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Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, took to the Internet a few years ago\u00a0to propose<\/a>\u00a0that homo sapiens would be the first species \u201cto design our own descendants\u201d. In his best case scenario, the \u201cmerge\u201d between humans and artificial intelligence occurs at some point over the next 50 years. The alternative, where we remain simply human and the machines follow their own path, is more ominous. \u201cIf two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it \u2013 in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond \u2013 they are going to have conflict,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n More recently, Elon Musk, the world\u2019s richest man, who at one point last year was granted the power to reconfigure the US federal government, argued\u00a0on his social media platform, X,<\/a> that \u201cit increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence\u201d \u2013 our role in the history of the cosmos reduced to that of the low level code that boots up a computer before you can run sophisticated programs on it.<\/p>\n And Musk is on the tame side of the evolutionary proposition. According to\u00a0Silicon Valley lore<\/a>, he once pushed back against Google co-founder Larry Page\u2019s claim that our next manifestation, to follow in the steps of the meat-and-bone humans you see walking about today, would necessarily have digital form in order to spread throughout the galaxy. (In fact, he recently testified in court that it was those concerns that prompted him to found OpenAI with Altman.)\u00a0<\/strong>Meat and bones do not make for efficient interstellar travelers.<\/p>\n