Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? (opens in new tab)

A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a ‘transhuman’ future – actual humanity be damnedSam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, took to the Internet a few years ago that homo sapiens would be the first species “to design our own descendants”. In his best case scenario, the “merge” 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...