Finally, robotics will eventually raise the possibility of intelligent and self-replicating machines whose processes so closely mimic ours that we will wonder if the only difference between them and us is that our life form is based on carbon. It s expected that in about 10 years, engineers will reach the limits of their ability to put circuitry onto silicon chips. But alternatives to silicon are under development. So promising are these ideas that Joy expects the computers of 2040 to be a million times faster than today s machines. At these speeds, technology acquires the inexorability of the ocean tides.
Engineers tend to associate history with progress.
Technology is evolving a thousand times faster than our ability to change our social institutions, says Joy. Brooks, for one, foresees a gradual convergence of humans and intelligent implants, to the point that the difference between the two becomes both physiologically and philosophically meaningless. Even with humans, he says, there is nothing beyond physical principles going on. There is no soul, no elixir of life, nothing beyond molecules working together in the mindless, fixed ways that the physics of their constituent particles dictates. The most common definitions of human proceed from an assertion of an intelligence unique to us, but this is precisely what technology is eroding.