Will humanity be altered/improved in the future?

Technology 2: Humanity Beta

If it is possible, based on electronic eye research, to mimic sensory input to the brain, then it would be possible to mimic sensory input to a brain on a hard drive. With that much understanding of the human brain, there are two possible paths humanity will follow: Copy & Paste human beings or HumanBeing Beta. At only eighty minutes per copy, it could be incredibly tempting to keep several clones scattered around the internet (or around one extremely large hard drive), but that is not an advancement of technology, just another use for incredible technology #1. HumanBeing Beta would be the next true leap.

Creating life is a process that has always fascinated people. Shelley’s Frankenstein is a testament of what can go wrong and just how much complexity there may be to deal with in creating a human being. To create a mind, however, would just require knowledge of how the mind worked. Keeping the internet organized once entire brains and cultures begin uploading themselves will be an enormous task. By taking the time to look at the socializing functions of the brain, the same psychologists and scientists developing the technology to upload a brain to a virtual world could upload a brain fragment to the same world.

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These are very similar to modern “bots” used in network functions today, in that they would have the capacity to do simple, social tasks. By uploading only a personality or social capacity, something governed by only the frontal lobe of the brain, individuals residing on a hard drive could have a program that exists for messaging and data retrieval. Ethical concerns aside, the existence of such programming would mean that human beings could create virtual human beings. Copying out the social and personal functions of a human brain could create Artificial Intelligence. If these bots were the only messengers sent to transmit and retrieve data, they could very quickly become the only other “human” interaction other hard-disk-residents receive.

The wheels of economics do not cease to turn for uploaded minds. Until this technology transforms human culture enough to remove the need for income and trade, virtual individuals will still need to perform some kind of service for income, even if it only supports their energy allowance per day. This need combined with the part of humanity not living online would lead to incredible technology #3.