What if by pitting ourselves against future machines, potentially greater in intelligence and discipline and will; what if by imagining our story could somehow be overwritten; what if by hoping for an everlasting legacy (or life), we miss a greater story, and a more essential truth?

Does "synthetic" or "artificial" have any real meaning? I figure there's no out-of-this-world, no matter how out-of-this-world. Technically speaking. We have progressively separated ourselves from nature and this is its continuation.

It took us quite a long time to evolve the value systems we have today (however feeble they can be), but technology is advancing at an exponential rate. We only recognize local, linear advancement. Peter Diamandis (Singularity University) explains it this way: you can imagine yourself walking 30 steps or 30 meters ahead (linear), but 30 exponential meters gets you 26 times around the planet.

When we think of AI advancing, we can kind of imagine cognition that is well beyond our current capacity (maybe IBM's Watson ), but I think that's a fairly flat formulation. Any sufficiently advanced AI would need to be social in order to fit the description. That means it would need to be PRO-social, i.e., have emotions. Why wouldn't it be more human than we are? Us-plus?

I could argue that we're collectively evolving; it's possible AI is just what's next on the wacky roadmap that began at atom and moved (very roughly, skipping steps) to molecule to single celled life to fish to bird to mammal to primate to us ---> ?.

We're just a chapter.

- julie