Transhumanist’s Nightmare

A Dark Version of the Glorious Future

I have always viewed with misunderstanding and suspicion those who oppose radical technological progress. The benefits of new technologies always seemed to trivially outweigh the costs and risks to me. And it seemed that being a techno-optimist meant being on the “right side of history.” However, strategically, technologies are stagnating, and it appears that dreams of space colonization, biotechnological augmentation of humans, and the discovery of new energy sources will not be realized by default. In nearly all areas, humanity has encountered tremendous obstacles — walls kilometers thick, with progress advancing at a speed of only a few centimeters a year. This has happened with all the technologies that are key to our survival. And only artificial intelligence — the only technology that stands out as the fundamentally dangerous, the only technology whose emergence is more likely to lead to the destruction of humanity rather than an increase in our chances of survival — surges ahead.

What Went Wrong?

All those who, at some point in their lives, became part of the techno-optimist community were motivated to varying degrees by a colossal cultural impulse that developed and gained strength during the second half of the 20th century — the ideology of the inevitability and…