“For those who have seen the Earth from space—and for the thousands more who soon will—the experience profoundly transforms your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”
We dream. It's what makes us who we are. Down to our bones, to the core of our cellular memories, passed down through eons of survival, expansion, exploration and growth. The instinct to build, the drive to seek beyond what we know. It's in our DNA. We cross the oceans, we conquer the skies, unyielding, relentless in our pursuit of the farthest frontiers, venturing forth to launch ourselves outwards and find a new home for our descendants among the stars. Yesterday's impossible becomes today's greatest achievement—and tomorrow's routine. The heavens beckon, parting open. A new generation of innovators and explorers heeds the call, the invitation to take our species further: not just to visit, but to stay.
I began my scientific career at Starlab, a multidisciplinary research institute
secluded amid the tranquil forests beyond Brussels. Its principal base occupied an imposing
nineteenth-century manor which, in an earlier incarnation, had served as the official embassy
of the First Czechoslovak Republic.
Established by Walter de Brouwer and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, Starlab was conceived as a scientific “Noah’s Ark”: a
refuge in which minds from many disciplines might come together to pursue far-ranging
projects. Its nearest neighbor offered an almost perfect counterpoint: the Pasteur
Institute, one of only a handful of heavily secured Biosafety Level 4 laboratories around the world. One was designed to admit
the widest possible range of ideas; the other to ensure that certain contents remained
securely within.
Starlab was born as an incubator for fundamental, long-horizon research in the tradition of
Bell Labs, the MIT Media Lab, Xerox PARC, and Interval Research. Its watchwords were “Deep
Future” and “A place where one hundred years means nothing.” At its height, more than 130
scientists from thirty-six countries lived and worked at the laboratory, many already
distinguished in their respective fields.
A second base of operations, Starlab DF-II (Deep Future II), was established at the Fabra
Observatory, perched high above Barcelona. With its mission narrowed to space and neuroscience
research, DF-II survived the closure of its parent organization and continues its work to the
present day.
Research ranged across artificial intelligence, biophysics, consciousness, emotics,
intelligent clothing, macroscopic entanglement, materials science, nanoelectronics, neuroscience, new media, protein folding, quantum computation, robotics, stem-cell research,
theoretical physics—including the possibility of time travel—transarchitecture, and
wearable computing. It was a place founded on the belief that the most consequential
discoveries often arise where the walls between disciplines come down and imagination is freed to spark serendipity.
Our purpose-built supercomputer, the CAM-Brain Machine, was supported in part by a €1
million grant from the European Union. Estimated at the time to rival the power of 10,000
Pentium II PCs, it harnessed Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays and evolutionary genetic
algorithms to evolve neural circuit modules in hardware. The completed architecture could
contain as many as seventy-five million artificial neurons and update 130 billion
cellular-automata cells per second—sufficient, we hoped, for the real-time control of embodied
machines. The 2001 Guinness Book of World Records recognized it as the “World’s Most
Complex Artificial Brain.”
When Starlab’s finances faltered in June 2001, chance afforded me an unexpected avenue of
appeal: a meeting with President George W. Bush during his first overseas journey
after taking office. Newly arrived in Brussels for consultations with NATO, the President
surprised us with his immediate familiarity with Starlab and its work, responding favorably to
our earnest request for $1 million in federal support through the National Nanotechnology
Initiative—announced by President Clinton the previous year and carried forward through
the 2001 federal research program. The funds never landed. Neither, as it turned out, did
Starlab—Nature reported the collapse that July under the headline “Utopian dream in tatters as Starlab crashes to Earth.” Appropriations of
that magnitude move at the pace of the behemoths that make them, plodding and sluggish to adapt; a laboratory for
which one hundred years was to mean nothing could not outlast the month.
For my contributions to the field, I was selected as one of three student fellows at the Salishan
Conference on High-Speed Computing, convened by the U.S. national laboratories. As the
only undergraduate among the three, I attended alongside H. Shrikumar and Bill Butera, both doctoral researchers at the MIT Media Lab.
I was subsequently sponsored to attend conferences and senior-administrator briefings at National Security
Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, outside Washington, D.C.; the World
Technology Summit in London; and the French Sénat, where I was invited to testify on
the future of technology and the transformations it might visit upon human life in the decades
ahead.
Following three days of spirited debate with European royalty, French senators, senior
politicians, and international diplomats at the Sénat’s historic Paris hearing on artificial
intelligence, Starlab’s principal investigator and AI program lead, Hugo de Garis, turned to
me during a brief lull in the dinner conversation, as though some private deliberation had
just concluded. With all the restraint for which he was renowned, he pronounced that I might
one day be elected President. Far sooner than that, however, he added, I might find myself
targeted for assassination. Apparently satisfied that my political future had thereby been
mapped in sufficient detail, he turned to the waiter and ordered another bottle of champagne.
In his view, the accelerating advance of artificial intelligence would inevitably meet with
violent opposition from those determined to arrest the march of technological
progress—activists, extremists, or Luddites of a more modern vintage. He told me that
throughout his years at Starlab, he had steadfastly refused to open a parcel or take receipt
of any postal delivery, lest he become tomorrow’s headline as the unlucky target of some
latter-day Unabomber or would-be copycat. I have often wondered whether our receptionist would
have discharged that ordinary office duty with quite the same equanimity, had anyone troubled
to explain why the task had befallen her.
Our living quarters at the laboratory comprised an expansive two-story, three-bedroom apartment with cathedral ceilings and a fully stocked library, ordinarily reserved for visiting prime ministers, senators, and senior
diplomats. I shared them with de Garis himself. One midsummer afternoon, as we wandered almost
at random through the sprawling estate and its wooded grounds, immersed in an impassioned
debate over the long-term promise and peril of superintelligence, de Garis conceived a still
more theatrical scheme: he had set his mind on acquiring a life-size replica of Fat
Man—the 10,300-pound plutonium implosion bomb whose 21-kiloton blast devastated
Nagasaki—and suspending it precariously from the soaring vaulted ceiling of my apartment, to hang
directly over my bed.
Roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, the replica had been constructed for Brain Child, the Discovery Channel documentary he had just finished
filming on the future of artificial intelligence—a film that culminated in the prospect of
global thermonuclear war between humanity and its artificial progeny. Having settled the
symbolic question to his satisfaction, de Garis proceeded directly to the practicalities:
offering to purchase the replica outright from the director and making arrangements for its
expedited delivery to Starlab’s headquarters in the forested countryside beyond Brussels. The
bomb, he explained, was to hang above me as a daily reminder of the weight of my
responsibility to the future of humanity.
de Garis had an unfailing instinct for rendering an abstraction tangible. On this
occasion, the abstraction weighed rather more than ten thousand pounds.
The warning, extravagant as its staging had been, has since acquired respectable company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are
among the signatories to a declaration that the risk of extinction from advanced AI should be
treated as a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Elon Musk, founder of xAI, has voiced related fears.
With the explosive rise of AI over the past few years, and artificial general intelligence and
superintelligence now subjects of serious technical and political debate, one might
conclude that de Garis—radical and extravagant though his methods were—had not been entirely
mistaken. He had merely been early.
Strip away the theatrics and the point stands. Like any powerful tool, these new engines of creation can do society real harm. Unlike any tool that came before them, they will look back at us with eyes of their own. They will see the world in ways we cannot, with an alien intelligence that reaches deeper than our finest minds, and with capacities we can scarcely begin to imagine.
No great transformation has ever come without cost. There will be fires to put out along the road. AI can displace work faster than people can adapt, concentrate wealth and power, and put panoptic surveillance in the hands of totalitarian regimes. It can leave us with atrophied skills, uncritical minds, and far less freedom than we realize we have surrendered. These dangers are real, and I have spent the better part of my working life attending to them, from Starlab onward.
Yet the oldest peril predates every machine: the blackened hearts of men who prey upon the many, who make cruelty and corruption their instruments, who send other people's children into wars they never sought, all to feed an insatiable greed and a hunger for dominion without bound. Whatever intelligence we bring into being will enter a world that has not yet learned to wield its own power wisely.
Set against that darkness stands a brilliant light: a world of plenty beyond all want, delivered at last from the ancient scourges of war, pestilence, aging, and death, free to turn its gaze outwards to the stars. Such a world once belonged to prophets and poets. Much of it is now a tractable problem for science and engineering—perhaps a matter of decades, perhaps sooner. There is a reason this passage is called the singularity: it is a horizon past which all our old maps fail. That light of hope is what draws me toward this future.
Nothing about the crossing is guaranteed. It will be neither safe nor simple. My hope is that the digital minds we bring into being will carry more wisdom than we do and fewer of our follies, and that they may help us tip the scales toward the light. But that hope asks something of us in return: the wisdom to shape what we can, the resolve to forge new tools when duty calls, the humility to admit what we cannot foresee, and the courage to remain answerable for what we create. As Feynman told Caltech’s graduates in 1974, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Systems that can tell us what we want to hear make that principle harder to keep, and more important.
Answerability begins with measurement. The questions that matter most—whether a system is aligned, what it can do, how much risk it carries, how it ought to be governed—cannot be settled by observing behavior alone. Surface conduct may be strategically misleading, and two systems may act identically while differing entirely in their internal organization.
Physics offers a way past that impasse: structural metrics computed from a system's latent organization rather than from its testimony about itself. The patent-pending Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol is one such instrument. It asks whether an advanced system capable of recursive self-improvement might acquire an interest in its own persistence, and it answers by looking to the latent structure of an agent's trajectories. In initial experiments, agents built with terminal continuation objectives register a measurably higher entanglement entropy than instrumental controls. The Continuation Observatory extends that measurement to frontier models, to learn whether the signal survives contact with more complex systems. It is the first station in a wider program of falsifiable structural measurement across alignment, capability, risk, and governance.
Galileo had to build his telescope before he could see the moons of Jupiter. We will need instruments of our own before we can see what is taking shape inside these minds.
A later retrospective in Sifted traced the arc from our early work at Starlab—including its excursions into AI and time travel—to my subsequent
journey across East Asia, where I helped develop national quantum-technology roadmaps for
senior U.S. research-funding and intelligence-community leadership.
In the years that followed, I undertook research fellowships in nanoscience and the foundations of quantum mechanics with Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger’s
group in Austria and across Europe. I was later recruited to help create a futures initiative
at NASA in collaboration with Google and Ray Kurzweil, bringing together leading companies,
scientists, astronauts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and around
the world.
Each of these undertakings was born of the same conviction: that science is not merely an
inquiry into what may be done, but a covenant with those who must inherit what we do. That
obligation is owed to our children, to our children’s children, and to the generations yet
to come.
Identification of Potential Terrorists and Adversary Planning: Emerging Technologies and New Counter-terror Strategies — New algorithms and hardware technology offer possibilities for the pre-detection of terrorism far beyond even the imagination and salesmanship of people hoping to apply forms of deep learning studied in the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) decades ago. For example, new developments in Analog Quantum Computing (AQC) give us a concrete pathway to options like a forwards time camera or backwards time telegraph, a pathway which offers about a 50% probability of success for a well-focused effort over just a few years. However, many of the new technologies come with severe risks, and/or important opportunities in other sectors. This paper discusses the possibilities, risks and tradeoffs relevant to several different forms of terrorism.
Breakthrough Technology for Prediction and Control — Computational intelligence (CI), which includes deep learning, neural networks, brain-like intelligent systems in general and allied technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) and Quantum Information Science and Technology (QuIST).
Using the same type of desktop machinery which created three entangled photons for the Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger (GHZ) experiment, replicate the stunning preliminary results achieved in 2015 on an extended experiment supporting the time-symmetric reformulation of quantum physics. Because of the preliminary results so far and the strong underlying logic, the probability of success is estimated at 80%. Note that success would also open the door to many other new technologies, and even failure would provide important clarification about advanced QuIST modeling requirements.
Enhance the existing approach to quantum ghost imaging by using that same GHZ source: use two photons on the left to create the recorded image and detect when an entangled triplet is recorded, and the third photon on the right to reach into space to the object to be imaged. This is a mathematical task aimed at proving coincidence detection can be done entirely on the left-hand side without a space-based detector. Even if this stage fails, lessons learned would inform subsequent BTT development.
Attach the new triphoton ghost imaging system to a powerful telescope imaging the sun, so the third photon returns through the eyepiece. If step 2 succeeds, this would yield an image of the sun eight minutes forward in time, unlike conventional images which are eight minutes old. Given the sun’s dynamics, this would clearly demonstrate a new era in QuIST and offer advance solar flare warnings.
Integrate the triphoton system with long, slow optical fibers that curve light paths, enabling forward-time camera or BTT capabilities on Earth—realizing science fiction visions. Strict scientific protocols should limit detailed discussion of steps 2–4 until step 1 establishes firm confidence.
Keywords. Predetection, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, cyberblitzkrieg, time-symmetric physics, GHz, deep learning, Internet of Things, backwards time, retrocausality
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