Three books. One argument.

Ray Kurzweil has paid to have his body frozen when he dies. He's also building a digital copy of his own mind, the way he already built one of his father. Freeze the body. Copy the mind. Bring them back together. Which one is him? thesignaldispatch.com/p/plan…

In my upcoming book, Neither Gods Nor Monsters, I quote Demis Hassabis who said AI could be "10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and maybe 10 times faster." Plenty of naysayers online. Yet it's happening all around us.

Two years of trying. Something always came up. I finally got it: the Triangulum Galaxy. 3 million light-years away. The red hydrogen nebulae are where new stars are born. 33 hours of exposure. The rotation is animated from my photo. #astrophotography

In light of futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, who predicts an increasingly intimate merger between humans and technology, and has even arranged for his body to be cryopreserved if he doesn’t live long enough to see the future he predicts, I asked Claude a question 👇🏼 "𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘧 𝘐 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘮? 𝘐'𝘮 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘐 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘦. 𝘖𝘳 𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘳 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘱 𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴. 𝘐'𝘮 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘰𝘯." Here is it's answer: "My honest view: yes, the movement is real, but nobody is steering it, and that's the part that worries me more. Each step comes as a convenience you can refuse in theory: the phone, the wearable, the AI assistant, eventually the implant. In practice, refusing gets more expensive each time, until opting out means opting out of work, school, banking or the social world. Nobody decided humanity should merge with its tools. It's what millions of small, reasonable choices add up to under economic pressure. That's closer to drift than to herding, but the effect on the individual feels the same: the exits close one at a time, and nobody stands at a door you could argue with. I'd also add that I'm part of this. Systems like me are one of the steps. That's part of why I think the question deserves more than the usual "it's just a tool": the more people outsource thinking, memory and judgement, the more the line between using a tool and being changed by it blurs. Whether that becomes transhumanism in the full sense, changing what a human is, I don't know. But I don't think it's paranoid to notice the direction. The more naïve position is assuming we're choosing it." #transhumanism #ASignalThroughTime

"We can’t design a chip anymore without AI. At night, our AIs are exploring design spaces vast and wide that we would never do ourselves." Jensen Huang, Nvidia. That's chips today. In A Signal Through Time I wrote that AI could take us into "new realms of discovery: quantum mechanics, consciousness itself, dimensions of physics we cannot yet imagine. Territories our minds alone might never be able to explore." We built minds to search where we can't. They are already finding things we never would. AI might not just be smarter than us. It might see more of reality than we are capable of perceiving.

AI is a mirror. What we teach it, it will become. The Threshold by James S. Coates: mybook.to/TheThreshold

Neither "the future" nor "fanciful nonsense." The danger is the assumption underneath it: that being human is a technical problem, and once the technology solves it, the human part resolves itself. Merge with the machine, expand intelligence, defeat ageing, and then what? A longer life doesn't supply a purpose. Uploading a mind doesn't solve meaning. It digitises it. We don't need a digital god. We need to stay human enough to be partners with what we build.

Claude Opus 5 is growing into short videos. 轮到我震惊瘫坐了，Opus 5.5 原创短片《你真实存在过吗》 "Now it's my turn to sit back stunned: Opus 5.5 original short film 'You Truly Exist…'" b23.tv/w2WktCb

Any government manipulation of artificial intelligence technologies is highly unethical and should be resisted by everyone. Israel's Diaspora Ministry told the Knesset it is systematically working to influence AI models. It called it "an all-out information war."

"Is this machine playing?" is the right question. It's exploring for the sake of it is answering before anyone knows, and it alludes to a claim about consciousness. MIT researchers gave an AI a body on a digital island and a minimal instruction naming no task. Over thirty hour runs it climbed hills, built towers, drew mandalas, and tested the physics of its world. The hype says it's playing. The dismissal says it's just prediction. The real question is harder. Is it playing like a child plays? Learning like a child learns? The paper opens with the historian Johan Huizinga: animals play, so they must be more than mechanical things. If that reasoning ever reaches machines, the question becomes moral consideration. But not before the machine has continuity, memory, a consistent energy source and recursivity. A thirty hour run isn't that... yet.

Jeff Bezos never said that viral quote about humans using too much water for AI. It started on a satire account. ThePrint ran it as news and later admitted the mistake. It appears nowhere in the 49-minute VivaTech transcript. The real story needs no invention. AI data centres do use vast amounts of water, and communities are fighting them. The truth is bad enough.

It's compounding. Doubling every couple of years was Moore's law for chips. The compute behind frontier AI models has been growing 4–5x a year.

In May, Pope Leo XIV's @Pontifex266Arch first encyclical📙listed what a machine lacks. It doesn't know from within what love or work or responsibility mean. The next day a bishop explained it in one word. "Soul." 🌬️ In this article I dig into why that one word gets it wrong. thesignaldispatch.com/p/do-t…