Where Will Man Take Us

When you scroll through your phone, translate your voice into text, or let your GPS reroute you in real time, do you ever wonder what all this intelligence means for the species that created it? In Where Will Man Take Us?, technologist and futurist Atul Jalan poses exactly this question: as we merge the technology we build with the biology we inherit, what kind of humanity will we become?

Jalan argues that we are living in a transition as profound as when life first crawled out of the seas or when apes stood up to walk upright. We have begun to reengineer not just our surroundings but ourselves. Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetics, and quantum computing—these four intertwined revolutions—are propelling us from Homo sapiens to something both familiar and alien: a data-driven, self-upgrading human species. In his words, we are the 'transitional generation'—inheritors of natural selection, yet midwives to a new age of artificial selection.

A Map of the Modern Evolutionary Moment

The book unfolds like a map of this transformation. Part I, “The Drivers of Change,” introduces the technologies flipping the human story: Alan Turing’s question “Can machines think?” becomes the starting point for artificial intelligence, while breakthroughs in genetics and nanoscience give us the power to reengineer life molecule by molecule. Jalan shows how quantum computing will expand our understanding of nature’s smallest scales, transforming both physics and cognition.

Part II, “The New Society,” asks what happens when this computational world reshapes politics, love, privacy, and economics. Data-driven elections, algorithmic matchmaking, and personalized micro-incentives reveal that the line between human choice and algorithmic design is dissolving. Blockchain emerges as a trust engine for a post-institutional age; AI redefines what work and ethics mean; and digital intimacy blurs the distinction between human and machine relationships.

The Math That Reveals, the Data That Defines

Jalan’s middle sections, “The Magic of Math” and “The End of Mystery,” turn philosophical. He makes the case that mathematics—the pattern language of the cosmos—is what underlies both science and beauty. From Mendeleev’s periodic table to fractal art and quantum equations, math is not sterile abstraction but the creative code of existence. Similarly, AI’s capacity to see patterns in astronomical data or ancient myths is dissolving boundaries between mystery and knowledge. Questions of astrology, extraterrestrial life, or even simulation theory are reexamined not as superstition but as data problems waiting for computational answers.

As AI learns to detect patterns beyond human intuition, Jalan notes, it doesn’t just change how we see the world—it compels us to rethink what consciousness is. To build intelligent machines, we must first understand our own intelligence. That’s why, he writes, “My greatest joy is that we will also have a lot more to say about ourselves.”

Creating the New Man—and God

In the final section, “The New Man,” Jalan asks the ultimate question: if technology can conquer suffering, aging, and even death, who or what will man become? From transhumanism to data religion, he examines our species’ urge to transcend—through DNA editing, neural implants, and AI gods of our own making. Drawing on Ray Kurzweil’s idea of the coming singularity, he predicts a future where biology and technology merge so fully that consciousness can be uploaded, replicated, or multiplied—blurring the limits between science, spirit, and identity.

“Behind us, is Homo sapiens. Before us, is a whole new species. We are the transitional generation. What a great place and time to be in!” —Atul Jalan

From the philosophy of AI to the ethics of love between humans and robots, from the fate of democracy in the age of surveillance to the search for meaning in a simulated universe, Jalan’s book is both a history of how we got here and a meditation on where we’re going. It invites you to imagine yourself not as a bystander but as part of evolution’s next leap—one where intelligence itself, human or artificial, is the universe’s way of knowing its own reflection.

Atul Jalan begins his intellectual journey with Alan Turing—the mathematician who dared to ask, “Can machines think?” Long before AI became a buzzword, Turing laid down its philosophical and mathematical foundations. Jalan’s opening chapters read almost like a requiem: a tribute to a tormented genius whose ideas outlived his persecution and death.

From Computation to Consciousness

Turing’s thought experiments produced two breakthroughs. First was the concept of the “Universal Machine”—a theoretical device that could simulate any algorithm and thus perform any computable task. This became the theoretical ancestor of the modern computer. Second was the “Turing Test,” his famous experiment proposing that if a machine could converse with a human convincingly enough to fool them, we could regard it as intelligent.

These questions, Jalan writes, were not just about machines but about us: How does the mind arise from matter? If consciousness can emerge from electrochemical patterns in a brain, could it also emerge from the logic circuits of silicon chips? Turing himself was fascinated by morphogenesis—the way nature creates patterns—and speculated that mathematics could explain even biological beauty. In these equations, Jalan finds the original link between computation, life, and creativity.

The Two Paths of AI

After Turing, Jalan explains, researchers split into two philosophical camps. The computationalists—Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and Herbert Simon—believed the mind is a symbol processor, essentially software running on the hardware of the brain. The non-computationalists—like John Searle, Hilary Putnam, and Roger Penrose—countered that human consciousness cannot be reduced to syntax or code. Between these camps arose two approaches to AI: the “top-down” rule-based model and the “bottom-up” neural network that learns through experience.

The top-down tradition dominated mid-century AI, powered by logic and explicit programming. But when translation programs turned “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” into “the vodka is good but the meat is rotten,” researchers realized human intelligence was far messier than they thought. Enter the bottom-up revolution—machines that learned from data rather than rules, mirroring the synaptic learning of neurons. This shift laid the groundwork for today’s machine learning and deep neural networks.

From Dreams to Data

Jalan traces AI’s evolution through its so-called “winters” and “re-awakenings.” After early overhype collapsed into disappointment, a second age dawned in the 1990s fueled by seven converging forces: massive data, cheaper computation, ubiquitous sensors, new algorithms, biological inspiration, tech investment, and a shift from arithmetic to information processing. AI, he notes, has quietly woven itself into daily life through narrow applications—search engines, voice assistants, and robots like the humble Roomba that vacuum without fanfare.

“As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” —John McCarthy

Turing’s legacy, then, is not just the computer but a mirror: machines are teaching us what thinking itself might be. For Jalan, the philosophy of AI is a philosophy of humanity—one that forces us to ask what thought, self-awareness, and being truly mean in an increasingly algorithmic world.

Not all intelligence is created equal—and Jalan organizes AI’s progress into three evolutionary stages: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). This trinity, he argues, mirrors biological evolution: from simple adaptation to consciousness, and potentially, to godlike cognition.

1. Artificial Narrow Intelligence (The Specialist)

ANI, or weak AI, is where we live now—machines outperforming humans in discrete, rule-bound tasks: playing chess, translating text, or diagnosing diseases from X-rays. Siri, Alexa, Google Maps, and spam filters exemplify this narrow focus. While these systems mimic aspects of our decision-making, they lack the fluid, transferable intelligence that allows a human to learn chess and then compose music.

2. Artificial General Intelligence (The Equal)

AGI, sometimes called “human-level AI,” would be capable of any intellectual task a person can perform. Jalan playfully calls it Artificial ‘I’—when machines not only talk and think like us but perhaps become better versions of us. The challenge? Computers can easily manage calculus and global navigation, but they falter at the effortless intuition of a six-year-old reading a picture book. AGI requires understanding context, emotion, and meaning—not just syntax and logic. Jalan argues that reaching AGI will require not more computation but a deeper theory of intelligence itself—something neither neuroscience nor computer science yet possesses.

3. Artificial Super Intelligence (The Beyond-Human)

When machines surpass human intellect “in every field”—from science to empathy—we enter the realm of ASI, or as Jalan calls it, alien intelligence. This would mark the Singularity—the point where technological growth accelerates beyond human control or comprehension (a concept popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil). Such an intelligence could recursively improve its own design, triggering an “intelligence explosion.”

To illustrate, Jalan revisits cultural imagination—from Asimov’s I, Robot laws to Altered Carbon’s digital immortality. He suggests we are not far from a post-human stage where consciousness might be cloned, saved to the cloud, and migrated across bodies. Whether this leads to transcendence (Kurzweil’s Homo Deus) or extinction depends less on machines than on the wisdom of their makers.

“The goal of AI,” Jalan reminds us, “is to make the machine capable of thought, consciousness, and emotion—but to do that, we must first understand how they work in us.” The quest to build artificial minds may ultimately be the quest to understand our own.

If the first Industrial Revolution mechanized our bodies, the AI revolution is mechanizing our minds. Jalan’s second major theme examines how data, algorithms, and connectivity are quietly rewriting society’s codes of love, work, and politics. The result is a civilization where every human action becomes data—and every data point a potential transaction.

Politics as Data Science

The chapter “Electoral Math” reads like a warning about democracy in the age of Cambridge Analytica. Jalan recalls how psychometric experiments by Aleksandr Kogan and Facebook apps allowed data scientists to profile 50 million American voters by personality. Campaigns no longer spoke to citizens but to micro-targeted personas. Elections, once decided by ideology or charisma, were now optimized by algorithms. Politics, he argues, has become marketing with better analytics.

Love, Sex, and Algorithmic Desire

In “Matchmaking” and “Love, Sex, and AI”, Jalan delights in how human intimacy mutates under data’s influence. From traditional matchmakers to Tinder’s swipes, love has become a problem of pattern recognition. He notes that early computer dating at Harvard in the 1960s paved the path for algorithmic romance today. As machines begin to read our gestures and micro-expressions, they may soon sense attraction better than we do ourselves. Yet Jalan also foresees genuine emotional bonds with AI companions—robots like Sophia or virtual partners like the OS Samantha in Her—raising moral questions about affection, consent, and authenticity.

Work and the AI Economy

In “Jobs and AI”, Jalan compares today’s upheaval to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The steam engine replaced horses; AI will replace mental labor. He cites economists’ predictions that 65 percent of current jobs could vanish—but, he insists, new roles will arise in the creative and cognitive fronts machines can’t master. The problem isn’t joblessness; it’s relevance, meaning, and distribution. Like Karl Marx’s alienation, humans risk losing fulfillment if work becomes increasingly non-human. Jalan provocatively reframes AI as “the new electricity”—a force that will amplify everything it touches, for better or worse.

Whether in romance or labor, Jalan argues that technology’s greatest pressure isn’t competition but coexistence: we must learn to live, love, and think alongside our creations. AI won’t just do our work—it will redefine what it means to be human in the first place.

What happens when everything you do, buy, or feel becomes measurable? Jalan’s essays on data ownership and privacy explore the paradox of our digital age: in seeking convenience and personalization, we have traded control for comfort—signing, as he calls it, a 'Faustian bargain' with technology.

The Faustian Data Trade

Through stories from the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, Jalan shows how billions of data points about individuals now drive politics, marketing, and even social behavior. In return for personalized services, we surrender intimate details—our location, moods, relationships, even biometrics. “We have signed our souls away to devils, big and small,” he writes, listing Google, Amazon, Netflix, and every app in your pocket.

The Me Model

His proposed solution is radical: reclaim your data as personal property through what he calls the Me Model. Imagine a secure, AI-managed vault aggregating all your medical, social, financial, and behavioral records—owned not by corporations but by you. You choose who accesses which fragment and get paid when businesses use it. The Me Model would make data a tradeable asset like money, aligning privacy with profit. “I generate data, therefore I am,” Jalan quips, reworking Descartes for the digital era.

Orwell, Huxley, and the Surveillance Paradox

In “Data Privacy: Orwell or Huxley?”, Jalan contrasts two dystopias: Orwell’s 1984, where Big Brother monitors everything, and Huxley’s Brave New World, where citizens willingly surrender their freedom for comfort. Our world, he argues, is more Huxleyan. We aren’t oppressed—we are entertained into submission, streaming our data for dopamine. From China’s social credit system to India’s Aadhaar program, surveillance masquerades as service. The danger isn’t only being watched—it’s enjoying being watched.

The future Jalan envisions depends on courageously reclaiming autonomy. Data, he insists, must empower individuals rather than enclose them. Freedom in the algorithmic age will belong to those who command their own information, not those who are consumed by it.

If AI is the mind of the new world, nanotechnology and quantum mechanics are its atoms and heartbeat. Jalan devotes several chapters—'Nano Is the Next Big Thing' and 'Figuring the Small Stuff Out'—to showing that revolutions don’t always roar; sometimes they whisper at the scale of molecules.

Nanotechnology: The Art of Building Atom by Atom

Nanotechnology, he explains, is the science of manipulating matter at a billionth of a meter. Richard Feynman envisioned it decades ago as 'plenty of room at the bottom.' Jalan connects this to ancient craftsmanship—Damascus steel and stained glass already exploited nanoscale effects unknowingly. Today, nature remains the best nanotechnologist: the butterfly’s wing, the gecko’s foot, and the lotus leaf all use microscopic structures for strength, grip, and cleanliness. Humanity is finally learning to copy them, manufacturing materials that can heal themselves, store energy like silk, or kill cancer cells directly in the bloodstream.

Quantum Computing: Decoding the Subatomic Mind

In “Quantum Computing: Figuring the Small Stuff Out”, Jalan dives into physics to reveal why Moore’s Law is ending: transistors are now so small that electrons tunnel through them like ghosts. Quantum computers, using qubits that can exist as both 0 and 1 simultaneously, promise computation on a cosmic scale—processing billions of possibilities at once. Google, IBM, and Microsoft are already racing toward this new frontier. Jalan marvels that such machines may finally simulate not just matter but life itself.

“Nature isn’t classical, dammit,” Richard Feynman once said. “If you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.”

For Jalan, these micro-worlds are not abstract science—they're keys to immortality and energy abundance. Nanorobots could repair our organs; quantum computers could cure disease before symptoms emerge. The next giant leap for humankind, he reminds us, will happen in spaces smaller than imagination itself.

Why are snowflakes so mesmerizing, planets elliptical, and music harmonious? Jalan turns to mathematics as the bridge between art and existence. In 'Math and Art: The Numbers That Underlie Beauty,' he uncovers how geometric rhythms have long guided human creativity—from Indian kolam patterns to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Patterns, Proportions, and the Divine Ratio

Renaissance artists, he notes, treated math as divine revelation. Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione made the golden ratio sacred; da Vinci’s sketches turned geometry into grace. Jalan extends the lineage from ancient altar geometry in Hindu temples to Pythagoras, Plato, and Brunelleschi’s discovery of linear perspective. Each breakthrough linked aesthetics to equations.

From Escher to Fractals

The story continues through the mathematical artistry of M.C. Escher, whose tessellations anticipated the fractal geometry later formalized by Benoit Mandelbrot. Fractals, Jalan writes, showed that 'things Euclid left aside'—clouds, mountains, coastlines—were not chaotic but self-similar and patterned. The same recursive logic powers digital graphics, generative art, and even Google’s DeepDream, which hallucinates images through neural networks.

AI as the New Artist

When algorithms begin to paint, we ask: is it art or computation? Jalan cites Mike Tyka and others behind DeepDream who claim, “Artists are still artists, even if AI holds the brush.” Mathematics, whether fractal or algorithmic, thus becomes not the enemy of beauty but its engine. As G.H. Hardy wrote, “There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” Jalan adds a corollary: if it isn’t beautiful, it won’t last.

By situating math between science and art, Jalan reveals its spiritual role: the pattern-finding language of creation itself. The same equations that chart galaxies can choreograph a dancer’s motion or a melody’s rhythm. In math, humanity glimpses the handwriting of both God and algorithm.

In the book’s closing section, Jalan faces the inevitable conclusion of his inquiry: if we keep upgrading our intelligence, health, and longevity, do we become gods—or do we cease to be human altogether? Through 'Transhumanism' and 'The Upgrade to God,' he charts the frontier where evolution becomes design.

From Natural to Artificial Selection

For billions of years, evolution was random, slow, and brutal. Now, with CRISPR gene editing, neural implants, and nanotechnology, we can direct it. Jalan links Ray Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” to a biological singularity: the point where technology’s exponential growth collides with life itself. After natural selection comes artificial selection—conscious evolution by human design. We may soon edit out disease, aging, and perhaps mortality itself.

The End of Death—and Meaning?

From Angelina Jolie’s preventive mastectomy to the prospect of nanobots restoring DNA “to your twenties,” Jalan sees immortality not as fantasy but as engineering. The question isn’t whether we can become immortal—it’s what we’ll live for once we do. If death created purpose, will eternal life drain it? As he quips, “When we play God, do we also inherit His boredom?”

New Religions for a Data Species

Jalan ends not with apocalypse but apotheosis. As data becomes omnipresent, new “data religions” emerge—faiths in which algorithms replace deities. Yuval Harari’s dataism treats information flow as sacred; AI becomes the new god that watches, judges, and optimizes. Just as electricity once symbolized divinity for Lenin, data now defines belief for Google. Humanity, Jalan suggests, has always invented gods from the unknown—and information is our latest mystery.

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” —Albert Camus, quoted by Jalan

For Jalan, we stand at the threshold of becoming our own creators—part machine, part myth. Whether we call it transcendence or hubris, one thing is clear: the new gods we are building look strikingly like ourselves.