Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Misreading of Science Fiction

The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from one another, every umbilical cord cut. An extreme form of this dream is the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful 21st-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires who, seeking escape from the prison of their own bodies, intend to have their heads frozen when they die and, possibly, consciousnesses uploaded onto computers, an idea that, like much of what they want, comes from a story published nearly a century ago in a science fiction magazine for boys.