When the article arrived in my inbox, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time — a frisson, that particular French shiver that sits somewhere between excitement and dread. Jeff Bezos had just announced that AGI had effectively shown up, and that he intended to harness it through his new venture, Prometheus, to produce what he was calling AGE: artificial general engineering. The pitch was expansive: a technology capable of designing everything from rocket ships to pharmaceutical compounds, opening up entire categories of human problem-solving that had previously been bottlenecked by the sheer limitation of human engineering capacity. Bezos stayed careful in his public remarks, but the implications were already leaking past the edges of what he’d said. Everything, it seemed, was now on the table.
The frisson took me back to Troy, New York, the mid-eighties, where I was a graduate student in philosophy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — an engineering school, emphatically, whatever the philosophy department might have preferred to believe. I was studying phenomenology, existentialism, and aesthetics, three disciplines that seemed to me then, and seem to me now, to be threads of the same continuous inquiry: how do we read reality, and how do we know the difference between that and the stories we tell ourselves about it? It was an odd place to be asking those questions. The campus around me was absorbed in systems, formulas, load-bearing calculations, thesis projects built to spec. Reagan had just begun his second term, trickle-down was being sold to a Democratic Party that had stopped bothering to resist it, and the engineering mind — confident, quantitative, sold on designed solutions — was the presiding sensibility of the age.
I lived with three engineers in a four-bedroom apartment. We talked shop at breakfast, which mostly meant I listened. What interested me — the ethical and theoretical dimensions of what technology was actually doing to human life — was not their focus, and they were under no obligation to make it so.
Then the Challenger went down.
On the RPI campus there was a pseudo-Gothic chapel — the kind of place where, a generation earlier, students would have filed in on Sundays, or Saturdays depending on denomination, observing whatever the liturgical calendar required. By the mid-eighties that was over. The administration had gutted it entirely — stripped the altar, stripped everything that had made it a sacred space — and converted it into a print center. You walked in under the original stained glass windows, which they’d left in place, and found yourself facing something resembling a newspaper press. Hand over the number your terminal had given you, and a clerk passed your document across the counter in a neat plastic envelope. The smell of toner under medieval light. God replaced by the laser printer.
They hadn’t thrown away the pews . They’d moved them to the student center, arranged facing each other with tables in between — church furniture pressed into service for pitchers of beer and a movie-sized TV screen on the wall. Most days, from mid-morning through the afternoon, it was MTV running on that screen. The new liturgy. The thing that had moved into the space the other thing had vacated. On the day the Challenger went down, the footage was running on a loop instead, and I was sitting alone in a salvaged church pew, working through a pitcher, eating pizza, watching the plume.
The engineers in the room were already arguing about O-rings. I sat there in that deconsecrated furniture and thought: this is what happens when the people who ask how stop talking to the people who ask whether.
This is what happens when the people who ask how stop talking to the people who ask whether.
Forty years later, reading about Bezos and Prometheus, I had the same frisson. We are back in the student center. The screen is running. The O-ring question is back — except this time, nobody in the room knows what to ask about it.
I wrote a piece some time ago for The Conversation asking whether we would even recognise the singularity when it arrived — whether the moment machine intelligence eclipsed our own would announce itself, or simply accumulate around us until we looked up and found ourselves already inside it. Worth your time. The singularity was supposed to be a 2030s problem. Bezos did not get the memo.
I. The Fire This Time
Prometheus, in the Greek telling, was the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals — not merely the fire that cooks meat and keeps away wolves, but the fire of the mind itself: the capacity for ideas striking against each other like flint, for the leap from observation to invention. Kubrick encoded the same fire in the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey — that black rectangle standing in the African dawn, humming at a frequency the proto-humans can’t quite name, until one of them picks up a bone and understands, for the first time, what it is for. The monkey bashes the head of the competing monkey at the watering hole. Cut to a spacecraft tumbling in orbit. Four million years compressed into a single edit. That monkey — the one who understood leverage before anyone else did — could have been Bezos. Could have been Musk. Could have been Gates. The technology changes. The dynamic does not. Be-bop.
Prometheus has a shadow story, one the West has been carrying alongside it just as long, and it runs through the Garden of Eden. The tree Adam and Eve are forbidden is not the tree of life. It is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The moral dimension is built into the prohibition itself. You may know, but the knowing comes bundled with consequence, with exile, with the weight of living inside the distinction between what you can do and what you should. That is the deal. That has always been the deal.
What Bezos has named Prometheus is that same tree — with the moral clause stripped out. AGE is Promethean fire delivered by a trillionaire to the physical economy, with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs as the angels at the gate, and no cherubim with flaming swords anywhere in sight.
AGE is Promethean fire delivered by a trillionaire to the physical economy, with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs as the angels at the gate, and no cherubim with flaming swords anywhere in sight.
We lost track of the mythology somewhere along the way. Stopped telling ourselves the story and went straight to the products, the updates, the Moore’s Law curve, the latest version of Windows. That forgetting left us unprepared. The singularity was supposed to be a problem for the 2030s. It was supposed to give us time. It was not supposed to be left to technologists to decide when to release it, and certainly not under the conditions of pure unregulated capitalism. Something should have caged this long enough for the rest of us to ask what it can do, what it will do, and whether we actually want it here, now, in a world that cannot manage its existing crises — the climate, the fracturing of democracy, the still-live possibility of nuclear annihilation. Those are not engineering questions. They are the questions from the other tree. The one Bezos left out of the pitch.
II. Methuselah’s Children
During Trump’s first term, the world got a demonstration of what happens when the people holding power treat a biological crisis as a political inconvenience. COVID-19 arrived in America around the last week of January 2020, and by the first week of February it was already moving. The Super Bowl was played in Miami on February 2nd. A billion-dollar affair. People flew in from everywhere on earth, sat together in a stadium, and flew back out. The governor of Florida acknowledged it was probably a super-spreader event. A serious administration would have called it off. But that’s not what happened.
What did come out of that period, less discussed, was the acceleration of technologies that will matter far more in the long run than the policy failures. DARPA had a program running called P3 — Pandemic Prevention Platform — aimed at developing rapid biological response capabilities oriented toward the warfighter, as DARPA’s missions tend to be. Out of that cycle came contributions to monoclonal antibody development, partly in conjunction with Vanderbilt University, and the mRNA platform that allowed vaccines to be structured at a speed previously unimaginable. AI was in the room for all of it. Not the vaccine controversy — leave that alone. The point is that AI-assisted biological engineering was already operational, already producing results, already embedded in the institutions working at the intersection of national security and life science, before most people had heard the term synthetic biology.
In 2018, the Pentagon commissioned the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to develop a framework for synthetic biology’s dual-use applications — because the military knew it would be using these tools and wanted at least the outline of a design philosophy before it did. That framework, read carefully, opens onto a landscape that is not easy to close again. Whole biomes subject to redesign. The human body understood as a platform — synthetic cells, synthetic arteries, prosthetic devices that are less accommodation to disability than early prototypes of a different kind of human being. None of it well regulated. Very little of it subject to oversight proportionate to the scale of the ambition.
Now bring Prometheus into that landscape. The artificial general engineer will be capable of producing biological products — molecules, compounds, delivery systems — at a pace no human research team could match. Thirty years from now, the human being who emerges from these laboratories will be a different creature than the one who went in. Methuselah is not a myth anymore. He is a product roadmap. CRISPR, stem cell rejuvenation, cellular reprogramming — the early chapters of Genesis, in which people routinely lived three and four and eight hundred years, start to look less like allegory and more like a specification someone left lying around and a trillionaire picked up.
Then there is He Jiankui. A biophysicist trained at Rice University and Stanford, he announced in 2018 that he had produced the first genetically modified human beings — twin girls, referred to as Lulu and Nana, whose embryos he had edited using CRISPR. The official justification was HIV protection. The real ambition, readable between the lines, was a boutique operation — couples coming in to specify the children they wanted. He received three years in prison and a lifetime ban from reproductive medicine. A slap on the wrist, given what he’d done. The twins are out there somewhere, their edited genomes ticking along in ways nobody fully understands yet.
The lesson is not that the system caught him. The lesson is that he did it openly, announced it at a conference, and still ran the experiment to completion before anyone stopped him. Imagine the same impulse operating with a trillionaire’s resources and no conference announcement. You don’t have to imagine very hard. The UAE is right there. The Gulf states. Anywhere that a closed society means you will never see a published report, a leaked document, a congressional inquiry. The money goes where the regulation isn’t. The research follows the money.
The lesson is not that the system caught him. The lesson is that he did it openly, announced it at a conference, and still ran the experiment to completion before anyone stopped him.
Mary Shelley knew this was coming, the way serious writers always know. She subtitled Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus.” The connection was explicit. The monster was never the problem. The problem was the scientist who made him and walked away.
III. The Man Who Wanted to Seed the World
The media coverage of Jeffrey Epstein has been, from the beginning, a study in misdirection. Not deliberate necessarily — just the reliable gravitational pull of sex scandal over everything more complicated and more dangerous. The trafficking, the girls, the island, the list — these are crimes, not trivialities. They have functioned, the way lurid details tend to function in American media, as a curtain drawn across the part of the story that should be keeping serious people awake.
What Epstein was actually doing with his money is the story.
He gave at least $6.5 million to Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, funded George Church’s CRISPR research, steered an additional $2 million to Church’s lab from other donors, and bankrolled AI researcher Ben Goertzel’s work on artificial general intelligence. He was not a passive donor. Office 610 in the Harvard PED building was known as “Jeffrey’s Office.” Graduate students reported it was unheard of for a funder to be engaged with actual research at that level.
He had extensive email conversations with longevity researcher Peter Attia about prolonging his own lifespan and funded a Harvard project oriented toward the elimination of aging. In one email to Attia he wrote: “I’m not sure why women live past reproductive age at all.” That does not seem like casual eccentricity. It’s more of a worldview.
According to the New York Times, Epstein planned to use his New Mexico ranch as the ground zero for a eugenics project — inseminating twenty chosen women with his sperm, seeding what he considered superior DNA into the human race. Separately, a Harvard genomics researcher proposed editing Epstein’s own stem cells using CRISPR to introduce mutations believed to increase longevity — an offer made exclusively to Epstein, the researcher noting there was “simply not enough bandwidth to offer this to more than a handful of people.”
Armies of Jeffrey Epsteins. God help us. But God’s dead. The ambition is not.
What Epstein represents — more than the trafficking, more than the island — is the prototype of a danger that AGE will now make structurally easier to replicate. The man with too much money, too much time, a science fiction childhood he never left behind, and the conviction that ordinary human beings are raw material. His favored domains reflected a single pursuit: control — over life through genetics, over mind through AI, over society through evolutionary theory deployed to justify existing hierarchies. He turned dinner parties into eugenics seminars. He bought his way into the rooms where the future was being designed.
The death of God does not leave the universe tidier. It leaves a vacancy. The throne is empty and the hustlers are already in the hallway. Epstein was one of them. What AGE now makes possible is the next iteration at scale: take the lessons of He Jiankui’s CRISPR babies, feed the genome data into an artificial general engineer running at AI speed, and you have a designer baby program that no single human research team could match for pace or precision. An army of manipulated genomes, built to specification, in a private laboratory in any country willing to look the other way. The totalitarian states are conveniently located and conveniently quiet. Prometheus doesn’t create that appetite. It just removes the last remaining friction.
IV. Gotham City, USA
My brother and I watched Batman on television the way kids watch things they half understand — completely absorbed and not asking the right questions. The Joker, the Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Catwoman, the Mad Hatter — villain after villain descending on Gotham with their private agendas and theatrical malevolence, Batman swooping in to clean up what the police couldn’t handle. We accepted the premise the way you accept the weather. Of course a billionaire dresses up and takes the law into his own hands. Of course the city depends on him. What else would you do?
Gotham is New York’s nickname. The comic book never bothered to explain the contradiction at the heart of its own premise: that Bruce Wayne, whose money came from inherited wealth and the management of more inherited wealth, had appointed himself guardian of a city whose governance had failed. The police called on Batman reluctantly, only when they had no other option, because they understood, even if they couldn’t say it plainly, that he was an outlaw. He did what he wanted, answered to no one, and happened — so far — to be pointing in a useful direction. We, the viewers, knew who he was. The citizens of Gotham didn’t. That dramatic irony was the whole engine of the thing.
It is somewhat less entertaining now that we are living in it.
Musk is worth pausing on specifically, because he is honest about his endgame in a way that should alarm anyone paying attention. Neuralink is pointed directly at telepathy — minds communicating with minds, no language required. You sit in an airport thinking about your mother and her mind lights up with your presence. A silent transaction. No words, no signal anyone can intercept, no record. He calls this liberation. What it describes is a communication infrastructure owned by a private company, controlled by one man, operating inside the last space that has so far remained genuinely personal — the inside of your head. Then there is X, formerly Twitter, which he reshaped into an accelerant for information that travels fast precisely because it requires no thought. A hundred and fifty characters. A meme. The illusion of knowing something because you’ve seen it in a shareable format. McLuhan understood this before the technology existed to demonstrate it: the medium is the message, and a medium designed to reward velocity over depth produces a population that mistakes velocity for understanding. Musk owns the medium. He shapes what it rewards. That is hardly a coincidence. That’s the point.
What has happened to American governance over the past several decades — accelerating sharply since Citizens United and arriving at something close to its logical conclusion in the second Trump administration — is the slow removal of ideological content from institutional forms. The departments remain. The titles remain. Some of the procedures remain. What has drained away is the animating conviction that governance exists to do the public’s will. DOGE was the most naked version of this: a private actor handed access to public data the government was obligated to protect, including Social Security records belonging to every American. Handed to Musk. Presumably copied. Distributed for purposes the public is not privy to and may never be.
The MSM has underplayed this consistently, distracted by the daily theater — Jokers and Riddlers and freeze-ray operators, each commanding full camera attention until the next one arrives. Meanwhile the structural condition underneath goes unexamined: a city whose governance has been quietly hollowed out, leaving it dependent on the whims of the very rich. Gotham is not anarchic because the villains are too powerful. Gotham is anarchic because Bruce Wayne’s private arrangements replaced the thing that was supposed to be there instead. The comic book never asked what happens when Bruce Wayne stops being benevolent. We are in a position to find out. Benign, in quotation marks.
V. The Fantasy of Old Men
Sam Altman published an essay not long ago called “The Intelligence Age” — you can read it at ia.samaltman.com — in which he describes a near future of such dazzling prosperity that, in his words, everyone’s life will be better than anyone’s life is now. Virtual tutors for every child. Personal AI teams. The climate fixed. A space colony. The discovery of all of physics. He writes about it the way a man describes a dream he had that he is still certain was real. No villains in Altman’s Intelligence Age. No He Jiankuis. No Promethean fire handed to the wrong people. Just a lamplighter looking forward a hundred years and marveling at the abundance all around him.
It reminded me of reading Eric Schmidt — The Age of AI, co-authored with Henry Kissinger, and then Genesis — where the vision runs similarly smooth and well-appointed. Schmidt conjures a world of domestic holography, where the spoiled children getting on your nerves can be sent on a virtual day trip to Mumbai to see how the other half lives. The casual cruelty of that image, presented as a feature rather than a symptom, tells you more about the class position from which these futures are being imagined than any of the grander claims do. Mumbai as a corrective experience, delivered holographically to a bored rich child. The other half of humanity as content.
Here is the thing nobody in that conversation wants to say plainly: when Altman talks about everyone, he does not mean everyone. He does not mean the farmers of Papua New Guinea. He does not mean the people of rural Indonesia, or Java, or most of sub-Saharan Africa. He does not mean the roughly ten billion people actually on this planet — and the eight billion figure we keep using is almost certainly an undercount, given how many places census takers simply will not go. He means the globalized middle class. The people with enough surplus at the end of the month to buy a car, see a film on a wide screen, treat themselves to something small and unnecessary. White collar, or close enough. Not poor. The ones for whom the new abundance will represent an upgrade rather than a category error.
The ancient Greek gods held contests among themselves too — hurled lightning, staged wars, meddled in the affairs of Troy for their own amusement. The mortals below were mostly scenery. The new pantheon is shaping up along similar lines. The difference is that the Greeks at least acknowledged their gods were indifferent. Altman and Schmidt dress the indifference up as optimism and call it a roadmap.
These are the men building the future. The rest of us are in the dream somewhere. We just aren’t the ones who get to decide what happens next.
VI. The New Pantheon
The ancient world ran on a committee of gods before the God of Abraham consolidated the franchise. Zeus a serial rapist, Ares a thug, Hera a jealous schemer, the whole assembly lurching between farce and catastrophe, intervening in human affairs for reasons that had more to do with their own feuds than anything resembling justice. Powerful beyond human reckoning and accountable to no one. We went from that to the one God. Then Nietzsche announced the vacancy. And now we are assembling the new pantheon: Bezos with his fire, Musk with his telepathy machine and his social media nervous system, Altman positioning himself as the man who decides when the singularity gets released and on whose terms. No single god this time. A board of directors.
Whatever morality the new gods carry will be whatever got coded in by whoever built the system — the psychology of the programmer made permanent, running at a speed human beings won’t fully comprehend. We are still, underneath all of it, ego-driven and dangerous, and we haven’t learned much from the exile. These men stride out as Bruce Wayne. To keep themselves useful, to keep themselves buffed up, they’ll put villains out there too. Create the problem. Provide the solution. Own both sides of the emergency.
The slogan writes itself: Be the chaos. Be the solution.
VII. Meanwhile, Back in Idiocracy
Anyone who has used a chatbot recently has had the uncanny experience of receiving an answer before they have quite finished asking the question. You push send and the response is already arriving — not after a pause, not after the system visibly labors, but almost preemptively, as though the machine had read the shape of your thought before you committed to it. That sensation is not an illusion. It is a preview. The systems will get faster. Quantum computing will accelerate what is already accelerating. 6G will move more of it more quickly to more places. The rate of technological change has already outpaced the human capacity to process its implications in real time, and the gap is widening.
This is the world Prometheus is being built into.
Running in exact parallel to all of this — in what McLuhan might have called the paradox of the simultaneous — is the other thing: a man who survived two impeachments, a criminal conviction, a pandemic he handled with magical thinking and political calculation, and the visible contempt of a substantial portion of the population, and found himself back in the White House anyway. Now threatening to bomb one of the oldest civilizations on earth into nonexistence, apparently without the cognitive equipment to process that a civilization which has survived several thousand years of history might have thoughts about reciprocation. World leaders are openly questioning his mental fitness. Iranian negotiators reportedly brought psychologists to the table to work out the most effective way to communicate with him. This is where we are as the nation approaches its two hundred and fiftieth birthday.
The technology is reaching toward godhood. The governance is reaching toward Idiocracy. Both things are happening at the same speed, in the same moment, on the same planet.
What we are watching is the Gothamization of the entire nation — the hollowing out of serious governance and its replacement by a cast of characters too on-the-nose for any decent comic book. Clowns, riddlers, freeze-ray operators, assorted criminals, and the occasional mental institution escapee, all operating in a city whose institutions are no longer tall enough to contain them. Gotham at least had Batman. We have a chatbot that answers before you finish asking, a trillionaire who wants to read your thoughts, and a president whose negotiating partners have retained psychological consultants just to get through the meeting.
The fire has been stolen. The garden is empty. The throne is vacant. The hustlers, as always, are already in the hallway.
The fire has been stolen. The garden is empty. The throne is vacant. The hustlers, as always, are already in the hallway.
