Humans will be cyborgs within 200 years, expert predicts
Within the next 200 years, humans
will have become so merged with technology that we’ll have evolved into
“God-like cyborgs”, according to Yuval Noah Harari, an historian and author
from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Harari researches the history of the
human species, and after writing a new book on our past, he now believes that
we’re just a few short centuries away from being able to use technology to
avoid death altogether - if we can afford it, that is.
“I think it is likely in the next 200 years or so Homo sapiens will upgrade themselves into some idea
of a divine being, either through biological manipulation or genetic
engineering of by the creation of cyborgs: part organic, part non-organic,”
Harari said during his presentation the Hay Festival in the UK, as Sarah
Knapton reports for the Telegraph. “It will be the greatest evolution in
biology since the appearance of life … we will be as different from today’s
humans as chimps are now from us.”
Obviously, we should take Harari’s predictions with a
grain of salt, but while they sound more suited to science fiction than real
life, they're not actually that out-there. Many researchers believe that we’ve already started down the path towards a cyborg future;
after all, many of us already rely on bionic ears and eyes, insulin pump technology and prosthetics to
help us survive. And with researchers recently learning how to send people’s thoughts across the web, subconsciously control bionic limbs and use liquid metal to heal severed nerves, it’s not
hard to imagine how we could continue to use technology to supplement our
vulnerable human bodies further.
Interestingly, Harare’s comments came just a few days
after UK-based neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow from Cambridge University got
the Internet excitedby saying that it could be
possible to upload our brains into computers, if we could build computers with
100 trillion circuit connections. “People could probably live inside a machine.
Potentially, I think it is definitely a possibility,” Critchlow said
during her presentation at the festival.
But Harari warned that
these upgrades may only be available to the wealthiest members of society, and
that could cause a growing biological divide between rich and poor - especially
if some of us can afford to pay for the privilege of living forever while the
rest of the species dies out.
If that sounds depressing, the alternative is a future
where instead of us taking advantage of technology, technology takes advantage
of us, and artificial intelligence poses a threat to our survival, as Elon
Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have all predicted.
Either way, one thing seems pretty clear - our future
as a species is now inextricably linked with the technology we've created. For
better or for worse.
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