Upgrade

by Blake Crouch

We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.

“So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.”

Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself? —John Sulston

Finally understood that free will did not exist, because I could not choose my desires, only whether to pursue them.