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'Holdout Humans': Chilling Glimpse Into Our Future if We Survive Another Million Years - ScienceAlert
Nov 30, 2022 1 min, 48 secs

Foreseeable 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 (AI) may produce technological forms of new species not seen in biology.

There are many among us who want to improve the human condition – slowing and abolishing ageing, enhancing intelligence and mood, and changing bodies – potentially leading to new species.

It is plausible that even if these technologies become as cheap and ubiquitous as mobile phones, some people will refuse them on principle and build their self-image of being "normal" humans.

In the long run, we should expect the most enhanced people, generation by generation (or upgrade after upgrade), to become one or more fundamentally different "posthuman" species – and a species of holdouts declaring themselves the "real humans".

It can also think and change on the timescales set by computation, probably millions of times faster than biological minds.

While there are profound uncertainties and disagreements about when or if it becomes conscious, artificial general intelligence (meaning it can understand or learn any intellectual problems like a human, rather than specialising on niche tasks) will arrive, a sizeable fraction of experts think it is possible within this century or sooner.

At some point, we are likely to have a planet where humans have largely been replaced by software intelligence or AI – or some combination of the two.

This means we should be able to get many more artificial minds per kilogram of matter and watts of solar power than human minds in the far future.

"Natural" humans may remain in traditional societies very unlike those of software people.

It is not given that surrounding societies have to squash small and primitive societies: we have established human rights and legal protections and something similar could continue for normal humans.

They would probably regard software people and AI as going too far, but be fine with humans evolving into strange new forms.

If biological humans go extinct, the most likely reason (apart from the obvious and immediate threats right now) is a lack of respect, tolerance and binding contracts with other post-human species.

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