Reviews | October 07, 2026

The Human Future: From Symbiosis to Transcendence 

Bacteria to AI by N. Katherine Hayles. University of Chicago Press, 2025, 304 pp., $27.50 (paperback). 

Alien Earths by Lisa Kaltenegger. St. Martin’s Press, 2024, 288 pp., $30.00 (hardcover). 

Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff. Oxford University Press, 2023, 208 pp., $18.95 (hardcover). 

Fear of a Black Universe by Stephon Alexander. Basic Books, 2021, 256 pp., $18.99 (paperback). 

Lights On by Annaka Harris. Macmillan Audio, 11 hrs. 9 min., 2025, $26.99 (digital audio). 

Future Superhuman: Our Transhuman Lives in a Make-or-Break Century by Elise Bohan. UNSW Press, 2022, 368 pp., $29.99 (AUD). 

History turns on its paradigms. The Cold War’s paranoia, for example, birthed a communications network meant to outlast nuclear annihilation. ARPANET, engineered in fear of Soviet missiles, is now the Internet—a planetary nervous system whose tremors ripple across markets, democracies, and our most intimate lives. (In 1985, when the government leased commercial space on ARPANET, this very magazine ventured into online literary publishing with the help of a tech-savvy intern.) The age we inhabit has been born of accident and necessity, its trajectories propelled not by inevitability but by what Thomas Kuhn once called paradigm shifts: sudden, unsettling realignments of thought that force us to redraw the boundaries of the possible. 

One such shift came in 1960, when psychologist J. C. R. Licklider sketched a vision of “man–computer symbiosis.” He did not imagine machines replacing us so much as machines entangled with us, accelerating our thinking, amplifying our perception. Licklider’s phrase has been realized in ways he could not have foreseen—in AI systems that now converse, generate, and predict; in quantum computers that hint at nonhuman cognition. We are living his thought-experiment, though in a key of dread as much as promise. 

But the story of the future cannot be told solely through the voices of the usual suspects—white men of the Pentagon and MIT. We must also turn to those historically sidelined: women philosophers and scientists who expand the vocabulary of what it means to be human, and thinkers of color whose cultural vantage offers ways of knowing that science alone cannot codify. Their perspectives puncture the hubris of universal claims, grounding speculation in lived experience. They remind us that the future is not only a technical puzzle but a cultural one—of who gets to imagine, and for whom. 

This is especially urgent because we live with a paradox. On the one hand, we have telescopes peering into the deep sky, revealing a universe thick with galaxies—perhaps two trillion of them—each holding multitudes of stars, many with planets bathed in conditions not unlike Earth’s. The statistical likelihood is staggering: life should be everywhere, perhaps even intelligence, in forms we can scarcely conceive. Our planet is not the center; we are not the miracle. Yet on the other hand, vast segments of our world remain bound by theologies that insist on human exceptionalism, on the sovereignty of an absentee God whose silence has been filled with doctrine. Religion, in this sense, holds us back: its insistence on chosenness collides with the indifferent immensity of the cosmos. The more we know about exoplanets and biosignatures, the less special we seem. 

We endured the Copernican insult—Earth demoted from cosmic center—because religion reassured us we still held God’s moral attention, according to Neil deGrasse Tyson and many others. But the new astronomy is less forgiving. If our galaxy is one among trillions, if exoplanets teem with conditions for life, then the possibility that we are not alone demands a second revolution: a dethronement not just of axis and geography, but of metaphysical centrality. 

That prospect cuts both ways. It may free us at last from the weight of divine exceptionalism, inviting us into a more modest, relational cosmos. Or it may doom us to despair, our species revealed as provincial, finite, and easily replaced. Our imagination of the human future depends on which story we tell—whether we embrace symbiosis, seek out alien kin, discover cosmic purpose, improvise our way through darkness, or re-anchor our identity in consciousness itself. 

The books reviewed here trace this reckoning. N. Katherine Hayles’s Bacteria to AI invites us to shed anthropocentrism altogether, situating human cognition as one node among bacterial colonies, machine intelligences, and planetary systems. Lisa Kaltenegger’s Alien Earths transports us outward, to the new worlds astronomers have cataloged by the thousands, shifting the dream of “elsewhere” from myth to measurable possibility. Philip Goff’s Why? The Purpose of the Universe asks whether meaning, against all odds, might be written into the cosmos itself, not by a traditional deity but by a subtler form of teleology. Stephon Alexander’s Fear of a Black Universe fuses physics with jazz improvisation, showing how outsiders remake science through rhythm and imagination. And Annaka Harris’s Lights On takes consciousness—elusive, contested, irreducible—as the ground of being, blending philosophy with the humility of wonder. 

Each book is a facet of our moment: speculative, searching, discontented with inherited frameworks. Together they suggest that the question is no longer whether machines can think, or whether life exists beyond Earth, but how we will reconfigure ourselves—culturally, morally, spiritually—in light of the answers. The prologue to the human future is already being written, and it does not permit us the comfort of exceptionalism.