Posthuman Blues

Tech's experts predict future: We may become pets of robots, Pew survey says

Only a handful predicted a doomsday scenario. But Saffo, of the Institute for the Future, offered this in his response: "Fear of enslavement by our creations is an old fear. But I fear something worse and much more likely -- that sometime after 2020 our machines will become intelligent, evolve rapidly, and end up treating us as pets."

Scary stuff -- but highly unlikely. Saffo doesn't understand that the ascendancy of machines is indistinguishable from our own transhuman evolution. The machine-human dichotomy is largely illusory; we need each other -- to the point where it becomes useless trying to differentiate between "us" and "them."

If intelligent machines are indeed in our future, we're liable to exist with them symbiotically. What ultimately emerges from this fusion is quite beyond our ability to predict.