[extropy-chat] Human - Posthuman gap (was: Spain has become the third country in Europe to legalise gay marriage)

[Rik van Riel]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Emlyn wrote:

> To me it's pretty clear that in an environment containing
> non-negligible posthuman and human populations, humans will quickly
> die out due to inability to compete. Given that the gap between
> posthumans and humans is likely to be much larger than that between
> neanderthals and modern humans*, I expect it'd happen pretty quickly.

Assuming posthumans are interested in living in the shadow
at the bottom of a gravity well.

Then again, posthumanism may well have started with the cell
phone - how long until people will stop carrying around their
cell phone and use implants?  Will people stop talking through
those implants and communicate thoughts more directly?  

Language-less communication has obvious stealth benefits to the
intelligence community, so chances are money will be invested
in this kind of technology.

Posthumans could be smart monkeys with embedded cell phones/PDAs,
or completely transformed creatures able of living in hard vacuum.
With a bit of luck, we could even have both...

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan