Instead of dying out because we had no children, we would live our children’s and grandchildren’s and great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lives for them. Kurzweil himself planned on living 700 years: his would be both the last generation of humanity, and the first of super-humanity.
You’re probably wondering what these first supermen do? Nothing super, I regret to say. A consistent theme of western twilight, from the grade-school poster of clapping hands circled around the words “We applaud ourselves!”
to the woman in Starbucks Blackberrying and Facebooking and Twittering to herself, was of humanity turned inward, “revolving on themselves without repose,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. The prototype Singulars, pioneering a form of immortality that extends the moment forever, are similarly self-preoccupied, Tweeting into Tweeternity—while physical labor falls to the Welfare Robots, doing the jobs Post-Humans are too busy self-uploading to do.
And so the last generation of ever more elderly westerners goes on—and on and on, like the joke about the gnarled old rustic and the axe he’s had for seventy years: he’s replaced the blade seven times and the handle four times, but it’s still the same old trusty axe. They have achieved man’s victory over death, not in the sense our ancestors meant it—the assurance of eternal life in the unseen world—but in the here and now. Which is what it’s all about, isn’t it? An eternal present tense.
You would be surprised by how fast demographic destiny, economic reality, and technological escape-hatches intersect. Compare the turn-of-the-century’s suspicion and denigration of genetically modified foods with what was either enthusiasm for or indifference to genetically modified people. Mess with our vegetables and we would burn down your factory.
Mess with us, and we passed you our credit card. And by the time we wondered whether it was all such a smart idea it was the robots that had the Platinum Visa cards.
The world after America is more dangerous, more violent, more genocidal. The fulfillment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions was more than simply the biggest abdication of responsibility by the great powers since the 1930s. It confirmed the Islamo-Sino-Russo-Everybody Else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer had the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.
What changed? At first, it seemed that nothing had. When a year or two went by without Israel getting nuked, people concluded that there had been no reason to worry in the first place. Washington’s “realists” said it demonstrated that “containment” (the fallback policy) worked. If the destruction of the Zionist Entity and, indeed, the West as a whole were Iran’s goals, they were theoretical—or, at any rate, not urgent. Pre-nuclear Iran had authorized successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, and blown up Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, and acted extra-territorially to the full extent of its abilities for a third of a century, suggesting at the very minimum that it might be prudent to assume that when its abilities go nuclear Iran would be acting to an even fuller extent. But to acknowledge that simple truth would have asked too much of the “great powers,” preoccupied as they were with health care reform, and gays in the military, and universal nuclear disarmament.
Everything changed, instantly. But we pretended not to notice. At a stroke, Iran had transformed much of the map—and not just in the Middle East, where the Sunni dictatorships faced a choice between an unsought nuclear arms race or a future as Iranian client states. The “realists” argued that Iran was a “rational” actor and so, because blowing Tel Aviv off the map was totally “irrational,” it obviously couldn’t be part of the game plan.
