Category Archives: Superintelligence

SPOILERS for Venom: The End by Adam Warren, Jeff Chamba Cruz, and Rahzzah below

Venom was introduced back in Spider-Man #299.Since then it has had a long history. It has bonded with a lot of Marvel superheroes and no matter what it has always survived. After all, it was created like Wolverine and Captain America in one version. But the question is- how does the Venom symbiote actually meet its end? Venom: The End answers just that.

Venom takes on AI. Pic courtesy: newsarama.com

Venon: The End tells Venoms final story which spans trillions of years. It also involves some of the most insane plots and storytelling that the character has ever been part of. But it still feels like a perfect tribute to this once cant-be-killed symbiote.

In the one-shot, we see the final tale of the Venom Symbiote. Its final life takes place over multiple lifetimes through Marvels future. In the story, Eddie Brock is the last living human. He is a husk whos been kept alive within the symbiote via cellular bioscaffolding. Its shown that Venom has actually replaced Eddies neurons one by one. Gradually his host crumbles which leaves the symbiote all alone for the first time since meeting Eddie. This sad moment isnt the only thing going on as Venom will now have to get ready to face the Artificial Superintelligence arms race that has caused an A.I. takeover of the entire universe.

READ MORE: First Morbius Trailer Is Full Of Direct Venom And Spider-Man References

Venom sacrifices himself to give biolife a chance. Pic courtesy: AIPT.com

In this war, Venom fails to unify the remaining symbiotes for a one last shot at defending biolife as opposed to A.I. So Venom makes use of the contained codex of Multiple Man Jamie Maddrox to create his own army of hosts. He keeps experimenting with other mutants and tries to use them as hosts. He then uses Quicksilvers codex to distort space-time and bond with literally everything that has ever lived. If you think thats cool, we need to tell you that it indeed is.

Venom then makes use of the multi-dimensional network of codices contained within his form to respawn all of the biolife into a new Venomverse. He also brings all of his previous hosts back into the proper time streams inside the new universe.

So what venom does is, he uses himself to make a new universe. In this universe biolife can begin again and it will also be a symbiote free future. Its an incredible sacrifice, and one that shows Venom is more than just a mysterious alien symbiote. He truly cares about humanity. The fact that he cares for humanity and Eddie was shown before as well in Venom #13. At the end, this anti hero did get a heroic send off even if his best friend Eddie wasnt there to see it.

READ MORE: Eddie Brock Becomes The Ultimate Venom/Avenger Hybrid In Absolute Carnage #4

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Venom: The End Gives A Heroic Farewell To An Anti-Hero - Animated Times

Spoilers for Venom: The End by Adam Warren, Jeff "Chamba" Cruz, and Rahzzah below

The Venom symbioteis nothing if not a survivor. Since the character was first introduced back in Spider-Man #299, Venom has bonded with a growing number of Marvel superhero hosts. And while its biological partners have come and gone, the symbiote has adapted to live another day. Which raises the question: how does the Venom symbiote actually meet its end? Well, it's complicated.

Venom: The End is the latest in a series of one-shots from Marvel Comics telling 'the final story' for different characters. Where some ends are destined to arrive in just years or decades, Venom's final story spans trillions of years, and involves some of the most insaneplots and storytelling that the character's ever been a part of. Yet somehow, it tells a wild, perfectly fitting end for the symbiote.

Related:Eddie Brock is Going To Kill Carnage - WITHOUT Venom

The one-shot tells the final fate of the Venom symbiote, taking place over multiple lifetimes through Marvel's future. Eddie Brock is the last living human, as a husk who's been kept alive within the symbiote via"cellular bioscaffolding." Venom has replaced Eddie's neurons one-by-one, and eventually sees his former host crumble in his hands. Leaving the symbiote all alone, for the first time since meeting Eddie... and finally ready to face the Artificial Superintelligence arms race that has caused an A.I. takeover of the universe.

After failing to unify the remaining symbiotes in one last defense for the fate of biolife, as opposed to A.I., the Venom symbiote uses the contained codex of Multiple Man Jamie Maddrox to create his own army of hosts. He keeps experimenting with a slew of other mutants as new hosts, eventually using Quicksilver's codex to distort space-time and bond with literally everything that's ever lived. Venom uses the multi-dimensional network of codices contained within his form (as the last of the symbiote hive mind) to respawn all of the biolife into a new Venomverse - while bringing all of his former hosts back into their proper time streams inside the new universe.

Venom quite literally weaves himself into a new universe, where biolife can begin again -- essentially making him responsible for bringing biolife back from extinction, and preserving their symbiote-free future. It's an incredible sacrifice, and one that shows Venom is more than just a mysterious alien symbiote - he cares about humanity.

Venom: The End gives the antihero a heroic sendoff, in the form of an outrageouslycomplicated story told over trillions of years, surprisingly bringing his journey full circle. Who knew Venom would be the force that brought humanity back from extinction? It's a nice twist to give Venoma proper, albeit bananas, end. Even if Eddie wasn't there to see it...

Next:VENOM's Next Battle is Going To Change Him Forever

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Liam McGuire is a comics editor for Screen Rant. Hailing from Nova Scotia, he has worked for numerous publications including Cineplex Canada, MLB.com, Vice, CBR.com, and more. You can reach out to him directly at LiamMcGuireJournalism(at)gmail(dot)com.

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The Death of VENOM is Marvel's Craziest Ending Ever | Screen Rant - Screen Rant

The holiday season is over, but TV has some new gifts you'll never want to return. Settle in for 12 months of fan-favorite stars (Fran Drescher, Edie Falco), inspiring physical feats (the Olympics), new streaming services, and another must-see season ofOutlander.

Launches: MayPrice: $14.99 per monthHow to watch: Visit hbomax.com for updates.

Original programming: HBO Max has announced a robust slate of series but has yet to confirm when each will debut. High-profile projects include The Flight Attendant, a thriller starring Kaley Cuoco in her first live-action series since The Big Bang Theory; Grease: Rydell High, a musical show based on the hit movie; Ellen DeGeneres' competition series Ellen's Home Design Challenge; and Superintelligence, a comedy film starring Melissa McCarthy as a woman who must save humanity from a sentient, artificially intelligent being.

Library content: If you're not a couch potato yet, you just might be soon! HBO Max has the rights to several big-ticket series including Friends (which left Netflix in December), The West Wing, The Big Bang Theory, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Doctor Who, 50 years of Sesame Street, The Flintstones and Gossip Girl. Naturally, every title from HBO's vault, including The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Game of Thrones and The Wire, will be available as well.

Psych: The Movie (Credit: Alan Zenuk/USA Network/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

Launches: AprilPrice: TBAHow to watch: Visit peacocktv.com for updates.

Original programming: Several projects are in development, but this service from NBCUniversal has yet to confirm the titles available at launch. A few we can't wait to see? A reboot of the 198993 high school sitcom Saved by the Bell with stars Elizabeth Berkley and Mario Lopez returning, a second Psych movie with James Roday and Dul Hill reprising their roles from the USA comedy and Soleil Moon Frye as an adult Punky Brewster in an update of the 198488 series. Demi Moore also stars in an adaptation of Aldous Huxleys 1932 book Brave New World.

Library content: Expect full seasons of fan-favorite comedies Cheers, Frasier, Parks and Recreation and MarriedWith Children; dramas including Friday Night Lights, Downton Abbey and House; plus a vast movie collection including everything from Bridesmaids to Back to the Future and Brokeback Mountain to Erin Brockovich. All in all, 15,000 total hours of content will be available to stream when the service bows.

(Credit: Quibi)

Launches: April 6Price: $4.99 per month with commercials, $7.99 withoutHow to watch: Content is available exclusively on the Quibi app.

Original programming: Quibi short for "quick bites" will offer more than 70 comedies, dramas, reality series and news programs, all with episodes between three and 15 minutes long. April premieres include Mapleworth Murders, a comedy from exec producers Lorne Michaels and Seth Meyers starring Wine Country's Paula Pell as a mystery writer who solves crimes in her small town, and an update of the 196367 suspense series The Fugitive featuring Boyd Holbrook (Narcos) and Kiefer Sutherland (Designated Survivor).

Library content: None. Quibi is an all-originals service.

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2020 Preview: HBO Max, Peacock & More New Streamers on the Way - TVInsider

Elon Musk has published a chilling meme which connects smartphones to the collapse of human society.

The billionaire memelord published an image which recalled the optimism of 2009, when people bought a smartphone and thought: It can do anything.

The next image then features the words: 2019. Stare into this nightmare rectangle and watch society collapse in real-time.

Elon captioned his tweet with the word phoney.

You might think that a man who used cutting edge tech to get stonking rich would be excited about the bright future awaiting us.

But Elon is definitely not a bright-eyed techno-optimist.

The billionaire is an outspoken doom-monger who fears super-smart computers are destined to conquer the Earth and annihilate humanity.

He recently issued a warning about the dangers of denying the threat that super-intelligence poses to our species.

On Twitter, Musk responded to a tweet from the writer Robert McFarlane, who quoted a New York Times article and wrote: I wonder if the essence of climate denial among disbelieving Americansis an unwillingness to accept there is anything in this world so powerful it could overrule them.

Musk then replied: Same goes for digital superintelligence denial.

The subtext of this tweet suggests the rise of the machines is a threat comparable to the dangers of climate change.

Elons fears are shared by many experts most notably the late Stephen Hawking yet is quite out of step with some of the billionaire techno-optimists of Silicon Valley.

MORE: The probability of human extinction is frighteningly high, scientists calculate

In 2018, was claimed that Google founder Larry Pagedismissed Elons fears as speciesist during an argument at a Napa Valley party in 2015.

A top professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alleged the two tech moguls clashed in a long and spirited debate in the early hours of the morning.

In his book Life 3.0: Being Human In The Age of Artificial Intelligence,Max Tegmark wrote: [Pages] main concerns were that AI paranoia would delay the digital utopia and/or cause a military takeover of AI that would fall foul of Googles dont be evil slogan.

Elon kept pushing back and asked Larry to clarify details of his arguments, such as why he was so confident that digital life wouldnt destroy everything we care about.

At times, Larry accused Elon of being speciesist: treating certain life forms as inferior just because they were silicon-based rather than carbon-based.

Tegmark and Page were talking about a childrens book called The Day My Butt Went Psycho at the party before the two billionaires locked horns after cocktails.

The MIT professor said Page is a passionate supporter of digital utopianism, which holds that robots and AI are not a threat to the future of our species.

Larry [said] that digital life is the natural and desirable next step in the 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, he continued.

He argued that if life is ever going to spread throughout our galaxy, which he thought it should, then it would need to do so in digital form.

Elon Musk isnt alone in his fears about the development of artificial intelligence.

Also in 2018, Professor Stephen Hawking said AI is likely to replace humans altogether and become a new form of life that will outperform our fleshy, flabby species.

Read more:

Elon Musk links smartphones to the total 'collapse' of society - Metro.co.uk

Its hoped that computers will do a better job than unreliable human weathermen and women (Image: PA)

Google has invented a new AI-powered weather prediction system which can accurately predict whether youre about to get soaked in a rain shower.

Its notoriously difficult to work out what the weathers going to do in a place like the UK thats cursed with a changeable climate.

Now Google has worked out a new to guess if the heavens are going to open imminently.

Jason Hickey, a senior software engineer at Google Research, wrote: The weather can affect a persons daily routine in both mundane and serious ways, and the precision of forecasting can strongly influence how they deal with it.

Weather predictions can inform people about whether they should take a different route to work, if they should reschedule the picnic planned for the weekend, or even if they need to evacuate their homes due to an approaching storm.

But making accurate weather predictions can be particularly challenging for localized storms or events that evolve on hourly timescales, such as thunderstorms.

In a paper called Machine Learning for Precipitation Nowcasting from Radar Images Google presented its research into the development of machine learning models which can work out if its going to rain.

It uses highly localized physics-free predictions that apply to the immediate future.

This means the computer is not trained to analyse raw physics to make its predictions, but instead uses data gathered by weather monitoring facilities.

Googles approach is cheaper than normal forecasting and is also more accurate and outperforms traditional models, even at these early stages of development.

The tech giant is evangelical about the benefits of AI and machine learning, but not everyone agrees.

Elon Musk is one of the worlds most famous doom-mongers and fears super-smart computers are destined to conquer the Earth and annihilate humanity.

He recently issued a warning about the dangers of denying the threat that super-intelligence poses to our species.

On Twitter, Musk responded to a tweet from the writer Robert McFarlane, who quoted a New York Times article and wrote: I wonder if the essence of climate denial among disbelieving Americansis an unwillingness to accept there is anything in this world so powerful it could overrule them.

Musk then replied: Same goes for digital superintelligence denial.

The subtext of this tweet suggests the rise of the machines is a threat comparable to the dangers of climate change.

Elons fears are shared by many experts most notably the late Stephen Hawking yet is quite out of step with some of the billionaire techno-optimists of Silicon Valley.

MORE: The probability of human extinction is frighteningly high, scientists calculate

Last year, it was claimed that Google founder Larry Pagedismissed Elons fears as speciesist during an argument at a Napa Valley party in 2015.

A top professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alleged the two tech moguls clashed in a long and spirited debate in the early hours of the morning.

In his book Life 3.0: Being Human In The Age of Artificial Intelligence,Max Tegmark wrote: [Pages] main concerns were that AI paranoia would delay the digital utopia and/or cause a military takeover of AI that would fall foul of Googles dont be evil slogan.

Elon kept pushing back and asked Larry to clarify details of his arguments, such as why he was so confident that digital life wouldnt destroy everything we care about.

At times, Larry accused Elon of being speciesist: treating certain life forms as inferior just because they were silicon-based rather than carbon-based.

Tegmark and Page were talking about a childrens book called The Day My Butt Went Psycho at the party before the two billionaires locked horns after cocktails.

The MIT professor said Page is a passionate supporter of digital utopianism, which holds that robots and AI are not a threat to the future of our species.

Larry [said] that digital life is the natural and desirable next step in the 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, he continued.

He argued that if life is ever going to spread throughout our galaxy, which he thought it should, then it would need to do so in digital form.

Elon Musk isnt alone in his fears about the development of artificial intelligence.

Last year, Professor Stephen Hawking said AI is likely to replace humans altogether and become a new form of life that will outperform our fleshy, flabby species.

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'What's the weather like?' Google is using AI to predict rain and sunny weather - Metro.co.uk

The Future of Life Institute was founded in 2013 to mitigate the existential risks posed to humanity by emerging technologies, in particular artificial intelligence. Founded by MIT professor Max Tegmark and co-developer of Skype Jaan Tallinn, it is also supported by Teslas Elon Musk and tech philosopher Nick Bostrom.

Involved in various activities including writing an open letter to the United Nations calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs), the Institute also produces a fascinating podcast with great interviewees. If you enjoy geeking out to AI-related topics including public attitudes to AI, government policy, killer robots, ethics and driverless cars, AI trends and breakthroughs, then you will love this.

The latest episode is an hour of conversation between Yuval Noah Harari, author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Tegmark. They cover consciousness, morality, the place of mythmaking in human society, and the risks associated with artificial general intelligence and superintelligence (should they occur any time soon), and immediate concerns around big data and AI-enabled human hacking. Compelling stuff.

The FLI Podcast

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Anxious about AI? This podcast will break it all down for you - The Irish Times

DeKalb, Ill. Autopilot automobiles, wearable devices, services such as Uber and Lyft. Technological advances in the 2010s made headlines, and some made their way into our everyday lives.

So what should we expect from the roaring 2020s?

We put that question to NIU Professor David Gunkel, a communication technology expert and author of Robot Rights and How to Survive a Robot Invasion. Gunkel pointed to four areas where technology is poised to make an impact on the coming decade.

Robots By the mid-2020s, robots of one kind or another will be everywhere and doing virtually everything, Gunkel says. This robot invasion will not transpire as we have imagined it in our science fiction, with a marauding army of evil-minded androids either descending from the heavens or rising up in revolt against their human masters. It will look less like Blade Runner, Terminator or Westworld and more like the Fall of Rome, asmachines of various configurations and capabilities come to take up influential positions in our world through a slow but steady incursion.

Artificial Intelligence Innovations in Artificial Intelligence, especially with deep-learning algorithms, have made great strides in the previous decade. The 2020s will see AI in everything, from our handheld mobile devices to self-driving vehicles. These will be very capable but highly specialized AIs. We are creating a world full of idiot savants that will control every aspect of our lives. This might actually be more interesting, and possibly more terrifying, than superintelligence.

Things that Talk In 2018, Amazon put Alexa in the toilet, when they teamed up with Kohler at the Consumer Electronics Show. Manufactures of these digital voice assistants, which also include the likes of Siri, Google Assistant and Bixby, are currently involved in an arms race to dominate the voice-activated, screenless Internet of the future. By mid-decade, everything will be talking to us, which will dramatically change how we think about social interaction. But they will also be listening to what we say and sharing all this personal data with their parent corporations.

The Empires Strike Back This past year has seen unprecedented investment in AI ethics and governance. The 2020s will see amplification of this effort as stakeholders in Europe, China and North America compete to dominate the AI policy and governance market. Europe might be the odds-on favorite, since it was first to exit the starting block, but China and the U.S. are not far behind. The technology of AI might be global in scope and controlled by borderless multinationals. But tech policy and governance is still a matter of nation states, and the 2020s will see increasing involvement as the empires strike back.

Media Contact:Tom Parisi

About NIU

Northern Illinois University is a student-centered, nationally recognized public research university, with expertise that benefits its region and spans the globe in a wide variety of fields, including the sciences, humanities, arts, business, engineering, education, health and law. Through its main campus in DeKalb, Illinois, and education centers for students and working professionals in Chicago, Hoffman Estates, Naperville, Oregon and Rockford, NIU offers more than 100 areas of study while serving a diverse and international student body.

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NIU expert: 4 leaps in technology to expect in the 2020s | NIU - NIU Newsroom

Trying to get a handle on the progress of artificial intelligence is a daunting task, even for those enmeshed in the AI community. But the latest edition of the AI Index report an annual rundown of machine learning data points now in its third year does a good job confirming what you probably already suspected: the AI world is booming in a range of metrics covering research, education, and technical achievements.

The AI Index covers a lot of ground so much so that its creators, which include institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and OpenAI, have also released two new tools just to sift through the information they sourced from. One tool is for searching AI research papers and the other is for investigating country-level data on research and investment.

Most of the 2019 report basically confirms the continuation of trends weve highlighted in previous years. But to save you from having to trudge through its 290 pages, here are some of the more interesting and pertinent points:

All this is impressive, but one big caveat applies: no matter how fast AI improves, its never going to match the achievements accorded to it by pop culture and hyped headlines. This may seem pedantic or even obvious, but its worth remembering that, while the world of artificial intelligence is booming, AI itself is still limited in some important ways.

The best demonstration of this comes from a timeline of human-level performance milestones featured in the AI Index report; a history of moments when AI has matched or surpassed human-level expertise.

The timeline starts in the 1990s when programs first beat humans at checkers and chess, and accelerates with the recent machine learning boom, listing video games and board games where AI has came, saw, and conquered (Go in 2016, Dota 2 in 2018, etc.). This is mixed with miscellaneous tasks like human-level classification of skin cancer images in 2017 and in Chinese to English translation in 2018. (Many experts would take issue with that last achievement being included at all, and note that AI translation is still way behind humans.)

And while this list is impressive, it shouldnt lead you to believe that AI superintelligence is nigh.

For a start, the majority of these milestones come from defeating humans in video games and board games domains that, because of their clear rules and easy simulation, are particularly amenable to AI training. Such training usually relies on AI agents sinking many lifetimes worth of work into a single game, training hundreds of years in a solar day: a fact that highlights how quickly humans learn compared to computers.

Similarly, each achievements was set in a single domain. With very few exceptions, AI systems trained at one task cant transfer what theyve learned to another. A superhuman StarCraft II bot would lose to a five-year-old playing chess. And while an AI might be able to spot breast cancer tumors as accurately as an oncologist, it cant do the same for lung cancer (let alone write a prescription or deliver a diagnosis). In other words: AI systems are single-use tools, not flexible intelligences that are stand-ins for humans.

But and yes, theres another but that doesnt mean AI isnt incredibly useful. As this report shows, despite the limitations of machine learning, it continues to accelerate in terms of funding, interest, and technical achievements.

When thinking about AI limitations and promises, its good to remember the words of machine learning pioneer Andrew Ng: If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future. Were just beginning to find out what happens when those seconds are added up.

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AI R&D is booming, but general intelligence is still out of reach - The Verge

Hi there! I recently put together an electroencephalogram (EEG), or in normal words, a brain wave reader, so you can see what goes on inside my brain!

I received a kit from OpenBCI, a successful kickstarter project to make inexpensive brain wave readers available to the masses. Heres what it looks like:

Yes, it looks like something Calvin and Hobbes would invent.

Here is how it looks on my head:

A number of electrodes are touching my scalp and a wire is connected to my ear. The layout on my head looks like the following schematic:

The EEG is measuring the voltage between different points on my scalp and my earlobe. The positions on my scalp are receiving a current from my brain while my earlobe acts as the ground. The EEG is essentially a multimeter for my brain.

Brain waves are generated by ions building up inside the neurons. Once the neurons reach capacity, they release the ions in a cascade across the brain. This leads to the wave effect.

So can I see any connection between my brain waves and what Im consciously experiencing in my mind?

To test that, inspired by the EEG hacker blog, I generated a graphic known as a spectrogram of my brain waves across a set of activities.

The spectrogram shows the range of brainwave frequencies in my brain at a given point in time. In the following plots, the horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis is frequency. There are some artifacts in the plots, such as a middle band and a big pink blotch, so dont take all patterns as significant. The important thing to note is the overall texture of the plot.

The greens and reds are low amplitude frequencies, and the blue and magenta are high amplitude frequencies, meaning those brain waves are stronger. The spectrogram is generated from the readings of the #1 electrode in the schematic above.

I performed three different activities to see how they affect the spectrogram.

First, I just absentmindedly tapped the Enter key on my keyboard. I did not focus on anything in particular, just pressed Enter whenever I felt like it. This is the EEG spectrogram that random tapping generated:

Second, I played a game of Tetris on very slow speed, using a Github repo.

Heres a video of the game speed:

This is the corresponding spectrogram:

Finally, I played Tetris much faster, and the spectrogram looked like this:

You can watch a video of the game speed here:

The big difference is that, as my activity became cognitively more difficult, the spectrogram became more blue and magenta, meaning that my brain waves became stronger.

What does this mean? It means that, at least at a high level. I can measure how cognitively difficult a mental task is.

Another interesting thing is the direction of causality. The intensity of my mental processing brought about an observable brain state. The causality did not go in the other direction; the magenta brain state did not increase my conscious process.

So my subjective mental experience brought about a change in my physical brain. In other words, my consciousness has a causal impact on my physical processing unit, the brain.

This type of observation causes a problem for those hoping to duplicate human intelligence in a computer program. This Tetris EEG experiment shows that conscious thought is essential to human intelligence. So, until we make conscious computers, which is most likely never, we will not have computers that display human intelligence.

Update: Someone online suggested it might just be my facial muscle tension. So, I tested out the idea by recording while I tensed my brow (where the electrode is placed):

The result looked no different than the tapping EEG, so I consider the just facial tension hypothesis falsified.

If you enjoyed this item, here are some of Eric Holloways other reflections on human consciousness and computer intelligence:

No materialist theory of consciousness is plausible All such theories either deny the very thing they are trying to explain, result in absurd scenarios, or end up requiring an immaterial intervention

We need a better test for AI intelligence Better than Turing or Lovelace. The difficulty is that intelligence, like randomness, is mathematically undefinable

and

Will artificial intelligence design artificial superintelligence? And then turn us all into super-geniuses, as some AI researchers hope? No, and heres why not

See the article here:

Playing Tetris Shows That True AI Is Impossible - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Transhumanists think that bodies are obsolete technology

Yves Gellie/picturetank

By Brendan Byrne

THERE was a lot of futuristic hype surrounding cryonics company Alcor. When Dublin-based journalist Mark OConnell travelled to its facility in Arizona, he found himself surrounded by corpses in an office park, between a tile showroom and a place called Big Ds Covering Supplies.

In his book To Be a Machine, new father OConnell invokes the twin spectres of death and child-bearing in an attempt to make sense of his subject but he also manages to be staggeringly funny. He explores the intersecting practices of body modification, cryonics, machine learning, whole brain emulation and AI disaster-forecasting.

The transhumanist world view, OConnell writes, casts our minds and bodies as obsolete technologies, outmoded formats in need of complete overhaul. He worries more about the collateral damage such a future will inflict, less on the world views of the supposed visionaries who supply the ideas. Not that the two can be separated.

Throughout the text, it is difficult to ignore Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and an adviser to Donald Trump. While Thiel, , is not featured directly, the longevity start-ups he funded are, including Halcyon Molecular, 3Scan, MIRI, the Longevity Fund and Aubrey de Greys Methuselah Foundation.

Another pervasive presence is Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher. But while Thiel wants to extend life, Bostrom is worried about its eradication. He is best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence, which brought thought experiments about AI security to public notice. OConnell finds it disquieting to see the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates effusing about this book. These dire warnings about AI were coming from what seemed like the most unlikely of sources: not from Luddites or religious catastrophists, that is, but from the very people who seemed to most personify our cultures reverence for machines.

attempts to address such existential threats by freely disseminating its research. This is meant to encourage the rise ofmultiple AIs, whose balance of power will keep any non-benign ones off-balance. While Bostrom agrees that this plan will decrease the threat from a world-eating singleton, that winning the AI race is incompatible with using any safety method that incurs a delay or limits performance. If basic information is made public, the race to achieve AI first will be tight, pushing corporations to disregard security.

Given Musks that he is trying to move Trump to the left, rumours that Mark Zuckerberg is considering a presidential run and the fact that many users are deleting the Uber app after the company broke the taxi strike at JFK Airport, Silicon Valley can no longer claim to be apolitical. And there seems to be something about transhumanism that draws out reactionaries. As OConnell observes, in one sense the whole ethos of transhumanism is such a radical extrapolation of the classically American belief in self-betterment that it obliterates the idea of the self entirely. Its liberal humanism forced to the coldest outer limits of its own paradoxical implications.

Thiel is strangely for a former libertarian a planner. In his 2014 book Zero to One, Thiel writes of the dot-com bubble as both a peak of insanity and a peak of clarity: People looked into the future, saw how much valuable new technology we would need to get there safely and judged themselves capable of creating it. Depicting how private enterprise failed to bridge the gap between aspiration and realisation, Thiel seems here to be arguing for total mobilisation of the state.

Thiel favours taking huge risks to achieve miraculous results. He champions the government-funded space race and rails against incrementalisation in scientific and civilizational achievements. At the time of writing, , the managing director of Thiels Mithril Capital, is one of Trumps main candidates to head the Food and Drug Administration. ONeill thinks that drugs should be approved not by safety but by efficacy. Thiel himself has criticised the FDA for being overly cautious, , I dont even know if you could get the polio vaccine approved today .

If the low-safety moonshot approach favoured by Thiel and the futurist frat houses OConnell describes is applied on a national level, and longevity research funded by a Silicon Valley billionaire does pay huge dividends, a new question emerges: immortality for whom?

Thiel is notoriously anti-competition, writing in Zero to One that only becoming a monopoly can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival, since competitive markets destroy profits. A monopoly price for life extension suggests a future in which we will all be in monetary debt to mortality, working forever to pay off our incoming years.

During a recent public lecture, genomics pioneer Craig Venter discussed his new company that aims to use genetic sequencing to provide proactive, preventative, predictive, personalised healthcare. According to Venter, 40 per cent of people who think they are healthy are not they have undiagnosed ailments such as tumours that have not metastasised or cardiovascular conditions. And he says his method can predict Alzheimers 20 years before its onset, and a cocktail of soon-to-be-marketed drugs can prevent it. Thanks to this $25,000 genome-physical, Venter himself was .

Can any imaginable public healthcare provision pay for such speculative treatments? Or will there be a widening gap between those who can afford to stay healthy and those who will have to shoulder early-onset penury in the face of their time-limited humanity?

In response to questions about such inequality, Thiel offers little comfort. Probably the most extreme form of inequality, six years ago, is between people who are alive and people who are dead.

Jonathan Swifts satirical letter A modest proposal responded to an equally cold-blooded ideology, in his day. But a field whose pioneers sport names like T. O. Morrow (Tom Bells 1990s soubriquet), FM-2030 and Max More demands something different from OConnell an unexpected, often funny effort of restraint.

Mark OConnell

Doubleday/Granta

This article appeared in print under the headline In debt to mortality

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