One Future™

Are Humans the future vehicles for cosmic consciousness?

AUTHOR:Grey Lindley | DATE: 05 May, 2008 | CATEGORY:AI and RoboticsEvolution of consciousness

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I don't know about you, but transhumanists kind of drive me up the wall. Mainly because they all seem to envision a future where we are all part robotic amoral, de-spritualised cyborgs with circuit boards sticking out the sides of our heads as a result of some post-Trekkie bizarro concoctions of sci-fi futurism.

Just when being a geek was becoming cool, too.

Despite that, (quite annoyingly so), they do actually have a good idea, in part. The concept our species adapting it's current genetic base with robotic/computer/biomechanical enhancements doesn't seem so silly for some really pragmatic reasons. One of them I think about a lot: we can't survive in a vacuum, which could in future be seen as a major drawback as that is the main environment of most of the known universe. That's on top of some other design flaws we seem to have: We need to eat a bizarre concoction of foods three times a day, we sleep about a third of our lives, and after we've been around for about 80 years, we die. No backups, no reboots, just dead and that's it. All in all, from the point of view of any well-to-do self respecting solar powered Human v2.0 AI Cyborganism, we are seriously in need of an upgrade.

My posting this is prompted by these videos below from NASA. They show their work on some possible lunar rovers and are quite creepy in an amazing kind of way. It's clear that the more intelligent these things get, the better we will be at space exploration...

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