@Matthew: It is interesting to contemplate this. For example, how will religions of the world treat uploaded people? Could you for example be an virtual personality and a member of a church?

It would be interesting to see what would Vatican say about this. Would they admit that virtual upload is actually the essence of the soul, (or possess thereof) or would believe that you actually die at the moment of upload and the digitized copy is some sort of artificially generated echo, and an abomination.

It would also be interesting to see what would they do about devoutly religious AI’s.

Interesting topic. You said: “I know someone will bring up a human soul in the comments.” So, let me be that person, as much as you want to avoid that topic, I think what you believe about a soul is central to what it means to be human.

Those who believe human beings have an immaterial aspect, a non-material part that maintains identity and probably survives death will say that what it means to be human is to have a human body (i.e. human DNA) with a human soul. And if that’s the case, it’s hard to see how one would ever “transfer” the soul – just transferring physical neural connections wouldn’t be enough.

On the other hand, those who believe that humans are 100% physical should have no problem with the idea that eventually the physical mind will be able to be copied. In that case, you’d probably need to define humanity on behavior, certain kinds of thoughts, or a Humanity Turing test, as mentioned before.

Hey, I like the Turing test approach. Then again, the Turing test is fairly subjective and difficult to administer to real wold systems.

I really do suspect that there will be edge cases where AI’s and long time virtual personas might have different responses from baseline humans. So a skilled tester could possibly pin down a machine – kinda like in Blade Runner.

On the other hand, there could be cases where a cuttrnt level chat bots can often fool one into thinking they represent a real person. It all depends on context and the questions asked during the evaluation.

I’m going to take the Turing Test approach here – I don’t believe we have souls and I think “human” is as much a cultural construct as it is a biological one. We’ll change – evolution, cybernetics, culture – it will happen.

The only way to judge what is human is if other humans consider it to be.

That said, I think the drivers of change (again evolution, cybernetics, culture) will cause massive cultural and biological splits. What is now human will become many things. I don’t see a “whole species” future.

Yeah, the theory is that our next major evolutionary leap as a species will not be driven by Darwinistic natural selection bot by technology. Homo Sapiens will likely be replaced by something bigger and better at some stage of this process.

Interesting question is whether or not we will ascend to this new state as a whole species, or will the new post-singularity breed branch off from Homo Sapiens and co-exist with it at least for the time being.

Are we going to be replaced by super-intelligent machines we create or will we become these machines via digitization and electronic augmentation?

Nice piece. There certainly is a powerful system driving cell design and reproduction, no reason to think that such a powerful system is also driving most human actions. Whether or not we are conscious of this larger system, is another question. It does not surprise me in the least that our technology is starting to look like biotechnology, which is moving closer to biology. Over time, the distinctions you talk about will become more and more arbitrary. Our current view of technology “separateness” is only a manifestation of how primitative our efforts are at this incredibly early stage of whatever we as a species, are building. Sure would be nice to know what it is that we appear to be so busy building, kind of like looking at the ants working so hard. :-)