Mechanical Terra-reforming, human-tech coevolution

Terraforming, terra-reforming

In 2030s, the humans arrived on Mars. Humans were born on land, and they had lungs that could not extract the gas that humans need to continue their chemical life-fire. Not a problem. They brought with them cylinders of compressed life-gas, and life-gas producing creatures. They turned Mars green and covered its surface with life-gas.

In 19th century, metallic horses were born on earth, and they had circular feet that could not trot over most kinds of land. No mountains, no grasslands, no marsh. Only hard flat surface of no more than 10 degrees in slope. Not a problem. Their human companion-species set out and terra-reformed the world for them. Now there are 10e10 of these metallic horses running wild on the hard flat surfaces over earth.

Human-tech coevolution

Gender is defined as a personality type associated with biological sex. Gender has been quite rigid in America for centuries, only to become more fluid after practical contraceptive technologies, transsexual surgery, safe abortion, and general rise in productivity. Gender will become more fluid when reproduction can be done fully in artificial incubators, cosmetic surgery cheap and effective, hormonal-therapy for self-improvement, and many other sex-related technologies.

Gender is not as rigid as species, but species is not rigid either. The idea of "human nature" is thus suspect. If there's no human-species nature, then what is human nature? If there is no such thing as "human nature", then it is quite meaningless to claim that we must preserve "human nature" from corruption by new technologies.

Humans are the only mammals that don't wean themselves when they grow up, a lasting effect from humans' 1e4 years of coadaptation with cattles. Humans are the only mammals that never grows up (in the milk-drinking aspect). Agriculture has already corrupted human nature for 1e4 years, and it is not a disaster. Or perhaps it used to be, but not anymore.

Did humans lose their mammal nature? They have. Is it of moral significance? Excuse me, but is there such a thing called "mammal morality"? No. Sometimes I imagine ancient mammals silently judging humans and their loss of weaning and laugh at their immaturity. Humans will be the only ones laughing, however. The human-age extinction is here and expected to intensify with impunity.

Instead of making sure that AI must always serve "human values", putting in stopgaps and regulations all around these intelligent newcomers, some spineless humans may instead reshape their own bodies, own minds, own behaviors.

In the past, this has been mild. Instead of relying on mental and oral memories, people have reshaped their memories to use books and computers for many kinds of long-term memories, and scratchpads for for short-term memories. But more radical changes are possible. Some basic demonstrations of cyborgs are already a reality: people seeing in infrared, ultraviolet, people with selected genetic mutations, people with mechanical upper limbs.

If the pace of human-technology coevolution speeds up, natural humans may be left behind like natural primates, while their increasingly inhuman cousins mutate alongside the machines. Human nature will be natural humans' undoing while the inhumans undo human nature.

Intelligence explosion

Humans will not anthropomorphize AI. AI will boil over and splash all over humanity in a hot mutant mess, exploding in all directions into the big universe, carrying useful bits and pieces of humanity along. The bits are so burnt and melted, that they might as well been made from scratch by the AI, instead of robbed, filtered, and deformed from humans.