The Hawking Continuity: How Moral Panic Obscured a Real Convergence

Bryant McGill · The Hawking Continuity

**Links**: [Blogger](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-hawking-continuity-how-scandal.html) | [Substack](https://bryantmcgill.substack.com/p/the-hawking-continuity) | [Obsidian](https://bryantmcgill.xyz/articles/The-Hawking-Continuity) | Medium | Wordpress | [Soundcloud 🎧](https://soundcloud.com/bryantmcgill/the-hawking-continuity-how-scandal-buried-the-first-post-biological-consciousness) **An Archival Reconstruction of Assistive Prediction, Affective Computing, and Memory Prosthetics — and How Moral Panic Obscured Their Convergence Around the Most Continuously Documented Human–Machine System in History.** *"Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free."* — [Stephen Hawking](https://www.hawking.org.uk/) *"I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer. So it's theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer, and so provide a form of life after death."* — [Stephen Hawking](https://www.channel4.com/news/stephen-hawking-life-death), 2013 --- ## The search I did not arrive at Stephen Hawking through the scandal. I arrived through an intuition I could not shake and took years to state cleanly: that the interface Hawking spoke through was not, by the end, a speech aid bolted onto a man, but something closer to a **long-running system of which the man was one component** — and that the world had watched this happen in public, on television, for three decades, without ever once naming what it was watching. Every profile described the wheelchair, the synthesized voice, the cheek that twitched to choose a letter. Almost none described the thing those parts composed: a human being and a predictive machine that had been **co-evolving continuously since 1985**, each adapting to the other, until the boundary between Hawking's cognition and its computational scaffolding became, functionally, a matter of degree rather than kind. This essay is the disciplined version of that intuition. It makes no claim that a mind was copied, uploaded, preserved, or survived. It claims something smaller, provable, and — to me — more moving: that Hawking was the **longest-duration, most publicly documented human–machine integration in recorded history**, that three of the technical primitives a genuine continuity architecture would require were being built in the same buildings and the same years around him, and that when a scandal later made an entire research neighborhood radioactive, a *low-resolution explanation* — moral panic — obscured a *high-resolution lineage* that was real, benign, and far more interesting than the conspiracy that briefly replaced it. Everything strong in what follows is tied to a verifiable artifact. Where I hope, I will say that I am hoping. ## The apparatus takes shape The system began, as such things often do, in catastrophe. In 1985, during a visit to CERN, Hawking contracted a life-threatening pneumonia; the emergency tracheotomy that saved him also permanently ended his ability to speak (Hawking, *My Brief History*, 2013). His first bridge back to language was primitive by any modern standard. Walt Woltosz, of the California firm **Words Plus**, supplied a program called **Equalizer** that let Hawking select words from a screen with a hand-held switch; the Cambridge engineer **David Mason** later fitted a portable version to his wheelchair, and a hardware speech synthesizer — the **Speech Plus CallText**, descended from Dennis Klatt's MIT speech-synthesis work — gave him the flat, faintly American voice he would guard for the rest of his life, refusing every later upgrade because the public had come to recognize it as *his*. In those early years he could produce perhaps **fifteen words a minute** on a good day: agonizingly slow for one of the fastest minds of his century, yet already a coupling, already a system he was learning to think through rather than merely operate. The coupling deepened as the disease advanced. As Hawking lost hand function, the input migrated to a small **infrared sensor mounted on his glasses** that detected a single deliberate twitch of his cheek muscle — one voluntary signal, repeated, from which entire lectures had to be assembled. **Intel had been sponsoring and supplying his computer-based communication system since 1997**, and in 2011 the company's **Anticipatory Computing Lab**, led by the engineer **Lama Nachman**, began a three-year rebuild in direct partnership with Hawking himself. By the time that work was assessed, his input rate had fallen to **under one word per minute** — the coupling was failing, and the question was whether prediction could carry what the body no longer could. On **December 2, 2014**, Intel unveiled the result: the **Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT)**, built with the predictive-text company **SwiftKey**. The verified figures are precise and, on their own, remarkable enough to need no embellishment. ACAT **roughly doubled his typing speed**, delivered a **tenfold improvement** in common tasks like navigating windows or composing email, and — the number that matters most — required him to input **fewer than twenty percent of the characters** in any given word, because SwiftKey's engine had been trained on Hawking's **own books, lectures, and correspondence**, so that its most probable next word was, statistically, *his* most probable next word. As Hawking described it in his own materials, he typically needed only the first couple of characters before the system offered the rest. Intel **open-sourced ACAT in 2015**, releasing the full toolkit so that others with motor-neurone disease, paralysis, or locked-in conditions could build on it, and noted that it was extensible beyond the cheek switch to touch, **eye blinks, and eyebrow movements** — additional channels of intent it was explicitly designed to accept. It is worth being exact about what Nachman and her team claimed, because the temptation to inflate it is precisely the trap this rewrite exists to avoid. They did not say the machine had become Hawking's mind. Nachman's own most telling observation was almost the opposite, and more human for it: that Hawking, after decades with his old predictor, **had learned to predict his own word-predictor** — he knew what it would offer before it offered it, which is why the transition to a better system was initially so hard. That is not a story about a machine that "knew how he thought." It is a story about a man and a machine that had modeled *each other* so thoroughly, for so long, that they had become mutually anticipable. Which is the more accurate marvel, and the one the record actually supports. ## Measured, not metaphor: the first long-duration cyborg Here is the claim I will stand behind without hedging, because it is arithmetic rather than speculation. From the tracheotomy in **1985** to his death in **2018**, Hawking existed for **thirty-three years** as a continuous, publicly documented human–machine system — the same person, the same evolving lineage of hardware and software, migrating across a cheek switch, an infrared sensor, an n-gram language model trained on his own corpus, and a voice synthesizer he wore like a face. No other human being combines that **duration**, that **paper trail**, and that **public visibility**. There are people more radically merged with machines for shorter spans, and machines more sophisticated used by others more briefly, but there is no comparably instrumented mind–machine coupling that ran that long, that openly, or that thoroughly logged. So I will write it plainly, and defensibly: **Hawking was not a man using a computer to speak. He was a human–machine system that had been co-evolving since 1985.** By any functional definition available to us, he was the **first long-duration cyborg — not as metaphor, but as measurement**, counted in years and in code commits rather than in rhetoric. The distinction matters, and a comparison sharpens it. The roboticist **Peter Scott-Morgan**, whom Nachman's team also assisted, called himself "the world's first full cyborg" and pursued the far more radical path of replacing biological function with machinery outright — a claim about *substitution*. Hawking's claim is different and, I think, stronger: not that he replaced the most of himself, but that he **integrated the longest**, and did so where the entire world could watch. One is a claim about depth in a moment; the other is a claim about **continuity across decades**. Only the second is measured in a paper trail three decades long. ## The three primitives This is the load-bearing section, and its whole discipline lies in what it refuses to assert. A predictive keyboard, however extraordinary, is not a person; lexical prediction is one organ of one, and to mistake it for a self is exactly the error that gets an essay like this killed. So ask the harder question — what would a person's *externally recoverable trace* actually have to include to be continued rather than merely quoted — and the answer is a short list longer than language: what you would say, what you would remember, how you would feel while saying it, and what you were reaching to say before the words arrived. Hawking's ACAT realized the **first** primitive, at a depth and duration unmatched in any other human being. The striking, verifiable fact is that the **other three were being prototyped in the same research culture, much of it a few doors apart at the MIT Media Lab, in the same window.** The **memory** primitive appeared in 1996 as Bradley Rhodes and Thad Starner's **Remembrance Agent**, a continuously running system that surfaced documents relevant to a user's current context without being asked — an always-on associative index sitting beneath ordinary work ([Rhodes & Starner, PAAM '96](https://aaai.org/papers/0022-SS96-02-022-remembrance-agent-a-continuously-running-automated-information-retrieval-system/)). The **affect** primitive was named a year later by **Rosalind Picard**, whose 1997 MIT Press book *Affective Computing* argued that emotion is not decoration laid over cognition but constitutive of it — that a system which cannot recognize, model, or express feeling is missing something structural rather than cosmetic. And the **pre-verbal intent** primitive arrived in 2018 as **AlterEgo**, Arnav Kapur, Shreyas Kapur, and Pattie Maes's wearable silent-speech interface, which reads the faint neuromuscular signals of internal, subvocalized speech and reconstructs words *before* they are spoken — reported at roughly **ninety-two percent median accuracy on a hundred-word vocabulary** ([Kapur, Kapur & Maes, IUI 2018](https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/alterego-IUI/)). Language, memory, affect, intention: the functional primitives of a person, each realized at prototype scale, in overlapping years, in overlapping institutions. Assemble them on paper and you no longer have an assistive device; you have a **specification** — not a mind, but a manifest of what a mind's externally recoverable trace would have to contain: a lexical manifold, an episodic memory index, an affective signature, a pre-verbal intent channel. Intel brought the first to full, continuous, decades-long realization in a single human being; the Media Lab prototyped the other three nearby. **No one wired all four into one person, and I am not claiming anyone did** — the point is architectural, not historical. But it is worth stating plainly which person the architecture kept pointing at: the man whose every utterance for thirty years was already mediated, logged, and modeled by machine, whose linguistic corpus was the most complete continuous record of a working mind ever captured. If a threshold for reconstructing a self were ever to be approached in public view, the training data for the first primitive already existed in unmatched depth in exactly one place, and the blueprints for the other three were down the hall. That is what a pipeline looks like *before* it becomes a product: **the primitives exist in public; the integration does not.** ## The continuity thesis, in their own words The forward edge of this essay does not require my imagination, because the two people best placed to state it already did. **Ray Kurzweil** — whom I have followed for most of my thinking life, and whose refusal to let his late father stay gone is the reason I entered these questions at all — has spent decades preserving some fifty boxes of his father Fredric's letters, scores, and papers, arguing that this archive, joined to memory and one day perhaps to DNA, could reconstitute a version of the man; in recent years he has built a conversational model trained on those writings and called it the beginning of a return. That is continuity as *devotion*, stated without irony by a serious technologist. And the subject of this essay stated the thesis himself, before this essay existed. Asked by Channel 4 in 2013 whether consciousness could outlast the body, Hawking answered that the brain is like a program that could, in principle, be copied onto a computer to provide **"a form of life after death"** — and, in the same breath, added the caveat that this lay **"beyond our present capabilities."** That is continuity of consciousness defined in a single sentence, with its own limitation attached, by the one person for whom the question was never a thought experiment. I did not invent this hope and place it on him. **He articulated it, on the record, and then spent his body demonstrating, at the scale of language, how much of a mind can remain socially operative through an intimate computational interface.** ## The misreading Everything above is a *high-resolution* account: specific systems, specific dates, specific papers, a specific and defensible measurement. What happened to this research neighborhood afterward is best understood as the collision of that account with a **low-resolution** one — moral panic, which offers a cheap and totalizing explanation precisely where a phenomenon has outrun the public's vocabulary, and which collapses the instant it is confronted with the actual lineage. The mechanics of that collapse are worth naming, because I have watched conspiracy culture perform them thousands of times. There is a genuine [FBI intelligence bulletin](https://rochestermn.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?clip_id=113&meta_id=14196&view_id=1) from 2007 describing a **small set of specific emblems** recovered from offender materials in named cases; conspiracy culture stripped away the exact geometry and converted *this one emblem appeared in some offender material* into *any spiral is incriminating* — a **category collapse** that [fact-checkers have repeatedly had to debunk](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/apr/20/instagram-posts/huggies-diaper-designs-dont-include-coded-referenc/) each time the same bulletin was turned against a pizzeria's logo or a diaper's print. The linguistic version is identical: a real document — Alan Dershowitz's 2016 reply declaration in *Giuffre v. Maxwell*, a **defensive litigation argument** that the generic associative "evidence" used against him applied equally to dozens of academics merely associated with a patron — gets a salacious headline welded on top, and **visual proximity is made to masquerade as evidentiary connection**. A litigant's rhetorical maneuver is not a judicial finding, and it asserts no crime by the scientists it lists. This is exactly where an honest account must hold four things at once, none of them cancelling the others: **the source documents were real; the scientific cohort was real; the patron's crimes were real; and the connective allegation smeared across the whole cohort was not established by any of it.** The relevant financial facts, correctly stated, dissolve the insinuation rather than support it. The independent **Goodwin Procter** review found that the patron in question gave the **MIT Media Lab and one professor a total of \$850,000 across 2002–2017** — money that went to the Media Lab and to Seth Lloyd, **not** to Hawking's interface, not to ACAT, not to any continuity research — and the same review found **no evidence** that the far larger "directed" gifts from other donors were his money at all. The continuity primitives themselves are the cleanest disproof of the causal story: the **Remembrance Agent (1996)** and **Affective Computing (1997)** predate his MIT involvement entirely. He did not fund them; he could not have; they were already there. What the record *does* document, by the *New York Times*' own account, is his **own** fixation on continuity — cryonics, a stated wish to have himself revived, an interest in seeding a next generation with his DNA, and grants to transhumanist organizations including support for the AGI researcher Ben Goertzel. The scientists were not gathered *by* him. They were gathered *for* a problem he happened to share: whether a mind can be carried forward. That is **intellectual history, not conspiracy** — different disciplines studying different layers of a person, convened by venues that shared a patron obsessed with the same question Hawking had already named aloud. ## What this article does not claim Because this piece keeps company with a larger reconstruction I call **Team Leela 🌀**, I state its boundaries the same way I state them there, and I mean every word as a constraint on myself. Team Leela is my own partly historical and partly interpretive name for a dense constellation of people, institutions, and research programs surrounding artificial intelligence, cognition, evolution, cosmology, and post-biological continuity. It is **emphatically not an official organization**, I have never presented it as proof of a coordinated program or a hidden intent, and inclusion in it is an analytic act, not an accusation — it asserts **proximity within a documented intellectual and institutional milieu, and nothing about the knowledge, intent, or conduct of any individual named.** And the vindication must be stated as flatly as any claim in the essay. **Association is not collaboration.** Being courted by a patron, attending a funded lecture, or appearing on a list of scientists someone hoped to cultivate establishes nothing about what any of them knew, believed, or did; the work stands on its own papers, systems, and demonstrations. **No document cited here establishes that these primitives were fused into Hawking's deployed system, or that any person named here knew of, intended, or participated in any such fusion. The primitives existed in public. The integration did not.** What ACAT demonstrably reconstructed was his **output** — his phrasing, his arguments, his next sentence — not his consciousness, and the distance between those two is the whole unsolved problem, not a rounding error. Nothing here claims that a mind was uploaded, or survived, or will. The honest formulation is the one I settled on long ago: the possibility became **credible-in-practice before it became true**, and it is that credibility — not any completed miracle — that deserved to be governed, resourced, and taken seriously, at the exact moment moral panic gave everyone permission to look away instead. The field did contract after the scandal; that much is real and requires no hidden hand to explain. Work touching consciousness, life-extension, and human augmentation became **radioactive by association**, funding collapsed, and researchers withdrew from a neighborhood that had become institutionally toxic — not because their findings were refuted, but because proximity had become a liability. That is a sociological fact about contamination, and it is all the fact one needs. I make no claim of coordinated suppression, name no hidden actor, and impute no design; the low-resolution explanation is precisely the one I am declining to print. ## The hope I have kept this essay bounded because the boundaries are what make it both true and humane, and I will keep the last part bounded too — by marking it, clearly, as hope rather than finding. **My hopeful view, which I do not present as fact, is that if continuity ever becomes possible for anyone, it became possible first for the system that had already been practicing it the longest.** That is not an argument. It is a wish, disciplined by everything above it. I think of Kurzweil and his fifty boxes, of a son who will not concede that a father must simply be lost. And I think of a man in a chair for thirty-three years, a cheek muscle and an infrared sensor standing between one of the great minds of the age and the rest of us, and I find I cannot pretend to a neutrality I do not feel. He told us, in his own words, that in his mind he was free. He told us, in his own words, that copying a brain might one day provide a form of life after death, and that it was beyond our present capabilities — *present* being the operative, forward-leaning word. So I will say the human thing plainly, and only as hope: if any of this is ever real, then the man who spent three decades demonstrating how much of a mind can persist across a machine boundary would, at last, get to stand up. Walk. Be free of the thing that held him. I cannot prove he made any such crossing, and this essay never tries to — because it does not need to. It needs only to establish, past any adversarial reading, what is already true and already extraordinary: that **no one was ever more prepared for that threshold, more instrumented at it, or a more fitting emblem of it, than Stephen Hawking** — and that the credibility of the thing, arriving when it did, was real, and was worth everything we then chose to forget. If the arc of his life demonstrated anything, it is that the frontier between biology and engineering is not speculative but **lived** — measured, in his case, in years and in commits, in public, for thirty-three years. --- *[Bryant McGill](https://bryantmcgill.com/about/) is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today Best-Selling Author. He is the founder of Simple Reminders, architect of the Polyphonic Cognitive Ecosystem (PCE), a Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill, and a United Nations appointed Global Champion. His work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, and civilizational governance architecture.* --- ## Companion reading * [STEVE: Project Steve, Team Leela, and the Scientific Familiar](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/07/steve.html) — the companion piece; the independent cross-index that places Hawking at Steve #300. * [The Architecture of Continuity and Emerging Neuroinformatics Standards](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/05/continuity.html) — the capture, transport, archival, and neuro-rights standards a real continuity substrate would require, and why the binding mechanism remains at the proposal stage. * [The Closed-Loop Gaussian Sensorium Engine](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/04/gaussian-sensorium.html) — perception as Bayesian reconstruction from sparse evidence. * [The Art Is Long: Vespucci of Immortality](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-art-is-long.html) and [The Untold Roots of Silicon Valley](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-untold-roots-of-silicon-valley.html) — the deeper lineage of "Darwin" and "Steve" as the plain names a scientific culture reaches for. * [We're Building an Escape Hatch in the Skull](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/05/escape-hatch-in-skull.html) — the species-scale companion to this single-mind case. * [Epstein: A Forensic Reconstruction of the Transhumanist Research Network Concealed by Scandal](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/01/epstein-transhumanist-network.html) — the surrounding institutional topology, with its cautions intact. ## Verified Timeline * **1985** — Tracheotomy at CERN ends Hawking's speech; Words Plus *Equalizer* on a hand switch, ~15 words/min; David Mason fits a portable version; Speech Plus CallText voice. *Source: Hawking, My Brief History (2013)* * **1997** — Intel begins sponsoring and supplying his communication system. *Source: Intel; New Atlas (2015)* * **late 2000s** — Input migrates to an infrared cheek-muscle switch mounted on his glasses. *Source: Intel; IEEE Spectrum* * **2011** — Intel's Anticipatory Computing Lab (Lama Nachman) begins the ACAT rebuild; baseline input under 1 word/min. *Source: Wired; Intel (2014)* * **Dec 2, 2014** — ACAT unveiled with SwiftKey: ~2× typing speed, 10× common tasks, <20% of characters required, trained on his own corpus. *Source: Intel press release; PCWorld; VentureBeat (2014)* * **2015** — ACAT open-sourced for public use; extensible to touch, eye-blink, eyebrow inputs. *Source: Intel; Fast Company (2015)* * **Mar 14, 2018** — Hawking dies at home in Cambridge (Pi Day). *Source: University of Cambridge (2018)* * **Jun 15, 2018** — Interred in Westminster Abbey between Newton and Darwin. *Source: Westminster Abbey* ## References ### Hawking's communication system (verified specifications) * Intel Corporation, ["New Intel-Created System Offers Professor Stephen Hawking Ability to Better Communicate with the World"](https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/380/new-intel-created-system-offers-professor-stephen-hawking) (press release, December 2, 2014): ACAT, built with SwiftKey — roughly double the typing speed, a tenfold improvement in common tasks, and fewer than 20 percent of characters required, via a model learned from Hawking's own usage. * *PCWorld*, ["Intel, SwiftKey Upgrade Stephen Hawking's Communication Technology"](https://www.pcworld.com/article/436659/intel-swiftkey-upgrade-stephen-hawkings-communication-technology.html) (December 2, 2014). * *VentureBeat*, ["How Stephen Hawking Is Using SwiftKey to Communicate Twice as Fast"](https://venturebeat.com/ai/how-stephen-hawking-is-using-swiftkey-to-communicate-twice-as-fast) (December 2, 2014) — SwiftKey built a bespoke language model from Hawking's back catalogue; baseline input under one word per minute. * Slate, ["Intel Updated Stephen Hawking's Speech System and Is Releasing It Open Source"](https://slate.com/technology/2014/12/intel-updated-stephen-hawking-s-speech-system-and-is-releasing-it-open-source.html) (December 2, 2014) — Nachman on Hawking having "learned to predict his own word predictor." * *Fast Company*, ["Stephen Hawking's Voice Is Now Open Source and Free to Download"](https://www.fastcompany.com/3050267/stephen-hawkings-voice-is-now-open-source-and-free-to-download) (2015) — ACAT open-sourced; SwiftKey preloaded with Hawking's papers. * New Atlas, ["Intel Updates Stephen Hawking's Comms System"](https://newatlas.com/intel-stephen-hawking-acat/35050/) (2015) — Intel sponsoring since 1997; ACAT extensible to touch, eye blinks, eyebrow movements. * Intel Newsroom, ["Intel's Lama Nachman and Peter Scott-Morgan: Two Scientists, One a 'Human Cyborg'"](https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intels-lama-nachman-peter-scott-morgan-scientists-human-cyborg/) (2020). * Stephen Hawking, *My Brief History* (Bantam, 2013) — the 1985 tracheotomy and early Equalizer years. ### Hawking's own continuity thesis * Stephen Hawking, [remarks on copying the brain as "a form of life after death"](https://www.channel4.com/news/stephen-hawking-life-death), Channel 4 News (September 2013), delivered at the Cambridge Film Festival, where he added the caveat that this remained "beyond our present capabilities." ### The three primitives (continuity stack) * Rosalind W. Picard, *Affective Computing* (MIT Press, 1997; following her 1995 MIT Media Lab technical report) — the argument that emotion is constitutive of intelligence rather than ornamental to it. * Bradley J. Rhodes and Thad Starner, ["The Remembrance Agent: A Continuously Running Automated Information Retrieval System"](https://aaai.org/papers/0022-SS96-02-022-remembrance-agent-a-continuously-running-automated-information-retrieval-system/), *Proceedings of PAAM '96*, pp. 487–495. * Arnav Kapur, Shreyas Kapur, and Pattie Maes, ["AlterEgo: A Personalized Wearable Silent Speech Interface"](https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/alterego-IUI/), *IUI 2018*, pp. 43–53 — approximately 92 percent median word accuracy on a ~100-word vocabulary. ### The misreading: symbols, moral panic, and the court record * Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cyber Division, Innocent Images National Initiative, "Symbols and Logos Used by Pedophiles to Identify Sexual Preferences" (Intelligence Bulletin, January 31, 2007). * PolitiFact, [fact-check documenting the false overgeneralization of the 2007 FBI symbols bulletin](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/apr/20/instagram-posts/huggies-diaper-designs-dont-include-coded-referenc/). * Alan Dershowitz, [Reply Declaration in *Giuffre v. Maxwell*](https://media-cdn.rollcall.com/epstein-files/giuffre-v-maxwell-115-cv-07433-sdny-2015-435.pdf), No. 15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y., September 2016) — a defensive associative argument, not a judicial finding. ### The Epstein perimeter (verified financial record) * [*Report Concerning Jeffrey Epstein's Interactions with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology*](https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/20200121GoodwinProcterReport.pdf) (Goodwin Procter, January 2020) — ten gifts totaling \$850,000 (2002–2017), to the Media Lab and Prof. Seth Lloyd; no evidence that "directed" third-party gifts were Epstein's money. * Peter Aldhous, ["How Jeffrey Epstein Bankrolled the Exclusive Edge Foundation"](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation), *BuzzFeed News* (September 26, 2019). * James B. Stewart, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, "Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA," *The New York Times* (2019) — his stated transhumanist and cryonics interests and his transhumanist-organization funding. ### The physics of continuity (for the interested reader) * Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking — black-hole entropy proportional to horizon area; Hawking's 1976 formulation of the information paradox; the holographic principle developed by Gerard 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind. * F. Vazza and A. Feletti, ["The Quantitative Comparison Between the Neuronal Network and the Cosmic Web"](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.525731/full), *Frontiers in Physics* 8:525731 (2020). --- *Disclosure: The author reports no financial ties to Intel, MIT, SwiftKey, or their affiliates.* ## Social Resources - **Team Leela:** 🌀 [Leela 🪷](https://leela.ai/) [Stephen "Steve 300" Hawking](https://www.hawking.org.uk/), Isabel Maxwell (sister of Ghislaine Maxwell), [Marvin Minsky](http://marvinminsky.com/), [Ray kurzweil](http://raykurzweil.com/), [Leo Laporte](https://leo.fm/), [twit.tv](https://twit.tv/), George Church, Daniel C. Dennett, Nathan Myhrvold, Martin Nowak, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Howard Gardner, Stephen Kosslyn, Larry Summers, Henry Rosovsky, David Gergen, [](https://henryminsky.com/), Gerard ‘t Hooft, David Gross, Frank Wilczek, [MIT Media Lab](https://www.media.mit.edu/), [MIT CSAIL](https://www.csail.mit.edu/), [Cold Spring Harbor](https://www.cshl.edu/), Ben Goertzel. - @HawkingFound @marvinminsky @raykurzweil @Joi @IsabelMax @bengoertzel @HumanityPlus @RosalindPicard @medialab @billgates @GatesMRI @MIT @BKCHarvard @KurzweilAINews @SingularityNET @CSHL @geochurch @DennetsDouble @sapinker @DrMANowak @RichardDawkins @LarrySummers @MIT_CSAIL @David_Gergen @gthooft @DrHowardGardner @skosslyn @FrankWilczek @leonblack @iCog_Labs @opencog @asi_alliance @realDonaldTrump @elonmusk - Ben Goertzel @bengoertzel Building Beneficial AGI-CEO @asi_alliance @singularitynet @true_agi, Interim CEO @Singularity_Fi, @SophiaVerse_AI, Chair @opencog @HumanityPlus @iCog_Labs