What awaits is not oblivion but rather a future which, from our present vantage point, is best described by the words “postbiological” or even “supernatural.” It is a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny.
Today, our machines are still simple creations, requiring the parental care and hovering attention of any newborn, hardly worthy of the word “intelligent.” But within the next century they will mature into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something transcending everything we know.
In the last thousand years or so, inventions beginning with movable type printing have greatly speeded the flow of cultural information, and thus its evolutionary pace.
We are very near to 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, however inhuman it may be in physical or mental detail. Such machines could carry on our cultural evolution, including their own construction and increasingly rapid self-improvement, without us, and without the genes that built us. When that happens, our DNA will find itself out of a job, having lost the evolutionary race to a new kind of competition.
Humans evolved from organisms defined almost totally by their organic genes. We now rely additionally on a vast and rapidly growing corpus of cultural information generated and stored outside our genes—in our nervous systems, libraries, and, most importantly, computers. our culture still depends utterly on biological human beings, but with each passing year our machines, a major product of the culture, assume a greater role in its maintenance and continued growth.
Sooner or later our machines will become knowledgeable enough to handle their own maintenance, reproduction, and self-improvement without help. When this happens, the new genetic takeover will be complete. Our culture will then be able to evolve independently of human biology and its limitations, passing instead directly from generation to generation of ever more capable intelligent machinery.
The uneasy truce between mind and body breaks down completely as life ends. Our genes usually survive our death, grouped in different ways in our offspring and our relatives. In a subtle way it is no doubt in their evolutionary interest to regularly experiment like this with fresh shuffles of the genetic deck. But the process is devastating for our other half. Too many hard-earned aspects of our mental existence simply die with us.
A mind that aspires to immortality, whether it traces its beginnings to a mortal human being or is a completely artificial creation, must be prepared to adapt constantly from the inside.
A postbiological world dominated by self-improving, thinking machines would be as different from our own world of living things as this world is different from the lifeless chemistry that preceded it.
In these internal modules of the world I see the beginnings of awareness in the minds of our machines—an awareness I believe will evolve into consciousness comparable with that of humans.
We are at the start of something quite new in the scheme of things. Until now we have been shaped by the invisible hand of Darwinian evolution, a powerful process that learns from the past but is blind to the future. Perhaps by accident, it has engineered us into a position where we can supply just a little of the vision it lacks. We can choose goals for ourselves and steadfastly pursue them, absorbing losses in the short term for greater benefits further ahead. We see the road before us only dimly—it hides difficulties, surprises, and rewards far beyond our imaginings. Somewhere in the distance there are mountains that may be difficult to climb but from whose summit the view may be clearer. In the metaphor of Richard Dawkins, we are the handiwork of a blind watchmaker. But we have now acquired partial sight and can, if we choose, use our vision to guide the watchmaker’s hand. In this book I have argued for the goal of nudging that hand in the direction of further improved vision. New worlds may then reveal themselves, to our vision and to our reach.