Sci-fi master/math nerd Vernor Vinge believes that machines are about to rule the human race as humans have ruled the animal kingdom.
Wired: Is technology neutral? Or is it inherently good or bad?
Vinge: Technology is neutral in the sense that it needs some human medium to express itself. But I think technology is close enough to being out of control that human intervention has become a weaker and weaker constraint. Also, it's important to regard technology in the long sweep of history as being one with history. In fact, it's one with biology, one with the rise of multicellular life forms, and it's headed someplace - probably. But it's not alien to the sweep of development and beauty and order in the universe.
Wired: What's your dream in life?
Vinge: Oh, to be a whole lot smarter and live forever. But those two things are so extreme that, if you tried to define them precisely, it might sound a lot like what many people think Hell is. If you're going to be stuck inside a human-capacity body or mind, a 10,000-year lifespan is a strange thing to ask for. It would be like playing a tape loop forever. There's just not enough depth in humans to take advantage of 10,000 years. If you really want to live forever, you have to be growing. But if you become twice the person you are now, intellectually and emotionally, would you still be the same person? If you became a million or a billion times bigger than you are now, that new creature would bear about as much resemblance to you as you bear to your zygote. And, that's beginning to sound like death again.
Wired: No, that sounds like birth.
Vinge: Yeah, but it's the end of Kevin Kelly.
Wired: But does a zygote die to become me?
Vinge: Well, think of your essence as this indigo dye. It's in a thimble, so dark that it's black. But as you grow, you'll take that dye and put it in a bathtub full of water. That's still going to be pretty blue stuff. OK, now another million, 2 million, 3 million years; it's time to expand again, and you dump the dyed bath water into a swimming pool. Well, you can still see some of the blue. But, down there toward the end of time - at that point, it's like pouring that thimble of dye into the Atlantic Ocean. For me, the point is that sufficiently radical optimism - optimism that more and more seems to be technically feasible - raises the most fundamental questions about consciousness, identity, and desire.