Deep Thoughts: the future of being human

First, two timelines of the future:

1. A Future Timeline of Humanity and the Universe:
An excerpt from the online hypertext Human Knowledge: Foundations and Limits.

2010
Automatic translators allow monolingual humans to converse with any speaker of any major human language.

2015
Bandwidth has increased enormously due to fiber optics and spread-spectrum radio.

2020
Almost all overt tyranny has been eliminated.
Physicists have confirmed that the fate of the universe is asymptotic expansion.
Most text, images, audio, and video is produced and consumed digitally. Unauthorized reproduction and distribution of such media is routine.
1st Martian sample return has revealed no conclusive fossil evidence of life.

2030
20% of former fideists have become mystics.
Radio astronomers have discovered signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.
Computer display technology plateaus with cheap flat panels and retinal projectors.

2040
Physicists have completed a quantum unification theory.
Personal bodily flight has become commercialized.
Transonic flight still serves just a few intercontinental routes.

2050
Molecular biologists have detailed description of how life on Earth began.
Computing is limited not by processing, storage, or bandwidth but by heat, latency, and batteries.
Fresh water availability is now limited only by energy costs of transportation and desalinization.
Automated vehicle/traffic control gives rail-like traffic flow to roads.
Privacy is curtailed by commercial availability of mobile remote-controlled microsensors.

2075
Physicists have reached limits of knowing why fundamental physical laws are as they are.
Hydrogen fuel cells are replacing internal combustion of fossil fuels.
VTOL aircraft are as widely owned as RVs in 2000.

2100
Expected and maximum human longevity have increased by 30 years.
Humans are able to record and archive all they ever see, hear, and say.
Most of humanity is using a common currency descended from the American dollar.
Unmanned radio observatory has been established on far side of moon.

2150
Remaining fideisms have diluted into agnostic mysticism; true fideists dwindle.
Fusion provides major parts of humanity's power.
Most psychotropic drugs are legal; addiction is prevented neurochemically.

2200
Permanent manned space stations in Earth orbit have been established.
1st artifactual life and artificial intelligence systems have been created and enfranchised.
Obesity and other nutritional diseases are curable.

2300
1st Von Neumann probes have been dispatched from Earth.
Most genetic, infectious, immunological, and cancerous disease is preventable or curable.
Most of humanity enjoys Western standards of living and productivity. 
Earth's population has stabilized at around 20 billion.
The workweek has stabilized at around 20 hours.

2400
Extropian positivism has displaced most other belief systems.

2500
Heat pollution has become the last significant environmental problem.
A truly global federal government exists.

2880
Asteroid 1950DA (1km wide) has a 1/300 chance of hitting Earth March 16.

3000
Humans have created on the moon their 1st self-sustaining extraplanetary colony.
Earth has received 1st telemetry from unmanned probes to nearby stars. 
Neurotechnologists have started to modify and augment natural human intelligence.
Genetic engineers have designed first artificially-created species.
English is the native language of 90% of humans.
Floating communities and estates have become increasingly popular.

4000
1st embarkation of mobile space habitat toward nearby star.
Humans culture animal tissue in bulk rather than raise animals en masse.
As the next ice age begins, Earth is about 0.5C cooler (relative to 2000CE) than it otherwise would have been.

5000
Humans mass-produce intravenous liquid food.

10K
1st terraforming (of Mars or a Jovian moon) has started to show progress. Another 90Kyr-long ice age has begun, and Earth is about 3C cooler (relative to 2000CE) than it otherwise would have been.

16K
The precession of Earth's axis has made Vega the northern pole star.

23K
The 1679-bit 1974 Arecibo interstellar message finally covers the 21Kly distance to its target, the globular cluster M13 (300K stars).

100K
A majority of persons descended from H. sapiens lives beyond Earth.

250K
An object more than a kilometer wide will probably have struck Earth. 
Earth's magnetic will by now probably have reversed, as it does every few hundred thousand years and as it last did 780Kya.

1M
A majority of persons descended from H. sapiens lives beyond the Solar system.
The red dwarf Gliese 710, currently 63ly away, will pass within 0.5 ly of Sol and appear at 0.6 magnitude.

2M
Pioneer 10 (launched in 1972, 68 ly away) passes near Aldebaran at 44 Mm/h.

50M
Africa has collided with Europe (closing the Mediterranean), Australia has merged with SE Asia, and California has slid up the coast to Alaska

100M
Earth has information from probes to the Andromeda galaxy.

226M
Sol has completed one more orbit around the Milky Way's center.

250M
The Americas merge with Afro-Eurasia, reducing the (formerly growing) Atlantic to an inland sea.

1B
Earth has information from probes to every star system in the Milky Way.

2B
Increased Solar output has extincted any remaining Earth life due to runaway greenhouse effect.

6B
Sun ends its main-sequence life as a red giant large enough to engulf and possibly swallow Earth, and then cools into a white dwarf. 
Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide.

10B
Milky Way galaxy's intelligent population stabilizes at its maximum.

100B
Living systems are huddled around red dwarfs for light and warmth. 
The charred and frozen Earth-Moon system (if not already swallowed by Sol's red giant phase) has stabilized to a 47-day rotation/revolution at a distance of 560,000 km.

150B
Due to the universe's accelerating expansion, the view of everything outside the gravitationally-bound Local Group of galaxies stops changing and fades away.

1014
Almost all stars stopped shining, having become brown or white dwarfs. Little or no life remains.

1015
Planets have been dislodged from their solar systems by stellar close encounters.

1020
The remaining stars (brown or white dwarfs) have all either been dislodged from their galaxies, or collapsed into central galactic black holes. Dwarf collisions cease, and the last few stars formed thereby stop shining.

1040
Proton decay has left the universe with only black holes and subatomic particles.

10100
The last black hole evaporates, emitting the cold dark universe's final flash of visible light.

2. A timeline of techno forward leaps:
2006-2010
EMOTIONALLY RESPONSIVE TOYS
RESPONDING to the sound of its owner’s voice, these toys will react with a variety of emotions. Sony’s Aibo dog robot can already simulate anger and fear, surprise, dislike, sadness and joy.

ELECTRONIC MEDICAL PRESCRIPTIONS
THE doctor will enter his diagnosis into a handheld computer, prescribe treatment and send instructions directly to a pharmacist via a text message.

VIDEO TILES
THESE will provide news or entertainment in the bath or shower. They can even change a scene to let you bathe under an African sunset, for example

2008 - 2012
MEDICINE DELIVERED VIA FRUIT
SCIENTISTS will be able to produce genetically modified fruit that carry medicines and extra vitamins. For example apples could contain the polio vaccine.

VIDEO TATTOOS
ONE worth waiting for ... ultra-thin polymer video screens stuck to the skin will act as as “moving tattoos”.

SENSITIVE FABRICS
CLOTHES made from smart fabrics will measure the wearer’s heart rate and temperature and transmit the data to a computer controlling the home. The computer will use the information to judge our mood - and light and heat the room accordingly.

2011 - 2015
SELF-DRIVING CAR
CARS will steer themselves, using enhanced satellite navigation and sensors to stop them getting too close to the car in front. Mercedes has already carried out tests on a closed track.

TOOTH REGENERATION
FILLINGS will become a thing of the past. Using gene therapy, lost or diseased teeth will be regrown in the mouth from a few cells. Scientists have already successfully grown mouse teeth in a lab dish.

MICROCHIPS IN FOOD
INTELLIGENT microwave ovens will automatically read the information on a chip hidden in the packaging of food and cook it exactly according to the instructions.

2013 - 2017
ACTIVE MAKE-UP
THE make-up is applied normally, but a small control unit in a handbag sends out electronic pulses that change the colours.

ROBOTS GUIDE BLIND PEOPLE
A PROTOTYPE robot which helps blind people shop or find their way around buildings already exists at Utah State university. Professor Vladimir Kulyukin designed the machine that locates items and avoids collisions. The robot could replace guide dogs.

2016 - 2020
ELECTRONIC LIFE FORM GETS BASIC RIGHTS
AS robots become more sophisticated and involve the addition of organic material into their construction there will be calls for their rights to be safeguarded.

VIEWERS PLAY FILM ROLES
USING computer-simulated versions of themselves, viewers will be in the thick of the action by introducing themselves into the movie.

EMOTION CONTROL DEVICES
THE most extreme use of emotion control devices would be to put a stop to criminal activity. It could suppress anger or stimulate feelings in emotionless psychopaths by sending electronic pulses to the brain.

2021 - 2025
E-TRANSLATION
WITH computers automatically translating every language there will be less need for humans to learn more than one. One universal language - probably English - will dominate.

HOLOGRAPHIC TV
INSTEAD of a flat screen, TV will become a three-dimensional affair, viewable from every side and projected into the middle of the room.

2026 - 2030
3D HOME PRINTERS
COMPANIES including the US-based Z Corporation are already working on technology which involves the printer building up layers of a material to create a solid model of a digital image.

2031 - 2035
BIOSTASIS IN SPACE TRAVEL
TECHNOLOGY will be available to slow the body’s metabolism enough to delay aging on space journeys lasting decades. Travellers will sleep the whole time, connected to drips to provide basic nutrients and vitamins.

COMPUTER GENIUSES
THE power of computers already doubles virtually monthly. At the rate the technology advances, they could become more intelligent than their creators.

2036 - 2040
SPACE ELEVATOR
A SEATTLE company is already planning to connect the earth to space via a cable running between a floating ocean platform and a satellite. Passenger pods and cargo could travel up and down the cable.

2041 - 2045
MOON BASE
A VILLAGE will be firmly established on the Moon, serviced by regular shuttle flights.

2046 - 2050
MARS COLONY
A SMALL colony of scientists and explorers will be entirely self-sufficient, growing food in large greenhouse-style pods.

NUCLEAR FUSION
THE idea is to recreate the nuclear reactions which take place at the heart of the sun. Last month the EU, America, Japan, Russia, China and South Korea agreed to build an experimental £6.6billion nuclear fusion reactor in France.

2051+
BRAIN DOWNLOADS: EVERYTHING in your brain - thoughts, feelings and memories - will be transferred to a computer, ensuring a form of digital immortality if eventually uploaded into a human brain later.


3. A REVIEW OF "RADICAL EVOLUTION -- The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human" by Joel Garreau.

Far-fetched as it may sound, the first person who will live to be 1,000 may already walk among us. The first computer that will think like a person may be built before today's kindergarteners graduate from college. By the middle of this century, we may be as blasÈ about genetically engineered humans as we are today about pierced ears. These sorts of predictions have a habit of sounding silly by the time they're supposed to come true, but there's a certain logic to them. Joel Garreau calls that logic "The Curve."

The Curve is the untamable force of exponential growth that propels technological progress. It's the compound interest on human ingenuity. The fact that computing power has doubled every 18 months, right on schedule, for the last four decades is a manifestation of The Curve. So is the rapid expansion of the Internet and the recent boom in genetic technologies. According to the inexorable logic of The Curve, if you want to get a sense of how radically our world will be transformed over the next century, the best guide will be looking back at how much things have changed, not over the past century, but over the past millennium.

Garreau, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, has sought out the scientists who are driving The Curve's breakneck acceleration and the major thinkers who are contemplating its implications. His breezy, conversational book, full of mini-profiles and chatty asides, is a guide to the big ideas about the future of our species that are circulating at the beginning of the 21st century.

As he tramps around the country meeting futurists and technophiles, Garreau becomes acquainted with researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who are trying to abolish sleep and invent cyborg soldiers. He meets "transhumanists" for whom genetic enhancement promises a kind of messianic salvation. He also meets naysayers who fear that all this so-called progress is far more likely to lead to auto-annihilation than to techno-bliss. Garreau lays out three alternative futures for our species: a happy ending that he calls the Heaven Scenario, a tragic ending he calls Hell and a middle scenario he calls Prevail, in which humans somehow manage to muddle through the ethical and technological jungle ahead without creating paradise on Earth or blowing ourselves up.

In the Heaven scenario, genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnology make us happier, smarter, stronger and better-looking. Man and machine gradually meld as we transcend the physical limitations of our bodies and become immortal. Humans evolve into a new species of post-humans as different from us today as we are from chimps. We become like gods.

According to Vernor Vinge, one of several eccentric scientists whom Garreau interviews, The Curve will continue to get steeper and steeper until it eventually goes completely vertical in a rapturous moment he has dubbed "The Singularity." At some point this century, but probably no later than 2030, Vinge believes that humans will build the last machine we'll ever need -- a device so intelligent it will be able to reproduce rapidly and create new machines far smarter than humans could ever imagine. Practically overnight, our social order will rupture, and our world will be transformed. There's no guarantee that will be particularly pleasant.

Many of the thinkers Garreau interviews are less than sanguine about humanity's prospects. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, warns that technology is empowering individuals to do evil on a scale never before imagined. A single rogue scientist will soon be able to engineer a plague capable of wiping out humankind. Even well-intentioned scientists could accidentally do something catastrophic, such as releasing a swarm of self-replicating nanobots that would suck the planet dry of energy -- turning the world into the "gray goo" of Michael's Crichton's fanciful novel Prey . In such a one-strike-and-you're-out world, it's hard to imagine we'd last very long.

Francis Fukuyama and Bill McKibben's Hell Scenarios are less apocalyptic. They fear that the coming technologies will upend societies and sap life of its meaning, gradually leading us into the dehumanized hell of a Brave New World. They'd like to manage The Curve through government regulation or by taking the Amish approach of forswearing objectionable technologies.

But just as inescapable as The Curve's upward trajectory may be humankind's uncanny knack for rolling with the punches. Garreau's Prevail scenario is "based on a hunch that you can count on humans to throw The Curve a curve." Even if technology seems to be a force out of control, we'll always find some way to direct it toward our desired ends, Garreau suspects. Jaron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality, envisions a version of the Prevail scenario in which humans use technology to build tighter and tighter interpersonal relations. Our bodies become less important as our social bonds strengthen. The Internet, according to Lanier, is an early step down this path to global interconnectedness.

If these scenarios sound outlandish, that is only because it's hard to look so far into the future without getting whiplash. But Garreau argues that the stakes in thinking all this through are enormous. We "face the biggest change in tens of thousands of years in what it means to be human," he writes. It's an exhilarating adventure our species has embarked upon. It might be a little less terrifying if we knew where we were headed."


4. BIONIC MAN Moves Artificial Arm With Brain -- Breakthrough Could Change Lives Of Amputees, Patients With Spinal Cord Injuries

Researchers have developed artificial arms that can be moved as it if they were real limbs, simply by thinking about making them move, according to Local 6 News.

When Jesse Sullivan's brain tells his arm to do something, it's done in seconds.

The world's first bionic man, Jesse Sullivan, 54, accidentally touched live wires while working as a utility lineman in Tennessee. He suffered severe burns, causing him to lose his arms.

Now, Sullivan is the first to try out the most sophisticated artificial arms ever designed.

Surgeons attached his arm nerves to healthy muscles in his chest.

"So now when Jess thinks, close hand, the impulse is picked up by a transmitter, and goes to his hand," doctor Todd Kuiken said. "He thinks, closes hand and it does."

Sullivan's hand rotates 360 degrees, according to the report. When Sullivan's brain tells his arm to do something, it's done in seconds and he has feeling in the bionic arm.

"This gives me a lot of hope," Sullivan said. "I was an independent kind of guy. I didn't ask anybody for anything. If I could do it, I did it."

Eventually tiny sensors in the fingertips will allow Sullivan to feel texture and temperature.

Doctors at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago said the breakthrough could change the lives of amputees, patients with spinal cord injuries and stroke victims, according to the report.

By the time it's perfected, the cost of manufacturing the bionic arm is expected to be about $6 million, according to the report.

5. WHEN WILL WE BE IMMORTAL?

Anything we can think of, we will one day achieve, except maybe time travel. You can't go back in time and kill your grandfather, can you? Immortality is definitely in the agenda. That may kill off religion, which is often based on the silly promise of a life after death -- all you have to do is believe enough in my religion to pay my priests a good salary to keep you believing such bilge. Here's a review of two books about your post-human future.

'Radical Evolution' and 'More Than Human': The Incredibles -- by Annie Murphy Paul

''This book can't begin with the tale of the telekinetic monkey.'' So opens Joel Garreau's captivating, occasionally brilliant and often exasperating ''Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human.'' Garreau, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post and the author of the influential work of social demography ''Edge City,'' acknowledges his authorial choice is a sacrifice. After all, ''how often does someone writing nonfiction get to lead with a monkey who can move objects with her thoughts?'' But to begin his book about the technological enhancement of the human mind and body with this kind of gee-whiz gimmick would send a misleading signal. Garreau makes it clear he's more interested in people than in machines.

Readers will be grateful, since an airless sterility often creeps into books like ''Radical Evolution,'' which is focused on the near future. In the next generation or two, Garreau writes, advances in genetics, robotics, information technology and nanotechnology (the science that permits the construction of infinitesimally tiny devices) may allow us to raise our intelligence, refine our bodies and even become immortal -- or they could lead to a ruinous disruption of our individual identities and shared institutions, and if things go really wrong, to the total destruction of humanity.

Unless you've cultivated a taste for the hypothetical, the situations mapped out here, in which computers take over, can become so much numbing science fiction. Wisely, Garreau devotes himself to embedding these unfamiliar technologies in a human context. We meet researchers from the federal government's mysterious Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, now engineering soldiers who don't need sleep and who can stop a wound from bleeding just by thinking about it. We spend time with scientists at a biotechnology firm called Functional Genetics, engaged in research on ''anti-infectives'' that could one day make humans invulnerable to AIDS, Alzheimer's and cancer.

Garreau focuses on three camps of thinkers who have paused to contemplate the future. The first espouse what Garreau terms the ''Heaven Scenario.'' They believe enhancement technology will allow us to live forever in perfect happiness without pain, more or less. The most vigorous advocate of what one skeptic calls ''techno-exuberance'' is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist. ''I'm not planning to die,'' Kurzweil announces. Instead, he speculates that humans will one day upload the contents of their brains to a computer and shed their physical bodies altogether.

Set opposite Kurzweil and his buoyancy is Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, whose musings tend toward the apocalyptic. Well known for his dire warnings about the growing power of technology, the misnamed Joy represents what Garreau calls the ''Hell Scenario.'' Joy speculates that we may meet an undignified end in ''gray goo,'' a scenario in which self-replicating devices designed to improve our bodies and minds instead take on a life of their own, becoming ''too tough, too small and too rapidly spreading to stop.'' They may, Joy continues, eventually ''suck everything vital out of all living things, reducing their husks to ashy mud in a matter of days.''

Things really get interesting when Garreau meets up with Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and originator of the concept of virtual reality. Lanier foresees neither nirvana nor apocalypse, but a future in which every technological crisis is met and matched by our own ingenuity and resilience. Garreau christens this the ''Prevail Scenario,'' and confesses his personal preference for this vision animated by what he calls his ''faith in human cussedness.'' Heaven and hell share the same story line, he writes: ''We are in for revolutionary change; there's not much we can do about it; hang on tight; the end. The Prevail Scenario, if nothing else, has better literary qualities.''

Garreau's style often takes the form of a notebook dump, in which he deposits his assorted jottings directly onto the page. Sometimes the results are stultifying, but when the subject has a mind as original as Lanier's, they're enthralling. Lanier's reflections are at once whimsical and serious: What if we could project our thoughts and feelings so that they were instantly visible to others? What if our superintelligent machines are felled by a Windows crash, just as they're about to take over?

To read Garreau's dazzling, disorderly book is to be thrust into a bewildering new world, where ambiguity rules and familiar signposts are few. As he observes, ''by the time the future has all its wires carefully tucked away in a nice metal box where you can no longer see the gaffer tape, it is no longer the future.''

Whereas Garreau's portraits make it clear that ideas about the future are always idiosyncratic and subjective, rooted as much in emotional need as in rational analysis, there's no such nuance in Ramez Naam's ''More Than Human.'' Naam, a professional technologist who helped develop Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer, is a relentlessly positive pitchman, unburdened by doubt or complexity. But his conception of our enhanced future looks less like Kurzweil's sunny utopia and more like a fluorescent-lighted superstore, in which we roam the aisles selecting from displays of brain implants and anti-aging pills.

To Naam, the technological augmentation of our minds and bodies is not an ethical or philosophical question but just one more consumer choice. Accordingly, his main concern is with governmental interference in the free market for such devices. People should be allowed to make up their own minds about enhancements, Naam argues, since ''millions of individuals weighing costs and benefits have a greater collective intelligence, better collective judgment, than a small number of centralized regulators and controllers.'' Never mind that we don't allow citizens' ''collective judgment'' to decide which drugs are safe; that's why we have the F.D.A. Expert guidance, based on long-term, large-scale research, would seem even more essential in the case of activities like germline genetic engineering, which permanently changes the genetic code of an individual and all his or her descendants.

Naam's other targets are those who seek to slow or even arrest research on biotechnology. Though these objectors span the ideological spectrum -- from Bill McKibben, the liberal author of ''Enough,'' to Leon R. Kass, the conservative chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics -- Naam lumps them all together as curmudgeonly sticks in the mud, ''advocates of the biological status quo.'' Yet just one page earlier Naam talks up the wonders of ''keeping people young longer'' through science. He seems not to notice that eternal youth -- along with faultless functioning, perpetual fertility and unfailingly pleasant mood -- is its own kind of frozen status quo.

In fact, there's something peculiarly adolescent about the blend of narcissism, self-indulgence and lust for control that appears to motivate this quest to become ''more than human.'' Naam's book fails to grapple adequately with the consequences that may follow if, through technology, some of these limits are lifted. In hailing a drug that makes long-married couples feel like newlyweds again, or a neural prosthesis that allows you to ''turn down the volume'' on your brain's ''empathy centers,'' or gene therapy that bulks up your muscles ''while you're watching television,'' Naam and his fellow enhancement boosters seem unwilling to reckon with the fact that the same limits that make life difficult also give it meaning.

(Reviewer Annie Murphy Paul is the author of ''The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves.'')