Matthew Mandel

I recently finished reading Le Mage du Kremlin. It was the runner-up in the big French book contest last year and received acclaim for its literary analysis of Putin in particular and power and politics in Russia more generally. Given the discourse around the book, I was pretty surprised by its final passages, which veer away from politics and into the realm of techno-philosophical speculation:

We believed for a long time that machines were instruments of humanity, but it is clear today that it is humans who were the tools for the advent of the machine. The transition will happen slowly: the machines won’t impose their domination on humanity, but they will enter humanity, like an urge, an intimate aspiration. The perfection of the machine has already become the ideal of billions of people who fight to immerse themselves ever more in the flux of technology.

Human history ends with us. With you, with me, and maybe with our children. After, there will still be something, but it won’t be humanity anymore. The beings who come after us, if there are any, will have ideas and preoccupations different from those that have occupied humanity up to today.

We will have been the aside that made the descent of god into the world possible. Only, god, instead of appearing in the improbable form of a disembodied entity, will be nothing more than a gigantic artificial organism, created by humanity but capable, at some point, of transcending humanity and realizing the prophecy of a time without sin or pain.

(my inexpert translation)