What If?

And, thus, the human species as we know it will fade out of existence, while a new one fades in.

Society will, I think, be more likely biased in favor of those who adapt the new technology, as opposed to those who don't, kind of like how drivers with corrected vision are more favored than those with impairments are not.

Hopefully, the notion of the universally rational human being is dead; destroyed in our mind's eye by a wave of psychological, sociological, economic and biological research, personal observation and experience.  Our biological brains are imperfect tools at best at sensing the whole of the universe.  Worse still, is that we don't know if there is a limit to the universe.  After all, there could be things that we cannot perceive or conceive with our current biological, sociological and cosmological make up.  How could we ever, with confidence, say that we've got EVERYTHING figured out definitively, even with these potential technological corrections?

Unfortunately, the worst offenders amongst us, those who perceive the universe less accurately than others, are likely to be the most stubborn amongst us at accepting and working with the new technological changes that could be coming down the pike.  These are the people who will be left behind and less favored by society and the natural universe, as those with the greater cognitive and potentially physical abilities get ahead faster and more often in our societies than those who don't.  These are the people who could, hypothetically, lash out against those who are adapting to the changes in knowledge that we get into the brain and robotics.  While they could win the war against the next generation of humanity, they are also likely to be more prone to self-destruction, thanks to the uncorrected "vision" as it were of their view of the universe and how things are and how things work.  They'll crash into that rock and die, while those who had corrected vision could have avoided it.

So, while I wouldn't want to be an early adapter of the new technology as it comes out, I also wouldn't want to be at the tail end of adapting it.  Those who have honestly contemplated themselves and the universe as a whole are more likely to acknowledge, be aware of and desire to fix their persistent mistakes and errors, while those who think they've got everything are more likely to not see their potential pitfalls and thus, not correct them appropriately, effectively or in time to save themselves.  I think that this should all be done by choice.  But I also think that things will progress to a point that you won't have a choice, if you're interested in being able to survive and succeed in our society.  New becomes old, new eclipses the old: cycle of life and the universe.

Quite frankly, I'd rather have my "vision" of how the world is corrected than leave it to chance alone.  I don't think I'm perfect as I am; my ego doesn't allow me to think like that.  Only then could we, I think, potentially begin to cope with the magnitude of the universe, what is and how it all works.

I hope that this technology comes to fruition at the appropriate time, if not for my own sake, then for our descendants' sake.

In Superintelligence, the new book from futurist thinker Nick Bostrom,  a variety of intellectual models are used to explore what will happen when machines exceed human intelligence.

Read more: http://www.33rdsquare.com/2014/04/nick-bostrom-explores-superintelligence.html#ixzz30ut5gUPC 
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