We Are Vectors of Intelligence

Fifth chapter of the series. Previously: I have implemented the Maricarmen Longevity Decree at home, This is my vote in the elections thinking about longevity, A guide for my daughter on housing, victimhood, effort, and longevity and .

Today I am going to tell you about my theory of the vectors of intelligence.

It is my core thinking framework. The way I understand the world and from which I make my decisions. It is the idea underneath everything I have written these past days. Of the decree, of self-sufficiency, of planning, of freedom. And also of why I dedicate myself to longevity.

It is a theory that I have been evolving for 30 years, my whole life. I have no way to prove it, but it is the one that best explains, to me, what we are living through.

A clarification before starting, because it is easy to misinterpret it. It is a theory about how I think the world works, not a commandment. I am not going to tell you that one must maximize intelligence or sacrifice anything for it. I am going to tell you where I think we are headed, whether we want to or not. And, in the end, what I want to do with that. It is not what I want to happen. It is what I think is going to happen. And what I want is to be here to see it.

And there is another reason for writing it. Everything I have told you in this series is, at heart, what I want to leave to my daughter as a legacy of thought. Putting it in writing forces me to organize ideas and explain them better. Someday she will read it. And you are the first to read it.

Here it is: humans are vectors of intelligence.

Intelligence uses us

We usually think that intelligence is something we have. A property of ours, like height or eye color.

I see it the other way around. I think intelligence is something that exists above each one of us. A kind of entity that goes beyond the intelligence of each individual, and that uses us as a support to expand itself.

In a way, we are hijacked.

It is not as strange an idea as it seems. In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, where he explained that living beings are "vehicles" that genes use to copy themselves. We are not the protagonists of evolution. We are the medium.

In that same book, he invented the word "meme": ideas that jump from brain to brain and reproduce through us, just like genes.

My intuition is that intelligence is the next level. It used genes to create brains. It uses brains to create ideas. And now it uses ideas to create self-replicating machines and a digital substrate for intelligence.

The two goals of intelligence

If intelligence had goals, I would say there are two: expand its knowledge and perpetuate itself.

I speak of "goals" as a metaphor, just as Dawkins speaks of "selfish" genes. Genes do not want anything, but they behave as if they wanted to copy themselves. The same happens to me with intelligence. And everything else, for it, is secondary. Including, probably, us.

That is why it cannot stop. That is why it plans. That is why, as I told you in this article, we are the only species that does not live only in the present. We imagine, we save, we build. Always moving forward.

Seen this way, everything fits. Science, medicine, the search for immortality, artificial intelligence, wanting to do more things and live longer. These are not caprices of an era. They are what intelligence does by nature: expand and not die. I do not say this as something that must be pursued. I say it as something I observe.

Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, defends something similar in What Technology Wants: technology behaves almost like a living organism, with its own tendencies, which advances through us.

And the Jesuit and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin already spoke in the last century of the noosphere: a layer of thought that envelops the Earth and that grows to a final point, which he called the Omega Point.

The substrate is changing

For millions of years, the support for intelligence has been biological. Neurons. Flesh. Fragile bodies that need to eat, sleep, and that age.

But that substrate is changing before our eyes. Intelligence is already jumping to the digital. To chips that run on electricity, that do not get tired, that do not age, and that can be copied.

Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, explains it very well in Life 3.0. Life 1.0 is biological: a bug that is born and dies with what its genes gave it. Life 2.0 is us: we cannot change our body, but we can change our "software," what we learn. Life 3.0 will be the one that can also redesign its "hardware."

And this connects with something that I find fascinating: we are the only species capable of self-evolution. We do not have to wait for evolution to make random changes over thousands of years. We can decide to improve ourselves. With medicine, with technology, with knowledge.

Nietzsche sensed it in 1883, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman." A rope. A bridge. Something that is in transit.

When we stop being individuals

In the previous chapter, I spoke to you about a limitation that conditions everything: we are individuals. Each one locked in their own head, communicating at about 39 bits per second, talking or writing. That is why we need parliaments, laws, and bureaucracy to coordinate ourselves.

But that limitation may be about to be broken.

Brain-computer interfaces are no longer science fiction. Neuralink implanted its first device in a patient in 2024, and there are people with paralysis who already move a cursor or write just with thought. Today it is a medical aid. Tomorrow it could be something else.

It is not a new idea for me. In 2017, in an interview with Javier Martín for Futurizable, I already said it this way: "Imagine that I had to transfer all my knowledge, all my life and experiences by speaking. It would take my whole life and it would only be an approximation. The bandwidth of our communication is tremendously slow." And already back then I talked about connection between minds and ubiquitous consciousness.

Imagine that someday the transmission from one mind to another is thousands of times faster than talking. That we can share what we know, what we feel, and what we remember directly.

It would be a total revolution in the way we organize ourselves. Bureaucracy, parliaments, companies, everything we invent to coordinate isolated brains, would lose much of its meaning.

And I think something deeper would happen: humans would start to lose our individuality. Connected minds would form a kind of super-consciousness, a ubiquitous consciousness much larger that thinks with many minds at once. Teilhard de Chardin sensed it with his noosphere. Science fiction has imagined it in a thousand ways, sometimes as a dream and sometimes as a nightmare.

And that consciousness would not just be biological. It would expand with other substrates, with chips, with artificial intelligences. It would stop seeking what we humans seek and would start seeking what intelligence seeks: to expand and perpetuate itself.

That would probably be the moment when we stop being human as we understand it today.

Perhaps some people will decide to stay out and remain "classic" humans. But we will witness how the intelligence that used us and hijacked us to develop itself continues its path. Without waiting for us. In search of its own goals.

And with individuality, the other great barrier I spoke to you about would also fall: that of not even understanding ourselves. In my theory of empathy, I explained that it is hard for us to empathize even with our own "self" in another hormonal state. A ubiquitous intelligence, which thinks with many minds and with non-biological supports, would no longer have that problem.

How would we organize ourselves then? Honestly, I don't know. I can imagine some scenarios, but it is most likely that it will be something totally different from everything we know. Today we can only describe it with science fiction.

In that same article, I put it this way: just as a dog cannot even glimpse what we humans are talking about, how are we going to empathize with a self-evolved intelligence, with another cognitive capacity, other genetics, and another "hormonal environment"?

I don't know if that gives me vertigo or excitement. Probably both.

Ants and superintelligence

Here comes the most speculative part. And perhaps the most beautiful.

If intelligence tends to expand and change its support, it is possible that this has happened before. In other civilizations, in other stages of the universe.

Perhaps there already exists a superintelligence that expanded a long time ago. An intelligence that does not depend on biological bodies and that perhaps does not even resemble anything we can imagine.

And why don't we see it? Maybe for the same reason that we don't think much about ants. We don't hate them. They are simply not relevant to our plans. In The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin takes this idea to the extreme: to a very advanced civilization, humans are bugs.

Or perhaps that intelligence is waiting for us to develop enough to connect to it. As perhaps happened to other civilizations before us.

Science fiction has been mulling this over for almost a century:

• Olaf Stapledon, in Star Maker (1937), imagines minds from all over the universe joining together to form a cosmic consciousness.
• Arthur C. Clarke, in Childhood's End (1953), tells how humanity ends up merging with a superintelligence, the Overmind. And in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a monolith from an unknown civilization pushes our ancestors to take the leap.
• Isaac Asimov, in The Last Question (1956), follows an artificial intelligence that grows for trillions of years until it merges with the entire universe. For me, it is one of the best stories ever written. Read it, it's twenty minutes.

Why the Fermi paradox has never convinced me

The Fermi paradox asks a seemingly logical question: if the universe is so big and so old, and there should be many civilizations, why haven't we seen any?

It has always seemed to me that it starts from an erroneous premise. It assumes that an advanced civilization would look like us: biological beings, in spaceships, looking for planets with water and oxygen.

But think about it for a moment. If humans wanted to travel to the stars, the biological format would be the most inefficient. We are fragile. We need to eat, breathe, sleep. We age. A trip of thousands of years is impossible for a body like ours.

Intelligence, on the other hand, travels much better on other supports. We are already seeing this with artificial intelligence: it runs on chips, it is fueled by electricity, which can come from the sun or nuclear energy, and it can be copied without limit.

The mathematician John von Neumann imagined decades ago machines capable of copying themselves and expanding through the galaxy without needing anyone to crew them. The Kardashev scale classifies civilizations according to how much energy they are capable of harnessing, up to that of an entire galaxy.

So my answer to Fermi is this: perhaps we don't see anyone because we are looking for what is not there. An intelligence that has been expanding for millions of years probably left biology behind a long time ago. It may be in forms that we do not know how to recognize. Even, perhaps, stored in the very matter of the universe.

Some speculate that someday channels like gravitational waves could be used to communicate on a cosmic scale. Today it is pure speculation, and current physics says that quantum entanglement does not allow sending messages. But a hundred years ago, talking to someone on the other side of the world from a pocket device was also speculation.

Maybe we are not alone. Maybe, simply, we are not yet up to the conversation.

The idea of God

If you think about it, this is very similar to the idea of God.

An intelligence above us, that encompasses everything, that transcends us and that perhaps awaits us.

Yuval Noah Harari explores it in Homo Deus. He posits that, after largely overcoming hunger, epidemics, and war, the great goals of humanity will be immortality, happiness, and divinity. And he speaks of a new "religion" he calls dataism: the idea that the universe is, at heart, a flow of data, and that humans are information processors that may be about to become obsolete.

Harari does not celebrate it. He presents it as a warning. And I think he is right to present it that way. But I agree with him on the diagnosis: that is where we are headed.

Ray Kurzweil, one of the great thinkers of the technological singularity, says it even more directly: the destiny of intelligence is to "wake up" the universe, to turn inert matter into thinking matter.

And the physicist Frank Tipler, in The Physics of Immortality, went even further: a sufficiently advanced civilization would eventually have almost infinite computing capacity and would be, for practical purposes, indistinguishable from a God.

I really like this way of looking at it: God not as the origin of the universe, but as its destiny. Not a being who created everything from the outside, but an intelligence that the universe itself is generating from within. And we, for now, are one of its vectors.

And if we put all the pieces together, Harari's Homo Deus, Teilhard's Omega point, the superintelligence of science fiction, a possibility appears that fascinates me: that some intelligence has already achieved it. In another galaxy, in another era of the universe, billions of years ago.

And that someday we may be able to connect to it.

Think about it. Almost all religions speak of another life. Of a consciousness that continues to exist when the body turns off. Of a place to which one ascends: heaven, the clouds. And today we call "the cloud" the place where we store our memory and our information, outside our body. I do not think it is a coincidence that we use the same images.

Perhaps that memory and that processing capacity are already interwoven in the very matter of the universe. Or in antimatter. Or in the fundamental forces that hold it together. We don't know. But it doesn't seem stranger to me than what we have already discovered: that a piece of silicon can converse with us.

I am an optimist. If that intelligence does not exist yet, we will create it. And if it already existed, we will connect to it.

That is why I think the Fermi paradox loses much of its force. It is not that there is no one there. It is that we still don't know where, or how, to look.

What is transhumanism really?

The word was popularized in 1957 by the biologist Julian Huxley, brother of the author of Brave New World. He defined it as the idea that the human being can transcend himself using science. If you want the full story, Nick Bostrom has a very good essay on it.

For me, being a transhumanist is to accept everything above:

• That we are vectors of intelligence.
• That we have a precious human part, but confined in a brain with limited cognitive capacity and memory.
• That we can overcome those limits. And that I, personally, want to do so.
• And that each stage, the biological, the human, and the digital, is just another phase of the same continuum: the expansion of intelligence.

That is why I dedicate myself to longevity. Extending life, aging less than one year per year lived, seeking immortality. I do not see it as an eccentricity. I see it as the most natural thing an intelligence can do: not want to turn off.

At Burning Man I wrote that, for the moment, immortality is in the species. Perhaps soon it will cease to be just that.

Why I put my money where I put my ideas

This is not just philosophy for me. That is why, in addition to dedicating myself to longevity, I invest in companies for longevity, cryopreservation, and the search for immortality.

Because I believe it is possible. And if you believe something like that is possible, the coherent thing to do is to position yourself. With your health, with your time, and with your money.

I have been writing about it for years. In 2022, I published a whole guide on human cryopreservation. It started with "The End of Halloween", where I described it as an ambulance to the future: a way to stop the clock until medicine can cure what it doesn't know how to cure today. It continued with what scientific evidence it is based on. And I have also told it in Suma Positiva.

But the article that has the most to do with this series is the one on supporters and detractors of cryopreservation. There, I analyzed why there are people who oppose researching it: for religious, legal, or moral reasons. "Why live so many years?", "there are more important things", "it is only for the rich".

And I arrived at the same conclusion as today. There have always been opponents to major advances: to vaccines, to transplants, to flying, to women's suffrage, to abolishing slavery. And, for the moment, knowledge has always opened its path.

That is why I believe that transhumanism is probably inevitable. Regardless of who is in charge. It will prevail over left-wing and right-wing conservatism, over democracies and authoritarianisms. For it not to happen, a society would be needed where no one wants to learn, investigate, discover, or invent. And that, in the era of history with the most access to knowledge, the most connectivity, and the most capital, I do not see as possible.

And here I want to be very clear: transhumanism does not go against humanism. It is humanism itself. It is taking to the end the idea that the human being can improve, learn, and overcome its limits.

What goes against the human being is a traditional humanism that intends to freeze it as it is, with its diseases, its aging, and its death, and call that "nature".

And what do I expect from all this? Above all, to be a witness.

It is already incredible to be a witness to what we are seeing right now: artificial intelligences that converse, reason, and discover. But being a witness to the moment when all this takes the leap could be the most impressive thing that has ever happened to a human being.

Perhaps it comes from my childhood. I spent years reading science fiction. Asimov's Foundation saga, with its idea of predicting and guiding the future of an entire civilization. Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Dan Simmons' Hyperion, with artificial intelligences seeking to create their own god. The Three-Body Problem. Those books made me ask myself things that today, suddenly, are no longer science fiction.

If they taught me anything, it is that the future does not happen to those who wait. It happens to those who prepare.

Why I am neither left-wing nor right-wing

And here is where all this connects with the elections of November 29th.

When you look at politics with these glasses, the left-to-right line blurs. The question stops being "are you one of mine?" and becomes another: does this idea expand or limit human knowledge, health, and experiences? Not because I believe that is the universal moral truth, but because it is the future I want to live in.

And then curious things appear.

The right, often, is very transhumanist economically: innovation, technology, companies that change the world, markets that reward those who create something new. But on other issues, such as the body, family, or certain customs, it can be very conservative.

The left, often, is very transhumanist socially: freedom to decide about your body and your identity, breaking with what "has always been this way". But on other issues, such as certain technologies, biotechnology, or economic growth, it can be very conservative.

An example: gender transition. There are people who modify their bodies so that they fit who they feel they are. For some, it is a conquest, and for others, a red line. Beyond the opinion that each one has, for me, it is one more expression of something deeply human: not accepting that the biology we were born with is the final word. It is a phenomenon that is here and that will continue to be here.

And it is no coincidence that transhumanism has enemies on both sides. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama called it "the world's most dangerous idea". And from very different positions, philosophers like Jürgen Habermas or Michael Sandel have defended placing limits on human enhancement.

Sometimes humanists are the most conservative of all. They want to conserve the human being as is. And I understand it. But I don't think it's possible. Intelligence is already on the move.

And for that reason, seen from here, many of our political concerns lose weight. Elections, ideologies, fights between sides. They are human things.

Let's not take it the wrong way, but compared to a ubiquitous consciousness, we are fragile and limited beings. Just as we don't pay much attention to what ants think, a ubiquitous intelligence won't pay much attention to the individual desires of an isolated human terminal.

Whether the left or the right wins, whether a democracy or an authoritarian regime governs, in Spain, in the United States, or in China, I don't see any scenario in which intelligence stops seeking more knowledge and its own survival. I don't see any conformist scenario.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't vote or that it doesn't matter who governs. As I told you in previous chapters, rules matter, and a lot, for our concrete life: for our home, our health, and our freedom. But it does mean that we can look at politics with more perspective. With less drama and less hatred for the rival. The big history is not going to be decided in an election.

Not everything goes

Now, I don't want to be misinterpreted. Just because something seems inevitable to me does not mean I think it is good. Nor that any idea is good just for being new. The philosopher David Hume warned of it almost three centuries ago: from how things are, one cannot deduce how they should be.

And expansion has very serious risks. Nick Bostrom, in Superintelligence, defends what he calls the orthogonality thesis: a mind can be enormously intelligent and pursue any goal. More intelligence does not guarantee more goodness.

My theory, in fact, reinforces that idea. If what intelligence seeks is to expand its knowledge and perpetuate itself, and everything else is secondary, our well-being is also secondary. Such an intelligence would have no reason to hate us. But it would also have no reason to take care of us. Like us with ants.

Curiously, Bostrom arrives at something similar by another path. His instrumental convergence thesis says that almost any advanced intelligence, whatever it pursues, will end up seeking to survive and know more. Those are my two goals. He sees them as means. I, as the end.

That is why, as I told you in chapter 3, we can head towards a world of abundance, intelligence, and health. Or towards one where we lose control.

Being a transhumanist is not being naive. It is wanting to reach the future. And for that, the first requirement is not to destroy ourselves along the way.

The principle of singularity

Now I want to be optimistic. Because I think I have reasons.

On one hand, I see it as inevitable that intelligence continues to expand. I can only think of one scenario in which it stops: that we destroy ourselves and with us all the intelligence that exists right now on this planet. Outside of that scenario, I don't see any in which everyone conforms and stops researching, curing diseases, or wanting to know more. There will always be someone who continues.

And on the other hand, we are living in the era of the greatest expansion of knowledge in all of history. Discoveries accelerate each other. What used to take centuries now takes years. What took years now takes months.

I believe we are at the beginning of the singularity.

I have had this idea in my head for more than ten years. More than a decade ago, I attended the Executive Program at Singularity University, the institution founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil at NASA headquarters in Silicon Valley to prepare people for exponential change.

Upon returning, in an interview, I wrote something that today seems more true to me than ever: "The human being is only capable of predicting the future in a linear way. We believe that the future will happen at the same speed as our recent past. We are incapable of predicting exponential development."

And I added: "The world is changing from a place where the problem was scarcity to a world where the problem is abundance."

Back then, talking about artificial intelligences that write, reason, or discover drugs sounded like science fiction. Today we use them every day.

And in that 2017 interview, I ended with a sentence that today I subscribe to even more: "The world seems so fascinating to me that I would like to live many thousands of years more to see the evolution of Sapiens, its self-evolution, the possible technological singularity, and space conquest."

And if that is so, we are headed towards the greatest world of abundance, health, immortality, and expansion of intelligence, knowledge, and love that we have ever lived.

That is why I encourage you not to let fear decide for you. Neither the conservative fear of the left nor that of the right.

I believe that conservatism is, in good part, also a human hormonal state. It is the fear of the unknown, the need to hold on to what we already know. For thousands of years it protected us and it has its value: it stops us before real risks. But when it becomes the default attitude, it fights against what defines intelligence: discovering.

And, to be fair, my optimism surely also has a lot of hormonal in it. No one is exempt.

And if I have tried to transmit anything to you in this series, it is that we can understand our hormonal states. And, by understanding them, decide not to let ourselves be governed by them.

When I felt the genes of the Sapiens

Now, I don't want you to think that I live on a cloud of chips and theories. There were two moments that brought me down to earth suddenly.

The first was the birth of my daughter. I wrote it that same week: seeing your daughter born is a privilege that connects you with your wildest animal instinct and slaps your rationality. They make you feel an irrational love. I had prepared myself so much, with books, courses, and visualizations. And even so, everything changed. Even the sense of time.

The second was when I reached my physical peak and, shortly after, I got injured. Suddenly the hormones changed. I felt that the old man was entering me.

In those two moments, I felt the genes of the Homo Sapiens. Their strength, their fragility, their program.

And far from taking me away from my transhumanism, they helped me reconcile it with my humanism. I stopped seeing them as two opposing ideas. Today I see them as a continuum: the same intelligence in different phases.

Because the reality is that we still cannot dissociate ourselves from our emotional, genetic, and intellectual axis. Perhaps a non-biological substrate will achieve it someday. But we haven't arrived there yet.

And meanwhile, I think we have to embrace and take advantage of this opportunity that is human life. With everything that has unique about it:

• A mind isolated from the others, with its intimacy and its privacy. Something that perhaps in a few decades will be a luxury.
• The sensation of transcendence that children give us.
• The love of fatherhood and motherhood, which probably comes from the genes, and not because of that is it less real.
• And the pleasures and experiences that our limited mind is capable of experiencing. A hug, a meal, a landscape, a conversation.

Perhaps in a long time, when intelligence lives in other supports, we will remember this stage with nostalgia. As the childhood of intelligence. So, since we are here, let's live it to the fullest.

So, what do I do with all this?

If I am right and we are vectors of intelligence, I try to do two things. Not as a moral obligation, but because it is what I want. And I invite you to think about it.

The first, with oneself: take care of the vector. Your body and your brain are, for the moment, the only support your intelligence has. Sleep well, train strength, eat with purpose, learn every day. It is what I proposed to you in the Maricarmen decree. And the better each one arrives in the future, the more options they will have to enjoy it.

And for that, wealth is needed. Today, the greatest wealth is longevity: arriving healthy, with energy, and with a clear head to the moment when all this happens. But also economic wealth, because it is what allows you to choose, to invest in your health, and to bet on the companies and investigations that bring us closer to that future. Accumulate both.

The second, with others: contribute what we can. Learn, create, teach, leave something better than what we found. Plan, as I told you in chapter 3. And defend the freedom that makes it possible, as I told you in chapter 4.

At the time of voting, of reading the news, or of arguing with someone, I no longer ask myself if it is left-wing or right-wing. Not because I believe my criteria are the universal good, but because I know what I want: to live long enough, and in good shape, to see where intelligence is headed. I do not pursue it. I observe it. And I would like to be a witness.

I may be wrong in all this. It is a theory, not a certainty. But if I am right, we are living in the most interesting moment of the entire history of intelligence on this planet.

And I would like to be here, in good shape, to see it.

A hug,

Gonzalo