DIVIRTAM-SE
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Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?

In April 2000, Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach) organized a conference at Stanford University to discuss the question; “Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?” Among the participants were Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, John Holland, and myself. The question was serious.

I chose to answer the question by examining each word in the question, starting at the end.

2100:

When thinking in the long term, especially about technology, I find it very helpful to think in terms of human generations. As a rough estimate I reckon 25 years per generation. Civilization began about 10,000 years ago (the oldest city, Jericho, was born in 8000 BC) which makes the civilization now present in Jericho and the rest of the world about 400 generations old. Tha's 400 reproductive cycles of mother to daughter. Four hundred generations of civilized humans is not very long. We could almost memorize the names of all 400 cycles if we had nothing much else to do. After 400 generations we are different people than when we began. We had the idea of automatons and robots only maybe 8 generations ago, and made the first electronic computers 2 generations ago. The entire World Wide Web less than 2,000 days old! The year 2100 is only four generations away, keeping the same human lifespan. If we morph into robots in 2100, civilized humans will have lasted only 400 generations. That would be the shortest lifespan of a species in the history of life.

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