Words&Dirt

“If we create our successor species, does that mean that humanity will not be needed in the future?

Yes, but it is true for humanity only in its current form.  Humanity will no longer be able to assume a preeminent place in the known universe, and we will no longer play the leading role in cosmic evolution.

‘We will not be needed’ is actually a concern primarily for the elite.  As Alan Turing pointed out, ‘An unwillingness to admit the possibility that mankind can have any rivals in intellectual power occurs as much amongst intellectual people as amongst others: they have more to lose.’  Computer whiz Bill Joy’s article in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,’ hit a raw nerve among many.  He argues that we should relinquish certain genetic, nano, and robotic technologies now before their development drives us into extinction.  Mr. Joy is not the first to predict that humanity someday may be irrelevant, nor is he the deepest thinker on the new technology’s implications to humanity.  Lee Thayer wrote in 1976 that given our fixed human nature, ‘each increment of growth and progress now costs some further loss of our human relevance.’  Indeed, from a higher perspective, humans are a transitional species.  As with any other animal, humanity’s lasting value may not be much more than as ‘living fossil’ in the distant future.  The human species is extremely precious at present, but it may not be so after it spawns countless new beings that are far more ‘human’ than us.  They will not be masters of us humans, but they will be masters of the universe in ways we can never be.  Our spiritual (if not fleshy) offspring will first be our servants, then our partners, and finally gods.”

––Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution, by Ted Chu, pg. 289-90

“We go on, with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it.”

––As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, pg. 107-8