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Brilliant and minstretching manifesto on the end of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, the dawn of Homo Technicus,
and the ethical implications of bioengineering. Author Alan H. Goldstein is director of the Biomedical Materials Engineering Science Program at Alfred University in New York. Snip:
"The current popular fixation on clones, or science fiction's obsession with cyborgs, does not provide useful paradigms for the new forms of sentience that will ultimately emerge from nanotechnology. Both clones and cyborgs are too anthropomorphic. Ultimately, the future will not be about mixing humanity and technology but about sentient chemistry. Just as the revolution in quantum physics laid the foundation for the creation of weapons capable of vaporizing the planet, so the nanotechnology revolution is laying the foundation for the end of evolution and of life in any form we can imagine."Link (thanks, Stephen Hill)"A recognition of the ethical implications of bioengineering should have followed logically from the ethical questions raised by genetic engineering. But somewhere in our human hearts we apparently need to believe that, even in a cyborg, there will be a border where biology starts and technology ends -- a plug, a slot, an interface. That, unfortunately, is a fantasy. Silicon and carbon are perfectly happy to bond on the molecular level. DNA has no mandate from any deity that gives it an eternal role as the information storage system of sentience. Homo technicus will be different at the atomic level. We are not only going through the looking glass; we are merging with it."