After finishing reading
’s Homo Deus, I just realized that humans might be the first (known) species to transcend their biology: we will be able to separate what makes us human from our physical bodies.
It won’t happen willingly but by accident: a parent uploading a dying child’s mind into the cloud to preserve her, for example, could be a start.
Once we have our minds stored safely in the cloud, we might want to then to download them into biological or mechanical bodies to continue our physical experiences.
Soon, however, we might realize that replicating the physical experience is fruitless: the physical reality is far inferior to the one we will be able to create with software.
In the cloud, we will be able to have billions of experiences, conversations, sensations in fractions of a second without the friction of having to exist in a physical world.
This will open endless possibilities and our advancement will grow exponentially. For instance, we could expand into the universe without the limitations imposed on our biological bodies, have billions of collaborations in nanoseconds or even exist in multiple locations at once.
However, once we become pure data beings we might feel that coalescing into a collective being is preferable than maintaining our independence. In the collective, everything known by anyone will be known by everyone removing the remaining friction. The illusion of the Self, at this point, will be irremediably lost in the process.
The interesting thing in this trajectory is how Eastern traditions like Hinduism and Taoism, with their liberation of the Self, might offer a better path to visualize this collective existence and Humanity’s future.
But anyways, thank you
for the stimulating read.
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Jorge Téllez is CEO at CeroUno.