Digital Health and the Frankenstein Syndrome


Technology in life takes hold

Does Moore’s Law apply to advances in the biological sciences? Will advances like artificial hips, cardiac pacemakers and spinal stimulators for pain be only the beginning of the realization of how humanity will be “re-engineered”” to take fuller and richer advantage of what science offers us?

Ray Kurzweil certainly thinks so. So does the venture capital industry and many other thinkers, companies, physicians and patients. Kurzweil’s technological singularity advances the idea that life is changing at a rate that will soon change the very notion of humanity. Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which events cannot be predicted or understood. Proponents of the singularity typically state that an intelligence explosion is a key factor of the Singularity where super-intelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds.

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