The World in 2030

92 The World in 2030
Wouldn’t it be really great if we, by packaging ourselves
into a machine (or a machine into ourselves)
could somehow achieve that greater-than-human
intelligence, and become our own evolutionary successors?
Wouldn’t it be great if we could survive the
Singularity?
Meet the Transhumanists – an Internet-connected
virtual community of futurists whose stated goal is
self-transcendence through technology. International
in scope, though few in number, transhumanists
tend to be young, intelligent, and technologically
literate – often graduate students in neuro- or information
science.
Along with (Vernor) Vinge, their intellectual heroes
include roboticist Hans Moravec, artificial intelligence
pioneer Marvin Minsky, nanotechnology guru
K. Eric Drexler, and physicist/cosmologist Frank
Tipler.
Moravec and Minsky have argued for the theoretical
feasibility of ‘mind-uploading’ wherein a person’s
mind and personality could be emulated by a computer.
Drexler has argued that the Singularity is even
closer than we think, driven by – you guessed it – nanotechnology,
the science of creating objects by controlling
matter on a molecular scale. Tippler’s cosmological
scheme holds that the universe is evolving
into a giant supercomputer which he chooses to call