A better man

We have started to use technology to improve man a long time ago. Not only with glasses but also with shoes, gloves and clothes. We have replaced fur with a variety of replacements, some good for cold climates, others for hot climates, and replaceable. We have managed to manufacture extra soles for our shoes. For us it is so ordinary that we don't even notice it. But we are one of the rare animals to fabricate all these appendices that we put on our bodies. The advancement of technology into the domain of the electronics and nanotechnology has provided and will provide certainly many other appendices but these will not be something new, they will just prolong our costume of changing our body with the help of things we manufacture. We, in a sense, are the only animal, who creates more and more of his own body.

more revolutionary, we applied the same technique to the modification of the mind. We are very proud of our human brain, we brag about how it is so much more complex than the other mammals. But in fact our brain is not so special, in fact, if we place a newborn human in a jungle that human baby will not behave very smartly at all. Our greatest invention was oral and written language. With it we were able to re-imprint on the brains of children, the way of life of previous men and women. We vastly extended our biological powers by augmenting, through language, what can be learned in a life-time , to what can be learned through an unlimited number of life-times. In this respect our brains are not very important, they are just needed now and then to act out all these "recipes" for life carefully guarded in books and computers. In a very important sense our brains are becoming more and more of a bottleneck: we have a gigantic amount of information about the best ways to deal with the world. But these ways are getting more and more complex, and the fact is, less and less human brains are able to capture what we, as a collectivity, have found over the course of generations.

Fortunately we are approaching the time where the brain itself will be subject to improvements. Just as we used glasses and hearing aids, radars and thermometers to improve our senses and books to extend our memory, in a few centuries we will be able to improve the brain itself and create countless interfaces which will have several advantages. Besides the general advantage of providing a great computational power and memory, the interfaces between brains will allow for the appearance of better ways of communicating. Words will no longer be necessary as visions of others' minds will pop into our minds with the right interfaces. Smell, sensations, emotions, unspeakable thoughts, will be able to spread all across mankind. Not only the sound of Mozart but what it feels like for a great musician to hear Mozart.

Our fear of dead will make us feel delighted by the prospect of improving our lifespans, reducing sickness and providing for physical and mental dexterity in old age. Man will feel the benefits of science more and more. Knowledge will give its benefits. Although, given the role that mythologies and superstitions play in our social structures, it seems inevitable that many wars will occur, changing a process that could take only a few centuries into something that may take many millennia (even something like a hundred thousand years seems plausible given the chance that retrograde societies may asphyxiate man's creativity indefinitely).