Beyond Transhumanism
By Gene Stephens
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Happy 2100!
Now it’s really time to reflect and try to decide what’s next for me. I’m young—88 in a few months—but still it never hurts to take stock, especially in this Brave New World. I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before. Anyway, it’s really true today. Who would have thought I’d be one of the few predominantly humans left on Earth?
Old Ray Kurzweil may have sounded like a prophet a century ago, but he was so far off. He believed there’d be only 20,000 years of progress in the twenty-first century. It’s been more like a million years of progress. It sure floored me; in fact, it left me so far behind, my kind is pretty much irrelevant.
All my friends have become chimeras or cyborgs or even robots. Most have actually opted for transhumanism, or that new term, universalist—getting all traces of human out of the equation. If I’m going to exist another thousand years or so, I’ve got to get with the program. I’ve wasted way too much time fighting the inevitable. What good are civil liberties and species pride if your species is extinct?
I’m still in good standing with the underground, but there are only a few hundred of us left worldwide. Since many in the group have turned down the latest life-prolonging technology, humanity is truly a dying breed. We were warned that the smart machines would inherit the earth, but we didn’t realize it would be our choice to hasten the day by implanting every hot new neurochip into our bodies until we became more robot than human.
I rue the day I took that first step—acquiring 20 languages instantly in just one cheap nanochip. From there, it was a slippery slope to adding chips that increased lower body strength, chips that stored quadrillions of data bits with nanospeed retrieval; a chip here, a chip there, everywhere a new chip.
Now I’ve got to make some decisions and make them fast. I may only have minutes, even seconds, to decide about these life-altering changes, to choose who (or what) I want to be next, how long, and what’s after that.
To have any chance of keeping up, I’m going to have to leapfrog over a further-enhanced cyborg, transhuman, or even universalist and go directly to cloud master. Even if I don’t have it all figured out, I’ll get additional time to think once I’m a cloud dweller.
With my total memory reduced to a powerful nanochip and my environment-polluting organic body discarded, I can reside in the wireless cloud as long as I need. If I choose, I can be implanted in a robot or virtual body to give me some mobility and sensing experiences.
Who knows? I may like it enough to spend eternity in this utopian dream. Maybe, but.….
About the Author
Gene Stephens is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina. He continues to teach and write about the future, specializing in public safety. He is also THE FUTURIST’s Criminal Justice contributing editor and a consulting futurist. He can be reached at stephens-gene@sc.rr.com.
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