The first popular, mainstream electric car, pictured above – the Model S. It has self-driving technology built in.

Electric

Many manufacturers are following suit and producing electric vehicles.

There are clear advantages to electric cars: they are environmentally friendly, thanks to the possibility of using renewable energy. With fossil fuel based cars, the petrol or diesel is necessary for the engine to run. With electric cars, batteries are used, and yes, some of the power may be produced at power plants that burn fossil fuel, but in the long run, it’s possible to move to renewable sources.

One downside that gets bandied around a lot is range.

Fossil fuel based cars typically have ranges of 600 km or over, depending on the size of the car and the fuel tank. Electric vehicles have been limited to around 100 km in the past, and although Tesla have configured their battery storage in a way that allows for more, it hasn’t reached traditional range as yet.

Superchargers and charging stations

Tesla’s superchargers change the game significantly here. Imagine being directed towards a Supercharger via GPS when your batteries are running low, and having multiple superchargers in every country, effectively making the range issue a non-issue.

Other companies also have charging stations, and it isn’t difficult to imagine a standard being agreed upon, similar to mobile phone chargers using mini-USB. Once that happens, electric cars may well completely take over market share.

Self-driving

Several companies have announced self driving car plans.

Some car manufacturers have even partnered with app companies like Uber and Lyft, and the speed of development has been staggering.

Combine the two

If you take electric car technology and self-driving technology and combine them, it’s not hard to imagine a world where people don’t drive their own cars, but rather, if they do own them, they add them to networked “Car Pools” and collect money from them every month, whilst using the same car pools to do most of their travel.

While there will always be motorheads who own and drive their own vehicles, it may be that the vast majority of the population won’t bother either owning or driving cars in the near future.

The post The future of motoring will be electric, and self-driving first appeared on The Men-tal Hospital.

AI will soon see exponential growth in power. Ray Kurzweil calls this exponential growth the Singularity, when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and grows at an exponential rate. The only way humans would potentially be able to keep up would be to transcend biology and become High Men.

Our brains would have to merge with machines and be contained in the Cloud, allowing us to also progress at an exponential rate.

What would this mean for humanity and for the planet?

As humans we are currently limited by physical limitations – our brains are slower than computers, our bodies are, relatively speaking, quite fragile. Transcending biology would solve these problems.

As uploads, our minds would be in the Cloud, and be able to leverage redundancy and expandability.

We could still navigate the physical world as either telepresence robots connected to the Cloud, or as nanobot swarms, without worrying about our bodies being destroyed, or about biological illnesses.

How would the environment benefit?

Humans consume a lot of resources – from agriculture to mining, to depleting forests, the planet really takes a hit to allow us to survive and grow as a species. If we transcended biology, we could minimize the amount of resources we needed to survive. A lot of functions could be centralized, without sacrificing autonomy. (Each individual would still have a unique Mind File, but use shared resources to run whole brain emulations allowing the Mind Files to form a continuation of the person in his or her previous biological form.

Humanity could also leave the confines of Earth far more easily, not needing an environment suitable for our current biological bodies to live in.

Is it really possible?

There’s a lot of skepticism and a lot of technological hurdles to overcome. But if it turns out to be possible, it could take humanity to the next level.

The post The Rise of the High Men – Mind Uploading first appeared on The Men-tal Hospital.