Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Editors’ Abstract₁

1. Roboticist Hans Moravec forms a picture of the cybernetic human mind in his 1992 essay "Pigs in Cyberspace."
2. As machines become smarter, organizations of robots with increased intelligence could expand, occupy, and manipulate matter. Either humanity will have produced a worthy successor, or transcended inherited limitations and transformed itself into something quite new.
3. Moravec suggests a virtual out-of-body experience² as replacing the human biological body with a "brain in a vat³" scenario, which has often been used to mean disembodiment. However, a person cannot exist without some form of physical system.
4. Moravec's supposition actually proposes a cybermind, rather than a disembodiment, where cyberspace becomes what we might consider to be a new type of body.
5. While Moravec’s forecasts and future timeline are stimulating and always grand in scope, they might not necessarily reflect those of other transhumanists⁴.