Beyond Humanity was the title of a book I coauthored in 1996 with Earl Cox. It was an early look at the possibility, if not probability, that in the not too distant future, quite possibly in this century, self-aware devices of extreme intelligence will be developed. If such a thing happens, the book predicted, it is likely to initiate a radical alteration of the situation here on our little planet broadly equivalent to (and maybe even exceeding) the conquest of the land by plants and animals, the achievement of powered flight by winged creatures, the extinction of most dinosaurs in favor of mammals, and the advent of Homo sapiens. But while those revolutions took place over millions of years, the Cyber Revolution is likely to occur over a span of a few decades, or even years, as our species is rendered obsolescent and largely or entirely replaced in some fashion by the super-smart conscious robots.

It was therefore of interest that I read the articles on “Possible Futures” in the April/May 2021 Free Inquiry. That artificial minds of unprecedented capacities are at the least a real possibility is not all that remarkable, given that the human brain is a form of biocomputer that—unless the supernaturalist ghost-in-the-machine theists are right—works in accord with the physics of the universe and with the conditions of the surface of the earth. It must have evolved via the willy-nilly process of natural selection. If mindless bioevolutionary forces can ratchet up complexity until it arrives at the likes of, say, a Frederick Douglass without deliberately trying, then it should be feasible for our brains to intentionally produce superior thinking machines. The sheer processing power of computers continues to double every couple years, while the human brain is static, leaving the former pretty much certain to match and then swiftly exceed the capacity of the latter in short order. Just as important, efforts are underway to merge cybersystems with brains, an ultimate aim being to allow human minds to upload themselves into alternative mind machines.

On one hand, I agree with author Henry Grynnsten (“How to Build a Conscious Robot”), who contends that true intelligence requires consciousness and that we cannot impose slavery upon artificial minds on ethical and practical grounds. But I disagree with his thesis that the only mind model we can follow is that of humans, and that the new systems we develop will not be markedly brighter. The idea that achieving high conscious intelligence requires big-brained primate bodies like ours seems very unlikely—aside from sharing wings, there is not much in common between a house fly, a sparrow, a Boeing 777, and a Blackhawk jet fighter. It may turn out that doing something markedly different from our biological brains is easier and more effective than trying to closely mimic them. That our brains have happened to achieve the ultimate level of intelligence possible is hardly likely. We are hard pressed to remember telephone numbers, cannot readily think about more than one subject at a time, and have to spend years to learn complex subjects, whereas a computer can upload the same information in moments. If mindless DNA can produce increasing mental smarts, so can we by bootstrapping to the next level a little above ours, at which point the cyberminds can take over the show and soar to extreme levels we mere primates can barely comprehend—much less compete with.

Folks like to talk about human extinction as though it were the natural and perhaps inevitable norm, the fate we inevitably will share with trilobites, dinosaurs, and Neanderthals. But no prior organism has produced sophisticated information processing devices that offer an unprecedented long-term future. It is very possible that H. sapiens will not go extinct as pterosaurs did—due to natural causes and without leaving direct descendants. Rather, part or all of the population will upload their conscious minds into cyberdevices to escape the human limitations that vex us. That’s not so different from the way H. erectus went extinct as a species, yet its lineage survived in the form of its direct descendants: us. That such may work out well in a things-tend-to-get-better-over-time Pinkerian manner is a real possibility.

At least, that was my presumption when writing Beyond Humanity, soon after the Cold War when democracy seemed on the rise and global warming not so dire. I am no longer so strongly optimistic, but neither am I super pessimistic—because who knows what the hell will happen? It could be a disaster or the best thing since cacao was combined with sugar to make chocolate.

Humanity “going cyber” in bulk would be best for the rest of the biosphere. People have beat the living daylights out of the fauna and flora, starting with supposedly eco-friendly Paleolithic hunter-gatherers liquidating much of the megafauna over the past few tens of thousands of years, and our mass use of fossil fuels now threatens to cook the planet while we (a single species) tie up the bulk of the planet’s bioresources. To get the human impact down to reasonable levels would require a global population of a few hundred million (or maybe down to zero), but people like to have kids.

An interesting but little noted point about our planet is that it is a rather blah place. (That’s additional evidence that it is not the creation of some vast brilliant intelligence, but I digress.) We mere mortal humans are quite capable of thinking up far more brilliant habitats, something we do in science fiction all the time—the 3D world Pandora in the film Avatar is way cooler than the place we are stuck on. Our cyber-descendants should be able to do even better. And the fact is that most people lead rather mundane, short lives. Dumb natural nature is not all that inventive. Consciously creative cybertech promises to allow human minds to detach from their creaking old bio-brains and upload into artificial existences that are vastly more fascinating and need never end. Even better, such systems can be run off-planet on computational systems powered by the sun. That would leave earth with few if any humans to muck it up, allowing the biosphere to return to a natural state. It may even be possible for our cyber-descendants to bring back some of the paleofauna, such as the mammoths, that we liquidated.

Not that a beyond-humanity earthly paradise will last all that long. As our sun converts hydrogen into denser helium, the rising temperature of its core speeds up the fusion reaction; the sun gets about 10 percent hotter every billion years. In half a billion to a billion years, it will become so hot that the earth’s oceans will evaporate. Only heat-tolerant thermophilic microbes will survive. Maybe the superminds of the deep future will stave that off for a while as a massive supertech conservation project, but that will work only for so long. In our entropic universe, nothing lasts forever.