biosynths VS Cyborgs, futurism VS Science Fiction

pan p wrote:

> Million year old civilizations don't choose that path in general.

Who knows? We've never met any such civilizations. Maybe we're the first.

> That may seem odd to you but, I'm the Alien and I know.

Don't be silly.

> The true path of evolution is continual augmentation and improvement of
> the bodies we have, which are for many reasons always going to be the
> bodies we more or less keep, because of ethical, aesthetic, and even
> pragmatic reasons.

Some will -- just as there are people know who don't use electricity.
But the vast majority will be happy to move into bodies that are far
more functional and durable (and are easily backed up for disaster
recovery).

> It should also be noted that the few very advanced civilizations which
> do go that route die out fairly quickly, the problem with living in full
> on machine bodies is that human needs and thus motivations are what
> drive us, and machines, having no such brain functions, and far fewer
> real needs, tend to cozy up into their AI entotainoverses and masturbate
> to death.

Nah. Many will choose to lose themselves in entertainments, but since
those won't reproduce and spread, they will in the long run become
irrelevant, and the fraction of the population (however small that
fraction may be initially) which chooses to live, work, and reproduce in
the real world will be dominant. The basic principles of evolution
continue to apply.

> Cyborg bodies and uploading ourselves into machines will become
> possible, but we won't do it for the same reasons we wouldn't now say
> for instance cut off our arms to replace them with "more functional and
> durable" prosthetics.

We wouldn't do that now mainly because no such more functional and
durable prosthetics exist.

> The future still has aesthetics in it, and it still features human
> beings. Human beings with Nanites in them, and mainframe computers
> printed digitally into the inside of their skulls, and even life
> extension and etc, but still human beings, more or less, and still
> recognizable to buck rogers and still even genetically compatible with him.

Maybe. What you're proposing is much more of a stretch,
technologically, than simple mind uploading. I suspect that some of the
nanotech fantasies will prove to be no more than that.

Best,
- Joe