I recently watched a doc about Ray Kurzweil called Transcendent Man. It was a really interesting and well made movie, but there is a small part of me that wondered how Kurzweil can so nonchalantly talk about the merging of man and machine with no real concern for the possible negative implications of this. I know Hugo de Garis is often criticized by Kurzweil and his peers, but the theories and scenarios de Garis develops seem as likely to happen as much as other leading futurists' ideas. I don't know.....am I the only one who isn't the least bit troubled by the fact that Kurzweil says we will be able to "download" our brains into machines by 2045???
i am troubled by all that they call progress, as all too often, once it becomes a reality, it doesn't turn out to be progress at all but regression, the exact opposite...but i do have faith in the spiritual growth of mankind and am sure a balance will prevail, but at what price??? yes, it's a concern, but there is nothing we can do about it anyway... humanoids just have to go through these things... apparently...
I think you are speaking of the moment of 'Singularity' because it is stated to occur also in 2045. And yes, it will happen. All it takes is a few insane scientists to make the tech step too far....and they will. Their belief that this is some form of transcendence is horrifying because making cyborgs out of people couldn't be farther from the truth. To them, we are a machine, every one of us, and all machines can be fixed and tuned up so that they never fail or die. This is their trap, and our end as the moment of singularity will coincidently also be the point where "machines are intelligent enough to make further machines on their own will." This may seem good for the healthcare industry because Western Med clearly is of no use, but there's already a whole field of emerging vibrational/sound/touch/light energy-based alternative therapies that have been used for centuries and do truly work. Why must we kill ourselves?! Are we truly the dumbest species on this planet? Only the human would think so foul as to bring forth our extermination by our own means. At that point we deserved it. This is serious enough that in my adult life, I may choose to wage a heavy political war against it with all the effort I can muster because this simply just can't happen
I think that the whole basis for this inevitable problem is the fact that a predominant number of humans don't ever want to die. The major unifying theme of most major religions is the quest for eternal life, and if you are a "faithful and devout" person, your god will reward you with eternal life in heaven. I'm not so much worried about the threat of terminators or Mr. Smith is going to be running over the planet "infecting" people......I'm more concerned with the reaction of organized religion, being that once a piece of intelligent technology becomes self aware, it will essentially become the most powerful intelligence that the world has ever seen.
The human body is a machine, a communication device. There is an idea that the body is somehow a sacred endowment but bodies are not created, men make them. Animus animates animal. Already tissues are being grown as ready plug-in replacements. There is no reason other than a homo-centric sense of specialness that our consciousness cannot be downloaded to a mechanical machine as opposed to a biological one. Our bodies are made of the same physical elements that a mechanical body would be made of.
What is preserved and disseminated in the process of procreation is information coded into genes. Beauty is a human aesthetic. Human beings do find beauty in the form and function of machines. Many people are in love with their cars. Which is more valuable, the life of ten minutes or the life of eighty years? Which is more inherently beautiful, carbon based life or silicon based life? Taboo is a cultural device. The purpose of taboo, is to separate us from them. The whole thrust of life is resurrection technology.
