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The Future

There's only one future

When you actually go looking for credible long-term futures for humanity, you find there's really only one: a merging of people and machines into something more intelligent than either. Whether that turns out well or badly, I've never seen a serious alternative proposed — except extinction.

That sounds dramatic, but the boring version is just as compelling. We have never been static. Not once in our entire history, all the way back to single-celled organisms, has our form held still. There's no credible reason to believe that the human being of today, of all the shapes life has ever taken, is the final one. We are going to change, and dramatically — and unlike our ancestors, we actually understand the mechanism that will do it: accelerating cultural and technological evolution, which moves far faster than the genetic kind.

So the honest forecast isn't "more of the same." A couple hundred years out, I'd expect us to be about as recognizable to people today as we are to the small, furry mammals we descended from — or the single cells before them. The only real question is whether we steer the transition or get steered by it.