by Elton Gahr

Created on: April 16, 2009

The future of mankind, as it exists now, has never been in more peril. Throughout human history change and growth of knowledge has been expanding exponentially. In the beginning of human understanding it took tens of thousands of years for the most basic of changes to take root. Then men began to discover agriculture, taking the ages of change from tens of thousands of years to thousands. As culture advanced we began to discover other tools. We created a written language to store ideas. We created math to begin to understand the world and expanded that into science and soon thousands of years became hundreds.

Eventually we discovered industry in the form of the printing press, the steam engine, the factory. We shrank the world in the form of the train, then the car and finally the airplane. We even left our world in ships. We also began to create computers. Devices to help us think faster and better. These devices too continued to expand exponentially, now taking only decades to double.

Soon Moore's Law took effect stating that computer power would double every two years and as we neared the year 2000 the understanding of the singularity began to slowly dawn on man. We no longer live in an age when change will take tens of thousands of years or even hundreds of years. With this exponential growth of knowledge we could soon be living in an age where the entirety of human knowledge could be doubled in weeks, days even hours.

How does this threaten the human race? As the speed of change increases we must adapt. Anyone with a child understands their ability to adapt to computers but what happens when computers begin to create computers making even children unable to adapt quickly enough. At this point humans as an adaptable creature will be forced to accept that we can no longer be the masters of this world and turn over much of the science, industry and governing to computers or change ourselves.

These changes are already beginning to be experimented with. We know two ways this can happen. The first is through genetics. The understanding of the human genome is also expanding exponentially and people are already beginning to screen for diseases. Once we begin to do this more we will begin to create new species. They may be human at first, but how many changes can take place before they recognise that they are no longer this species. Perfect health, and end to aging, intelligences that dwarf our greatest minds. At what point would we admit we were giving birth to homo-superior?

The other way in which we are slowly changing from this species is the science of direct communication between the human brain and computers. This is presently being used for the disabled, allowing computers to monitor brainwaves to do things like move a mouse key or an artificial hand, but as this technology increases it will become more powerful. Perhaps a person will be able to attach a hard drive to their brain to achieve perfect recall, or download knowledge to learn instantaneously. We may remove legs to replace them with superior artificial legs. Soon artificial eyes, ears, limbs, and organs will all be the equal to if not superior to those naturally occurring.

No matter if it is these technologies or others that change humanity it seems certain that the one thing we can count on is change. Humans of the next century will likely bear only a passing resemblance to the humans of this century. Our best hope is to try to lay a good foundation so that the problems of our species to not become the foundation of theirs.

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