We are racing to the threshold of what futurist author, lecturer and NYU Abu Dhabi Professor Ted Chu - chief economist of the International Finance Corporation at the World Bank and former chief economist at General Motors and the Abu Dhabi investment Authority - has called a "posthuman economy."
A posthuman economy will define an epoch with the potential to be dominated by astoundingly and unimaginably sophisticated robots, A.I. systems, man-machine cyborgs, "transhuman" and "suprahuman" technologies, including GMO creatures and other surprises - all of them "autoplastically"-evolved or "alloplastic" enhancements, competitors or replacements for "traditional" humans.
Alloplastic vs. Autoplastic Evolution
Robots and A.I. systems that we create as external tools represent what has been called "alloplastic adaptation": adaptation of ourselves and of our capabilities through changes we induce in environments and objects outside our bodies. Even a simple hammer and nail exemplify alloplastic adaptation, in virtue of expanding our construction capabilities, without having our having to wait a million years for our fists and finger nails to mutate into them, or to otherwise change ourselves.
By contrast, genetic human re-engineering, and by analogy, permanent high-tech human brain or other implants, performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals, robotic prostheses and ingested blood-regulating nanomachines and nanoparticles represent "autoplastic adaptation": evolutionary, often irreversible change — and, if we're lucky or wise, also positive adaptive advances — of, within and in some cases those permanently on our bodies that facilitate and represent self-evolution and self-adaptation adaptation of, by and for the self).
