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.

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.

Introduction: The big picture and the human story Part I: How to think like a transhumanist 1. Prepare the future shock 2. T is for transhumanism 3. What’s so great about humanity anyway? 4. The genetic lottery 5. Ape -brains in a modern world 6. Unfit custodians of the future Part II: A species in transition 7. Take x and add AI 8. Live forever or die trying 9. The post-work society 10. A generation of kidults 11. The future of sex 12. The end of having babies Postscript: The start of something new