Augmentation, Hivemind & the Omnipotism
I got a chip implant injected in my hand while running for the 2016 US Presidency as the nominee of the Transhumanist Party. At the time, I only knew a handful of people who had them. Now tens of thousands of people have them — and some companies encourage their employees to get chipped so bosses can better track workflow.
Implants are just a small part of our transhuman future. Already biohackers I know are planning on — probably in five years or less — amputating healthy limbs in order to replace them with brain-controlled robotic ones. Robotic limbs are still 15 years from being more functional than human limbs — but that won’t stop people who desire to be cyborgs. Something doesn’t have to be more functional to be implemented. Just consider the multi-billion-dollar plastic and breast augmentation industry. The great thing about robotic limbs is they can be removed and upgraded as new technology and styles become available.
The real game changer for future human health is bionic organs. Already dozens of medical companies are surgically installing robotic devices into people that mimic and replace specific organs, such as the pancreas, eyes, and heart. Within 20 years, all these bionic organs will synchronize via personal instruction from one’s smart phones, allowing humans to do feats they never imagined — such as climb Mt. Everest at age 80, or have wild sex literally all night. Bionic organs can and will outperform their biological counterparts, and by 2030, I expect humans to be like Formula 1 racing cars, where people regularly go into body shops for upgrades.
The future of work is more complicated. Robots threaten to steal all our jobs. Companies in California such as Kernel and Neuralink are already tackling the problem, trying to make humans more efficient workers. They aim to create neural prosthetics that allow the human brain to communicate in real time with machine intelligence, including AI and the internet. Forget looking to your computer and keyboard to trade stocks or do a complex business task — your mind through brainwave tech can instantly do it. Elon Musk, who owns Neuralink, thinks he’ll have a product to show in a few years’ time.
If our thoughts are connected directly to machines — supercomputers can already do 200,000 trillion calculations per second — where does that lead humanity? Transhumanists believe it leads to the Singularity, a moment in time — likely around 2045 — when the exponential evolution of machine intelligence grows beyond the comprehension capacity of the biological brain. Like an ant trying to understand people, homo sapiens won’t understand AI that gets too smart. Therefore, the only way for humans to stay at the top of the food chain will be to merge directly with AI — via uploading our thoughts and entire personality into it.
This future, sometimes called the hivemind — because everyone is jacked into AI and one another simultaneously — is a controversial outcome. But economics and the need for jobs might force more of the transhuman future than people want. To be better than robots, we’ll have to beat them, and that means joining them. Biology is simply too limited to remain competitive for much longer.
Beyond the Singularity — probably sooner than 2118 — will come yet another transformation for transhumanity: the AI age will end. After all, data and the microprocessor are limited by their material nature. The next age, or paradigm shift — sometimes labeled by quasi-spiritual transhumanists as the Omnipotism — will probably bring us to our final evolutionary stage: conscious subatomic intelligence. It’s a world where a sense of identity, value, and reason are imbued in the very quarks and quantum mechanics that make up the universe. We won’t resemble our human selves at all, but our conscious energy and thoughts will span the cosmos.
A version of this story was first published in The Guardian