The Biological Shell

There is an assumption we have taken for granted ever since we began to fear artificial intelligence: that creating an intelligence superior to our own somehow means being replaced.

The Biological Shell challenges this assumption: not with reassurances, but with a model. Drawing on geopolitics, the physics of information, philosophy of mind, and cosmology, this essay builds a conceptual framework for thinking about superintelligence not as a threat to be stopped or a destiny to be endured, but as a stage of evolution: the next, not the last.

What happens to a civilization when it ceases to be the most advanced intelligence on its own planet? And what if the real danger were not the emergence of a mind greater than our own, but our inability to transmit to it what we consider essential before that happens?

What you will find in this book:
A conceptual model spanning six chapters, from the geopolitics of technological competition to the possibility of a cosmic intelligence, supported by a framework of conceptual equations - never purely predictive and always explained in natural language - and by original hand-drawn illustrations.

An entire section devoted to ten objections that put the model's fundamental assumptions to the test.

An essay that promises no easy answers and that, precisely for this reason, devotes considerable space to putting its own assumptions to the test.

For readers of Bostrom, Tegmark, Harari - and anyone who still has questions.