You might be among the first to defy death! Or, be among the last to celebrate life!!

Evolution, the blind watchmaker, has been toying around with various models of biological entities for the last three and a half billion years.  And if you subscribe to panspermia (that the first life form originated somewhere else in the Universe and floated to the earth as star dust), God know how many years of evolution was under play before the three and a half billion years of evolutionary drama started on earth!

Evolution builds on top of evolution.  Because of this, as the time progresses, evolutionary changes happen in exponential speed.  Unfortunately, or brains are not geared up to perceive geometric progression.  That speed of evolution picked up with appearance of intelligent humans on earth.

‘Natural vs artificial’ is a false dichotomy.  Brick and mortar, soot and sewer are products of evolution, just as a honeycomb is a product of evolution.  Extending that thinking…

all the human achievement, including science, technology, philosophy, arts, modern medicine are all products of evolution

Ray Kurzweil of MIT has figured out a neat way to predict the progress of information technology.  Kurzweil has proposed (this video) that

• By 2020, we will have computer inexpensive hardware that are as powerful as a human brain (but we won’t have the software yet)
• By 2029, we will have reverse engineered all the regions of human brain, giving us a good understanding of how the software of the human brain works.
• By 2045, we will have machines that are just as powerful as humans.  While the intelligence of human brain is limited by its biology, capabilities of the machines will continue to grow in exponential pace.

Unbelievable as they might sound, Kurzweil has been accurately predicting major technological events from the mid 1980’s onward.  While Kurzweil maintains that it is hard to see how things will turn out beyond this point, it is obvious that the pace of improvement of technology will change who we are and what are our values.  As a result,

the very definition of human is changing!

These changes that are going to hit us with warp speed.  Understanding them will help us to prepare ourselves for both good and the bad that are in store for us.

Welcome to the future…

Where, you might be among the first to defy death!

Or, be among the last to celebrate life!!