Why The Future Doesn't Need Us

Concealed writes "There is an article in the new Wired which talks about the future of nanotechnology and 'intelligent machines.' Bill Joy, (also the creator of the Unix text editor vi) who wrote the article, expresses his views on the neccesity of the human race in the near future. " From what I can gather this is the article that the Bill Joy on Extinction story was drawn from. Bill is a smart guy -- and this is well worth reading.

Comments

Our descendents won't be human.

[ucblockhead]

...but they will be our descendents.

The problem here is the implication that one day, a bunch of humans, just like us, are suddenly going to find themselves obsolete, and either destroyed, or perhaps ignored, but some new, superintelligent entity that they created. But I don't see it happening that way.

Instead, what we will see is a series of gradual changes. Genetically superior humans won't appear overnight. Instead, humans will be slowly made superior, genetically. Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.

So yes, in a thousand years, the rulers of this earth may not seem much like what we'd call human. But I'm willing to bet that if you looked over the period in between, you wouldn't see "humans" going extinct. You'd see a slow process of evolution (not darwinian, but directed) towards something greater. You'd never be able to find a dividing line between "human" and what's next.

And while that may be frightening to some, it isn't really to me. We are "greater", at least in certain anthropomoprhic senses, than the ape-like creature that we are descended from. But that creature did not "go extinct". It evolved into us. Something is going to evolve from us. This doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to die at the hands of some sort of "SkyNet" AI. It just means that we aren't the be-all and end-all of creation.

The human race won't be supplanted by "homo superior". It will become "homo superior".