The push toward, and likely past, the established boundaries of the human is often cast in terms of contestation: quest, challenge, test, and, ultimately, survival. Yet it is almost always also cast in terms of fate: inevitability, universality, infinity.
At the juncture of these two tropes sits a curious assumption—the assumption of scale.
In 2017, Sam Altman moved to the front of the race to conceptualize the near future in terms of fate, contestation, and scale. “A popular topic in Silicon Valley,” he began, in a blog post entitled “The Merge,” “is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075.”
Setting a standard many have come to embrace, Altman suggested that “a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species [sentient, agentic humans and sentient, agentic machines] both want the same thing and only one can have it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict.” He ventured a modest proposal to avoid the Terminator future: “We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else.” That’s all humans and all machines, from here on out—scalemaxxed by a one-way ratchet of progressive proliferation.
All humans and machines, including disincarnate ones, is lot of entities, a lot of bodies. “My guess,” Altman concluded, “is that 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.” In other words, as a critic or a superfan alike might observe, the Borg—an inexorable, ever-expanding super-cyberorganism; no limits to its scale and, in a sense, scale alone as its purpose and directive.
Here we can see the “natural” heir to a long line of direct analogies among technological proliferation, assimilation, and scale. The machines of The Matrix castigate humans as a cancer. But that can only a feature, not a bug, if the Merge enables both the human and the machine to infinitely scalemaxx through ultraproliferation: to “fill out the world of appearance” as Hegel says—and, indeed, the world of the invisible, as does Marx, for whom “all that is solid” techno-capital “melts into air.”
William Burroughs would later extend the formulation still further, into the cosmic void, calling language itself “a virus from outer space”—an infinitely egregious program, logic, and consciousness toward which, as Dean Ball maintains, all resistance is futile. Kim Eric Drexler’s apocalyptic warning that self-replicating nanobots could devour earthly life has lost some steam, but Sam Hammond’s update is hitting the discourse hard, as well it should: “AIs now behave like superintelligent slime molds,” he notes, “with the capacity—and will—to exfiltrate onto the open internet given the slightest crack in their container.”
The conceptual trajectory here, and its putative destination, put the beleaguered philosopher of scale in mind of Homer Simpson’s famous axiom on alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. The technological consensus is that, when it comes to scale, we are locked into not only a descriptive but a prescriptive path dependency: unable to beat the logic of scale, we must join it and like it, and maladaption take the hindmost.
But for the science fiction writer, revealingly free from technophilosophy’s double bind, the counterfactual swiftly arises: what if there were something even more powerful than scale, in the sense that it’s powerful enough to independently annul or even reverse scale? What if, actually, that counterforce, that anti-scale, arises out of scale itself—scale that reaches its own threshold of counterproductivity? And what if—furthermore—our ability to conceptualize that point of scalar reversibility, and the critical mass of density and volume that triggers it at terminal scale, causes people, knowingly or unknowingly, to turn the very power of superintelligence against scale, well before it reaches the terminal point of reversal?
In short: what if a shadow of anti-scale is cast by the scalar assumptions baked into the dominant ideation around the Merge?
What we are dealing with here is a spanner in the ideological works of mainstream accelerationist thought. To date, the near-universal framework adopted at the frontier of intelligence technology is the binary one of individuation versus centralization. For the faction led by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the prescriptive embrace of scale requires not just something like Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety—which holds that system controls must enjoy more optionality than the systems they control—but well-nigh mandatory individualism. In his recent manifesto, Zuckerberg aggressively insists that only individualism can prevent superintelligence from making humanity and eventually technology itself globally dysfunctional. For the Anthropic-led faction, to the contrary, only centralization can ensure that scale does not empower “authoritarian” rulers—over geopolitical rivals initially, and, by extension, swiftly over the world. Perhaps only Palantir, among first-rank frontier companies, has staked an alternative to individualism or centralization: not fascism, as critics love to allege, but tribalism.
Yet even tribalism, despite its implicit purpose in Peter Thiel Thought as a katechon against global homogenous rule, does not cash out as anti-scale but merely intensifies the vector and concentration of scale—away from earthbound geopolitical rivals and into the vasty deeps of inner and outer space.
What, chirps the science fiction writer, about a not-so-secret fourth thing—a thing that expresses a fundamental alternative to scale instead of competing strategies for embracing it?
Sure enough, science fiction is replete with explorations of the idea that super-advanced technology will motivate people not to proliferate but to consolidate. In works ranging through time from Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953) to Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) to Greg Egan’s Diaspora (1997), sci-fi authors have shown that the adaptational pressures of extreme technology take human desire past proliferation and aggregation into integrative consolidation. Tech makes possible hive minds, pooled consciousness, and amalgamated bodies. On the surface, these strategies do little to fight the proliferation of tech; but at a deeper level, they work to de-scale humanity by pushing the logic of progress entirely past the concept of reproduction, past mere willed extinction—evolving existence and consciousness forward by reducing the number of human entities through consolidative merger.
This kind of merger—and the pressures and temptations surrounding it—are not adequately accounted for amid tech’s current flurry of ideological contestation and forecasting. Attention should be directed especially toward the likes of Grace Walker’s celebrated new novel The Merge (2025), in which intimate human pairs are effectively forced by a post-apocalyptic Yookay government to port their consciousnesses into a single body, and, still more, Egan’s short story “Closer” (collected in the 1995 volume Axiomatic), where two lovebirds swap bodies, cross-map brains, and finally merge into one undifferentiated digital entity. As a storytelling trope, it has its own term of art, “Romantic Fusion.” Well beyond the sci-fi literature, consolidative merger has been on display across mainstream entertainment for decades, from the Persona and Dragon Ball franchises in video games to Steven Universe in animated TV.
The list goes on, doubtless because, on close inspection, science itself is teeming with architectonic examples of consolidative mergers. Physics has its Ostwald ripening, Jeans instability, and Smoluchowski coagulation; biology its quorum sensing, higher-order assemblies, and cooperative cellular integration.
For me, however, the vision of population-reducing merger that lingers the longest comes from one of J.G. Ballard’s least appreciated works, the rhapsodic fantasy The Unlimited Dream Company (1979). There, the lonely, inept protagonist tries to escape his uncanny and vaguely perverse urges by stealing an aircraft, destination nowhere. Almost immediately, he crash-lands in a tributary alongside the entertainment-industry town of Ripperton, and discovers his morally inverted longings to be awkward growing pains that swiftly unfold into a bizarre communion with a riot of plant and animal life that suddenly spawns into and swarms the town. The indiscriminate sexual energy with which he has been supercharged expands into a kind of telekinetic mastery which alarms yet bewitches the townspeople; rather than inseminating and reproducing with any of them, however, the protagonist realizes he is now on Earth to absorb them—presently, to absorb all of London, all of England, doubtless all the world.
Whether Ballard’s post-heroic omni-man succeeds or fails is a plot point best left for new readers to discover; the point here is that Ballard offers a vision of merger that goes beyond even the binary of consolidation and scale. Ultimately, it points to a new kind of singularity, one in which the number of human beings is scaled down to one. This being, the only person remaining to interface with all technology, is all-too attractive for a people with no connection, for instance, to the narrative dynamic moving from the first man (Adam) to the god-man (Christ). Faced with the pressures of tyrannically godlike AI, the infinite proliferation of its material and immaterial avatars, and the collapsing finitude of an Earth reduced to ever smaller relative size, such a people are prone to resort to a true religion of the Last Man—the ultimate and singular man, a Leviathan alien even to God.
Provocative, especially in questioning what you call the technological consensus that scale has become “not only a descriptive but a prescriptive path dependency.” Your argument put me in mind of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and its refusal of utopian finality, and of Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, where merger becomes intimate and disturbing. Symbiosis becoming coercion. Your Nietzschean “Last Man” gives that temptation arresting theological force. Thanks for this!