The "Merge" with AI Has Begun

Society

/ July 7, 2026

The “Merge” With AI Has Already Begun

As AI insinuates itself into every corner of our lives, many of us are growing inured to the push to digitize the whole world—including humanity itself.

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An abstract human face dissolves into a cloud of glowing cubes. The image illustrates concepts of data fragmentation, information flow, and technological change.

(imaginima / Getty Images)

On May 1, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted about what his company hopes to achieve with artificial intelligence. “We want to build tools to augment and elevate people,” he wrote, “not entities to replace them.”

The statement was no doubt meant to calm the millions of nerves jangled by the cascade of layoffs that have accompanied the arrival of AI, with scores more predicted in the coming years. The problem is that, until very recently, Altman has been making it clear not only that “entire classes of jobs will go away” but also that he doesn’t envision humanity existing in its current form for long.

In a 2017 blog post, he argued that our best chance of surviving the rise of artificial superintelligence will be to “merge” with the machines. He wrote that “we will be the first species ever to design our own descendants,” and “we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” Altman was arguing, effectively, that there are two possible outcomes for the ASI age. Artificial superintelligence might get rid of our species; the “bad case,” he warned in 2023, is “lights out for all of us.” Or humanity could survive the advent of ASI by integrating ourselves into the digital world, becoming one with our digital progeny.

What might this “merge” look like? Altman has suggested it might start off with people becoming “really close friends with a chatbot.” But “the full-on-crazy version,” he told The New Yorker in 2016, “is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud. I’d love that.” Altman himself has signed up with a company called Nectome to have is brain “uploaded” to a computer when he dies. He’s already taking steps to become an AI himself.

The implications of Altman’s future-casting are radical and raise serious questions for anyone interested in our collective future. These questions include: Who will own the computers on which digital minds exist? Who will have the opportunity to “merge” with ASI once it arrives—everyone around the world? Billionaires and poor people alike? MAGA supporters and the “woke” left? Obviously not. The tech oligarchs who run our country will never permit the masses to join them on “the cloud.” These people live in gated communities, have their own apocalypse bunkers, and want to flee Earth for Mars. Their whole schtick is separating themselves from the masses, building a socioeconomic firewall between them and us. As the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff notes in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest, the billionaires want to upload their minds to the digital realm because it provides the ultimate escape hatch from the world they’re destroying. The digital afterlife is not for the 99.9 percent.

At least as serious is the question of what “merging” with AI would require of the human organism. Uploaded minds would have no physical body. They would exist as mere software floating in a digital ether—creatures in the form of pure information. They would never age, because software is immortal, and they could share memories, personality traits, and experiences with one another at the metaphorical click of a button. The boundaries between individuals would become porous, and everyone would meld into a giant amorphous digital hive mind. Consequently, uploaded humans would be so different from biological humans that we would classify them as forming an entirely novel species, which we can call “digital posthumans.”

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As for what might happen if we don’t become digital posthumans, Altman predicted a kind of Terminator-level “conflict” that could end either with their enslavement—or ours. “We need to level up humans,” Altman told The New Yorker, “because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever. What a time to be alive!”

Altman’s account of the future is an instance of what I call “digital eschatology,” where “eschatology” refers to a belief system or narrative framed around the end of the world as we know it. Adherents of this view believe that the future will—and should—be dominated by digital rather than biological beings. It finds expression in Elon Musk’s claim that, because of AI, biological “intelligence” will soon constitute less than 1 percent of all the “intelligence” on Earth. Larry Page, cofounder of Google, has reportedly argued that “digital life is the natural and desirable next step in… cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good.” Like Altman, he imagines humans eventually “merging” with AI such that “one day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.”

In 2012, Page personally recruited Ray Kurzweil, the famed futurist and transhumanist, to work at Google. Kurzweil argues that the “singularity”—when humans merge with machines—is imminent, and that if you choose not to upgrade yourself, then “you won’t be around for very long to influence the debate.” Become posthuman or die out.

A former Kurzweil collaborator, Eliezer Yudkowsky, similarly claims that “the happy future” is one in which people have been transformed into magical digital beings living in computer simulations that are “powered by the sun.” He suggests that these posthumans might then “clear all the humans off the earth and leave the entire place as a park.” On another occasion, he argued that it’s so important for there to be superintelligent AIs in the future that he would willingly sacrifice “all of humanity” to create such beings if it were the “only…reliable” way to make this happen.

As rank and untethered as these views are—and as much as they now serve to boost the narrative that AI is inevitable and can only be entrusted to our current tech elite—they are also an orthodox religious view within Silicon Valley. From leading scientists to young researchers, from tech CEOs to AI futurists, from AI “doomers” to “accelerationists,” nearly everyone agrees about one thing: The future will be digital. The age of biological humans is coming to an end, and the role of our species in this grand eschatological scheme is to initiate the new era of digital lifeforms—to trigger the singularity by creating superhuman AIs that usher in what Yudkowsky calls our “glorious transhumanist future.”

The advent of this digital era might seem like a distant possibility. Yet the CEOs of DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic all predict that ASI will arrive within five years—meaning that it could be here as soon as this year or as late as the early 2030s. According to Musk, who founded xAI (which recently merged with SpaceX), we’re already in “the very early stages of the singularity.” Altman agrees, declaring in a 2016 interview that “the merge has begun.” He reiterated this view in a 2025 blog post, arguing that “the takeoff has started,” although he tempered his pronouncement slightly by adding that this process will unfold in a gradual manner. “The singularity happens bit by bit,” he wrote, “and the merge happens slowly.”

To be sure, humanity has been “merging” with technology since the origins of our evolutionary genus, Homo. The first human species, Homo habilis, crafted stone tools to scrape meat from bones, among other things. These stone tools could be seen as technological “enhancements” of the human body, and consequently one could conceptualize our ancient ancestors as rudimentary “cyborgs.” Today, people have pacemakers to control their heart rhythms, electrodes in their brains to ease the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and cochlear implants to restore hearing. Many of us offload parts of our memories to computers. I doubt most people could recite their friends’ phone numbers; what’s the point of memorizing them when our smartphones can do it for us?

There is, however, a crucial difference between technologies that enhance humanity as humanity and those that would transform us into something completely different. The “merge” that Altman and other Silicon Valley extremists want to bring about would entail fundamental changes to the very nature of being human, because the ultimate goal, in Altman’s words, is to “crazy uplevel” people by reengineering them into digital posthumans.

Whereas I, and most people outside the Bay Area, advocate for technologies that improve the human condition, the tech elite advocate for technologies that would ultimately replace it with a new posthuman condition. That’s the point of “the merge”: to transition our species into a new digital era, whether you and I want this or not.

Alarmingly, we see evidence of “the merge” all around us today. Altman is correct that this process has already started—and that should worry us.

Consider that many students are now outsourcing critical thinking skills to AI. One study found that “more than half of teens” are using AI to complete their schoolwork. At the end of last year, I asked my class of 350 students at Case Western Reserve University to raise their hands if they know of someone in the class who used AI chatbots to generate an entire assignment at some point during the semester. To my chagrin, two-thirds raised their hands, despite my co-instructor’s and my insisting that they eschew AI.

One undergraduate told me that nearly everyone in his pre-med cohort uses AI to complete most of their coursework, as this frees up time for internships. If I were to walk into the pre-med library, he said, I’d find nearly every computer with ChatGPT open in a window. And students aren’t the only ones offloading the labor of thinking. Studies show that six in 10 teachers are now delegating grading tasks to AI, meaning that there’s no human in the loop at all: AIs are generating term papers that are then evaluated by AIs.

Critical thinking is a core capacity of the human mind. It’s what enables us to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize information. By offloading such skills to AI, young people are becoming dependent on it for even simple cognitive tasks. They are essentially “merging” with AI by integrating it into their cognitive systems, alongside other brain structures like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. If AI were to become suddenly unavailable, these students might experience the loss as a serious if reversible form of brain damage. This coupling of human brains with AI is a small but nontrivial step toward Altman’s goal of radical cyborgization.

Another manifestation of “the merge” concerns the way AI is replacing people in our social lives. We are in the grips of a loneliness pandemic, which impacts 18- to 24-year-olds the most. Consequently, many young people are turning to AI to satisfy their need for friendship, belonging, and even romance.

AI is designed to be sycophantic—to validate users with affirmations and constant flattery. Befriending AI requires no emotional effort or social skills, and one can turn to it at any time of the day—or night—to share one’s deepest secrets. Even more, AI “girlfriends” and “boyfriends” can be specifically designed by users to exhibit desired traits, and there’s no hassle if one opts to suddenly end the relationship. This makes AI especially appealing for young people isolated in a world torn apart by capitalism and technology.

One study from the nonprofit Common Sense Media found that 72 percent of teens in the US use AI for companionship,

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