Contact lenses

When you want to do it with someone miles away, you pick up a phone and talk.

Once the novelty wears off, the idea of being part-human, part-machine will cease to seem abnormal.

Indeed, the day may well dawn when only the extremely economically disadvantaged will be purely human.

Today, we are conditioned to see death as inevitable.

But does it have to be?

What if humanity evolved into a new species of cyborgs?

Body parts would be replaced whenever required, and would be far more durable than the ones we have to make do with today.

But what of consciousness?

Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, postulates that we will eventually scan our brain to map the locations, interconnections, and contents of the somas, axons, dendrites, presynaptic vesicles, and other neural components.

All this will then be recreated on a neural computer.

"Well before the 21st century is completed, people will port their entire mind file to the new thinking technology...

Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our hardware.

When the hardware crashed, that was it.

As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file.

We will be software, not hardware.

Our immortality will be a matter of being sufficiently careful to make frequent backups." Think of an artifici...

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