Progress in artificial intelligence is accelerating tremendously, along with our difficulties in understanding and managing its development. What seemed impossible only yesterday already appears outdated today, and we do not really know what tomorrow holds. In the mid-1960s, the young chemist Gordon Moore - who would become one of the pioneers of microelectronics and co-founder of Intel - made a prediction that would shape the entire semiconductor industry. It states that the number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles approximately every two years, leading to an exponential increase in computer processing power and a decrease in cost per transistor. Moore's law, which proved to be surprisingly accurate in the decades to come, greatly influenced the digital industry, with rapid advances in various fields such as computing, communication and electronics. But today, after sixty years, the question arises whether it still makes sense to talk about the validity of this law. Well, Moore himself argued in a 2005 interview that the limits of his theory are essentially physical, and that it will last until chips approach the size of atoms, and that therefore in the future, as miniaturisation proceeds, it is theoretically destined to run out. According to scholar and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, AI represents a paradigm shift in the scalability-based scheme of progress. His studies emphasise the ‘singularity’, i.e. a virtually unlimited explosion of the power of artificial intelligence that will render the entire history and culture of human civilisations obsolete. Kurzweil imagines that we will soon (in the coming decades, and in any case by 2050) experience the advent of algorithmic systems capable of autonomously improving themselves in thousandths of a second at an ever-increasing rate. Man and his role in the world would cease to exist in the way we have always known it. Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2024 and who is considered one of the fathers of AI and whom we have already met as one of the inventors of artificial neural networks, has taken the resounding decision to leave his position as an executive at Google in order to devote himself entirely to the one mission that is now close to his heart: warning the public about the most disturbing aspects of artificial intelligence. If the most immediate danger is that technology will make it increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fake news originated by AI systems, he fears that the future holds even more alarming scenarios. According to Hinton, in fact, there is a real risk that artificial intelligence systems could autonomously learn unexpected and pernicious behaviour, and that soon the human being will literally be supplanted by a superior intelligence that he is no longer able to control, like a genie that has escaped from the bottle: ‘Many people thought the idea that these systems could become smarter than people was wrong. I myself used to think that this was an eventuality yet to come, that it would not occur until 30 or 50 years from now, or even later. Obviously, I no longer think that way, and already in a few years we could develop an artificial intelligence that is much more intelligent than man. That is extremely frightening.’ This is a dystopian vision that echoes that previously expressed by the distinguished physicist Stephen Hawking, who warned that a super-intelligent AI could become unstoppable and beyond human control, with potentially catastrophic consequences, especially if its capabilities were used irresponsibly or maliciously. Hence, according to both Hawking and Hinton, the importance of carefully regulating AI to ensure that it remains at the service of humanity, rather than threatening our future. This basic pessimism, which fuels an essentially dystopian conception of the future, is not shared by Kurzweil who - along with other exponents of transhumanism, the new philosophical current that sees in technological progress the possibility of human improvement - instead espouses an optimistic view. In fact, he believes that artificial intelligence will help us solve hitherto insurmountable problems, for example in the bio-medical field, by allowing the integration of the human biological brain with external hardware and software in the future, which could potentially allow us to live indefinitely. We will thus witness not only the disappearance of degenerative diseases or the most aggressive forms of cancer, but a total biological improvement of man, towards immortality. If these predictions are true, the individuals who will live forever may already be born and present among us.