The speculation in that article is so laboured, I'm surprised it made it into a popular magazine. Considering that brain-computer interfaces have been in devel

The speculation in that article is so laboured, I'm surprised it made it into a popular magazine. Considering that brain-computer interfaces have been in development since the 1970s and have only made it to an extremely coarse, infection-prone vision replacement, it seems unlikely his "cyborgist" party could be a significant force. That leaves the war between "terrans" and "cosmists;" or "luddites" and "singularitarians." But unlike the luddites of yore, these needn't have easily available industrial targets. The Butlerian Jihad would need to be severe, indeed, to keep isolated research teams or even wealthy hobbyists from constructing a self-improving machine intelligence, once Moore's Law has taken the hardware obstacles out of the way. That probably wouldn't be an optimal outcome, but I don't see any way to avert eventual AI other than an energy collapse or other catastrophe halting the advance of technology in general.