Woah woah...not a few hundred dollars my man--not if you want better eyesight than you came in with. It cost me about $3800 for lasik about 8 years ago. Today it's cheaper at $1000 per eye (same place, same doctor). That is a great improvement, but not as drastic as you claim. Lasik might be an outpatient procedure, but having the right doctor and properly calibrated equipment is extremely important if you value eyesight. At the time of my research and procedure there was a lot of unprofessional lasik centers around. Even my own mother went to the wrong place, in search of a good deal. She deals with the problems (inconsistent visual accuracy, dry eyes, halos, etc.) every day.

I understand your point, but the example is flawed.

To me, the spiritual conundrum isn't necessarily a mutually exclusive issue. There can still be an "after life" even in a post-human world. All things being equal, a soul trapped in a hunk of flesh isn't necessarily the way it has to be. This is simply about choice. I would like to choose how long I live and spend with loved ones here on Earth, how many careers I follow, what good I can do the world with a few centuries of knowledge in tow. Nothing is immortal given a long enough curve but a few 100 years of added life would present some amazing consequences to humanity, good and bad. I'd love to see it.

Will we evolve into something very different than what we are today? YES! In fact, no matter what side of the ethical fence you are on, it's an inevitability. But as with every process in nature, this too is normal. The natural culmination of how organisms evolve and integrate with their world artificial or otherwise.

Very well put, I couldn't agree more.

For me the inhibition to such augmentation is mostly towards losing the senses I have now. While VR will evolve into an alternate dimension (sans-Jobe ) there are plenty of unknowns about the human body which we cannot begin to emulate, mysteries the human race has yet to chart. I can only hope this future of augmentation holds a true symbiosis of technology and humanity.

Some really interesting stuff here, but I have to laugh when people claim that AI will surpass peoples intelligence by 'x' period.

In reality, AI requires a serious breakthrough before it gets anywhere near this level. And, since there is no way to predict when this breakthrough will be, I take these claims with some skepticism.

I think the big advances will be with simulation of living systems and brains etc in computers... but to say that AI will be X advanced by Y period is at best, an informed guess, flavored by wishful thinking.

The thing with AI, is that we just need that first breakthrough, and it will snowball from there. The point when a machine can genuinely be taught and understand arbitrary knowledge will be all it takes. That first machine could run simulations many times faster than real-time (for example, reading the entire Wikipedia in a day) and will thus become more knowledgeable than any single human overnight. And it won't just stop there. It will continue to process all the information available to it, become an expert in all fields (including the field of AI) and then program even smarter AI more intelligent then both us and itself. Its really not unreasonable to think this could happen in the next 30 years. 30 years is a long time in the world of technology. Especially with the established exponential growth in technology, which nobody seems to be disputing. Its just really hard to get your head around the fact that a AI could be smarter than a human, merely because we don't have the capacity to understand what that AI would be thinking or what inventions it could come up with that are beyond our comprehension. But that doesn't mean its not going to happen, just because we can't yet comprehend it.

@Aeroflux: I've seen ads for $299/eye Lasik in NYC. Not that I would go to one of those butchers, but there are places that do it.

AI smarter than humans = Skynet

Indeed! My point was just that it is impossible to predict revolutionary events using an evolutionary extrapolation.

Well put and I agree. You can't just throw transistors and CPU cycles at the AI problem and expect emergent properties to magically appear.

Gotta agree with Cyber on that on the AI issue. Its only going to take one catalyzing event to tip the scales and frankly, given the weekly advances, that could come any day now. One key breakthrough and the chain of events to follow will push AI mainstream in a VERY short time-frame. After that the doors fly wide open, especially as it relates to making copies of our minds.

I think one of the many issues that make people uncomfortable with posthumanism is that certain biological functions can and will become extinct. When you really get down to it, the things we'll be trying to keep intact are sensory input, memory and emotion. Everything else is potentially throw-away.

I'm not so sure about that, when we'll have enough horse power and RAM to completely emulate the complexity of a brain, and we will have working models of neuron activity in the brain, then I think we'll be able to simulate a human brain.

I don't think we'll need to really understand the whole working of the brain or do any breakthrough progress in AI to do this. We would only need to create something similar to the inner brain working, and I think similar capabilities will emerge, even if we don't know how they work.

Having the needed power is probably only a question of decades, around 2020-2030 for the more optimistics considering Moore's (or equivalent) law. The main difficulty I think is to better understand the way neurons work and interact, and that may take a longer time.

Aside from all the advances in AI, you have to remember there will be similar (and more probable) advances in robotics. We already have amazing stuff *today* like this kid with the robot arm: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13378036

Not to mention the kind of primitive androids available NOW (mostly held back by poor AI):





They don't even need to totally understand (reverse-engineer) the human brain. Just figure out a way to transplant a working brain into an android. Then will will be able to live long enough for the rest of the stuff.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW78wbN-WuU&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
There's some interesting stuff in this video, but they do suggest that once genitics has advanced enough to be able to clone your body parts then there will be no need for cybernetics. If that does happen then advances in that technology might slow down

@Fred:

That is exactly my thought. Simulation of brain processes, even without truly understanding them, is probably our best chance of developing 'REAL' AI. It has much more potential than hoping that with more lines of code a program will somehow become 'intelligent'.

In my opinion, Raymond Kurzweil's prediction is not very practical, at least the timeline. He predicted in 2045 it would be the singularity time then all the crazy things happen. But to reach the singularity as he said, at least some thousand years will pass before it could happen because our technology development is still at the beginning state. I don't say all his prediction is impossible. Some of his predictions would come true definitely but forget about the timeline he predict, it's just too sci-fi style!

I came across this page from my University. It is the slides for a graduate level systems design engineering course on how to model neurobiological systems. The professor is a really smart guy who is cross listed in both engineering and philosophy departments and is well aware of all the theoretical issues concerning artificial intelligence.

http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca/courses/c ... index.html

I don't really understand the math, but gather that it uses basic neuroscience as theory and then models the encoding and decoding of neurons using algebra and calculus. I would assume to model any kind of thought process which may use millions to billions of neurons for any length of time would require supercomputers. I think at this point there is a lot of guesswork among researchers, and they are only just beginning to learn how to model these systems.