Written at the edge of the millennium, The Spike is one of the early attempts to grapple with what would later be called the technological singularity.

Written before the internet boom had fully unfolded, it reads today as a curious hybrid: half prophecy, half time capsule of late-1990s techno-optimism.

Damien Broderick argues that accelerating advances in computing, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence are pushing civilisation toward a radical discontinuity—an inflection point where technological change becomes effectively uncontrollable and human life is transformed beyond recognition. 

We zip through nanotechnology, machine intelligence, longevity research, and the philosophical consequences of post-human existence. For readers interested in the intellectual prehistory of contemporary AI discourse, The Spike captures a moment when the future of machines—and of humanity—was beginning to feel both thrilling and faintly catastrophic.