The majority of species are not permanent. They go extinct due to random changes in the environment. For a million years, a typical mammal can be found.
Humans have been around for 300,000 years. We will make it to a million years.
H.G. Wells was the first to realize that humans could evolve into other beings.
In his essay, Man in the year million, he imagined a world of big-brained, small-bodied creatures. He thought that humans could split into two or more different species.
The basic options he considered still hold true despite Wells's models not standing the test of time. We could either go extinct or change.
The added ingredient is that we have a technology that increases the probability of each of them.
Future technologies such as human enhancement (making ourselves smarter, stronger or in other ways better using drugs, microchips, genetics or other technology), brain emulation (uploading our brains to computers) or artificial intelligence could produce technological forms of new species not seen in biology.
Predicting the future isn't easy. It depends on a variety of random factors, including ideas and actions.
It's my job to explore the possibilities, and I think the most likely case is that a species splits into several others.
Slowing and abolishing aging, enhancing intelligence and mood, and changing bodies are some of the things we want to improve.
Many of these visions are cold.
It is possible that some people will refuse to use these technologies even if they are cheap and ubiquitous.
The most enhanced people, generation by generation (or upgrade after upgrade), should become one or more fundamentally different "posthuman" species.
We could go even further by using brain emulation, a speculative technology where one scans a brain at a cellular level and then reconstructs an equivalent neural network in a computer to create a software intelligence.
It is leaving the animal kingdom for the software kingdom.
There are many reasons why people might want to do this, such as boosting chances of immortality, or easy travel by internet or radio in space.
There are other benefits to software intelligence. It can be very resource efficient, since a virtual being only needs sunlight and some rock material to make chips.
It can think and change quickly, similar to biological minds. It just needs a software update to keep evolving.
Humans may not be the only intelligent species on the planet.
Right now, artificial intelligence is getting better. A sizeable fraction of experts think that artificial general intelligence will arrive within this century or sooner, despite profound uncertainties and disagreements about when or if it will become conscious.
It's likely that it will happen if it can. We are likely to have a planet where humans have largely been replaced by software intelligence or artificial intelligence.
It's possible that most minds will become software eventually. According to research, computers will become more energy efficient in the future.
Software minds don't need to eat or drink, which are inefficient ways of getting energy, and they can save power by running slower.
We should be able to get many more artificial minds per watt of solar power and kilogram of matter than we are currently able to. We should expect them to change a lot over time because they can evolve quickly.
Software beings have an advantage over physical beings in moving in the slow world of matter. The self-contained nature of them makes them different from the software that will evaporate if their data centre is ever disrupted.
Software people are very different from "natural" humans. The humble lifestyle of the Amish people is still possible thanks to the protection of the United States. We have established human rights and legal protections and something similar could be done for normal humans.
Is this a good way to go? It depends on how you view the world. A peaceful and prosperous environment is a good place to live a good life. Weird posthumans are not needed, we just need to make sure that the little village can function.
Some people value the human project but are open to progress. Humans evolving into strange new forms would be fine with them.
Some people argue that freedom of self-expression and following your life goals is more important than anything else. We should explore the posthuman world and see what it has to offer.
Happiness, thinking, and other qualities may be valued by others. Some people argue that we should hedge our bets by going all the way.
One million is a prediction. Humans are not as numerous as they are now, but they are more similar to us. Since there is less need for agriculture and cities, much of the surface is wilderness.
Cultural sites with vastly different environments pop up here and there.
There are trillions of artificial minds in the desert. The data centres which power these minds used to be a problem. The Dyson sphere is where each watt of energy powers thought, consciousness, complexity and other strange things.
A lack of respect, tolerance and binding contracts with other post-human species are the most likely reasons for the extinction of biological humans. Maybe it's time to treat our own minorities better.
The Future of Humanity Institute and the University of Oxford have a research fellowship.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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