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.""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."
Link (thanks, Stephen Hill)
