The temporary and precarious nature of our existence sometimes disturbs me and makes me fear for the people I care about, but for myself, I am not so worried. I suppose it would be unfortunate to be deprived of additional pleasure and fulfillment, but I have already had more than my share, I think, particularly when one considers the sometimes abbreviated, often more difficult lives of those ancients who had more talent and contributed more to the world than I did. Just to name one instance, Shakespeare did not live past the age of
fifty, I believe, and certainly many of my acquaintances have already
exceeded his span, and it is likely his life was more difficult due to
the times he lived in.
We are fortunate to be human, compared to say squirrel or cat, but being human does carry with it the curse of mortality, impermanence. Perhaps one day scientists will develop Homo Sapiens 2.0.
My vision of Homo Sapiens 2.0 stores our identity in bits and bytes upon a computer system. In the first place, I realize it is very controversial to propose that a human personality can be broken down into bits and bytes and stored on a computer. I believe that it can, that there is nothing to our psychology that cannot be translated into software. If I like something, I like it to a degree that can be quantified on a scale from one to a hundred, and if I dislike something, that dislike can also be quantified, and rules and provisions can be established that further refine my likes and dislikes. All of this should be immediately apparent to anyone who has ever programmed a computer. It is the non-programmers who tend to think that computers will never simulate human beings. I would never make such a rash presumption. Already, computers play better chess than human beings, and they do many other things better than we do as well. In time, artificial intelligence will eclipse our own native intelligence, and then it will be a simple matter to simulate our little personalities.
However, in order to interact with each other and with the physical environment, I think it will always be useful to spawn organic clones that are robust yet replaceable in the event of injury or death. We will, each or some of us, spawn clones to get things done, but when these clones die it will be of little or no concern to the entity that dwells in safety and redundancy on a computer system.
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