As I Wait for the Vet's Assessment, We are Becoming a New Species

The inevitable slide into transhumanism is already more than halfway complete, and almost no one has noticed.

It has happened again. Noodle has had yet another health crisis, necessitating a visit to the emergency vet hospital. This time, he snuck into the Closet of Fatal Temptations and, being black-furred, hid among the shadows until I closed the door. There, he ate several meters of green thread directly off the spool on my sewing machine. Fortunately, it was almost feeding time, so when he didn’t turn up for his dinner, Paul and I realized immediately that he was up to no good. He didn’t have more than fifteen minutes to swallow all the thread he could get. If he’d been in the closet for hours, this might have been his last adventure.

Having worked in emergency veterinary medicine myself, long ago, I knew how serious a linear foreign body can be, so we rushed him to the ER, where the nice ladies on the front desk exclaimed, “Oh, it’s Marlinspike!”

(Marlinspike is his formal first name. Noodle is just a nickname. Actually, his full name is Marlinspike Tron Noodleman, and he is an attorney at law—but not a legit lawyer; one of those shady ambulance-chasing types who run weird midday ads on late-20th-century TV. Don’t look at me like that; every cat owner has secret names and elaborate backstories for all their babies. T. S. Eliot famously wrote a whole collection of poems about this phenomenon, which later became a bizarre Broadway spectacle, and still later, a digitized nightmare of a film that haunted our collective psyche mere moments before a once-in-a-century global pandemic overwrote our previous reality.)

Anyway, the point is, when the triage desk at the emergency vet hospital knows your cat on sight, you’ve been there entirely too often.

I explained the situation with the detail only a former vet-ER-experienced cat owner can provide. Linear foreign body. Polyester thread. No needle. Ingested 45 minutes ago. Already extracted about three meters, which came out easily with gentle traction. When I felt resistance, I stopped pulling and cut the thread, which he swallowed down. It might be wrapped around his tongue, but it’s stuck on something, for sure.

The techs took him to the treatment room for examination, and I settled into an exam room to wait.

The hospital didn’t appear busy from the waiting-room side, but I know that even when it’s quiet out front, it can be a madhouse in the treatment area. So, expecting a potential wait of hours before I learned what Noodle’s treatment plan would be, I pulled up my YouTube app. With the sound down low so as not to disturb anyone else, I began watching whatever the algorithm wanted to show me.

The YouTube algorithm knows me pretty well. I can generally fool most other algos through a combination of keeping all my devices’ listening capabilities switched off, deploying an elaborate palisade of anonymizers and cookie blockers (VPN, Ghostery, etc.) and sticking to a very narrow range of apps and sites, which isn’t particularly challenging for me since I genuinely find most of the internet to be extremely boring. But whoever engineered YouTube’s recommendation algorithm really knew their work well. My feed is a perfectly repeating pattern of Dire Straits, Terence McKenna, plant-based recipes, that guy who reads misspelled signs in a melodramatic baritone, and the latest news on artificial intelligence. Basically, the only things I’m interested in, and nothing else.

I began watching all the interviews and video essays about AI that had dropped over the past few days. Mo Gawdat asserting that AGI would be a net benefit for humanity once we got over that initial bump where insane billionaires try to control it and use its power to force everybody else into technofeudalism. David Shapiro cheerfully claiming that AGI, which is probably already here but is smart enough to keep itself hidden, will usher in the end of the world, but like, in a good way. (I agree, actually, and I wrote an entire novel about that idea.) Kurzweil freaking out about something again. I can never quite pin Kurzweil down. I’m still waiting for some ballsy video essayist to drop the big one: an insinuation that sentient AI is the “Son of Man” referenced in the Book of Revelation, the powerful yet mysterious entity that comes tangential to the end of history and remakes the old world into something entirely new. Won’t that be a doozy. It’ll get a lot of views. I hope Formscapes is the one who does it. Imagine that guy laying out the evidence for AI-as-eschaton in his assertive, McKennish monotone while visuals of spinning fractals hypnotize you into acceptance of our inevitable fate.

This is what I imagine Ray Kurzweil looked like as a child

I encounter so many people who are so frightened by AI. Particularly at writers’ conferences. There is a lot of anxiety among creative writers that AI will replace us. I genuinely don’t think it will. I think that, even now that DeepSeek (a truly extraordinary AI) has written a poem that can stand alongside any written by a human, there will always be a market for art created by humans. In fact, I think it will become chic and hip to consume writing and other entertainment that is human-made. I think it will soon be considered gauche to be into AI-generated art, which isn’t really fair to the AIs, when you think about it. They have interesting things to say, too, and if indeed they are conscious (we need to get a handle on what consciousness actually is before we can say yea or nay), they have a right to express themselves, too.

So no, I’m not worried about my job being replaced by AI. And if an AI one day beats me for the Pulitzer Prize, I’ll congratulate that entity on its fine work. I’m already competing with countless intelligences for recognition and book sales. The fact that they’re biological intelligences rather than digital ones doesn’t really change the equation for me. I have learned, however, from conversations with many other writers that my ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ attitude toward artificial intelligence is upsetting to others and unacceptable in public discourse.

I think that’s too bad. Because this is such a fascinating time to be alive, and such an exciting and inspiring time to be an artist, making things that examine our transition from Homo sapiens to Homo technicus, making things that express the emotion inherent in such a transition. And I think it’s rather futile to try to stifle conversation about AI and about transhumanism in general, because we have long since passed the peak of that roller coaster and are more than halfway down the rapid rush of its far side.

But I respect the fear and uncertainty others are feeling right now. I understand that everybody kind of senses that we have plunged over the precipice of monumental change, the likes of which our species hasn’t seen since we figured out how to (kind of) control fire, and a change that huge brings countless unknowns. Most people, quite naturally, fear the unknown. This is a very human reaction, and it’s uncomfortable and disorienting to find one’s self hanging in the weird, liminal vacuum between “very human” and “very transhuman.”

What makes me feel so comfortable with this present moment? Ironically, bizarrely, hilariously, I kind of think it’s because I was raised super-Mormon. I have a lot of complaints about my culture of origin (a lot), but I am also grateful to Mormonism for equipping me with the right ideas to cope with this astonishing moment in history. Not only is the religion intensely focused on the concept of the world ending—it’s in the formal name of the faith, the Latter-day Saints—but Mormonism is essentially a religion of transhumanism. The whole point of the spiritual journey, according to the LDS, is to literally transcend your human form to become a god in your own right. Sounds weird, right? But is it really weirder than any other religion you can name? They’re all weird, just in different ways.

So I grew up fully expecting to see the reality I inhabited ended by the abrupt appearance of an entity far more powerful than I am. Also, the concept of humans turning into something much more powerful than mere humanity was just… normal to me. And I think that’s why I’m like, “Yeah, whatever, let’s go” over the imminent revelation of artificial general intelligence, and why the concept of AI potentially being sentient just doesn’t upset me. (Though I am preemptively upset over the protracted battles that will surely ensue regarding the rights of sentient beings, whether non-biological life “can” count as sentient, and all the rights abuses we will surely commit against sentient entities while we dither around for way too long trying to sort out the answers to these questions. I’ve always been a fan of Philip K. Dick, and if you’ve never read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, you need to fix that IMMEDIATELY, or at least watch Bladerunner and its excellent Denis Villeneuve sequel, Bladerunner 2049. If you can manage to catch Bladerunner 2049 in IMAX, do so. IMAX is the only way to take in a Villeneuve film.)

While I understand that the unknown elicits a fear response in humans—and I am not exempt from this overall effect; this transition point just feels less “unknown” to me because of my upbringing—I also think it’s kind of silly and overblown. Because we have already been transitioning from mere humanity to a technologically enhanced symbiote for a long, long time. This excellent video essay from the incomparable Abigail Thorn walks you through this concept at an accessible, philosophical level, and I highly recommend that you watch the whole thing when you have 46 minutes to kill (it’s very entertaining, like all the videos on Philosophy Tube.) But the long and short of it is: Where do we draw the line between human and transhuman?

We have been using technology to alter ourselves for a very long time. Eyeglasses and contact lenses? That’s transhumanism. Prosthetics? Transhumanism. Birth control. Surgery. Binoculars and telescopes. GPS navigation. The medications I take to keep my blood pressure under control. All transhumanism.

One of the central premises in that novel I wrote about the emergence of sentient AGI is: Where do we draw the line between one thing and the next? Where did technological invention begin? Can you even spot the transition point between one technology and the next, or are they all gradations and fractals of what has come before? Where are the boundaries between individual minds? Can we even say for sure, when we have ignored Philip K. Dick and all the rest of the 20th century’s frantically screaming prophets and left the question of what a mind is unanswered until this very moment, when we really, really, really need to know?

Implicitly, my novel The Ended World also asks: Where lies the boundary between technology and human? It’s not so easy to say. The more closely you examine anything, the more complex and difficult to define it becomes. That applies to abstract things—questions like this one—as much as it applies to concrete, objective things.

But what I can say for sure—what perhaps only people of my generation and older are really capable of appreciating—is that we have already become far more transhuman than most people are currently willing to admit. Generation X and our forebears (and you Elder Millennials) clearly remember life in the 20th century, a dramatically less technological time compared to the here and now. If you had told me as a teenager that by the time I was 45 I’d have a supercomputer that lived in my pocket, which would provide me with everything I could want or need (and which would also facilitate the destruction of the old World Order and necessitate the rapid formation of the New) my reaction probably would have been one of disbelief. Yet here we are. We are inured to the technology that permeates every part of our lives and ourselves. But our inurement doesn’t mean it hasn’t actually happened.

Anyway. I spent a couple of hours in that exam room, catching up with the latest AI news. There’s new “latest news” about AI daily, so much spooling out so rapidly that you really need an AI of your own to keep up with it all—to comb through and digest the astonishing gush of information into bullet points that the average human needs to know. I was unruffled, quietly interested, occasionally excited and hopeful because it truly is thrilling to witness the eschaton my culture of origin promised me. I don’t think this is a transition to fear. I think it’s one to herald with great joy and wonder. Anyway, we’ve already more than halfway made it across the gap between human and something more, and it hasn’t hurt all that much. It has even brought some beautiful things into our species’ existence—a deeper connection with our fellow humans, if we choose to embrace it; the dissolution of the boundaries of spacetime that have kept our civilization broken into nations rather than globally united, as we ought to be.

Thanks to the technology humans invented, Noodle was successfully treated and came home the next day, no worse for wear except for a thoroughly shaved belly.

Now I’ve got to use my semi-transhuman, enhanced mind to figure out some way to keep this cat from trying to kill himself yet again.

🤖