Name: Transhumanism: Will humans evolve to something smarter? | A-Z of ISMs Episode 20 - BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-07-30T10:00:15.000Z
Duration: 2 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Most of us would consider the end of the human race as a catastrophe.

There are some however who would not only rejoice at it

Transhumanists look forward to a future in which Homo sapiens

is superseded by a better, smarter, fitter model -

Any species that causes huge damage to our environment,

can't feed itself even though it has enough food

and fights countless wars costing millions of lives

must surely benefit from an intelligence upgrade.

our final years usually characterised by diminishing health and vitality,

often accompanied by a drop off in cognitive capacity.

One in three people born in 2015 are expected to get dementia.

Ageing could be stopped and even reversed.

Enhancements could dramatically raise our IQs

We might even be able to leave our fragile bodies behind

and upload ourselves to computers, living forever in virtual worlds.

Improving humanity through science and technology

Such a new beginning would in effect be the end of humanity as we know it.

Many transhumanists see this as not only desirable but inevitable.

The scientist and futurist, Ray Kurzweil,

believes we are approaching what he calls "the singularity" -

the point at which computers become smart enough to learn for themselves,

after which they will rapidly become smarter and smarter.

The future belongs to artificial intelligence.

The only way for humanity to survive is to embrace it

and become wholly or partially artificial ourselves.

The thought of being replaced by a new form of humanity

we would be wrong to lament the end of humanity as we know it

when what replaces us would be so much better.

It would be like wishing children never grew up

or that Homo erectus never evolved into Homo sapiens.

we could be one of the last generations of humans to roam the planet.

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