In the early years of the USSRThe United Socialist Soviet Republic, the USA's main rival in the Cold War before it collapsed and broke up into a number of smaller states in 1991., Soviet writers were engaged in an excitingly utopianImpossibly perfect. The term comes from an ancient Greek phrase meaning "no-place" invented by Henry VIII's chancellor, Sir Thomas More, in 1516, as the name of an imaginary, ideal island. project: turning men into steel.¹

The BolsheviksThe Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and later became the Communist Party. The party included Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. believed that turning flesh into metal would create the ideal Soviet subject called the "homo sovieticus", a perfect ideal without any individual will, who just did what would be best for the collective.

Leon TrotskyA prominent 20th Century Russian revolutionary and politician. described this ideal person in 1924 as "a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman". By transforming humans into machine-men, they would have the perfect citizens to build communism and help it to spread across the globe.

In some ways, the Bolsheviks had similar plans to our modern-day tech industry. TranshumanismA movement to use science and technology to give humans more advanced mental and physical capabilities. , the dominant ideology of Silicon ValleyA global centre of technological innovation in Northern California. It is home to many start-up and global technology companies including Apple, Facebook and Google. , preaches many of the same utopian ideas, with some claiming that we could even become immortal through combining our bodies with technology.²

But for most of the last century, the idea of technology becoming advanced enough to create transhumans was just that - an idea. Now, it is real.

2022 saw the release of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot launched by OpenAI, built with 570GB of data and around 300 billion words. It is our best chatbot yet, capable not only of highly sophisticated calculations, but also convincingly human conversation and long-form writing.

It also saw the release of Meta's $1,500 (£1,242) virtual-reality headset, which brings us a step closer to living in the metaverseAn online virtual world. A combination of meta, meaning beyond, and universe. , Mark Zuckerberg's promised virtual utopia.

But recent surveys show an increasing amount of pessimism about the growth of tech. One claimed that 36% of artificial intelligence researchers believe that AI could bring global catastrophe or even all-out nuclear war.

Some scientists believe that artificial superintelligence, technology which will far exceed human capacity, could result in our extinction.

But other experts counter that with time, the returns from technology will probably get smaller, rather than greater, and that the technology is unlikely to spiral out of our control.

For many, the dice have not yet been cast. In the right hands, technology could be a force for good which allows us to work less and drives standards of living up. In the wrong hands, it could be the force behind our demise.

Yes: AI technology is developing at a rapid pace, and nobody is regulating it. It is currently in the hands of a few billionaires who will only think about how they can gain from it, not how it might affect the rest of us.

No: We love to be fatalistic about AI technology, but realistically it will be an overwhelming force for good. And despite worries about robots stealing our jobs, AI is actually predicted to produce more and better jobs than we have now.

Or... As with every kind of dangerous technology, we need to monitor AI and ensure that it is regulated by authorities to protect the interests of the majority.