[Martin Elster]

Originally Posted by Max Goodman

Or can we? Does the way we use computers not in some sense separate us from ourselves? ... We are moving toward a world in which we might be too separated from ourselves and the rest of the natural world to create or appreciate the sort of art that humans have traditionally most valued. (Of course, if we reach that world, the lack of art will only be a symptom of the much deeper problem.)

What you said, Max, got me thinking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transh...al_singularity

Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition.

. . . . .

Artificial intelligence and the technological singularity

The concept of the technological singularity, or the ultra-rapid advent of superhuman intelligence, was first proposed by the British cryptologist I. J. Good in 1965:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.[27]

Computer scientist Marvin Minsky wrote on relationships between human and artificial intelligence beginning in the 1960s.[28] Over the succeeding decades, this field continued to generate influential thinkers such as Hans Moravec and Raymond Kurzweil, who oscillated between the technical arena and futuristic speculations in the transhumanist vein.[29][30] The coalescence of an identifiable transhumanist movement began in the last decades of the 20th century. In 1966, FM-2030 (formerly F. M. Esfandiary), a futurist who taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School, in New York City, began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and world views transitional to posthumanity as "transhuman".[31] In 1972, Robert Ettinger, whose 1964 Prospect of Immortality founded the cryonics movement,[32] contributed to the conceptualization of "transhumanity" with his 1972 Man into Superman.[33] FM-2030 published the Upwingers Manifesto in 1973.[34]