Are humans going to be in charge or AIs, after humans have been successful at transferring themselves into an artificial substrate?

Will we need to work? If we don’t, will we be retired – or unemployed? (”I’ve asked that for years,” says Phoenix.)

Will families and value systems disintegrate because, no longer human, those things won’t matter to us any more? (Yes, said Josh Storrs Hall, because “We will build it to care.”)

How will we define what it means to be a person?

Should we replace photosynthesis? If, that is, we’re able to develop better functionality. Do we build a planet-wide immune system? Surely, we’ll need to be able to adapt quickly to newly developing viruses, just so no one person can wipe out the entire world.

How do we back up the ecology of present-day earth as we know it? And should we bother?

In fact, wouldn’t it be better to move the entire thing off-planet for the final development stages? For safety’s sake? Doug Mulhall, author of Our Molecular Future and an environmentalist with experience building water recycling and flood control facilities in Brazil and China, rounded out this idea by estimating that the asteroid belt could be deconstructed to provide 1,800 backup copies of Earth, each of which could become a different experimental biosphere. “And then if we break apart Jupiter and Saturn…”

The rest of the write-up of last week’s conference from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

wg