In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines gave intellectual heft to a pursuit – videogaming – that had hitherto been the preserve of glassy-eyed youths. His advocacy proved prescient. Over the next couple of decades, the best minds of a generation dedicated their lives to making pixellated worlds as compelling and realistic as possible.

Among their inventions were GPUs (graphical processing units), electrical circuits which enabled extraordinary visual innovation through multiple simultaneous mathematical tasks. These GPUs are the same technology which underpins the ‘neural network’ architecture of AIs such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini. And advanced AI, in combination with gene editing and genome synthesis, promises to shake biology to its core.

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Its possibilities include sentient synthetic materials, giving us the ability to grow houses and clothing; the invention of entirely new species; the eradication of ‘monogenic’ diseases (those controlled by only one gene); and, most ethically dicey, the capacity to tweak the human genome to control factors such as height, weight and intelligence, or the wholesale ‘de-extinction’ of vanished human species such as Neanderthals and........

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