It would be hard to exaggerate what is at stake in this anxious and uncertain historical moment. In Europe and the Anglosphere, ideological polarisation is fomenting political violence. Popular anger at governing elites is coming to a boil. AI has begun to eliminate jobs across multiple industries, not just for symbolic thinkers \u2014 data analysts, coders, content creators, translators, tax preparers, accountants \u2014 but for anyone whose work can be done by robots. And tech multibillionaires are behaving like masters of the universe on a gambling spree in a cosmic casino, wagering humanity\u2019s future on a roll of the dice.<\/p>\n
This last is no over-statement. In 2025, companies and private investors will spend more than $600 billion<\/a> developing ever-more-powerful AI. This enormous boom (or bubble<\/a>) has made people like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison even more fabulously rich. But advanced artificial intelligence is, notoriously, a black box. No computer scientist understands how it really works, and while everyone agrees it will profoundly change our lives, no one can say exactly how. One prominent economist predicts<\/a> that AI will somehow introduce an era of unprecedented \u201chuman flourishing\u201d. Others, including the computer scientists who developed the AI 2027<\/a> scenario, warn<\/a> that it may \u201ckill all the people\u201d. Setting aside that extreme outcome, there are obvious reasons for concern. The internet, social media, and chatbots have already allowed us to peek under the hood of advanced, highly monetised digital technology, and what\u2019s flown out so far is not encouraging: depression, psychosis<\/a>, cognitive impairment<\/a>, societal atomisation, political polarisation, enhanced surveillance and censorship \u2014 the list goes on. And because more than half the people in the world already own smartphones<\/a> and spend, on average, more than three hours a day on them, these effects are global.<\/p>\n Yet while superintelligent AI is already looking like Pandora\u2019s box, governments, corporations, and consumers are hell-bent on opening it. The march of technology is unstoppable, and tech oligarchs now have as much say over our collective human fate as any world leader. What\u2019s more, they know it. Some, such as Bill Gates<\/a> and Elon Musk, have even come to regard themselves as potential saviours of humanity.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled<\/a> a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was \u201cthe most important project in the world\u201d. You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people\u2019s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war<\/a> in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonise space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind.<\/p>\n The desire to build machines that will allow us to flee our terrestrial home, and that will make humanity functionally obsolete, reflects the fatality of technology \u2014 a seductive, yet ultimately monstrous synthesis of desire and ingenuity. Ren\u00e9 Descartes spelled out the project in his 1637 Discourse on Method. This masterpiece of political rhetoric was written not in scholarly Latin but demotic French, to reach the broadest readership. He claimed that basically everything he learned in the finest school in France, where he was at the top of the class, was worthless. Knowledge needed an entirely new foundation, to be provided by modern tools of mathematical analysis, including the algebraic geometry he pioneered. His as yet unnamed project, he wrote, promised to make human beings the \u201cmasters and possessors of nature\u201d. Descartes predicted a future in which technology would produce \u201can infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it\u201d, rid us of \u201can infinity of maladies\u201d, and perhaps make us immortal. He compared himself to a prophet of God, who would not sin against mankind by withholding earthly salvation \u2014 a magnanimous example, perhaps, for today\u2019s tech oligarchs. Scientists, he suggested, would be the new rulers; science, the new state religion.<\/p>\n Human beings have always made tools to accomplish their goals, altering their relationship with nature and one another in the process. But for most of human history, that activity was subordinate to larger conceptions of the good, embodied in cultural practices and political structures. Our pre-modern forebears regarded the natural or created world as intrinsically well ordered, a suitable basis for human fulfilment. They found goodness and beauty in everyday life, and celebrated them in religious ritual, architecture, art, music, and literature. Technology, however, is indifferent to such soulful gratitude. It considers the world to be, at best, neutral matter, capable of any number of transformations and uses, waiting only to serve our desires for security, convenience, and pleasure.<\/p>\n In the long run, technology \u2014 which promised to give people what they want, when they want it \u2014 was the easiest of sales. It didn\u2019t just supercharge technical advancement. It made the potentially boundless or infinite development of what the Greeks called techn\u0113, technical skill, an end in itself, eclipsing all prior conceptions of the human good. Actuality \u2014 the real character of human existence, felt and understood \u2014 paled in comparison with possibility; the imagined future, a virtual playground of unconstrained individual freedom, came to seem more desirable than the quotidian present. Digital technology in particular has insinuated itself throughout our daily lives, dissolving human connections at alarming speed and exacerbating a crisis of meaning. Yet it has also proved to be a powerful economic engine and an invaluable military resource, so much so that it would be unthinkable to step off the accelerating AI train.<\/p>\n Today, technology is entering its final, post-human phase, in which it no longer regards nature, our bodies, and our psyches as neutral material to be moulded according to our wishes, but rather confronts them as enemies. This development, while shocking, was not entirely unforeseen. Its main lines were spelled out almost a century ago, in 1929, in a hideous little book by the gifted Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Bernal\u2019s \u201crational soul\u201d is the spirit of technology, which is moving with \u201cever increasing acceleration\u201d. Its enemies are the primary forces opposing \u201cthe progress of the future\u201d: the world (nature), the flesh (the human body), and the devil (human psychology).<\/p>\n \u201cTechnology is entering its final, post-human phase.\u201d<\/p>\n For Bernal, the world is a poor prison from which outer space is the only escape. In the future, synthetic foods and clothing will make for \u201ca world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present\u201d. Later, manmade \u201cglobes\u201d \u2014 space shells 10 miles in diameter \u2014 will replace the pathetic one we\u2019ve been stuck on for so long. Like the Russian Revolution (Bernal was a Stalinist), itself a violent leap into an inscrutable future, this radical break with the past promises somehow to make ordinary politics unnecessary: in these artificial globes, \u201cthere would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel\u201d. But our descendants will aspire to govern the universe, putting an end to its spectacular wastefulness: \u201cthe stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way but will be turned into efficient heat engines.\u201d<\/p>\n In Bernal\u2019s estimation, the flesh \u2014 the human body \u2014 is by no means our friend. Much of it already serves little purpose: \u201cmodern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.\u201d What the flesh needs now is \u201cradical alteration\u201d through physiological chemistry and the extension of foreign bodies into the structure of its living matter. \u201cNormal man\u201d, Bernal insists, \u201cis an evolutionary dead end\u201d, and there is much work to be done: \u201cWe badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.\u201d<\/p>\n Bernal envisions \u201cthe direction of mechanism by pure volition\u201d (something Elon Musk\u2019s Neuralink, now rivalled by other groups, has already achieved through brain implants for people with spinal cord injuries). And while his transhuman cyborg \u2014 which, he predicts, will ultimately evolve into a brain in a vat \u2014 is apt to strike us as \u201ca strange, monstrous and inhuman creature\u2026 he is the only logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present\u201d.<\/p>\n The greatest impediment to the birth of the technological and ideological \u201cnew man\u201d, Bernal writes, is our species\u2019 persistent irrationality, especially including its \u201cunintelligent respect for the past\u201d. This is where his book becomes truly demonic, inverting the spiritual order on which civilisation was founded. For \u201cwe can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil\u201d \u2014 the retrograde sensibility that rejects \u201cthe progress of dehumanisation\u201d. That can happen only if \u201cthe scientific expert\u201d \u2014 linked, Borg-like, to other advanced consciousnesses \u2014 rules the world. Bernal imagines political and psychological manipulators on the model of Dostoevsky\u2019s Grand Inquisitor, a scientific aristocracy with \u201cthe means of directing the masses in harmless occupations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom\u201d. These masses, reduced in numbers until the elite \u201care no longer seriously inconvenienced by them\u201d, might be allowed to live on Earth as \u201ca human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment\u201d.<\/p>\n Bernal\u2019s chilling priorities to one side, he understood earlier than anyone else that technology, like Soviet communism, would ultimately demand a radical disconnection from the past and a leap away from the only world we\u2019ve ever known. Such desperate leaps are, at bottom, a symptom of, and response to, nihilism: the sense that life as we know it is basically meaningless. And in a kind of doom loop, technology now offers itself as the solution to the problem of nihilism it has helped to create. This helps to explain the willingness of tech leaders to take extraordinary risks with our collective future.<\/p>\n