Gerhard Kessell-Haak (Gerhard Kessell-Haak) writes:
> > [ humans/insects vs. humans/transhumans ]
> Fair enough. However, what iteration of post-humanity are we talking
> about here? Assuming increasing abilities in reasoning and 'extropy' for
Real world is asynchronous, there are no iterations. The generations time spans would diverge according to each autoreplicator's complexity (if the latter is diverging, which is not certain: a Gray Goo (minimal replicator size) could be the darwinian equivalent of a single deep global minimum, so that nothing significantly more complex could evolve. Otoh, we could also have extremely large (hierarchically structured?) individua of stellar scale and beyond. It would be fun to conduct some realistic ALife experiments re the individual size).
> each iteration, this argument begins to depend heavily on which iteration
> one is talking about. I find it difficult to believe that the difference
> between humanity and the first iteration of transhumanity (or
> iteration-set, if there is a bifurcation into many different forms of
> transhumanity) will be as large as that between humanity and insects.
Given that generation time of evolved virtual species could be on the order of us and lower, and that things material could be remassaged on the scale of minutes/hours, humanity doesn't have the ghost of a chance to adapt.
At best, it perceives a cataclysm in action. At worst, it does perceive nothing because it's extinct.
> The second iteration, though, I'm not so sure about.
'gene