For most of human history, the pace of technological development was so slow that a person might be born, live out a full human life and die without having perceived any appreciable change. In those times, worldly affairs appeared to have a cyclical nature. Tribes flourished and languished, bad rulers came and went, empires expanded and fell apart in seemingly never-ending loops of creation and destruction.
To the extent that there was a direction or destination to all this striving, it was commonly thought to lie outside time altogether, in the realm of myth or supernatural intervention. A present day observer, by contrast, expects to see significant technological change within a time span as short as a decade and much less in certain sectors. Yet although the external factors of the human condition have been profoundly transformed and continue to undergo rapid change, the internal factors – our basic biological capacities – have remained more or less constant throughout history.
We still eat, sleep, defecate, fornicate, see, hear, feel, think and age in pretty much the same ways as the contemporaries of Sophocles did. But we may now be approaching a time when this will no longer be so.
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Nick Bostrom Ph.D. is a philosopher at Oxford University, the Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, and the Chair of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 and is a frequent spokesperson and commentator in the media.