On Dec. 13, 2018, Richard Branson stood in the Mojave Desert, eyes fixed skyward as he witnessed the culmination of a lifelong dream: His space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, had sent an aircraft into suborbital space. For Branson, the launch was not merely proof of concept for his latest business venture. It signaled that humanity was on the edge of a fundamental breakthrough. "Today we have shown that Virgin Galactic can open space to the world," he declared. Four days later, the prominent philosopher Todd May published a short article in the Stone, a philosophy series run through the New York Times opinion section. "Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?" asked readers to consider the possibility that the demise of humanity might be morally desirable.

Gizmodo is 20 years old! To celebrate the anniversary, we're looking back at some of the most significant ways our lives have been thrown for a loop by our digital tools. Like so many others after 9/11, I felt spiritually and existentially lost. It's hard to believe now, but I was a regular churchgoer at the time. Watching those planes smash into the World Trade Center woke me from my extended cerebral slumber and I haven't set foot in a church since, aside from the occasional wedding or baptism. I didn't realize it at the time, but that godawful day triggered an intrapersonal renaissance in which my passion for science and philosophy was resuscitated. My marriage didn't survive this mental reboot and return to form, but it did lead me to some very positive places, resulting in my adoption of secular Buddhism, meditation, and a decade-long stint with vegetarianism.

In a recent Living in the Solutionpodcast with otolaryngologist and broadcaster Elaina George at Liberty Talk radio, Wesley J. Smith, lawyer and host of the Humanize podcast at Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism tackled the question of "Can You be a Christian and Believe in Transhumanism?" (June 4, 2022) Transhumanism or H, as it is sometimes called, is a movement to create immortality through new biotechnology or merger with artificial intelligence (AI). In the first portion of the podcast, which we covered on Sunday, June 12, they talked about the way being a human, a computer, or an animal is viewed by transhumanists as all just a choice now, thanks to new technology. In the second, they looked at the religious elements in transhumanism. In this third and final segment, they discuss the difference in values between Christianity and transhumanism. A partial transcript and notes follow.

If, through biotechnology, we could drastically enhance ourselves--such that our ability to absorb and manipulate information was unlimited, we experienced no disquiet, and we did not age--would we? For advocates of radical enhancement, or "transhumanism," answering "yes" is a no-brainer. Accordingly, they press for the development of technologies that, by manipulating genes and the brain, would create beings fundamentally superior to us. Transhumanism is far from a household term, but, whether or not they use the word publicly, its adherents are in places of power, especially in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, the world's richest person, is devoted to boosting "cognition" and co-founded the company Neuralink toward that end.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (Mark O'Connell). "Flesh is a dead format," writes Mark O'Connell in To Be a Machine, his new nonfiction book about the contemporary transhumanist movement. It's an alarming statement, but don't kill the messenger: As he's eager to explain early in the book, the author is not a transhumanist himself. Instead, he's used To Be a Machine as a vehicle to dive into this loosely knit movement, which he sums up as "a rebellion against human existence as it has been given." In other words, transhumanists believe that technology -- specifically, a direct interface between humans and machines -- is the only way our species can progress from its current, far-than-ideal state.

WE have seen that AI, like any new technology only perhaps more so, brings with it a whole new raft of moral considerations that may easily seem unsurmountable. For AI computer systems have no conscience, and so the morality of any decisions they make will reflect the morality of the computer programmers - and that is where the difficulties start. How can we be sure that the programmers will build in a morality that is benevolent and humane? Rosalind Picard, director of the Affective Computing Group at MIT, puts it succinctly: "The greater the freedom of a machine, the more it will need moral standards." Political scientist and author of The End of History Francis Fukuyama regards transhumanism as "the world's most dangerous idea" in that it runs the risk of affecting human rights.

In late July, the world learned that the company Neuralink was close to integrating the human brain with a computer. The first interface hoped to enable the feat was unveiled. We may thus be in for an incredible leap in expanding our cognitive abilities. The consequences of such a leap would be varied, and we would certainly not avoid having to make unprecedented legal and ethical choices. In view of such a breakthrough, the question about machine rights becomes all the more relevant.

"I do plan to bring back my father," Ray Kurzweil says. He is standing in the anemic light of a storage unit, his frame dwarfed by towers of cardboard boxes and oblong plastic bins. He is in his early sixties, but something about the light or his posture, his paunch protruding over his beltline, makes him seem older. Kurzweil is now a director of engineering at Google, but this documentary was filmed in 2009, back when it was still possible to regard him as a lone visionary with eccentric ideas about the future. The boxes in the storage unit contain the remnants of his father's life: photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, and financial documents. For decades, he has been compiling these artifacts and storing them in this sepulcher he maintains near his house in Newton, Massachusetts. He takes out a notebook filled with his father's handwriting and shows it to the camera. His father passed away in 1970, but Kurzweil believes that, one day, artificial intelligence will be able to use the memorabilia, along with DNA samples, to resurrect him. "People do live on in our memories, and in the creative works they leave behind," he muses, "so we can gather up all those vibrations and bring them back, I believe." Technology, Kurzweil has conceded, is still a long way from bringing back the dead. His only hope of seeing his father resurrected is to live to see the Singularity -- the moment when computing power reaches an "intelligence explosion." At this point, according to transhumanists such as Kurzweil, people who are merged with this technology will undergo a radical transformation. They will become posthuman: immortal, limitless, changed beyond recognition. Kurzweil predicts this will happen by the year 2045. Unlike his father, he, along with those of us who are lucky enough to survive into the middle of this century, will achieve immortality without ever tasting death.

I have a four-foot-tall robot in my house that plays with my kids. Both my daughters, aged 5 and 9, are so enamored with Jethro that they have each asked to marry it. For fun, my wife and I put on mock weddings. Despite the robot being mainly for entertainment, its very basic artificial intelligence can perform thousands of functions, including dance and teach karate, which my kids love. The most important thing Jethro has taught my kids is that it's totally normal to have a walking, talking machine around the house that you can hang out with whenever you want to.

The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days. It is offered both as a way for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workplace, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently commented that humans can escape being outmoded by AI by "having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence."1 To this end, he's founded a company, Neuralink. One of its first aims is to develop "neural lace," an injectable mesh that connects the brain directly to computers. Neural lace and other AI-based enhancements are supposed to allow data from your brain to travel wirelessly to one's digital devices or to the cloud, where massive computing power is available.