“Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”
If you’ve read Rudy Rucker’s Software, you might remember in chapter twelve where Cobb and Sta-Hi went past a pair of museum displays, one showing natural selection, the other mutation, and Cobb explains how he came up with the idea of evolution for robots:
- Selection and mutation. That was my big idea, Sta-Hi. To make the robots evolve. They were designed to build copies of themselves, but they had to fight over parts. Natural selection. And I found a way of jiggering their programs with cosmic rays. Mutation.
A podcast debate on post-humanity.
According to this MSNBC article from 2005, human evolution is at a crossroad. Either bio-engineering will cause new forms of humans to emerge, or cybernetics will fuse us with machines. It’s also possible for both scenarios to occur simultaneously. But there is a group who may have the final word on how post-humans develop, if they allow them to develop: The health insurance companies.
So which camp will the post-human most likely end up at? My mind agrees with the simultaneous occurrences but twists it to form a duality between two formidable opposing factions. Biopunks vs Cyberpunks, Mutants vs Cyborgs, Creatures from the abyss vs Automated automatons. Bringing reasons for war above those of race, color, creed, ethnicity, or religion and down to the smallest DNA strain. Definitely something that I will be taking along for my own ride of a roller coaster dystopian novel. An extra dash of spice to mingle within the caste systems of post apocalyptic wrecked humanity.
