THERE was a lot of futuristic hype surrounding cryonics company Alcor. When Dublin-based journalist Mark O’Connell travelled to its facility in Arizona, he found himself “surrounded by corpses in an office park, between a tile showroom and a place called Big D’s Covering Supplies”.

In his book To Be a Machine, new father O’Connell invokes the twin spectres of death and child-bearing in an attempt to make sense of his subject – but he also manages to be staggeringly funny. He explores the intersecting practices of body modification, cryonics, machine learning, whole brain emulation and AI disaster-forecasting.

The “transhumanist world view”, O’Connell writes, casts “our minds and bodies as obsolete technologies, outmoded formats in need of complete overhaul”. He worries more about the collateral damage such a future will inflict, less on the world views of the supposed visionaries who supply the ideas. Not that the two can be separated.

Throughout the text, it is difficult to ignore Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and an adviser to Donald Trump. While Thiel, , is not featured directly, the longevity start-ups he funded are, including Halcyon Molecular, 3Scan, MIRI, the Longevity Fund and Aubrey de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation.

Another pervasive presence is Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher. But while Thiel wants to extend life, Bostrom is worried about its eradication. He is best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence, which brought thought experiments about AI security to public notice. O’Connell finds it disquieting to see the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates effusing about this book. “These dire warnings about AI were coming from what seemed like the most unlikely of sources: not from Luddites or religious catastrophists, that is, but from the very people who seemed to most personify our culture’s reverence for machines.”

“The race to achieve AI first will be tight, pushing corporations to disregard security”

attempts to address such existential threats by freely disseminating its research. This is meant to encourage the rise ofmultiple AIs, whose balance of power will keep any non-benign ones off-balance. While Bostrom agrees that this plan will decrease the threat from a world-eating “singleton”, that “winning the AI race is incompatible with using any safety method that incurs a delay or limits performance”. If basic information is made public, the race to achieve AI first will be tight, pushing corporations to disregard security.

Given Musk’s that he is trying to move Trump to the left, rumours that Mark Zuckerberg is considering a presidential run and the fact that many users are deleting the Uber app after the company broke the taxi strike at JFK Airport, Silicon Valley can no longer claim to be apolitical. And there seems to be something about transhumanism that draws out reactionaries. As O’Connell observes, in one sense the whole ethos of transhumanism “is such a radical extrapolation of the classically American belief in self-betterment that it obliterates the idea of the self entirely. It’s liberal humanism forced to the coldest outer limits of its own paradoxical implications.”

Thiel is – strangely for a former libertarian – a planner. In his 2014 book Zero to One, Thiel writes of the dot-com bubble as both “a peak of insanity” and “a peak of clarity”: “People looked into the future, saw how much valuable new technology we would need to get there safely and judged themselves capable of creating it.” Depicting how private enterprise failed to bridge the gap between aspiration and realisation, Thiel seems here to be arguing for total mobilisation of the state.

Shooting for the moon

Thiel favours taking huge risks to achieve miraculous results. He champions the government-funded space race and rails against “incrementalisation” in scientific and civilizational achievements. At the time of writing, , the managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital, is one of Trump’s main candidates to head the Food and Drug Administration. O’Neill thinks that drugs should be approved not by safety but by efficacy. Thiel himself has criticised the FDA for being overly cautious, , “I don’t even know if you could get the polio vaccine approved today” – .

If the low-safety “moonshot” approach favoured by Thiel and the futurist frat houses O’Connell describes is applied on a national level, and longevity research funded by a Silicon Valley billionaire does pay huge dividends, a new question emerges: immortality for whom?

Thiel is notoriously anti-competition, writing in Zero to One that only becoming a monopoly “can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival”, since “competitive markets destroy profits”. A monopoly price for life extension suggests a future in which we will all be in monetary debt to mortality, working forever to pay off our incoming years.

During a recent public lecture, genomics pioneer Craig Venter discussed his new company that aims to use genetic sequencing to provide “proactive, preventative, predictive, personalised” healthcare. According to Venter, 40 per cent of people who think they are healthy are not – they have undiagnosed ailments such as tumours that have not metastasised or cardiovascular conditions. And he says his method can predict Alzheimer’s 20 years before its onset, and a cocktail of soon-to-be-marketed drugs can prevent it. Thanks to this $25,000 genome-physical, Venter himself was .

Can any imaginable public healthcare provision pay for such speculative treatments? Or will there be a widening gap between those who can afford to stay healthy and those who will have to shoulder early-onset penury in the face of their time-limited humanity?

In response to questions about such inequality, Thiel offers little comfort. “Probably the most extreme form of inequality,” six years ago, “is between people who are alive and people who are dead.”

Jonathan Swift’s satirical letter “A modest proposal” responded to an equally cold-blooded ideology, in his day. But a field whose pioneers sport names like T. O. Morrow (Tom Bell’s 1990s soubriquet), FM-2030 and Max More demands something different from O’Connell – an unexpected, often funny effort of restraint.

This article appeared in print under the headline “In debt to mortality”

“Inner space is no longer a neat literary metaphor for alienation. Thanks to mobile technology, it has become virtual real estate”

“Data is public in the same way the White House is.”

So said Jer Thorp, , Ěýin an “AI Now” workshop on 7 July organised by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. ĚýThorp meant to highlight the uncertain ownership status of our personal data. He might just as well have been referring to the inscrutability of the White House itself: AI now?

This was the final session in the White House’s series exploring the uses of artificial intelligence and their implications. But why, in the final months of Barack Obama’s administration, and faced with a host of social and environmental problems, is the focus on artificial intelligence?

It’s natural to imagine that this is just a spot of legacy-burnishing from a president who made the drone strike integral to his country’s foreign policy. Is the White House simply hitching itself to the current AI hype cycle, or does it actually have a position on the subject? The answer seems to be neither. It looks as though the US government genuinely does not know what its position should be, and is trying to learn as much as possible, as fast as possible – a vision that’s as strategically disconcerting as it is intellectually admirable.

There is a great deal of anxiety here. The White House’s on big data, published in May, highlighted the way data, algorithmically processed, can worsen social discrimination. Ask an expert system a mean-spirited or wrong-headed question, and it will surely answer in the same spirit.

Kate Crawford, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, pressed the point in the first AI Now workshop in May, citing a recent article about .

Worthy of Monty Python

The next session also focused on the real-world implications of high-level processing. You could unclog city congestion, track bird flight, or anticipate police brutality. Here too, we had a barn-burning speech by Roy Austin, of the White House Domestic Policy Council, explaining the myriad problems the criminal justice system faces in exploiting big data: “We are not ready for machine learning,” he said, also emphasising that it would accentuate racial bias.

But though the conclusion of the White House’s report called for “accountability mechanisms” to address the problem of discrimination, its suggestions are weak beer indeed: “Encourage market participants to design the best algorithmic systems”, it says, exhibiting a faux naivety worthy of Monty Python.

Across the series, little distinction was made between AI, machine learning and advanced algorithmic processing. Questions of cognition, consciousness, personhood and potential citizenship were not explored. Few speakers bothered to mention that a potential AI might quite likely approach problems in a distinctively non-human manner and so be able to tackle problems that humans seem utterly unable to grapple with (climate change, for instance).

The determined if slightly muddled focus on the here and now was a relief in some ways. At least attendees did not have to sit through yet another retelling of Nick Bostrom’s deeply paranoid Superintelligence (2014), which warns of the rise of a “singleton”, defined as “some form of agency that can solve all major global coordination problems”.

A kind of corporate-hacktivist ethos permeated the most recent session, and an atmosphere of quiet positivity. No one felt any pressing need to ask Yann LeCun, now director of AI Research at Facebook, how much fun he was having, playing with all the data he now has access to. Latanya Sweeney, professor of government and technology at Harvard University, and a computer scientist, noted that she seemed to be the only techno-pessimist in the room.

It is heartening that federal government, at least in its current guise, is speaking plainly about the failures of the criminal justice system. But dire warnings, without proscriptive legislation or executive orders, do little. For instance, whistle-blowing news site The Intercept has revealed that the .

Worryingly, it appears that the White House called a conference on AI primarily so that it could warn people that AI should not be allowed anywhere near some sections of government. As one colleague remarked, “This shows you how scared they are about this happening.”

Brendan Byrne is a writer and critic based in New York

Gilded present, broken past

Ěýruns at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City from 5 February to 1 May 2016.

Images taken from line the entrance at Astro Noise, the first solo exhibition by film-maker Laura Poitras.

But the show, at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, doesn’t hit high gear until you find yourself in the dark. There, you are confronted by a massive screen playing slow-motion footage of civilians gazing on the wreckage of the World Trade Center shortly after the attacks on 11 September 2001.

As the distorted soundtrack unwinds – the US national anthem, sung at a World Series baseball game that November – it occurs to you that the people you’re watching behaved in much the same way as you are now. Heads twist from side to side as they try to read meaning in the twisted material before them. Already, you feel implicated.

On the reverse side of the two–sided screen, two interrogations of Afghan prisoners loop endlessly, mixing the rattle of their chains to the still-audible national anthem. The faces of the US guards are obscured by digital smears, masks or shadows. We see the supposed militants quite clearly: soon they will be transported to Guantanamo Bay.

ĚýA way of life

Astro Noise is, on the surface, yet another show about surveillance in which the artist makes visible the technologies that track, record and catalogue us. But Poitras, who regularly collaborates with Trevor Paglen, New York’s other celebrated artist of the “deep state”, is more interested in her audience. Closed-circuit video, mobile-phone sniffers, infrared cameras: for Poitras, these are not neutral devices, but infect all they touch. Astro Noise reveals how easily we naturalise this technology, accepting it as necessary kit for an art show or a political system – even, by implication, for our way of life.

In the next installation, you can lie on your back and stare at time-lapse projections of night skies in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, where drones flit like tracer fire as the stars shift fluidly above. You feel at once both totally exposed – a sensation heightened by the radio chatter of drone pilots – and perfectly secure, your anonymity guaranteed in the darkness.(Don’t get comfortable: the title of this piece, Bed Down Location, is military terminology for where a targeted person sleeps.)

Poitras, who is best known for her , took the title Astro Noise from the name of an encrypted file Snowden gave her that contained evidence of mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency. The film won her an Oscar.

In stark contrast, the 8 minutes and 16 seconds of footage that make up her next installation – shot on an Iraqi family’s rooftop while US forces engaged militants nearby – made her the subject of a “classified national-security investigation”. FBI documents on the incident line the walls. The footage of November 20, 2004 (which no one in the federal government ever requested to see) shows nothing pertaining to the security of the US, but rather focuses on some civilians trying and failing to see what’s going on down in the street.

Being watched

Poitras writes in the show’s catalogue that she is interested in the visitor as a “protagonist”. She’s not kidding. As you leave the show, two screens reveal that the exhibition has had you, the museum-goer, under surveillance. The first screen displays the live feed from an infrared camera positioned directly above the supine patrons of Bed Down Location. As they get up and leave, their heat signatures cling to the platform. You are complicit in their surveillance, yet the temptation to linger is strong.

The second screen, Last Seen, is a running list of the specs and Wi-Fi activity of every mobile phone and device carried through the exhibition.

Afterwards, should you find yourself in need of fresh air and a bit of space, you can wander out onto the Whitney’s series of interlocking decks and balconies, and stare at the new, gleaming World Trade Center. It appears to inhabit an entirely different America to the one you were just immersed in.

You wonder if that’s true.

Code words

The bio-bricks used in Hy-Fi can be grown in five days (Image: Kris Graves)

A sweeping tower made from over 10,000 bio-waste bricks bound with fungal fibre has been growing in the courtyard of MoMA PS1, an offshoot of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Looking like something between a three-headed grain silo, and a , Hy-Fi is the winner of this year’s MoMA PS1 (YAP), and its organic aesthetic clashes hard with the museum’s red-brick frontage and the green-glass Citicorp building behind.

This is appropriate. As the brainchild of environmentally conscious architects , Hy-Fi is no corporate monolith or repurposed temple of high culture. Principal architect David Benjamin calls it a ““. Grown from local agricultural waste with almost no carbon emissions, Hy-Fi is designed to be composted, save for a few beams made of reclaimed wood and steel. (A side exhibit shows the distinct stages of the bricks’ decomposition.) Hy-Fi isn’t meant to blend with its human surroundings, so much as with the urban ecosystem.

Hy-Fi, like all YAP final products, provides aesthetically charged shade for , and its persistent, not entirely unpleasant fungal stench will no doubt mix well with the fragrance released by intoxicated revellers. But it seems a shame to limit such innovative building techniques to summer bacchanalias. Standing in Hy-Fi’s interior shadow, where the July afternoon’s swamp-like torpor became more manageable, another function suggested itself: temporary shelter for those displaced by disaster.

Hy-Fi has been constructed to provide a pleasingly cool interior micro-climate (Image: Kris Graves)

When Hurricane Katrina struck the US eastern seaboard in 2005, large institutional structures, such as and , proved to be inadequate shelters. This highlighted a need for rapidly deployed, weather-proof housing, a theme that was explored by the 2008 MoMA show , which featured a presentation of prefabricated, modular housing units.

With its open roof, Hy-Fi might not be up to disaster protection in its current form. But its construction provides surprisingly effective relief from heat: the structure draws in cool air at the bottom and pushes hot air out the top, creating a pleasant interior micro-climate. Similar buildings could see use as a temporary triage station or a meeting-point for first responders.

The future of disaster relief may be found in such structures, says Benjamin. He emphasizes the sturdiness of the bio-brick construction, including its ability “to withstand hurricane winds”. , the sustainable bio-materials firm partnering with The Living, can grow the bricks in approximately five days from agricultural by-products such as corn stalks held together with mycelium – the vegetative matter of mushrooms. It remains to be seen whether structures descended from Hy-Fi can be erected quickly enough to be useful, with minimal engineering input.

Right now, Hy-Fi is an environmentally friendly chill-tent for urban partygoers. But it is possible, as you wander through this loamy, shady space, to catch the scent of a much bigger opportunity.

Warm Up runs at MoMA PS1 in New York until 6 September 2014