.
Sam Altman explicitly addressed “The Merge” in a 2017 blog post of the same title, in which he notes that:
“A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge… I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in.”
Sam Altman
Apparently aware that this isn’t a regular subject of dinner party conversation outside Northern California, Altman’s essay ostensibly aims to raise the rest of the world’s awareness of this burning issue.
After supporting this extraordinary statement with some gentle musings about the role of social media algorithms and smartphones in shaping human behaviour, Altman then well and truly dials it up to Vol Max:
“I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict…
…We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”
Sam Altman
The choice is as clear as it is grim: let humanity fade away, or merge with machines. As we’ll see, Altman, Kurzweil, Musk and the rest are all-in on the second option.
Brave New World
In 1957, evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley published a collection of essays, New Bottles For New Wine. In it, Huxley espoused his vision for the future of humanity, using the phrase “transhumanism” to describe the process by which the human species “can transcend itself”.
Huxley was a prominent but hugely controversial figure. Brother of Aldous, author of perhaps the original dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World, Julian was the first Director-General of UNESCO. During World War II he was Vice President of the British Eugenics Society, becoming President in 1959, long after the full horror of Nazi eugenics policies were revealed. Among a plethora of truly terrifying quotes, Huxley repeatedly used farming as a metaphor for cleansing the human race:
“No one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?“
Julian Huxley
Despite the term’s disturbing links to eugenics, Transhumanism persisted as a niche subculture until the 1980s, when early adherents began gathering at the University of California, Los Angeles. The movement really gained traction when British philosopher Max More launched a magazine, Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought in 1988. The Extropy Institute soon followed.
More coined “Extropy” as the opposite of entropy: if entropy describes the universe’s tendency towards disorder, Extropy represented humanity’s capacity to create ever greater order, intelligence and control. It’s an idea that’s absolutely central to Silicon Valley’s ethos.
So-called “Extropians” communicated via an e-mail list, the early internet’s precursor to chatrooms or social media. Notable members of the list included future Wikileaks architect, Julian Assange, as well as pioneers of AI, robotics, cryptocurrency and nanotechnology including Marvin Minsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Hans Moravec, Eric Drexler, and a couple of characters we’ve already met, Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge.
Unsurprisingly given those participants, Extropianism combined nanotechnology, AI, cryonics, space exploration, mind uploading, and libertarian politics, seeking to realise the Transhumanist vision of transcending mankind’s limits.
Another Extropian subscriber was Oxford Philosopher Nick Bostrom, who later became famous for his writing on super intelligent AI, particularly the alignment problem. In 1998 Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association, later renamed Humanity+, before setting up Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, with significant financial backing from Elon Musk.
At this point, continuing to point out the links between key figures in Silicon Valley and the Extropian/Transhumanist movement risks degenerating into a Carrie Mathison-style “wall of crazy”, complete with red thread joining the dots.
At the same time, however, while it would be easy to dismiss the Extropians as an eccentric aberration of the early days of Silicon Valley, these connections really matter. This was the intellectual milieu in which so many of the leading lights of AI – and the tech industry more broadly – came of age.
The hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares of the Extropians are front and centre in the narrative of the AI CEOs today. What binds these apparently disparate obsessions together is a profound rejection of limits. Death, ageing, intelligence, the body, scarcity, even the planet itself are not accepted as facts of the human condition, they are seen purely as engineering problems.
Crucially, the tech bros aren’t simply forecasting what technology might make possible, they are stating what they believe humanity ought to become. Their forecasts repeatedly smuggle in their worldview that constraints are inherently bad and that more is always better: more life, more intelligence, more humans, more growth, more energy.
Who Wants to Live Forever?
As Benjamin Franklin famously put it, there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. Many of the tech bros seem to disagree. For the sake of brevity we’ll ignore Silicon Valley’s complicated relationship with taxation and focus instead on their quest for immortality.
Multi-billionaire investor Peter Thiel is arguably the single most powerful person in Silicon Valley. Along with Elon Musk and others he co-founded PayPal, was the first outside investor in Facebook, co-founded big data surveillance giant Palantir, and made significant and early investments in OpenAI, DeepMind, and many other AI companies. He’s also well known as a mentor to Sam Altman and US Vice President J.D. Vance. The good news is that Thiel is going to live forever:
“Death? Basically, I’m against it”
Peter Thiel
In a 2023 interview with The Atlantic, Thiel admitted the origins of his immortality obsession lay in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which he claims to have read at least ten times. The books’ influence on Thiel, and much of Silicon Valley, is already well-documented. In another canonical case of the Torment Nexus phenomenon we saw with the Metaverse, Thiel and Alex Karp named Palantir after the all-seeing eye used by evil megalomaniac wizard Sauron.
But it wasn’t just the palantir that inspired Thiel:
“How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die. So why can’t we be elves?”
Peter Thiel
Thiel is by no means alone in his elvish obsession. The quest for immortality is a classic trope throughout human history, as familiar from Greek myths as from science fiction or fantasy. The Epic of Gilgamesh is more than four thousand years old, the oldest known example of a written story. A core theme of the sprawling narrative is Gilgamesh’ search for Utnapishtim, from whom he hopes to learn the secret of immortality. Lest we forget, cheating death and securing eternal life is the ultimate promise of many major religions.
Whereas the Greeks, Christians, or Muslims framed immortal life as the gift of the gods, Silicon Valley believes it’s just another engineering problem. Extropy Institute founder Max More made this contrast explicit in a 1989 essay, Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy in which he echoes Karl Marx in criticising traditional religion as a force for conservatism and a salve for the uncertainty and despair of certain death. Luckily, human progress will solve this problem:
“Science, technology, and reason must be harnessed to our extropic values to abolish the greatest evil: death.”
Max More
More put his money where his mouth is, becoming President and CEO of Alcor, the self-styled “world leader” in cryonics. He’s not the only one. Sam Altman’s Y Combinator fund invested in Nectome, a start-up promising to embalm your brain in frozen glass for hundreds of years, until the technology exists to revive you. Altman himself reportedly paid $10,000 and joined the program.
This isn’t Altman’s only bet on extending his natural life. He reportedly invested $180m of his own money in a longevity research firm named Retro Biosciences, which seeks to delay death by ten years. Jeff Bezos is a major funder of longevity research startup Altos Labs, while Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged much of their $200bn fortune to AI-powered biology research aimed at extending life. The list goes on and on: dozens of Silicon Valley billionaires are betting big on overcoming aging.
As well as altruism, there’s a certain selfish calculation going on. In his infamous essay Machines of Loving Grace, Anthropic founder Dario Amodei writes of AI-powered advances in biology doubling human lifespan to 150, by which point immortality should be within our grasp:
“Once human lifespan is 150, we may be able to reach ‘escape velocity’, buying enough time that most of those currently alive today will be able to live as long as they want.”
Dario Amodei
Ray Kurzweil is also banking on staying alive long enough for escape velocity to do the rest, apparently taking 80 pills-a-day to stay alive as long as possible. 48-year-old digital payments founder Brian Johnson claims to spend $2m-a-year on his quest to stay young forever, running a constant battery of diagnostics and taking dozens of supplements aimed at reducing his biological age, in Johnson’s words, “reframing what it means to be human”.
It turns out that abolishing death isn’t the only way of doing that.
Fresh Meat
Humans have long sought to improve our bodies. Diet, exercise, fashion, grooming, and cosmetics are huge global industries all aimed at taking the raw material we’re born with and perfecting it. Some of us take this to more extreme lengths than others with tattoos, piercings, dental implants, hair transplants, cosmetic surgery, even injecting deadly neurotoxins to freeze our wrinkles.
By now it probably won’t surprise you to learn that Silicon Valley plans to go to a whole new level. Here’s Kurzweil again:
“As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized body at will: we’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them.”
Ray Kurzweil
This vision seems positively understated, however, compared to Natasha Vita-More. While her husband Max More was the Extropian founder and Alcor cryonics CEO, Natasha was a key figure in the movement in her own right. As she explained in an interview with the ABC in 2001, she designed a prototype future human body named “Primo 3M+“:
“With humans living longer, let’s say at least 120, going on to a couple of hundred years if not indefinitely, we’re not going to be in these “meat bodies”, OK. So we let go of our meat wet bodies and we are put into other types of bodies.”
Natasha Vita-More
While this might seem like the ramblings of someone who should think about taking fewer drugs, Vita-More’s concept is taken seriously in Silicon Valley. Nick Bostrom listed “morphological freedom” as one of his core principles of transhumanism. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently echoed Bostrom, predicting that AI will provide individuals with complete “biological freedom” to choose their own weight, physical appearance etc.
Crucially though, AI will give us the ability not just to improve our bodies, but to transform our minds.
Mind Over Matter
As we’ve seen, The Singularity is all about the blending of humans and computers, a merger that Altman, Hassabis, Musk and many others think is already underway.
It’s crucial to note, however, these aren’t just predictions about the future, idle prognostications by publicity-seeking entrepreneurs. Silicon Valley’s billionaire class actively want the merger to occur and are investing their lives and their fortunes in making their Singularity fantasy a reality.
Musk is doing his best to accelerate the merge with his startup Neuralink. While much of the Transhumanist programme remains aspirational, this pillar is very real, today. Neuralink has already implanted electrodes into living human brains, enabling users to control computers and machinery with their minds. While current use cases focus on paralysed and brain damaged patients, Musk has always been very clear about the endgame:
“From a long-term existential standpoint, that’s the purpose of Neuralink: to create a high-bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI.”
Elon Musk
In case there’s any doubt about what “symbiotic” means, Musk makes clear that Neuralink will provide the “option of merging with AI”. That merge will, so Musk told Joe Rogan, enable “superhuman cognition”, adding AI as a third layer of brain to the limbic system and the cortex. To an extent, Musk’s dream here is just a more intrusive, more permanent version of Zuckerberg’s AI “pervert glasses”, with the heads-up display plugged into the visual cortex rather than on the inside of a lens.
At a Neuralink event in 2019, Musk spoke of the possibility of eventually uploading the brain’s contents to a computer. This is the ultimate triumph of the brain-as-computer metaphor I wrote about in The Ghost in the Machine. Nick Bostrom expresses it more clearly than most, claiming that silicon could replicate the computational processes of the brain (there’s that assumption again: the brain as computational processor) enabling brain upload. As Bostrom says, this would create mind-bending (literally) opportunities:
“…the ability to make back-up copies of oneself (favorably impacting on one’s life-expectancy) and the ability to transmit oneself as information at the speed of light. Uploads might live either in virtual reality or directly in physical reality by controlling a robot proxy.”
Nick Bostrom
Philosophers have grappled with the Mind-Body problem for centuries: how do physical bodies give rise to mental experiences? Silicon Valley promises to solve the problem in one fell swoop by eliminating bodies entirely. What started as a quest to improve the body’s performance and longevity becomes its abandonment. If physical bodies are a constraint, why not just eliminate them and live in the cloud?
Indeed, why not aim even higher than the cloud(s)?
Rocketman
In June 2026, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire when he listed a small fraction of his SpaceX company on the Nasdaq. Here is an actual quote from page 1 of the prospectus issued to investors:
“Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary…to harness the Sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets.”
Elon Musk
Anyone who remembers SpaceX’s Grok AI tool going rogue and calling itself MechaHitler might be forgiven for thinking the phrase “truth-seeking artificial intelligence” is the wildest part of this aspiration. That aside, solar powered data centres in space, moon bases, cities on other planets; this is pure science fiction. Isn’t it?
As it turns out, SpaceX see no reason to stop there. Their Starship product :
“…is designed to fly to other worlds and will enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars, and ultimately expansion to the Universe.”
Are you impressed yet? Don’t be. Musk’s dreams seem positively provincial next to Jeff Bezos. Not content with building the world’s best-known mail-order book company, Jeff:
“[I] would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system.
If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins.”
Jeff Bezos
Bezos’ laudable ambition for 1,000 Mozarts seems a way off, but he did manage to put Katy Perry in space for almost twelve minutes, which is a start I suppose.
While naysayers have questioned the feasibility of Musk’s plan to settle a million people on Mars, Bezos is already thinking well beyond that. In fact, his main concern is that other planets might not be big enough:
“The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are just way too small.”
Jeff Bezos
Like so many others we’ve encountered, Bezos is very open about the roots of his ideas, citing a youth spent reading science fiction as the origin of much of his thinking. His giant space stations are borrowed from a Princeton Physicist, Gerard O’Neill, who had applied but failed to become an astronaut in the Apollo programme.
Bezos claims he read O’Neill’s 1976 book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space many times. In it, O’Neill proposed pairs of rotating cylinders 32km long and 8km wide, filled with grassland, forest, and other earth-like habitats. This is a whole different ballgame from the International Space Station.
Bezos believes we need to build thousands, perhaps millions of these giant space stations and fill the solar system with them. His reasoning reveals a lot about him and the whole Extropian Transhumanist project:
“The alternative, if we stay on this planet, is not necessarily extinction. We can defend this planet, but the alternative is stasis. We will have to stop growing, which I think is a very bad future. It’s not the future that I want for my grandchildren or my grandchildren’s grandchildren.”
Jeff Bezos
Earth has physical limits and men like Bezos don’t do limits. The planet can only support a finite level of energy consumption, and rather than accept those limits on human population or lifestyle, Bezos plans to colonise the solar system. This is exactly the kind of thinking that led Peter Thiel to claim Greta Thunberg and other environmentalists are “legionnaires of the Antichrist”.
Perhaps you recall the strange second half of Musk’s tweet about Moltbook heralding The Singularity: “We are currently using much less than a billionth of the power of the sun”? Musk, Bezos, Thiel, and many of the other characters we’ve met so far subscribe to the view that maximising energy usage is the mark of a technologically advanced civilisation.
The title of a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom says it all: Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development. Bostrom argues that failing to use energy is costing lives and wasting the Universe’s potential. Every star radiating into lifeless space is energy that an advanced civilisation might instead convert into life, intelligence and value. In other words, the Universe is just another optimisation problem to be solved by visionaries like Bezos and Musk.
The Kardashev Scale was defined by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. In simple terms:
- Harness the energy of an entire planet
- Harness the energy of an entire star
- Harness the energy of an entire galaxy
Just prior to their IPO, SpaceX published a transcript of a truly astonishing conversation between Musk and a couple of other senior Execs. In it, Musk explicitly outlines that the rationale for SpaceX putting a million data centres into space is so that we use much more energy and aliens don’t laugh at us:
“So, in order to start to make some progress on the Kardashev Scale, we need to launch satellites to orbit Earth and capture solar power… And so, what we’re proposing here and what we intend to do is to try to climb the Kardashev Scale to be kind of like a respectable civilization.
So, when the aliens, hopefully there are aliens out there and they maybe finally decide to talk to us, where we have some respectable amount of the sun’s energy being used, that’s not like totally pathetic.”Elon Musk
The logic is now complete: death, biology, intelligence, the carrying capacity of the earth, the available energy of the Sun, all are unacceptable limits to overcome, engineering problems to be optimised away.
Surely they don’t really believe this stuff, do they?
Road to Damascus
Twenty years ago, I lived in Syria for a few months, studying Arabic. In addition to formal lessons, I met a “language partner”, Muhannad, at a cafe once a week to drink sweet mint tea and chat ineffectually in a mix of his bad English and my bad Arabic.
I’ll never forget the day we talked about 9-11. It quickly dawned on me that just as I believed with every fibre of my being that Al Qaeda hijackers had flown planes into the Twin Towers, Muhannad believed wholeheartedly that it was a CIA/Mossad hoax. Just as I pitied him being duped by a wild conspiracy theory, he pitied me for the same reason.
Years later I mentioned this in a podcast conversation with Patrick Fagan, the former Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Analytica. I’ve always remembered Patrick’s response, simultaneously both completely, absurdly obvious, and profoundly insightful:
“People really believe their beliefs.”
Patrick Fagan
This is the first crucial lesson of our magical mystery tour of Silicon Valley’s strange beliefs. Utterly wild though it sounds, there is a vast trove of evidence demonstrating that Altman, Amodei, Bezos, Hassabis, Kurzweil, Musk, Thiel and the rest really, truly believe we are in The Singularity, that superintelligence is imminent, that uploadable minds and modular bodies are coming, that colonies on Mars and interstellar immortal humans might live forever in a perfect utopia in the stars.
They say and write these things all the time and have done so for years, sometimes decades, and we need to take them seriously.
When Amodei reportedly talks of a world where Anthropic devours every private company in the world, where all jobs are automated, where everyone lives forever, he actually believes it.
When Altman seeks another few hundred billion dollars in funding for his wildly loss-making startup, on the basis that they’re creating a genie that can grant any wish, he actually believes it.
When Musk floats his company on the stock exchange with the promise of a million data centres in space and making humanity interstellar, he actually believes it.
The second lesson, is that while this stuff sounds crazy, Silicon Valley’s Transhumanist preoccupations are as old as humanity. Wanting to live forever, grow wings and fly, breathe underwater, develop superhuman strength, perfect our minds, develop telepathy, eliminate scarcity, colonise space, create utopia; these are the consistent tropes of Greek mythology, religion, science fiction, fantasy novels, Marvel comics, and much more.
We have always wanted these things.
What’s more, some of us have always believed we knew how to get them. History is full of people who believed impossible things. Most were wrong, many were crazy, but a handful changed the definition of impossible.
For most of history though, those people were mystics, prophets, novelists, or lunatics. Today they are CEOs of trillion-dollar companies. That matters because these strange ideas are no longer confined to obscure e-mail lists in California, they’re profoundly reshaping societies and economies across the globe.
A handful of men (and they are almost all men) have taken their faith in science and technology to radical extremes. Like everything else they’ve achieved, they pursue their Transhumanist dreams through an intensely rational, optimisation-driven worldview in which death, intelligence, biology, scarcity and even humanity itself are simply variables in a system to be improved.
They firmly believe that applying sufficent rationality, logic, computation, and engineering can overcome every barrier constraining humanity.
I suspect they are wildly wrong. But that isn’t the most interesting possibility: assume for a moment that they’re right. If you remove every limit that has historically defined human existence, what exactly remains?
Perhaps T.S. Eliot was wrong. Perhaps the world ends because we successfully replace it with something else. Not with a bang, not even with a whimper.
With an upgrade.
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