What is going to be the next step in human evolution?

[kungfuian]

It seems obvious to me that we will continue down the path we have already been going down. From the dawn of civilization we have been fighting against nature; which to be quite honest, wants to kill and eat you.

If we are successful the natural selection process will become less and less relevant for humans, to the point of being a non factor, and will eventually be replaced by us modifying ourselves to adapt to changes in the environment; most likely by surrounding ourselves with increasingly sophisticated tools and by merging technology with our biology. It's just much faster and more efficient to enhance ourselves, and therefore more likely to be successful, than waiting for natural selection (very slow process).

If you think about the human body as the base than we have come a long way toward this already. From the most simple tools to the highly sophisticated ones we carry in our pockets. We have houses to keep us warm and safe, glasses to help us see, cars to make us run faster and go farther, telescopes to help us see father, internets to help us waste time in the middle of the night on Christmas, etc...etc... Who needs to wait around for evolution when we can make tools that do a better job of meeting our needs. What I do see is us becoming significantly better tool makers and users and a willingness to keep those tools very close to us at all times.

One of the most obvious things is our creation of and merging with communication based tools designed to advance our senses. By merging with or immersing our senses in technology like augmented reality glasses we can potentially significantly enhance our senses. It's a natural progression toward abandoning the confines and limits of our physical bodies. Why see in front of you when you can see anywhere in the world, why only be connected to those in your physical space when you can be connected to anyone in the world, etc, etc....

In addition we will use those tools to enhance reality by fully merging it with a sea of information, which will become as much a part of that reality as reality itself (my guess is visually overlayed in holographic form). We are in the very infancy of this now but eventually I see this giving rise to some form of 'digital man'. Beings which, from our current perspective, would seem almost in-human.



Or nature will totally kick all our asses, Kevin Cosner will make a comeback, and we'll all be reduced to drinking piss water and fighting in heavily armored 80's cars against armies of genetically enhanced apes.......