There’s much doom and gloom about humanity’s future, understandably so at a time of climate change and large-scale environmental collapse. But there’s another side to what’s coming, and it won’t all be bad. Elise Bohan is your travel guide to the future of human minds and bodies. Enjoy the trip – your guide is as sharp, savvy, lively and entertaining as you could ever want.’
We’re hurtling towards a superhuman future – or, if we blunder, extinction. The only way out of our existential crises, from global warming to the risks posed by nuclear weapons, novel and bioengineered pathogens and unaligned AI, is up. We’ll need more technology to safeguard our future – and we’re going to invent and perhaps even merge with some of that technology.
What does that mean for our 20th century life-scripts? Are the robots coming for our jobs? How will human relationships change when AI knows us inside out? Will we still be having human babies by the century’s end? Elise Bohan unflinchingly explores possibilities most of us are afraid to imagine: the impacts of automation on our jobs, livelihoods and dating and mating careers, the stretching out of ‘the-circle-of-life’, the rise of AI friends and lovers, the liberation of women from pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, and the impending global baby-bust – and attendant proliferation of digital minds.
Strap in for an exhilarating, and starkly honest, take on the promise and peril of life in the 21st century.
One of the most entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking books I’ve read in a long time!’
As a research scholar at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, Bohan may be one of the best-positioned people to assess the road ahead.'
A brilliant, engaging and edgy introduction to transhumanism – the idea that in coming centuries we humans will take charge of our own evolution and transform ourselves into new, artificially enhanced beings.’
Elise Bohan wants us to believe our survival depends on integrating ourselves with advanced robotics and artificial intelligence so that we can achieve what she calls a sustainable posthuman future. After reading her excellent and well-researched book, I’m inclined to agree with her.’
This book is an intellectual tour de force.’
In Future Superhuman, Elise Bohan asks challenging but important questions. Is transhumanism the best future for humanity? How best should we ride technological waves like AI, not just to survive but to thrive?’
The last two chapters [The Future of Sex and The End of Having Babies] are astonishing.'