Tuesday, December 18, 2001 :::
 
In this, the dawn of the 21st century, I have this weird feeling that I'm being sucked into the start of a Greg Egan story that, in my more optimistic moments, eventually leads to a Iain Banks Culture like ending. In my less optimistic moments I see extinction looming on the horizon (see this and this for further information and conjecture). In any event I would not be surprised to find that by the end of this century that the "humans" inhabiting this planet (always assuming that the "Great Filter" doesn't take us out altogether) would be unrecognizable to any of us today. Beyond the ongoing (almost humdrum at this point) advances in the development of nanotechnology there are synergistic trends in genomics, proteonomics and neurology that will both feed, and feed off of, nanotech. From ongoing efforts to reverse engineer components of the human brain to examining in minute detail the anatomical and physiologic changes in neurons when they learn to utilizing DNA to perform in-vivo computing it's all changing very, very fast. I fully expect to see the speciation of the human race within the next 50 years and with inter-species competition the prospects for the retention of plain old homo sapiens (other that as a genetic reserve) would seem to be in question. And of course that's just inter-human(like) competition that doesn't take into account things like AI, robotics and meme wars.


::: posted by klc at 9:04 AM

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Random thoughts about Nanotechnology, Computation and the human condition.