Description

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In breathtakingly original prose, Elise Bohan argues that 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? 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’ as life-extension technologies mature, 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.

About the Author

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Elise Bohan is a Senior Research Scholar at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI). She holds a PhD in evolutionary macrohistory (Big History) and wrote the world’s first book-length history of transhumanism as a doctoral student. At FHI, she is part of a cohort of scholars who are dedicated to understanding, and tackling, humanity’s most pressing problems.

Praise For…

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'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.’ —Russell Blackford, author of At the Dawn of a Great Transition: The Question of Radical Enhancement

 

‘One of the most entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking books I’ve read in a long time! Future Superhuman provides a breathtakingly original, broad and optimistic view of a transhuman future. Elise Bohan’s fresh and unique voice comes through on every page: bold, fearless, fun and relentless on the absurdities of the human condition. She could well be the next big non-fiction star, at home in the same constellation as Yuval Noah Harari, Carl Sagan or Elizabeth Kolbert.’ —Rob Brooks, Scientia Professor of Evolution, UNSW, author of Artificial Intimacy