Upgrading Humanity: Future Roadmap

Originally published on LinkedIn.

For this months post I've chosen to highlight some insightful videos  on possible future directions of humanity and reflecting on these have created a possible roadmap.

UPDATE (Aug 2016): Having done more reading turns out that this overlaps with Ray K's other theories on Singularity. For completeness on this topic I've included a link to an interesting Time article on the topic:

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

Several of my thought patterns recently have been on the topic of what the future might look like. [I think this partly due to the recent comparisons to Back To The Future on 21st October 2015!] I had started to tire of the notion that we are living in a world of continued technological progress and that we are on the cusp of amazing breakthroughs. However some of these developments are fascinating food for thought...

So lets start with the Hybrid thinking concept that got some press last year; augmenting your thought power with cloud tech: (if in a hurry skip to 7mins in)

Transhumanism - going beyond human / biological limits using technology:

Does Transhumanism offer solutions to our future environmental and overpopulation crisis?

As much as a lot of this personally concerns me - i.e. implanting something that might go wrong - does Transhumanity offer potential solutions to our future environmental and overpopulation crisis? By this I mean if we "virtualised" - in a high(er?) fidelity way the majority of humanity (and could run this on renewables) would that allow the majority of society to have decadent, western quality of life that would not require the 10+ planet earth resources if it were done in the real world?

 This TED talk from 2003 features Biotech ethicist Gregory Stock looked forward to new, controversial technologies, like customizable babies, whose adoption might drive human evolution.

 Note that I also like this talk as a brilliant example of public speaking without supporting visuals or slides - which means you really focus on what is being said.

Roadmap

So here is my view on a roadmap of how these advances in tech might look like - don't hold me to these dates!

Reactions?

So how does this make you feel? Potentially meddling with genes or changing cells in ways that we don't understand the long term side effects of? What do you think of uploading yourself to the "Humanity Cloud" when your physical body becomes beyond the capabilities of biological / medical advances?

* Did you know that scientists have found a way to capture the vision of animals and recorded it? See this quite old video which also covers hybrid cell / micro chips too:

Some Further reading /viewing:

If you liked this you might also like my post on security connected devices and AI: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/securing-connected-devices-stopping-ai-going-bad-oliver-cronk?

YouTube playlist: http://bit.ly/futvisions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_enhancement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface

Originally published on LinkedIn.