Imagine your body—flesh and blood, muscle and bone—cast aside as mere refuse, and your brain “immersed in a liquid of the nature of cerebro-spinal fluid” inside a cylinder. Thus goes the dark prophecy of Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal nearly a hundred years ago. Bernal believed that our bodies, those paltry shells, were not long for this world. We are destined, he posited, for a new life “more plastic, more directly controllable and at the same time more variable and more permanent than that produced by the triumphant opportunism of nature.”

Article continues after advertisement

For most of us, Bernal’s vision of progress is a horror story.

In a manner no less bodily, Generative AI is also the stuff of horror—and as with any great story of fear, we are the likely victims, and sometimes the creators.

“The progress of the future,” Bernal argued, “depends no longer on physiological evolution but on the reaction of intelligence on a material universe.” His stilted syntax does not specify a human…