Humanity is on the verge of being replaced by a race of superhuman hybrids with powers only dreamt about in movies. Herbert Sim, a millionaire tech investor and futurist in London, has begun pouring his wealth into the study of transhumanism - the enhancement of humans through science and technology. At that point, Sim claims that the human race will essentially be obsolete as these real life'X-Men' make it impossible for regular people to match their abilities. The brainwaves are projected onto a computer which then reads and turns them into actions. Sim said it's one of the first steps in'upgrading' humanity, allowing this new race of mutants to live longer and defeat diseases.

Outside an opulent retreat in the mountains of Utah, the world is going to hell. Thanks to disinformation-spreading tools on the world's largest social media platform, people are being executed by bloodthirsty mobs and machine-gunned by their neighbors, politicians assassinated and governments crumbling. But inside Mountainhead, the billionaire tech moguls responsible for the chaos are smoking cigars and shooting the breeze, debating whether the eruption of global chaos is a crisis to be managed or a surge of "creative destruction" that will help usher humanity into a brighter future. If the fictional setting of Mountainhead, the debut feature by Jesse Armstrong, seems a little too close to reality, that's because it's meant to be. The movie, which stars Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith, was conceived, written, cast, shot, edited, and released in about six months, an astonishingly short timeline for any director, let alone a first-timer.

The years 2020 and 2021 have already been eclipsed by Covid-19. As we enter 2022, the Omicron variant has risen, giving a sense of deja vu. The pandemic has, however, played a critical role in giving an accelerated impetus to use of technology in our lives. For instance, BlueDot, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform, was the first to flag an "unusual pneumonia" in Wuhan. AI has been enhancing our capabilities in ways never witnessed in the past.

"We should not be confident in our ability to keep a super intelligent genie locked up in his bottle forever. Sooner or later it will be out…The answer is to figure out how to create the superintelligent A.I. such that even if –when –it escapes, it is still safe because it is fundamentally on our side because it shares our values." It was in the 1940s when Alan Turing, the computer scientist, mathematician, cryptanalyst and philosopher, defined artificial intelligence (A.I.) as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines who can speak a common language with humans and think like humans. In the 1950s, war scenarios were simulated in the US military to use in critical combat strategies. During the same period, IBM had already invented the machine that could check-mate the human opponent in a game of chess.

In 1950, Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings was at the cutting edge of vision and speculation in proclaiming: But this was his book's denouement, and it has left us hanging now for 68 years, lacking not only prescriptions and proscriptions but even a well-articulated "problem statement." We have since seen similar warnings about the threat of our machines, even in the form of outreach to the masses, via films like Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999), and Ex Machina (2015). But now the time is ripe for a major update with fresh, new perspectives -- notably focused on generalizations of our "human" rights and our existential needs. Concern has tended to focus on "us versus them" (robots) or "gray goo" (nanotech) or "monocultures of clones" (bio). To extrapolate current trends: What if we could make or grow almost anything and engineer any level of safety and efficacy desired?

Earlier this year I went to an event in Austin, Texas, billed as a sneak preview of the evolution of our species. The #Bdyhax Conference, which took place in a downtown exhibition complex, promised a front-row insight into the coming "singularity" – that nirvana foretold by science fiction in which biology and technology would fuse and revolutionise human capability and experience. The headline acts of the conference were mostly bodyhackers – DIY experimenters who, in their basements and garages, seek to enhance their own flesh and blood with biometric implants and cognitive enablers. These brave pioneers were extending their senses, overcoming physical limitation, Dan-Daring themselves and the rest of us into the future. At least that was the idea. The reality of the convention was a little more mundane. It was overpriced and sparsely attended. Disparate and awkward groups of the pierced and the tattooed wandered between lectures about the ethics of body augmentation, and budget demonstrations of virtual worlds, past stalls flogging various kinds of neurotropic snake oil or enthusing over the transforming possibilities of magnets and LED lights inserted under the skin.