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The cross-cutting ideas — singularity, posthuman, readiness, precaution — that every other article eventually leans on.
24 of 24 shown
The claim that technological capability grows exponentially or faster, so that the rate of change itself increases over historical time.
The use of machine learning to select drug targets, generate candidate molecules and predict failure, so far demonstrably faster at making compounds than at making medicines.
Machine-learning systems that predict what shape a protein sequence folds into and that generate new proteins with no natural counterpart.
A hypothetical artificial system matching or exceeding competent human performance across essentially all cognitive tasks rather than in narrow domains.
A system that measures nervous-system activity, decodes an intention or state from it, and converts that decoded signal into a command for an external device.
The class of diseases in which a somatic cell lineage escapes the controls on its own division, and the age-related cause of death that constrains most life-extension arguments.
A bacterial defence system repurposed as a programmable DNA-cutting tool, in which a short guide RNA directs the Cas9 enzyme to a chosen sequence in almost any genome.
Nick Bostrom's proposal to influence the order in which technologies arrive, hastening protective ones and delaying dangerous ones, rather than trying to halt progress.
The category of risks that would end humanity or permanently destroy its potential, and the research programme built around identifying and reducing them.
The study of humanity's possible long-run trajectories, conventionally grouped into extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthuman transformation.
The proposition that aging is the shared upstream driver of most chronic disease, so that slowing it would delay many conditions at once rather than one at a time.
The consensus taxonomy of cellular and molecular processes held to drive mammalian aging, set out as nine mechanisms in 2013 and expanded to twelve in 2023.
The portion of life spent in good health and function, as distinct from total lifespan; widely used as a goal but not standardized as a measure.
Computational models of an individual person's physiology, built from that person's own data and run to predict what an intervention would do before it is attempted.
The deliberate use of biomedical or technical means to extend human capacities beyond what is needed to restore or maintain ordinary health.
The proposal that humans and artificial intelligence will form a single cognitive system rather than remaining separate agents that merely use one another.
The hypothetical threshold at which medicine adds remaining life expectancy faster than time subtracts it, making death by aging recede indefinitely.
A hypothetical being whose central capacities exceed the human maximum, and, in a separate scholarly tradition, a critique of the humanist subject itself.
The regulatory doctrine that scientific uncertainty about a serious or irreversible harm is not by itself a reason to permit the activity that might cause it.
The claim that mental states depend on a system's functional organization rather than on the material implementing it, so that a mind could run on non-biological hardware.
The hypothesized point at which machine intelligence begins improving itself fast enough that technological change outruns human ability to predict or steer it.
A nine-point scale, originating at NASA, that rates how far a technology has moved from observed basic principles to proven operational use.
The intellectual and cultural movement holding that human beings can and should use technology to overcome the biological limits of the human condition.
A proposed procedure for reproducing a particular mind by scanning one brain's structure in detail, building a computational model from the scan, and running it.