Ken MacLeod Quotes

The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.

I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.

Not too many people in cocktail parties are aware of Bioprinting and growing organs, or the coming technological singularity; I've seen very little philosophical speculation about how far we can go, how much we could achieve.

Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We'll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We'll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We'll be able to modify life in the future.

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.

Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.

Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it.

In this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains - may change human beings themselves.

As we decipher our biology and learn to modify and adjust it, we are learning to modify ourselves - and we will do so. No laws will stop this.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.

One should proceed with caution. We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.

Transhumanism is the ethics and science of using things like biological and genetic engineering to transform our bodies and make us a more powerful species.

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis:... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.

If you put yourself in a place where you're having to work at understanding something, then you keep yourself awake to all possible choices. How the body will look like in the future, the ethics of the body: those are questions that really fascinate me. Let's get the dialogue going.

Our species is on the verge of changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human... and we are the people driving that change.

Of course it is a very simple matter to identify genes which might modify intelligence or memory and start thinking about whether you want to enhance a human, and the next generation is going to have to deal with that issue. Should we be trying to enhance humans rather than trying to educate them and so on?

New technologies are often met with skepticism. But if the world is to continue the remarkable progress of the past few decades, it is vital that scientists, subject to safety and ethics guidelines, be encouraged to continue taking advantage of such promising tools as CRISPR.

We're going to merge with machines and become gods, but first, we've got to reduce the world population 90 percent.

I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.

Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.

The song 'Paradigm' talks about nanobots - and how they can potentially be used to cure diseases and help you live forever. But how much of a human being would you be at that point? If you're 70 percent machine and 30 percent human, are you going to lose yourself?

‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.