Transhumanism: How do we know?

[stevebowers]

It almost certainly is. We are exploring the possibilities in OA, quite often without choosing between them; we can do this because we are describing a very large scenario, where almost anything that is physically possible is tried out, somewhere. The reality of the future is likely to be very different, both in scale and scope; but some. or many, of the developments that will affect humanity will be even stranger than anything we can come up with.

I've been writing amateur scifi since the Seventies; in those days I was writing about the Starlark spaceship, and a lot of the technology I imagined then is fairly similar to the tech used in the current version. One major difference is that the Starlark originally launched in 2065, rather than 2614. Like the current version, it was powered by antimatter, but there is no way we'd ever accumulate that much antimatter by 2065.

I remember imagining something like a laptop to contain the AI character Fred Hoyle, but at that time I assumed that laptop computers would be sentient, and that the Internet would connect to a big sentient mainframe somewhere. Instead we've got Google, a non-sentient but highly competent system, which is quite remarkable enough.