A lot of people make careers predicting what the world will be like five, 10, or even 15 years in the future. But let's be honest—those people are all prognostication wusses. The real game is trying to figure out what kind of world we'll be living in a 100 or 1,000 or even a million years in the future!
This is a time when—if you follow certain technological trends—humans will become immortal, interplanetary cyborgs. That may sound like science fiction (if not fantasy), but when you follow the lines of technological progress decades and centuries into the future, things start to get a little weird.
This weirdness is the backdrop of the new NatGeo series Year Million, which attempts to figure out how technology will augment the human species in the far future. The series is part dramatization, but also splices in commentary from various experts like Peter Diamandis, Brian Green, and Michio Kaku.
Executive producer Dave O'Connor stopped by PCMag's offices to take part in our Q+A series, The Convo. So, are we all going to live forever as digital gods?
"We? Probably not, but the generation after us, or even one or two after us might be," O'Connor said. "I think scientists and researchers today are working on technologies that are doing three important things. One: They are dramatically extending life through things like nutrition, creating new organs, and things like that. Two: Gene manipulation is letting us target genes that make it harder to survive. And Three—this is the real transformative thing—is taking consciousness, taking the mind and figuring out how to free it from the constraints of the biological body. And when that happens, that's where you really enhance the immortality paradigm."
This was a wide-ranging conversation about the prospect of extraterrestrial life, whether AI is good or bad for humanity, at which point cyborgs lose their humanity, and even the finer points of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Check it out.
The Convo is PCMag's interview series hosted by features editor Evan Dashevsky (@haldash). Each episode is broadcast live on PCMag's Facebook page, where viewers are invited to ask guests questions in the comments. Episodes are then posted on our YouTube page and available as an audio podcast, which you can subscribe to on iTunes or the podcast platform of your choice.