Steve Jobs was Apple, unfortunately his vision died with his biological body and now the much-loved innovative company is sadly floundering with little or no direction. Google has picked up the spear and is now moving forward to innovate towards the Kurzweil engineered singularity.
The boffins at Google may digest whole encyclopaedias of information in an afternoon into their intricately wired and focused brains, but when they came out with the Google Glass they took a further step in the evolutionary jump towards a tech engineered heaven or nightmare.
What Google are doing is symbiotically integrating technology with the biological. This is the next step in human evolution and will revolutionise humanity forever.
In twenty or thirty years time, computers as powerful as your mobile phone now will be the size of tiny cells or atoms and millions of times more powerful, one can only imagine the applications available then, and how they will be integrated into humans.
Consider the fact that computer processing power is expanding exponentially and with such vast speed that soon every synapse and connection in a human brain will be replicated. The future will soon be upon us, and the ability to transfer ones whole conscious mind onto a synthetic brain may conjure up immortality of consciousness for the humans who wish to take the great leap. There are many aspects to transferring human consciousness into a machine that may sound negative, but the possibilities to human enhancement are endless. There will be those who fight it. But they will not be any match for the superior intelligence and nano weaponry of the advanced humans, who will branch off from the biological and embrace technological supremacy. If the new race of humanoids then attain transhumanism, they will most certainly mine the sun of its energy. This is the next step, because this will mean the human spawned race will have reached a type one civilisation, as coined by physicist Michio Kaku.
The positives are all-knowing enhancement, immortality, discovery and unlimited simulated entertainment where whole worlds would be synthetically replicated down to each grain of sand on a beach and every sensation for the avatar. The human biological body is susceptible to disease, genetic defects and ultimately death. By embracing technological self aware machines in the singularity, the advanced humans would be immortal.
The negatives are once you step into total digitization you will relinquish your biological body, as it is no match for the mechanised form. Primary consciousness implementation will probably only be available to the elite controllers. What happens to the rest is a question only answered by the higher levels. It is natural that any new technology of this nature would first be eased into use for the general population over time, first touted as beneficial to humans with degenerative diseases or the severely disabled. It may also be eased in through predictive programming techniques via entertainment and celebrity endorsement. As with any new technological advancement, those who can afford it are usually the very rich or elite hierarchy. There are further questions about privacy as your every thought will be assimilated and transferred into the hive mind and also questions about the holders of this technology. You are at the mercy of the controllers, for as the person can transfer thoughts out, so they can transfer thoughts in. If for example you go against the system in any way, they will probably have the power to simply shut you down or worse still, project thoughts into your mind so you will be in a constant state of torture until they feel you have accepted your condition. Thoughtcrime is already being punished on the internet now on places like Twitter and Facebook. In today’s world, if you break laws they put you in prison or in some countries execute you. Once in the hive mind, your every thought will be controlled, and to this end, your physical body could be slaving away in a mine, but your mind could be induced to feel it is in a heavenly utopia. You will therefore not be conscious of what you are doing.
Philosophically speaking, one must first ask the question, of what it means to be human, as Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer at Google has asked.
By removing the biological part of a human, does this also mean the end of the human soul? Does the future need us?
