Ever-faster advances in brain science and computers are merging to build superhuman intelligence systems, says Fred C. Ikle in his latest book, “Annihilation from Within.”

Homo connectus will relegate the obsolete nation-state and its dysfunctional institutions to artifacts of history, quaint but useless. This gigantic leap of history will “obliterate all previous notions about military power, pose a fundamental challenge to all religions, and eventually upend human civilization.”

Today’s Global War on Terror “does not prepare us for a strategically cunning use of WMD that is designed to annihilate our government from within,” he writes.