I might agree with that idea, but that's not what I was saying. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with the idea of trying to make improvements to our bodies. What I am saying is that our motivation for doing so should not be that our bodies are poorly "designed" and in need of improvement. I think our bodies are pretty damn awesome. Even the broken ones never cease to amaze me with their capabilities. However, we should be careful in pursuing improvement, and approach the project with a good deal of humility. Even though our bodies came about via "dumb" evolution and are thus only as good as they needed to be in our ancestral environment, it would be sheer hubris to assert that we've as yet got the ability to do any better with our technology than evolution did. I've little doubt that we'll acquire that ability eventually, but I'll bet we'll make some pretty dumb mistakes in the process.
Why approach it with humility? The race goes to the swift. The water's warm, lets jump in.
Okay, my bad. I did not flesh the idea out in more detail because I haven't really thought about it that deeply yet. And I wouldn't say that I'm actually proposing we attempt it, just pointing out that it might be another option to consider.
If you get a chance to, I'd be interested. The problem is, I see too much seasonal variation to really say many places are ideally suited for humans 24/7/365. California maybe.
You both might check out John Scalzi,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scalzi, and his Old Man's War series. The first novel in the series was nominated for a Hugo and the third one has just been nominated as well. Some original ideas and well-drawn characters in the first. I'm working on the second.
People keep recommending him. I'm going to have to check those out.
You’ve been pretty lucky, GreyICE. For four pages of comment, nobody appears to have asked the rather basic question of how on earth you think any of this is going to work, why you think any of it is even possible, let alone ‘inevitable’.
I read once of some dweeb at a comic-con who asked J. Michael Straczynski why he had given his characters wrist communicators when it had been ‘established’ that chest-pins were how people would be talking to each other in the future. Similarly, as a fan of the re-vamped Battlestar Galactica I have encountered the argument that the series is ‘stupid’ because it’s ‘obvious’ that such a high-tech civilisation would have particle beam weapons instead of bullets and missles
Your claims of the ‘inevitability’ of the various technologies you decribe strike me as indulging in rather similar magical thinking. The Singularity, genetic enhancements, ‘nanotechnology’ and the downloading of brains are all ideas concieved of by science fiction authors, who have the luxury of not having to go too deeply into the complexities of what would be involved.
The singularity seems to me reasonably inevitable. The only thing really needed to start it is recursively self-upgrading AIs. We're already working on randomness algorithms to give AIs a form of innovation. Set them to upgrading their own innovation algorithms, and then set them to work upgrading themselves. Feed them data about the physical world, see what comes out. Evolutionary computation is already producing code that we don't quite understand.
As for nanotechnology, you may have noted it has already been designed by nature. There, it's called 'bacteria.' We have a model for nanoscale machinery right there. What, did you really think we'd make nanomachines out of METAL?!?
Let’s take, as a useful example, your blithe claim, countering the ‘super-soldier’ argument, that we could simply develop
Hmmm. Please explain to me exactly what ‘strip’ means in this context? Let’s assume that you’re trying to selectively deactivate gene expression. My virology course was long, long ago, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t something that real viruses do. Even synthetic adenoviruses for gene therapy have to be delivered directly to their target tissues to ensure they do their work. And even then, they tend to get clobbered by the host immune system. The only place we’ve ever got them to work in humans is in a couple of French children with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Syndrome, and even that a) was temporary and b) may or may not have given them leukaemia later.
Retroviruses operate by changing the genome. It was just a possible example. They change specific segments of it, then die. And as you pointed out, its already been done, at least in conceptual stages. There is obviously a lot of work to be done, but we went from Kitty Hawk to F22s with some ups and downs too.
We are a million steps away from developing even the more trivial technologies you describe. What makes you think that not a single one of those million steps will turn out to be insurmountable?
We now have a computer that ties into the impulses sent to your speech centers that can replicate speech. From speech centers, how long until other muscle centers? Obviously the voice box is a great deal simpler than the arm - but do you really think having done one, the other isn't simply a matter of refinement? From there, do you really think its so hard for us to make a machine that functions similarly to an arm?
Similarly with genetic engineering. We've done it on pigs, we've played around with plants for decades, the human animal isn't much different. We've mapped the genome. It's a matter of deciding where to poke. Obviously it'll take a lot of experimentation, but there's no reason to think it can't be done. We have all the technology. The 'millions of steps' are merely deciding how to apply it.
Those two transhuman technologies - cyborgs and genetic engineering - are already a decade away. General adoption for more than limited uses? Maybe 2-3 decades.
Memory recording is obviously a great deal more distant, and does involve millions of steps, if it ever works properly, but that one is way out there. Machines tying into the brain isn't.
