Intelligent (By Our Own) Design

I don't think that conscious beings more intelligent than ourselves will ever evolve naturally, on this planet or on any other. No intelligent being would allow such a thing to happen.

Over the next few hundred years, nanotechnology will improve and bring the wonders of mechanical manipulation and the ever-increasing wealth of electronic information to ever-smaller points of interface. In addition, biological technology and neurobiology will continue to improve, providing for an ability to manipulate our physical selves in many beneficial ways well beyond what we do now. Coupled together, these developments suggest that the great improvements in the human ability to function, perform, and endure (both physically and mentally) will, for the foreseeable future, be borne out by our own design, not that of nature.

I also believe that our intelligence is not spontaneous, but rather that there is a universal "learning curve" that any conscious species must endure, over generations, before it amasses the characteristic of being "intelligent." As such, I believe that any intelligent species, human or otherwise, must at some point reach a period comparable to our own: that of fair understanding concerning our bodies and the physical world. In such a situation, it only makes sense for such beings to begin to modify their own construction, to improve upon both their mental and physical abilities, leaving evolution behind as a sort of incubator, no longer sufficient for the real growth they are capable of.

This leads to an interesting standoff between progress and limitation, as future developments in the "evolution" of the species will be both driven by and limited by the intelligence of the being at the beginning of these self-enhancements. Even if such developments lead to beings with, say, modified brains (or equivalent) with capabilities comparable to those of supercomputers, the underlying biological faculties will more or less remain the same. The powers of abstraction, reason, and logic available to the species will essentially remain what they were before the transformation, and this may prove insurmountable by any artificial means.

Is this a mistake? Would it be better to allow nature to take its course, allowing for the development of perhaps greater innate intelligence before the reigns are passed to artificial enhancement? I would not argue that in such cases natural selection would be the "more intelligent" process, or an "intelligent" process at all for that matter. Our ability to manipulate and improve upon ourselves will be far more precise and calculated than evolution has been, and progress will be much more swift. Our greatest limitation, however, will be in our inability to fail. If natural evolution can be given credit for anything, it is its ability to improve upon design through variation, wherein all manner of possibilities are given fair trial. The artificial improvement of the human condition will render such processes obsolete, as we take leaps and bounds in the direction which improves the human ability to live, until one day we realize we're approaching a wall, and we're too far from to the turning point to go back.