perhaps thirty years? Technology is evolving at a faster rate than human evolution. At this speed what will be the outcome of our attempts to stretch our abilities and enhance our minds beyond our biological limit? Ideas, mine included, seem to lead to a belief that the progress of machinery that will someday bring us to face the inevitable- the creation of a life form more capable than man.
Computers are starting to operate more and more like the human mind, becoming a significant partner to the human race. Computers have long since been the thinkers and organizers of humans that we no longer acknowledge them as mere robots but as a growing part of ourselves and our technology. Slowly they are beginning to become a part of us, physically and mentally.
A leading roboticist, Hans Moravec, has suggested that we are disappearing into the machines we have created. "We are," he has stated, "very near the time when virtually no essential human function, physical or mental, will lack an artificial counterpart. The embodiment of this convergence of cultural developments will be the intelligent robot, a machine that can think and act as a human." Our relationship with computerized robots becomes even more noticeable when we think of how many we attach to ourselves daily: hearing aids, artificial hearts, livers, limbs, pacemakers, and an increasing number of biosensors to monitor our bodily activities. We our distorting our bodies with so many computerized robotics that it might be safe to call ourselves cyborgs, or humans that have been modified by robotic technology. .
The idea of us becoming part human and part robot may seem incredibly impossible for some, but for others it is becoming somewhat of a fantasy. As Alert Einstein once noted, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." If we can imagine ourselves creating machines that have the mind of a human, who's to say that we cannot achieve this idea? .
