Humanity quietly crossed a threshold this week when Elon Musk announced on X that the first person has received a Neuralink brain implant. “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” said Musk, later adding that the first Neuralink product is called Telepathy, which enables “control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking.”
Initial users of Neuralink, which Musk co-founded, will be people who have lost use of their limbs, giving a veneer of altruism to what is actually a radical project to merge humans with machines. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer,” Musk wrote on X. “That is the goal.”
But that’s not really the goal. The goal is to usher in a transhuman future by creating human-machine hybrids that will be “superior” to natural or non-enhanced humans. Musk and other tech futurists — some 40 other companies besides Neuralink are working on computer-brain interfaces — don’t exactly describe what they’re doing this way. It sounds creepy. Much more innocuous sounding to say you’re just helping disabled people with exciting new digital technologY.
In reality, what Musk and Neuralink are doing amounts to building a second Tower of Babel or a revisiting of the serpent’s offer in the Garden of Eden: You will not surely die, you will be as gods. They want godlike intelligence and, ultimately, eternal life — and they’re willing to tinker with the human body and mind, deconstruct and reconstitute it even, if that’s what it takes.
What will such a future look like? Yuval Noah Harari, the creepy underling of World Economic Forum chief Klaus Schwab, has an idea. He once described a future in which ever more powerful computing technology will create a massive new class of what he called “useless people” who will need to be “kept happy with drugs and computer games.” Harari has also said the future will bring a new class of what he believes are superhuman beings, which he describes as “entities that are more different from us than we are different from chimpanzees.”
In a 2021 interview with Anderson Cooper, Harari declared that we will “soon have the power to re-engineer our bodies and brains, whether it is with genetic engineering or by directly connecting brains to computers, or by creating completely non-organic entities, artificial intelligence which is not based at all on the organic body and the organic brain. And these technologies are developing at break-neck speed.”
And of course, this future will usher in an almost unimaginable level of inequality, Harari says, a “real biological inequality” such that “Homo sapiens will split into different biological castes because they really have different bodies — and different abilities.”
This post-human future isn’t something Harari is afraid of or is merely trying to warn us about. It’s a future he seems at times to be looking forward to. He tells Cooper that massive biometrical data collection is “not just dystopian. It’s also utopian,” because it will produce better health care.
It’s easy to caricature Harari, but he speaks for an entire class of tech futurists who share his materialist view of mankind as infinitely malleable and upgradable. During the recent annual meeting of the WEF in Davos, Switzerland, a clip of a TED talk by Harari made the rounds on social media. In it, he made the bold claim that only material things are real, that “kidneys and mountains are real,” but human rights are not. Human rights, he says, are “just a story.” Imagine being so committed to materialism that if you can’t cut open a human being and see “human rights” inside, then they must not be real.
What Harari and Johnson and Musk and all who sail with them are really proposing is something not radical or new, but in fact very old. What they offer is not just materialism but paganism, repackaged for the digital age.
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