Different scientific areas these days provide predictions about the future evolution of the human race. I actually don't beleive(like many others) there will be a major human race evolution shift in terms natural biological change.
I do believe in human race evolution, however, it will be an evolution due to massive technological advances in Biotechnologies, Nano technology and the ITC sector. These advances will bring us many "goodies" mainly through body implants, nanobots and the increased computational power.
The trend to inrease the computational power is a fact for 50 years, now(Moore's law). We double the computational(and communication) power 2 times every 2 years. There are evedences, that many hard scientific and technological problems will be solved, when specific computational power is achieved. Such tasks are human brain reverse engeneering and simulation, artifical intelligence, DNA sampling, quantium level reverse engeneering and simulations, arttificial intelligence
The super human - result of the next evolution shift will eventually be a result of an artiffical biological and tehcnological changes. What these may look lile? Some of the candidate technologies are nanobots, body implants, artificial organs - both artificially grown biological organs and pure artificial ones. We all know at least one movie or book, where they talk about cyborgs. This a reality already.
- Comminucation on digital level
The communication with external devices may flow on a digital level. Our brain implants or nano bots will encode the neural activities into a digital based protocol suitable for communication with external computer based devices. May be encoding/decoding will be needed for legacy device communication. Future devices may have a standard naural communication adapter much like the many USB based devices today. They will directly be able to encode/decode our neural signals. - Improved brain characteristics: memory capacity, information processing speed
The latest advances in the brain reverse engeneering and knowledge for the neural cell chemistry will produce brain implants to enhance our memory capacity. These memory brain implants will increase our ability to learn, revoke stored information and even increase the our speed of information processing. Have you ever watched the Johnny Mnemonic movie? - Augmented Virtual Reality
With the help of implants and nanobots we will see the environment as a combination from virtual and real world data. We won't need a PDA to see our calendar. We won't need a screen to see a city map or GPS information. Very similar to the way we operate in Second Life now. We may recall the map of the wolrd. We see the name of the person above his head.
Read more... - Full-Immersion Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality will not be virtual, anymore. Virtual worlds imput(visuals, auditory,sensorial) will be fed up directly into the corresponding neural circuits. Nano bots and implants will supress the senses from the real world and replace them with the virtual input. They will block the neural commands to our muscles and feed them back to the virtual world where will be interpreted as virtual actions. Want to go back to real world? Just turn the nanobots off. Say SL to plug in. Say RL to plug off.
Red more... - True empathy
What about feel the same as others? With the help of neural signals encoding/decoding we may be able to know each other better. - Improved senses and new sensor modalities
We're limited to sense the world through sensors for auditory(20-20KHz range), visuals(350-700Nm range ) , touch,gravity, chemical , etc. Nanobots and implants may give us improved auditory:longer distance, increased frequency range(utrasound), improved visuals: longer distance, increased frequency range(radio waves) and new sensor modalities like magnetic fields for exmaple. - Better health and longer life
Nanobots deployed in our blood circuit will monitor our live parameters 24x7 and send data through a wireless connection to a central computer system for analysis. They could help our immune system by detecting and kill viruses, cancer cells and baceterias. - Artificial Intelligence
All lof the topics descirbed above has relations on one or other way with the ancient dream of the human race to create a thinking machine. Many beleives that this is a matter of computational power only. There are lot of phylosophical and scientific debates if the artifical intelligence idea is plausible , however I beleive that the singularity is near.
Modifying our bodies this way will generally change the way we sense the world. This will force us to create new behavioral traits , which eventually will be the only one product of the natural human evolution.
Links
Prof Kewin Warwickm, The first cyborg
Ray Kurzweil - my favourite futurist
KurzweilAI - web site dedicated to AI and related concepts
Mechanical Singularity
Evolutionary psychology
Nanobots
Technological Singularity
Augmented Virtual Reality
No comments:
Post a Comment