In the future sleep may be obsolete.

I'll sleep when I'm dead.-WZ

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When we become cyborg like individuals I imagine we will be much more efficient with our time and one way to do that is to recharge our batteries so to speak and do away with the natural sleep cycles. Most of us enjoy sleep but if it becomes unnecessary I imagine most would much rather have an extra 7 or 9 hours per day to spend with family or work another job etc.

I don't have a link nor have I even researched the concept but I believe it is one inevitability when the day comes that man merges with machine. I will be in my grave the day it happens but it just sounds so exciting.

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Bro have you EVER been laid? Serious question...

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have you EVER been laid? Serious question...

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If you ever saw revenge of the nerds you would know that we are good at that sort of thing.

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 Most of us enjoy sleep but if it becomes unnecessary I imagine most would much rather have an extra 7 or 9 hours per day to spend with family or work another job etc. 

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Why in the blue frick would I want to trade in sleep for work???

Advances in genetic augmentation, regenerative medicine and the sorry current state of our educational systems all suggest that we are nowhere near our limits from a cognitive, physical or lifespan perspective.

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Really?!? I'm surprised to read this coming from you. The last 100 years mankind has made its greatest leaps, completely outside of traditional evolution.

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The key word in my statement, "I think we've reached our zenith as biological creatures," is biological. It has taken nearly 4 billion years for us to evolve from simple single-cell organisms to the most complex life form ever to exist on earth.

The reason for this great complexity, of course, is the human brain. Evolution for humans was completely natural until about 55,000 years ago.

This is when the modern brain "turned on" and humans began to manipulate the environment and other humans to their advantage. Of course, evolution of this modern brain continued but it was now being directly shaped by human interactions, the most influential interaction being war.

A ready example of the effects that war has had in selecting for the most intelligent humans can be seen in the Semitic community. The 5,000-year history of persecution of Jews has led to an insular population with an average IQ far above that of all humans taken together.

Of course, this effect can be seen in other groups but not nearly as starkly as with Jews. Simply put, only the most intelligent have survived. War tends to weed out the less intelligent and adaptable humans. Chronic persecution also keeps a victim population's numbers down. That's why there are only about 16 million people of this ancient faith living today.

This artificial selection, meaning human influenced, for intelligence had a species-wide effect until the Industrial Revolution, in my opinion. There were still some natural factors at play in selection for survival, such as disease and starvation, but the Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of what I think of as the hyper-manipulation of the environment.

It quickly led to the technology revolution of the 20th century that saw the conquest of most of the natural constraints on human population expansion. In 1900, for example, just over 1 billion people lived on earth. 100 years later, more than 6 billion competed for space and resources. In 2017, nearly 7.5 billion strain the earth's ability to provide enough food and clean water to prevent a calamitous human catastrophe.

It wasn't just a technology revolution in the 20th century, however. It was an explosion of advancements in every facet of science. The reason for the six-fold population increase was largely due to incredible new controls of diseases, for example. People of the 21st century live nearly twice as long, on average, as did those living in the first decade of the 20th century.

So, yes, fantastic advancements in human survival have occurred in the recent past. So many, actually, that we can say that all evolution for humans has stopped. Generally speaking, everybody survives. Dumb or smart, weak or strong, defective or not, humans tend to grow up and produce more humans. Lots more. There are pockets of exceptional circumstances, of course, but as a species humans don't face any significant risks of population reduction.

This certainly isn't what we think of as traditional evolution but is it evolution of any kind? When a species can deal effectively with any threat and all of its variations survive and flourish, can we say that it is still evolving? Is it devolving?

Now we should project what can be expected in the near future. Where will humans be in another 100 years? 1,000 years? 1,000,000 years?

When I say that we're at our zenith biologically, I don't mean that our creativity is at an end. It was creativity that turned on in our brains 55,000 years ago. We don't yet know what lit that candle in our minds, but it was not good news for the other human species and near humans who were living on this earth with us.

We, at a minimum, out competed them and drove them to extinction. At a maximum, we killed them and probably ate them. We are a warring species, after all. A compassion for other life forms, even those very similar to us, did not accompany the creative light that began to shine in our brains.

This creativity has gotten us to where we stand now, the only human species that survives. An intelligent species that rules absolutely and takes what it wants with a bewildering disregard for negative consequences to the environment and other species.

Can we continue into the future as we are? No, certainly not. We will face a Soylent Green world very soon if we continue on this path.

If we can't change as a species before certain disaster occurs, can we escape the seemingly certain destruction of our biosphere? No, not as we are. We evolved here and we are finely tuned to live here, nowhere else.

Can we evolve to live elsewhere? No. Natural selection is not available to us anymore because of its time requirement and need for random mutations.

That leaves creativity, the uniquely human characteristic that became part of us 55,000 years ago. Can we recreate our DNA by eliminating all the junk genes that have accumulated over billions of years and tailor the remainder to the requirements of worlds that might be potential habitats?

Or can we merge with machines, the products of our creativity? Can we become cyborgs that can deal with the severe conditions of space travel and worlds that aren't similar to the balmy crucible of our origins?

I don't know for certain but I highly doubt that we can take any of our biology into the Universe. It's just too fragile. It requires too much insulation, if you will, from known and unknown forces that could easily disrupt its functions.

That's principally why I think A.I. is destined to be our descendant species. It is creativity, not consciousness I think, that distinguishes us from every other species on earth. This is the intelligence that makes us human, our creativity. It isn't biology or consciousness that makes us exceptional.

If we build machines that are conscious and are creative, can't we say that they are human? They truly can be tailored to travel through space and spread the human effect, hopefully only the effects that are positive or neutral for other species we encounter.

Isn't this our purpose, our destiny? From my viewpoint, it is. In studying the origins of life from a reductionist standpoint, I see life as a natural chemical complexity that began as a superior catalyst for metabolism in a biosphere bathed in two energy sources, the sun and heat from earth's core, and a diverse wealth of elements and minerals.

When it began it was simple. However, the nature of life as a chemical chain reaction is to become more complex. This evolution of complexity produced us. We are a stage in this evolution. Next comes A.I. and a spread of this complexity into the Universe.

I think you should have more faith in humanity. The stars are our destiny.

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I don't think it will happen in our lifetime, but humanity will transcend its biological limitations.

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If we think of evolution as a chemical process that leads to ever increasing complexity, then we can consider ourselves to be the end product. Can we become more complex? Certainly not via natural evolution.

We are the masters of our own domain, so to speak, and are no longer subject to the natural forces that shaped us. How, then, can we continue to become more complex?

We are in control of our evolution now. We will determine what we will become.

In addressing your comment, the laws of physics limit us to only one outcome if we are to supersede biology. A.I. is the logical successor to biological humans. Since they would be created by us we can even call them artificial humans. That's probably more appropriate since they would have the creative consciousness that distinguishes us from all the other life forms that we know of.

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As for merging with machines, Stephen Hawking says that is the only way humans will survive into the future. Elon Musk is also a proponent of human evolution in that direction.

I disagree with them. I can't see a benefit of a human/machine merger. I think we've reached our zenith as biological creatures. The logical next step in the evolution of intelligence is A.I.

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I can see a benefit. I wouldn't mind being able to see outside of the visible light spectrum (infrared and UV vision would be awesome) or to have telescopic/microscopic vision. I also wouldn't mind being able to breath in atmospheres different than Earth's. I wouldn't mind being able to hear with more clarity than I currently can or hear sounds at frequencies outside of the typical human range. I wouldn't mind having an immune system that reacts more quickly and precisely than the one we evolved. I could go on.

As for your belief that we have reached our "zenith" as biological creatures, I disagree. There is no such thing as a "zenith". All life evolves to fill an ecological niche, not to reach some arbitrary human concept we call a "zenith".

As for AI, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually discover that there are some physical laws that prevent building an intelligence much greater than our own. Some of the potential problems I see are:
1. Complex brains exist only in moving creatures. Plants and fungi don't have anything that resembles a brain. Even animals that don't move, like sponges, don't have a brain. What I take away from this is that a brain needs to be mobile to exhibit intelligence that we would recognize. In order for a brain to be mobile, it needs to be light, durable, and energy efficient.
2. Any sort of "super-intelligence" would require an unfathomable number of "neurons" or "switches", far more than the human brain, yet these would need to be packed into as small of a space as possible, not only to make them mobile, but to avoid latency issues (something companies like Intel deal with when engineering CPUs). While the idea of quantum computers is exciting, they are anything but small due to all of the equipment needed to isolate the qubits from the environment. I'm not convinced that a mobile quantum computer is even possible.
3. Biological neurons are far more energy efficient than any existing technology we have (silicon transistors, etc.). While evolution has given some pretty strange results at the macroscopic level (like the path of the laryngeal nerve), at the microscopic level we continue to discover things that are mind-blowing. My point is that evolution has "found" many robust, efficient microscopic solutions to problems, one of those being the neuron. I'm not convinced that we'll ever be able to produce something more durable, functional, and efficient than a biological neuron. And if that's true, then any intelligence we design will ultimately be subject to the same constraints as us.