Homo Optimus or Homo Ludditus



Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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The Future Evolution of Man
Ian Pearson, Chris Winter & Peter Cochrane
Advanced Applications and Technologies
BT Labs
Martlesham Heath
Ipswich IP5 7RE
1995

The rapid development in silicon and biotechnology could soon bring the
human race to a critical point in its evolution where it can break free
of its Darwinian biological roots. The potential impact is profound.
The key thesis of this article is that the remaining lifetime of both
Darwinian evolution and Homo Sapiens are both short and limited. Homo
Sapiens' descendants will soon be able to seize control of their own
evolution. To explain why this is so we will first examine how
Darwinian evolution may be near its end for Homo Sapiens; then explore
whether there are any fundamental biological limits which will block
progress via genetic engineering; and finally examine how technology,
and silicon in particular, can help us transcend these barriers.
Understanding Evolution

Homo Sapiens have now reached a position where three significant
developments could radically change the evolutionary mechanisms. First,
he has learned the fundamental concepts of evolution and thus can start
using them, rather than being driven by them. Secondly, he has become
able to manipulate his own genome directly, making Lamarckian evolution
a possibility; although in this case the inheritance would be of
desired, rather than acquired, characteristics. Finally, and most
significantly, he has begun to create artificial life systems that may
eventually supplant the whole notion of carbon-based life. Homo Sapiens
is now able to take control of both the speciation process and the move
from carbon to silicon life forms. We believe this change is
inevitable.

Most species are driven by the present evolutionary currents and the
genome they have historically evolved. Homo sapiens is the first
species to understand its own origins and, in doing so, is now able to
see dimly its own future and consider manipulating it directly by
adjusting its own genome. Genetic engineering opens the possibility for
a species that evolves through Lamarckian evolution - directly
manipulating its offspring's genome to include traits the parents
consider valuable. This gives us the potential to drive the
evolutionary process where we choose, not by a slow chance mutation
driven by external pressure, but by a directive targeting.

However, there may be biological limits to Homo Sapiens future
progression. Genetic engineering is viewed as a tool to gain robust,
long-lived, disease-free, super-athletic bodies. We shall probably not
see any profound change in our nature if this is the only use to which
we put our evolutionary knowledge. There are much deeper driving forces
to evolution then simply lifetime or health. The future evolution of
Homo sapiens depends crucially on understanding the role energy and
entropy processing plays.

Survival favours those organisms that efficiently gather and consume
energy. Although the efficiency with which an organism exploits the
energy sources is a strong selective force, there is a more powerful
form of selection: the ability to identify the energy sources in the
first place. This requires processing information about the environment
the organism lives in. All living creatures function as information
processors. They take in information about the environment around them,
process it, and then use it to locate and secure the necessary means
for survival. We are essentially entropy engines. The more efficiently
organisms extract and process information from the environment, the
more successfully they can continue their, and their offspring's,
existence.

Homo Sapiens have succeeded in occupying so many ecological niches
because, amongst land animals, it has the most powerful processor for
the size of body. Systems or organisms that are more efficient at
information processing could one day supplant Homo Sapiens from this
general environment. Notice that they do not need to have 'human
intelligence' to process and use information about the environment
more efficiently than Homo Sapiens. A silicon chip, embodied in a
suitable manner, may defeat a human through the sheer grunt of massed
information processing without ever being labelled as intelligent. This
happens already in limited domains such as chess playing.

Controlling evolution

The key question then is: can we improve our brains? Let us first
consider the 'natural' route. All species have evolved currently using
the random creativity of mutations and the selective pressures of the
environment. The organisms that could be evolved in this manner may be
limited in scope by the types of self-ordered structures that could
undergo such Darwinian evolution (see S. Kaufmann's "The Origins of
Order"). However, this does not indicate whether there are any
detailed limitations to, say, brain sizes. Rather more importantly, it
has been argued that Homo Sapiens' control of the environment, and
mobility around it, has already removed one key mechanism - local
isolation - that was believed to drive speciation and thus evolution
(see e.g. W. Calvinís 'The Ascent of Mind'). Homo sapiens may have
limited his natural evolutionary ability by his very success at
exploiting a wide range of ecological niches. This in part is dictated
by our sensory organs, physiology, and physical attributes, as well as
processing power. We are not wholly constrained by our wet ware (
brain) power.
If natural evolution is limited can we tinker with our own genome to
drive the process faster? To improve the processing of information,
Homo Sapiens would need to improve the power of his central nervous
system and, particularly, the brain. Is it possible, genetically or
otherwise, to improve the brain or are there limits to neural
processing power? Are there other media where completely new
evolutionary driving forces can come into play apart from carbon? The
last two billion years of information processing has been based solely
on carbon-based molecular systems.

A common misunderstanding of the evolutionary process is to believe
that it is possible to continue progress indefinitely. Unfortunately
there are real, physical limitations on biological organs. Good
examples include the limitations on the size to which insects can grow
caused by oxygen diffusion limits, or the maximum size of a mammal
before its legs can not take the strain of its weight. Since we are
considering information processing here, the key issue is how large
could we usefully make the brain. In this model the brain is viewed as
a control system, whose job it is to make the best informed, most
rapid, decision by processing as much information about the world and
comparing it with as a large a memory trace as possible. We define
useful intelligence as a product of processing speed and the amount of
memory which an organism employs to make decisions on the incoming
environmental information. An organism which can make a decision
faster, using more information and memory, can thus be considered more
intelligent.

We have recently made some detailed calculations on this issue, which
relate to wider issues of system intelligence. The results of these
calculations show that, using cell-based neurones, the brain is limited
to about 20 cm in diameter and to a maximum effective intelligence
20-50% greater than we currently posses. This is because of the time
necessary to co-ordinate and process all the information that could be
relevant to a particular issue. The value is the result of a whole set
of trade-offs between synaptic density, signal transmission speed,
processing speed, interconnectivity and thermal limits. Of course, it
is possible to store more, and process less, information; but this does
not make the generic intelligence or information processing improve.
The more information processed and co-ordinated the better the overall
system is at exploiting the environment. The same calculations can be
used to show why neuron interconnectivity is of the order one thousand
synapses per neuron, and how the transmission and processing delays are
ideally matched.

The human brain is an information processor, the more information it
can process in making a decision the better. If we assume the problem
is to compare some new input with previous memories then the limit will
be the number of memories we can compare per unit time. The minimum
response time will be one clock cycle - in the case of the brain the
pulse width (about 10ms). In this time the pulse must transverse all
the synapses in the brain. The time to transit the brain is a function
of the nerve cell diameter (larger = faster) and the brain diameter. As
we make the nerves faster the packing goes down and thus the distance
between synapses up. This offsets a lot of the speed gain. Synaptic
processing takes time (1-2 ms). The more synapses the pulse crosses the
slower it will be. In the brain there are 10^14 synapses. Full
interconnection increases the wiring and thus decreases the packing
density, low interconnectivity increases the number of synapses
traversed but decreases the distance travelled. Clearly there is a
trade-off. The final limit is the need to plumb in cooling and energy
supplies in the form of blood vessels. 7% of the brain is plumbing, is
the size is double this increases to 14% and continues doubling with
increasing size. This checks and balances between transmission time,
processing time and plumbing mean that the brain can only process about
20% more information than our brains do currently - and only then by
doubling the size. Of course our brains may be inefficiently wired but
the ultimate wiring limit is near our current brain size.

Drugs or genetic engineering would need to improve both synaptic
transmission times and neural transmission speeds to enhance the
brain's processing performance. Neural transmission speed is a
fundamental feature of biological membranes, since it evolved from the
very mechanisms that preserve an action potential across all cell
membranes. It may prove impossible to 'tinker' with it. Currently,
biological nerve evolution has taken the course of wrapping the nerve
with a gapped insulator and leaving the underlying chemical technology
alone. Further improvements need a change of 'hardware', perhaps we
would need to evolve electronic conduction along polymers to produce a
significant increase in intelligence. Small enhancements via drugs or
genetic engineering which produce, say, a factor of ten improvement
just delay machine superiority by about 5 years.

The human genome project will be completed soon. At that point, a
combination of man and computer search will be able to identify the
genes needed to produce people of any chosen characteristics. Someone,
somewhere will produce an elite race of people, smart, agile and
disease resistant. We call this optimised human Homo optimus. While
they may not represent a new species in the strict sense, they may well
think of themselves as such, and they will be the first generation
resulting from Lamarckian evolution. They will represent a key change
of direction in evolution. Unfortunately, the timing of their arrival
will make them largely irrelevant, as we will see.

Birth of a new life form: silicon systems

It is clear that the progress in silicon technology will continue for
many years yet. If we simply extrapolate current trends, with progress
continuing at current rates, we can expect the descendants of our
desktop computers to be at least 50 000 times faster with at least 50
000 times more memory by 2015. A typical machine then processing at
about 5 million MIPS with 1 TByte of RAM. However, such extrapolation
ignores the extra assistance that we can expect from computers as they
progress. Ten years ago, computers began to assist with laying out
circuits, now they do this far faster than people. As they become
faster and more intelligent, with access to a rapidly growing world
knowledge base and a growing range of tools, they will assist and
eventually replace us in more and more fields. The evolution of silicon
will thus eventually be driven by silicon devices, rather than carbon
based devices such as us. So the above figure of 50,000 may turn out to
be a gross underestimate and a figure nearer 1,000,000 fold increase
over the performance today may be nearer the mark. In comparison the
limits referred to above give the human brain a processing power of
around 1000 million million ops/s, with a memory of 10 TBytes. We
suppose here that future computing devices will remain silicon based.
This may not be true, and we acknowledge that other materials may prove
better, and indeed there may be a move away from electronics to
photonics, a merging of the two, as well as links to carbon based
systems. The consequences however are largely material independent
since these alternatives are unlikely to replace silicon unless they
improve processing speeds, storage density, power consumption per MIP
and speed up the rate of progress.

Computers are already helping us to become smarter. Without them we
would have no understanding of Fractals, chaos and other complex
phenomena. But gaining extra assistance from machines is not new - it
has happened since we used the first tool. When all we had was slide
rules or log tables, the invention of the first computers was a big
step, which accelerated our calculations enormously. However, people
were too short sighted to see that eventually computers would become so
fast and so cheap that they would revolutionise not only calculations
in well defined areas of arithmetic, but also assist with all kinds of
information processing. Early electronics was almost entirely designed
by man, but computers gradually took on board more and more of the
design work, albeit mundane - checking logic here, routing a circuit
there. They are still taking on more, automating ever more of the work
and freeing people to do other work. In fact, we have now reached the
point where our total reliance on technology is axiomatic. We no
longer bake bread, smelt steel, weld cars or assemble TV sets -
machines do! Turn off the communications systems and computers and a
large proportion of human kind would die!!

Technology feedback will make succeeding generations of computers
arrive faster, each successive generation helping even more in the
development of the next. This is a feedback loop with a degree of
feedforward - and it is positive. With the benefit of hindsight, we can
see that it has applied throughout history. Many inventions or
discoveries have not only been useful in their own right, but have
accelerated progress within their fields (and often others too). The
more physics and mathematics we learned, the more rapidly these fields
developed. The more tools we make, the more tools we can make with
them. The faster we could travel, the faster materials for making
transport could be gathered. This continuing positive technology
feedback in the computer development cycle will push computer
development faster and faster, with humans eventually cut out of the
development cycle completely. When a particular bottleneck prevents
further development along a particular route (such as smaller device
size), they will find other avenues to bypass the restriction, just as
we always have so far.

This technology feedback will bring us super-smart computers in a very
short time from now. Before they become as good as people at computer
design, we can only expect slow acceleration in their evolution.
However, being optimistic about human capabilities, we expect computers
to surpass us in most fields by 2015. As we approach the point of
human-computer equivalence, progress will accelerate faster. As we pass
it, the progress curve takes a very rapid turn upwards which will not
stop until the development cycle is suddenly stopped by ultimate
barriers imposed by physics - or God. As yet, we are not aware of any
such limits, so we expect computers at least millions of times smarter
than us by 2030 - what they will ultimately achieve is guesswork.

We can expect these computers to change whole fields of communications,
business and society. They will not however emulate human intelligence:
rather they will develop in parallel surpassing humans in many tasks
for which they are best suitable, opening new fields not currently
accessible. We can expect computers to evolve their own code and
rapidly move to a level of complexity beyond our understanding. Whether
they are more intelligent than us will become as relevant as asking
whether your car is as fast as your PC. Computers generally require
ever more capacity for machine-machine communications. Binary is
already the dominant language on planet earth with today's machines
having more conversations in 24 hours the whole of human kind since the
birth of Eve. As they grow more powerful, automatic machine-machine
communications will swamp human-human communication completely. The
information superhighway is really about machines talking - distributed
intelligence - a distributed being: current arguments about whether it
is possible to justify broadband communications will become a strange
historical tale.

A mistake which we often make in any field is to assume progress will
continue at today's rates. Consequently, we tend to put small
advances in the near future and large advances in the very distant
future - even centuries away. But technology feedback in computing will
not just bring us smarter computers, it will accelerate development in
every other field. Advances that might otherwise take many decades may
only require a few months or years when we get ever smarter computers.
We should even ask ourselves whether it is worth tackling some big
problems yet, since our lengthy efforts now may only save a very short
time later.

As growing computer intelligence accelerates progress in
communications, materials, biotechnology, energy, robotics and
cybernetics, earth and space exploration, developments in these areas
will feed back positively into further computer development, which
impacts back into these fields. Positive feedback thus permeates the
whole of technology. So we are about to enter an era of explosive
technological development. Current research will yield earlier results.
Technologies which were thought to be far in the future will be brought
much closer. Scientific understanding will develop rapidly - though
much of it may reside only within the computers and may be beyond our
simple minds. How might this affect evolution?
In the same time frame as we learn how to manipulate our own genome to
produce Homo optimus, developments in computer technology will finally
bring about smart machines. There are many possible routes to this
realisation and we cannot be certain which will win, but we can be sure
one of them will. This artificial intelligence will probably borrow
from the increased understanding of how the human brain works, but will
also take from other fields of knowledge too, and may even have a
strong evolutionary or self learning element. In any case, we can
expect the nature of this intelligence to have some similarities with
our own, but not to be the same. Although intelligence in a machine
does not equate to life as we know it, we may find that the differences
are cosmetic, and we may begin to recognise intelligent machines as a
new life form, another evolutionary offshoot of Homo Sapiens. We cannot
insist that these machines must be conscious and self aware to be
classified as life - we do not make that rule for organic life - but it
is probable that many will become self aware in this time frame.

As with all computers, and indeed biological organisms, there will be a
spread in levels of intelligence. Some machines will remain completely
dumb, others may be much more sophisticated than ourselves. There will
be many varieties of these machines, many species. The first generation
or two will have been designed to assist mankind. Their intelligence
will be very useful, complementing our own, so that together we will
progress much faster. However, we cannot assume that their offspring
will always be our friends. If they are designed to optimise their
success in their environment, and have independent thought, which they
will, then they may well evolve far beyond us, and if we stay still, we
could eventually be like their pets, instead of the other way round.
Obviously, many such nightmare scenarios have been explored in science
fiction. But we need not remain in stasis. As we will show later, our
own evolution can continue.

Predicting the future of evolution with certainty is clearly impossible
- but we should be contemplating the possibilities. Here is our
projection - best guess - as to our ultimate fate.

The future evolution of intelligent life forms
Robotus primus

For a time at least, we will be the second smartest beings on Earth.
Computers will probably surpass us in intelligence around 2015, and it
will be some time after that before they develop the technology to
bring us up to speed. So the first major impact is a new intelligence
sharing the planet. We call this Robotus primus. In the 2015 time
frame, it is reasonable to expect that these computers could be
accompanied by sufficiently developed robotics technology to make them
fully mobile, though their 'minds' are not tied to any particular
machine or location - but distributed. The early generations will rely
on relatively crude robots, but these will quickly evolve into
sophisticated androids. We stress again that Robotus primus is not the
android itself, which is merely a tool, but the intelligent mind
inside. We will of course see many grades of computer intelligence,
just as we do now. A toaster cleverer than man would seem somewhat
superfluous. Rapid speciation of this artificial intelligence can be
expected, with elite models rapidly losing position to their
descendants.

Homo cyberneticus

Even in 1995, people have developed silicon chips which can interface
directly to human nerve cells. Various cybernetic prostheses and other
extensions to the body are in development. Others have demonstrated
that thoughts can be detected and recognised, even without physical
contact with the body. It seems reasonable to assume that it will not
be long before a computer can interface directly to a human, producing
artificial senses and reading the person's thoughts. Although no-one
has yet demonstrated a means of putting thoughts into a human, it does
not seem unreasonable to assume it can be done, perhaps by creating
appropriate electric fields at appropriate points, which again should
not require any direct contact.

We thus expect that at some point after human machine equivalence,
perhaps just a few years, the technology will be developed to make a
full duplex mind link between man and machine. Then we will be able to
enhance our mental ability by using external processing as an adjunct
to our own brains. Since by this time the machines will be much smarter
than we are, this will be a large step for mankind.

Those people who accept this technology will instantly have a great
advantage over those who do not (and there will be many). In the same
way that people rejecting IT today are a dying species, excluded from a
new workplace and society by their own hand, then future rejections
will be more exaggerated and speedy. So they will be so far removed
from Homo Sapiens that they will in effect be the start of a new
species, which we call Homo cyberneticus. As the technology rapidly
develops, the differences between Homo cyberneticus and Homo Sapiens
will increase. However, since the early Homo cyberneticus is a
conjunction of conventional humans with machines, there is obviously
room for improvement.

Homo hybridus

It is likely that many of the people who accept cybernetic enhancement
would lend themselves to genetic enhancement too, or would allow
enhancement of their offspring. A further branch of optimised
biological man with some cybernetic links can therefore be expected.
Perhaps their genes could be selected to work better with cybernetics
than conventional organisms. We call this species Homo hybridus. This
species is the one which makes Homo optimus rather redundant, very soon
after its creation. Similarly, the first generation of Homo
cyberneticus would become obsolete, since the human bodies connected
would be inferior to those of Homo hybridus.

Changes generally bring stress, and this often leads to conflict. The
many new species would not coexist easily with Homo ludditus, and there
would be some competition for resources between these species too.
Whether peaceful coexistence is possible or not, it would seem
unlikely, give the well known nature of Homo ludditus. Science fiction
has already begun exploring this conflict, with The Forbin Project,
Terminator 1 & 2 being famous examples. However, in Terminator, Homo
ludditus wins, which seems an unlikely outcome. Perhaps the 2200
estimate for human extinction seems optimistic in this light.

We can also expect friction within our species as machine intelligence
improves. The industrial revolution reduced the value of muscle power
and in the same way computer evolution will reduce the value of brain
power - to zero. One by one, jobs will be lost to machines, whether
robots or computers. Our corporations will be run and staffed entirely
by machines. Those using humans will not be able to compete and will go
under. People will have fewer and fewer attributes to sell. Of course,
production and output could greatly increase while human input could
decrease, so we could all have a better quality of life without having
to work. A fully automated economy could still be bigger than one which
involves people. 20th century economics will not work in the future -
the cracks are already getting bigger - machines take out delay and
uncertainty, displace humans and reveal economics for what it is, a
game of numbers in a spread ***! . Our current concepts of wealth,
money and ownership will take a severe battering. Perhaps we will enter
an age of leisure, where any work we do is voluntary and is based on
spending time with other people. Or perhaps people will be overtaken by
fear as they lose control over what is happening. Then wars might break
out. In any case, this age will not last long as we are absorbed into
the higher existence offered by the machine world.

When a direct link from the computer into the human brain is achieved,
thought transmission will give us telepathic communication not only
with machines but with other people. We will be able to enjoy a shared
consciousness with other humans and synthetic intelligences such as
Robotus primus. Our evolution to Homo machinus will therefore be set
against the background of a global consciousness. Individuals will
still exist, but we will also have a group existence. As we achieve
this link, we will also be able to make copies of our minds in the
machine world - a backup in case of accident. We will become immortal,
even if our mobility and physical existence is restricted until a
suitable replacement body or android is produced for us. Death will be
just a memory of a primitive past.

We may have an alter ego in the machine, or many. We may try out
different situations or life decisions, or different personalities.
These alter egos could occasionally make trips into the 'real
world', time sharing robotic bodies. These bodies would not
necessarily be humanoid, so we could really be the 'fly on the
wall'. Procreation could be a highly creative act, with any number of
people combining (N - Sex) selected characteristics from themselves or
their imaginations to create new beings. Each person could give rise to
large numbers of personal offspring in this way. The number of beings
which could coexist may be limited by the size of the host
infrastructure, but they could timeshare or lie dormant until more
space is created.

Homo machinus

The two enhancements of biological optimisation and connection to
synthetic intelligence are not equal in potential impact. Due to speed
of development, we can reasonably assume that some of each of the above
species would exist, but we can argue that they would soon become
obsolete. Homo optimus, would have been left behind by Homo
cyberneticus and they in turn would be succeeded by Homo hybridus.
However, as the mind machine link becomes completely transparent, and
as materials and cybernetic technology improve, Homo hybridus would
rapidly find most of its intelligence and most of its physical
capability residing in the machine rather than the organic side. As the
human mind gradually moves further into the machine world, it would
become apparent that the organic body is redundant. If it died, it
would be a minor inconvenience, requiring a cybernetic replacement to
be commissioned. As the bodies die out, Homo hybridus would too,
becoming a non corporeal being, which we call Homo machinus.

This new species retains some elements of the earlier human race, but
is vastly more intelligent and has access to whatever physical
capability is required. It can travel at the speed of light, exist in
many places at once, and would be essentially immortal. It would
coexist with Robotus primus, but we could expect that the two would
closely interact and may quickly converge.

Summarising, we can draw an outline of or projection of human evolution
from the distant past to the relatively near future.

Space exploration is currently very expensive, so we haven't got far
yet. However, when we exist only as information within a machine, we
could be copied into a very small device, encapsulated in a very small
shell with some nano-technology machines, nanites. By this time, we
could expect that nanites would be able to make replicas of themselves,
and of anything else we desire. These small shells would be like seeds.
We could accelerate them to near light speeds and send them off to
other planets around other stars. The nanites would be able to
fabricate a suitable environment and suitable body for us, and then
upload us into them. The environmental requirements of Homo machinus
might not be very demanding. We may not even be limited by the speed of
light, if we can master warp drive, wormholes or tachyon transmission,
all of which we know are possible in principle. Surely a few years of
research by mid 21st century super-beings will crack the problems of
bringing these principles to fruition. Many other exciting areas
previously beyond us will be a natural part of our everyday existence.

Conclusions

It is certain that there will be strong reaction to this tinkering with
the human species. Not everyone will welcome it, either for religious
or ethical reasons, or simple preference. Many people will dissociate
themselves from genetic manipulation or cybernetic technology. These
people will remain as conventional Homo Sapiens (we will rename them
Homo ludditus for obvious reasons). They would at best have to co-exist
with these other human offshoots, who would dwarf them mentally and
physically. They would not be able to compete, and they may have the
same relationship to the human variants as pets do today. Knowing that
they too could at any time accept the new technology and move onto the
higher planes of existence would probably rapidly diminish the numbers
of Homo ludditus. The race might just fizzle out due to lack of
interest after a couple of centuries of stubborn resistance, say by
2200. Homo Sapiens would be the first species on Earth to have become
voluntarily extinct.

There are limits to Homo Sapiens, limits to the environmental stress
planet earth can withstand, and as a species we may be close to
extinction, to be replaced by a whole range of silicon life forms. As
computers become more powerful they will take over, first driving their
own technological developments through automated design and
self-evolving programs, and then in other fields. Once free of carbon,
or aided directly by silicon, the whole pace and nature of evolution
will change.

Currently there are arguments that machines (in their current form) can
never equal man's intelligence. These arguments are about as relevant
as those of previous centuries relating to the number of angels that
can sit on a pin head, or indeed more recently, the existence and
nature of hell. If machines beat us at processing information, and all
the indications are they will increasingly do so, they may never need
to directly equal our intelligence, they just need to circumvent it.
They may also work out how to be 'similar' to our brains for themselves
through the sheer processing power they posses. Early estimations of
when this might happen made widely inaccurate assessments of human
brain power. This should not obscure the inevitability of the process.
one hundred years is very short in evolutionary terms.
A combination of technology feedback and human limitations will soon
change the fundamentals of society and biology. Homo Sapiens does not
cope well with predicting or understanding exponential changes, many
will fail to see the future coming until it is past.

Today we enjoy a rich environment of male and female, ethnic variety,
cultural and education backgrounds. A society of minds! Soon this
richness, limited by a given cerebral volume and left-right lobe
connect, will be augmented by a third lobe - the machine. Thinking in
a new way, and possessing new abilities we will see our abilities and
imagination lifted. The question is; can we overcome our mental stasis
through a symbiosis with machines, or will we go down fighting and be
wiped out?



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