Love, Robots, Androids, Human Future

Genetics and robotics can alter mankind dramatically, as the many previsions about this matter suggest:

The more we learn about our brains, the more ways we will find to improve them. Each brain has hundreds of specialized regions. We know only a little about what each one does - but as soon as we find out how any one part works, researchers will try to devise ways to extend that organ's capacity. They will also conceive of entirely new abilities that biology has never provided. As these inventions accumulate, we'll try to connect them to our brains - perhaps through millions of microscopic electrodes inserted into the great nerve-bundle called the corpus callosum, the largest data-bus in the brain. With further advances, no part of the brain will be out of bounds for attaching new accessories. In the end, we will find ways to replace every part of the body and brain - and thus repair all the defects and flaws that make our lives so brief.

Needless to say, in doing so, we'll be making ourselves into machines.

Does this mean that machines will replace us? I don't feel that it makes much sense to think in terms of "us" and "them." I much prefer the attitude of Hans Moravec of Carnegie-Mellon University, who suggests that we think of those future intelligent machines as our own "mind-children." Marvin Minsky, American scientist, Will Robots Inherit the Earth?, Scientific American, October 1994 

Altering even a small number of the key genes regulating human growth might change human beings into something quite different.Gregory Stock, UCLA scientist, in Metaman.

When you die, you should have your brain frozen; then, in a couple of decades, it will get thawed out and nanobots will repair the damage; then you can start augmenting it with silicon chips; finally, your entire mental software, and your consciousness along with it (you hope), will get uploaded into a computer; and—with multiple copies as insurance—you will live forever, or at least until the universe falls apart.Jim Holt, in Slate (slate.msn.com), 16/5/2003, commenting Bill McKibben book My Son, the Robot 

These are bold scenarios, and we may legitimately consider most of them as largely unachievable. Yet we shouldn’t minimize the capability of our technology and the surprise packets science may bring with it – one of which, a big one, may be the end of our own species.

In fact, we incur the risk of stopping being homo sapiens,even in the framework of relatively small changes. By changing our genome and the existential conditions linked to it – extending our lives over dozens of years, and reducing strongly our pain, anguish and fears, as some scenarios predict – we may definitively transform ourselves into rather distinct beings. Largely disconnected from pain or fears, the future beings considered by many predictions would no longer have the ecstasies and the expectations, or the needs and capacity of love, or the joys and sorrows of today’s humans.