Since Alan Murchison Turing first designed the ‘Turing Test’ 64 years ago, many people have slaved over the design and manufacture of robot prototypes and computer programs that emulate the brains and the bodies of humans. Just recently, a computer program bested the Turing Test and fooled 38% of the judges that it was the mind of a 13 year old boy called Eugene. (1) Some people think that this development is ‘one small step for a human and one giant leap for humankind’, but others say that we are centuries away from designing computer programs or robots that will fool 100% of us all of the time. (2)
It’s taken nature approximately 14 billion years to design and manufacture 7+ billion brittle human beings. That’s about 2 of us every year. (3) Evolving us from simple protozoa’s to conscious and cognitive humanoids appears to have been a slow and torturous progression, which has cold heartedly consumed countless of our ancestors. We create replicas of ourselves in the biological sense (children) at an average rate of 400 000 per day according to the website ‘Worldometers’, and we die at an average daily rate of 160 000. (4) This waste of human life in order to evolve more intelligent human life grows increasingly immense.
So how do we take over the evolution of ourselves in a more humane way? How do we reach the ideal of understanding ourselves enough in order to help ourselves become healthier and more intelligent, faster and more efficiently? There has to be a better way!
Mark McClelland has a solution:
“If you could transfer your mind into a body that needs no sleep, suffers no pain, is made entirely of replaceable parts, and might allow you to live forever, would you? Add to the bargain a vastly improved IQ and the ability to retain everything you learn. It's the promise of mind uploading -- the transfer of a human mind into a computer -- and it may be feasible during the lifetime of today's teens.”(5)
A titillating idea....