Posthuman Blues

2050 - and immortality is within our grasp

Futurist Ian Pearson: "We don't know how to do it yet but we've begun looking in the same directions, for example at the techniques we think that consciousness is based on: information comes in from the outside world but also from other parts of your brain and each part processes it on an internal sensing basis. Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're trying to design in a computer. Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion that it is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020." (Via The Anomalist.)

SETI guru Seth Shostak likes to quip (incorrectly) that getting here from another star system will take far too long for aliens to make the voyage. One of the many naive assumptions here is that intelligent aliens will be limited by biology -- a sentiment lifted directly from our own manned space program.

The exponential advance in computer technology is just one of the reasons I think we can expect extraterrestrials to defy SETI's quaint mold. Quite simply, they won't be alive in the familiar sense -- a prospect that threatens our ability to recognize them when we actually see them . . . and I think there's very good reason to think we already have.