-- Captions by VITAC -- www.vitac.com
CAPTIONS PAID FOR BY DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS
Ridiculous, right? A robot, voting.
Well, you know, they said the same thing about blacks in 1870
and about women in the early 1900s.
But you wouldn't give a programmable robot
the full rights of citizenship, now, would you?
I mean, they can't think like us...
They're not people!
...they don't feel like us...
They are fundamentally different from us...
For now.
But the lines are already blurring.
And if you doubt that,
well, ask your dad to turn in his pacemaker
or your grandma to live without her artificial hip.
Every day, we're getting closer and closer
to the moment when man and machine truly meld
and redefine what it means to be human.
Go to you fricking robot piece of crap!
What is wrong with this guy?
What's he so worked up about?
Maybe he's having a bad day or a bad life...
Or maybe he's just wired this way.
You see, we've always thought that the essence of who we are,
what separates us from the machines,
is some sort of divine spark.
If we remove that spark, does it launch us
towards that fateful day when man and machine meld?
Recent breakthroughs have allowed scientists
to dig deeper into the human mind,
to map out our neural wiring.
And guess what.
In the map of the mind,
there is no"X" that marks the spot of the human soul.
Get out of here! No soul, no vote!
What's the big difference between a man and a machine?
Well, machines are predictable. They're programmed.
And when they break down, their repairs are mechanical.
Humans are so complex that we believe
there's something called the mind, free will, a soul.
But what happens if, one day, we discover the complete wiring
that illuminates how the mind truly works?
This technology could eliminate the last barriers
between humans and our mechanical creations.
If you have a belief in the soul,
and you say, "It's this, and it's that."
"Our consciousness is this. Our mind is this" --
you may actually find
that there isn't supporting evidence for it.
It could be that the algorithms or the wiring of the brain
follows a pattern that's very simple...
...and that it's not actually that hard to make a mind.
The first step towards building a mind,
perhaps even one that would want the right to vote,
is drafting the blueprint of the human brain.
This epic undertaking has already begun
at the university of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Arthur toga is heading up a groundbreaking project
that will do the unthinkable --
map the connections between neurons
that underlay all brain function.
The brain is wired in a way
where different regions communicate with other regions.
We have embarked upon a project
which we call the human connectome project,
which is to make a map of this wiring diagram.
Ultimately, this map will chart
roughly 100 billion neurons in the human brain,
each one of which could be connected to 10,000 others.
Toga hopes it will give us a complete picture of the mind,
how it works...
And why sometimes it doesn't.
The human connectome project
will be able to detect miswirings of the brain,
perhaps identify where epilepsy comes from,
identifying the places
where Alzheimer's disease takes over the human brain,
comparable to using a car's diagnostic computer.
Maybe, one day, we'll live in a world
without prisons or mental institutions
because all that's needed is to tweak somebody's connectome.
A full diagram of the brain's connectome
could also unlock the secret of the self,
that essence that makes us so uniquely human.
And this allows us a processing of information
that may encompass any aspect by the individual.
Using a new, souped-up mri scanner,
toga tracks the movement of water molecules
that flow along the neural fibers.
That pathway shows us
how neurons are positioned and how they're connected.
There is the top plane and the bottom plane.
From these, we can compute a tract
and how it courses through the brain.
The connections are color-coded
to indicate the direction in which they move.
The bluish color that you see,
these fibers may connect
either to motor systems or sensory systems,
moving information out to affect motor movements
or sensory information back up from processing.
The color coding illustrates
how any given thought
can pass through multiple parts of the brain,
darting from neuron to neuron to make abstract connections.
When you embark upon such a monumental task,
to study an organ system
that's capable of performing a Beethoven concerto
or ballet or running the 100-meter dash,
those are feats of humanness
that just gives you awe-inspiring willingness
to keep trying to map it.
Every one of the brain's billions of neurons
has its own complex wiring diagram.
Locked inside our skulls
are miles of connections between each of those neurons.
And with every memory, every new experience,
those connections change.
We used to think that the brain
was pretty much set after childhood,
but now we know differently.
The brain continues to learn and change all the time,
this quality called plasticity.
When we have new experiences,
especially if they're intense or we repeat them a lot,
we can burn new pathways.
We can also forget old ones.
It is a tremendous opportunity
to understand our humanness, if you will.
Developing a complete map of the connectome
is part of that quest.
Some people say that the connectome is us.
Our memories, our dreams, our hopes, our defeats --
all of that encoded in our connectome.
One thing that's fascinating about the connectome
is if you could really go in and take a scan
and then have that brain turn into software,
you could have the analog-world version of you
and the digital-world equivalent of you.
So, what happens when the soul is digitized,
put on a silicone chip, and made available for download?
I mean, I think one of the big questions is,
if we could develop conscious, intelligent robots,
would they be human?
How would that make us feel about our humanity?
With an understanding of the brain
as a complex biological computer,
will we begin to engineer it like we do machines?
Augmenting our minds with digital parts
isn't that far off.
But what will it mean for our species
when we become more machine than man?
All right, congratulations. You guys are all done.
No lollipop for that kid.
Just the ability to learn better and faster.
All it takes is a small incision in the skull
and a tiny device shoved into his brain.
But what parent would ever agree to that?
Unless, of course, everyone else was doing it
and your kid was the slow one in school.
I mean, think today to what length parents will go
to give their kids an edge in this world.
And we're not talking about fixing some faulty wiring.
We're talking about brain enhancement.
And why would we want that?
Our brains are remarkable. Miraculous, even.
But they can't do everything...
...unless we give them a little high-tech help.
When children see the movie "The matrix"
and they see Neo jacking in an electrode
and all of a sudden becoming a kung fu master,
the first question they ask is, "How can I get one?"
well, this does not yet exist,
but it's actually physically possible.
The key to transforming learning
from an organic process
to a machine-like downloading of information
is a squiggly bit of brain known as the hippocampus.
The hippocampus is the gateway to memories.
Short-term memories are stored
right here in the prefrontal cortex.
But eventually they have to be transferred
to long-term memories,
and that's where the hippocampus comes in.
This part of the brain doesn't store the memories,
but it does the appropriate conversion.
At the university of Southern California,
bioengineer Ted berger has already proven
that a computer chip can replace or enhance brain function.
Right now, what our prosthesis does
is to convert a code
that's kind of in the middle of the hippocampus
to what would be the output of the hippocampus.
They've been able to take mice
and access the electrical signals
coursing through the hippocampus and record them.
And then, when they shot the message
back into the hippocampus, the mouse remembered the task.
We've found that we can not only restore long-term memories,
we can enhance the animal's ability to remember.
You could think about using devices like this
to greatly enhance human memory
and to shorten the cycle for learning,
in terms of downloading
huge quantities of memory at a single time.
Chips that augment our hippocampus
would very well help us learn faster.
So, will that make them a must-have
for competitive parents?
At that point, it could create an arms race
in elementary school.
What is 4 times 3?
Rumors go out that, "Well, Jones' kid, he's been enhanced,
and our Johnny has to compete with this enhanced kid."
the reality is that, with these kinds of technologies,
they do not get distributed to everyone at the same time.
Some people get it first. Some people get it better.
As a society, we have to really think long and hard
about who gets this,
if it's just the wealthy, that there are real dangers
that they will use it
to consolidate their power and their wealth.
A rising class of the intellectual elite
would have an additional edge.
They could Usher in a new era of sensory enhancement
that outstrips evolution.
We're just actually checking if everything's spiffy here.
Miguel Nicolelis at Duke university
is developing implants
that could leave millions of years of natural selection
in the dust.
They're called brain-machine interfaces.
In a few decades, brain-machine interfaces
will change the way we communicate,
the way we interact with machines,
and the way we actually interact with one another, for sure.
Nicolelis believes
that the external tools we use today to extend our senses,
like radar or heat vision,
may one day be implanted directly inside our brains.
Imagine being fitted with the ability
to see in pitch black, no glasses needed.
Well, basically, what we're seeing here
is an animal that is being trained
to learn a new sensation.
This lab rat is looking for water
by following its feel of infrared light,
something no mammal can naturally sense.
What we did was to have a sensor for infrared light
in the head of the animal.
And the output of this sensor, that is electrical currents,
goes directly to the somatosensory cortex,
to the touch cortex.
So, after a few weeks of training,
this animal acquired the ability to feel the infrared light
that's present in the environment.
By wiring an external sensor
to an interface attached directly to the rat's brain,
Nicolelis endowed the rat with a new, unnatural sense,
as long as he's hooked up.
It's similar to touch,
but it's not precisely the same thing.
This super-rat is hardwired,
but the tech exists to go wireless --
and not just for rodents.
The goal is to restore natural senses lost
through accidents or illness in humans
or replace those sense with new ones.
Humans will have implants in their brains
when it can be done, of course.
In theory, this could be X-ray or radio waves.
It could be any physical energy
that we translate into electrical signals to her brain.
Night vision for cops.
Radiation sensitivity for lab techs.
Or we could all have built-in GPS, like homing pigeons.
But just like we're getting dependent on GPS in our cars,
imagine how hooked we could get on those devices
if they're built into our bodies.
This trend of importing electronics into the human body
is happening now because people demand it.
Realize that, already, cochlear implants
are now being used by the thousands around the world
to give the gift of hearing.
Where does it stop?
There's a constant arms race that evolves
for cognitive supremacy,
and it doesn't just happen within an individual society.
It would happen across the globe.
I mean, how would American leaders respond
to the knowledge that brains were being enhanced in China?
Augmenting our brains with computers
will change the definition of the human mind.
But what happens when our minds can control machines
through the power of thought alone?
Will our sense of self expand far beyond our flesh and bones?
Quite an impressive one-man band.
He's performing surgery without nurses,
without any assistance at all,
except, of course, for the robotic arms
he's controlling with his mind.
Now, when we connect our minds to these devices,
or even to a full robot surrogate,
we'll be extending our selves
beyond the very flesh we were born into.
Today work is under way on technology
that will seamlessly integrate mind and machine,
not only giving us augmented senses,
but allowing us to control mechanical devices
with our thoughts.
All we have to do is concentrate...
...and hope the power doesn't go out.
From the moment
we first sharpened a stick to make a spear,
we became dependent on technology
as an extension of ourselves.
So, mentally controlling a prosthetic arm,
a machine, or even a robot with our mind,
it's not antihuman.
It's just a part of our natural evolution.
Scientists at brown university
used this tech to help tetraplegic Cathy hutchinson
control a robotic arm through thought alone.
But in his lab at Duke,
Dr. Nicolelis is pushing this technology
to an entirely new level.
Brain-machine interfaces are basically a paradigm
that allows us to link living brain tissue
with mechanical, electronic, or even visual devices
and use the signals that the brain produces
to actually control the movements of these devices
and interpret what these devices find in the world.
The key is developing a two-way signal
which more closely mimics
the relationship we have with our limbs.
Not only do they move at our mind's command,
but they also provide our brains
with information about the environment.
If it's successful,
there's no limit to how far this technology can go.
We'll have the power to move robots by pure thought.
And when that happens, we'll be able to have surrogates.
The prototype for a full robot replacement is this --
an exoskeleton which can be controlled
with a brain-machine interface.
When we move forward,
the human prototype is going to be much lighter
and is going to have hydraulic motors.
One of our dreams in two years
is having the first kick of the world cup
be given by a former paraplegic, a Brazilian teenager,
that would actually walk on the pitch and kick the ball
using an exoskeleton
controlled by some sort of brain-derived signal.
To achieve that goal, they've been training a monkey
to control a digital avatar with his mind.
Once the monkey is adept at controlling the avatar,
he can operate a mechanical exoskeleton,
turning his thought into mechanical action.
Well, he has to coordinate the two avatar hands
and position them in the center of the objects
that appear in front of them as fast as they can.
To acquire the electrical signals
from the brain that we need,
we have microfilaments that are, you know, thinner than a hair,
hundreds of them that you can implant in the brain tissue
and actually sample the electrical signals
the brain cells produce.
Over time, the computer begins to recognize
different signal patterns as specific movement.
We could read the signals
and get this avatar body to be controlled by a brain.
That avatar could also send signals back to the brain
so that the brain could interpret
what the avatar was touching.
If we're going to have
mechanical extensions of ourselves,
we're going to have to train our minds to respond to them.
What we are discovering here is that monkeys can do that.
So, this is basically the training
that, eventually, we are going to do with a patient
until we can see that the brain
is relearning how to walk or to move.
In the not-too-distant future,
we could have artificial limbs or accessories
that feel like natural parts of our bodies.
If you accept the notion
that even our sense of self can be changed
or can be expanded to incorporate tools,
the concept of being becomes very adaptable, too.
The sense of self doesn't end
at the last layer of ourselves, of our skin.
It ends at the last layer of atoms
of the tool that we are controlling by our brain.
Surrogates will do jobs with the three d's --
dull, dirty, and dangerous.
They'll go into burning buildings,
to the bottom of the ocean, to outer space,
and we will control them mentally.
And one of the questions that the law will have to face is,
is it property or is it a person?
For better or worse, this technology
is going to become an integral part of our lives.
Technology is part of us.
There is an intimate relationship between what we are
and what we can create with our brains.
We're starting to understand
the patterns that make us who we are.
That pattern can actually be replicated in technology.
We're learning how to put them into machines.
And that, I think, makes people more open to this idea
that I could be intimately connected
with my technology in the future.
Extending ourselves to include machines
will open up worlds of possibilities for humanity.
But what if we engineer a machine...
...that thinks?
Thank you for your vote.
Merci de vote. Gracias por votar.
Being human.
A lot trickier than it looks.
You know, our brains have evolved
over hundreds of thousands of years
into lean, mean calculating machines.
So a device that could keep up with the average human mind,
that's the holy grail of neuroscience.
If we could achieve that and make it the size of our skull,
put it in a strong, durable robot body,
like it or not,
you're looking at a potential replacement...For us.
If we knew the trillions of calculations
that our brain was performing every time we walk into a room,
recognize objects, and pick things up,
we would be paralyzed.
As a consequence, evolution has erased
all possible consciousness of these calculations.
But with artificial intelligence,
we're learning the hard way
that these tasks are extremely difficult.
You know all the physics that's going on in the robot, right?
Here, we are doing that computation with neurons.
Dr. kwabena boahen of Stanford university
is closing the gap between man and machine
by turning what looks like a circuit board
into a replica of the human brain,
maybe one that could be implanted into a body.
The brain is the best computing machine
that we have on this planet so far,
and so by building a brain in silicon,
I think we can really step forward
our ability to design intelligent systems.
There's two things
that are very interesting about the brain.
One is very obvious --
that we can outthink any other creature on the planet.
The second is that it does this
on a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
Boahen is the lead architect of the neurogrid,
a staggering piece of hardware
that mimics the brain's activity neuron for neuron.
A neurogrid can model
a million neurons in the brain in real time.
It's like, you know, an iPod-sized supercomputer.
The goal is to make a chip
that will simulate the human brain
and perhaps, one day, become a machine that thinks.
Neurogrid's engineers challenged themselves
to rival a supercomputer's power
using 100,000 times less energy.
You look at the brain as a physical device.
We don't know exactly how they are hooked up,
but it's a machine.
The key to neurogrid
is that it activates links, or synapses, between neurons.
If they're going to replicate a human brain,
they need to replicate the circuitry
that makes it so efficient.
What we've done with digital computers
is we've pushed the precision, precision, precision, precision.
But it's not helping us solve
these kinds of problems that humans are good at.
It's the ability to take a lot of data that's sort of fuzzy
and make sense of it.
Living neurons generate unique electrical signals
which are the model for the neurogrid.
This is what we call the blueprint of the chip.
This is actually a tiled array of 65,000 neurons.
And if I zoom in,
you can make out regular structures.
These regular structures
are actually neurons, individual neurons.
When voltage is applied, just like biological neurons,
these individual silicon neurons fire pulses.
Here, you see, in the middle panel,
recordings from an actual neuron.
What you see on the top here
is the recording from neurogrid neuron, the silicon neuron,
which is modeled to behave like this biological neuron.
That means the only difference
between us and a robot that could think like us
is more neural pathways.
In other words, it's just a matter of time.
I like to say biology is becoming a technology.
Eventually, we are going to push those limits
that the brain has already breached.
If robots become self-aware,
we'll have to ask ourselves
what exactly separates man from machine.
And they may ask the same thing.
When robots gain consciousness,
I think they will claim to be human.
As kurzweil said, "You may not believe them at first,
but they'll be exponentially persuasive."
one of the key distinctions
between the rights offered to humans
and the rights offered to self-aware, intelligent machines
may be around the right to reproduce.
Because if you have a digital system
that can make copies of itself,
it can make any number of copies of itself,
and all of these would be persons.
And that really messes up the voting rules, at the very least.
Once we're able to engineer an artificial brain
and place it into a human body,
it may be hard to distinguish between man and machine.
But building a robot surrogate
will require more than re-creating our intellect.
We'll have to teach them how to feel.
Hello.
This human is not just pro-robot.
In fact, she's part robot herself.
Like most of the humans here, she's been modified with a chip
that allows her mind to function faster and more efficiently.
And maybe that's why she feels sympathy for a machine.
But what's really surprising here
is that our citizen robot feels likewise touched.
Get a life.
What is a brain without emotion?
Would it be a human mind without it?
Emotion is a cornerstone
of what it means to be a member of our species.
And science has discovered
a surprising gateway to human feeling.
When you look at the human brain
and you realize that a huge chunk of our cerebral cortex
is devoted to our fingertips,
you realize that the sense of touch
is essential to define who we are.
Touch is so important in human development
that people who don't touch or hesitating to touch,
that oftentimes, they feel
not only physically disconnected from other people,
but psychologically and socially disconnected, as well.
So if we want to have robots
that have a social and emotional component to them,
it's through the intimacy and physical contact
that bring us to life.
Robots that smile, feel relief, or shed tears --
this defies our very definition of robot.
Yet, in the future, that is precisely
what our humanoids will do.
And it will all start with the sense
that most connects us to one another --
touch.
If robots are going to interact with humans
without injuring them,
they are going to have to have
some of the sensitivity that human caregivers have.
Today in Southern California,
Gerald loeb and his company, syntouch,
are developing the tech
that could make this type of sensitive robot a reality.
They've already built a piece of it --
a fingerlike sensor called biotac.
The biotac sensor is a tactile sensor
that replaces most of what you have
in normal biological fingertips.
What we call the bone is epoxy,
a nice, hard material that's easily molded
around all of the electronics
which we put in the bone for safekeeping.
A silicone skin slides around the core
and is inflated with a fluid
to give it a squishiness very similar to the human fingertip.
Poke your finger,
and you can see an indent from the pressure.
Biotac does the same thing.
Except here, the squishiness helps translate physical contact
into analytic data
and converts it into human terms.
It's hard or soft or it's rough or smooth
or it's warm or cold.
But the real breakthrough design
is one that mimics a unique detail
in nature's schematics for the human finger.
The skins we initially made were smooth on the outside,
'cause it's a whole lot easier to make smooth skins.
And we decided to try
machining a pattern of fingerprint-like ridges,
same dimensions as fingerprints,
into the mold in which we made the skins
to see what would happen.
And lo and behold, the amplitude of the vibrations
as we rubbed it over surfaces got 20 or 30 times larger.
Turns out sensing vibrations is key
when it comes to defining texture.
The rougher the surface, the greater the vibrations.
Could you design a robot that, if you shook hands with it,
you couldn't tell whether you were shaking hands
with a robot or a human?
Now maybe you're getting at the essence of intelligence.
So, if we want machines
that are very creative and intelligent,
they're ultimately going to have the same kinds of messiness.
So, in the end, it would be very funny to sort of think,
yes, we're creating this glorious intelligent robot
just as smart as humans, and it's still going to be
giving us surprises and unpredictable behavior.
But the one thing that biotac can't sense,
at least not yet, is pain.
If you look, it's black from just picking stuff up.
And there's, like, a burn on there and stuff.
Pain is really an indication of damage.
And in a biological system,
you want to prevent further damage by protecting yourself.
Pain is how we learn.
I mean, one of the very first things we learn as children
is not to touch that fire.
Eventually, robots would become so advanced
that they will feel pain
and they will really understand
the fact that, yes, humans can suffer.
You know, we sometimes ascribe behaviors that look emotional
to animals.
You know, if a robot is doing that,
who's to say what emotion is?
It's really in the eye of the beholder.
But if we give robots a sense of pain,
for their sake and ours, are they still just machines?
Because it's advantageous
to have the ability to feel pain to avoid danger.
At that point, we may begin to say to ourselves,
maybe it's wrong. Maybe it's wrong to make them suffer.
At that point, we may even give them rights.
Maybe even the right to vote.
But voting, along with many human behaviors,
requires a complex understanding of right and wrong.
It's what most distinguishes humans
from all other species on the planet.
If we're going to create robots with intelligence and emotion,
their ultimate natural evolution will be morality.
Hello, Jake.
What would you like to talk about today?
Well, my mother-in-law is sick,
and my wife can't make it down to visit her.
And I've got a lot of work going on, too, so...
There's nothing I can do.
We have robots that can build, clean, calculate,
but are we really on the path to robot shrinks?
To do that, they need a lot more than logic or even empathy.
They need a deep understanding
of the quality that most defines humanity,
our moral code of conducts that's called ethics.
And work is already being done
to add it to the robot repertoire.
Today when we think of ethical robots,
we think, "Who needs that?"
but, you see, let's say a robot
is guarding the president of the United States,
but he sees a bomb, and a child is right next to the bomb.
Does the robot save the child
or save the president of the United States?
Robots must have a value system.
They must understand what is important, what is precious.
If a robot does not have that ability, we're in deep trouble.
A husband-and-wife team out of Springfield, Connecticut,
have already created a robot
that can make his own decisions about what's right or wrong.
Hello.
Meet nao, spelled n-a-o,
a toddler-sized robot with tactile and visual sensors,
vocal ability, and a full range of motion.
He can even tell a good story.
Now, it may look like a cute toy,
but thanks to computer scientist Michael Anderson
and his wife, philosophy Professor Susan Anderson,
nao is also mastering ethics.
Any interaction between a robot and a human
has an ethical dimension to it.
When you do incorporate an ethical dimension
to these robots, all of a sudden,
it opens up horizons you wouldn't see before.
You wouldn't mind having them sit there
with your elderly grandfather.
As humans, ethics rule our legal and medical systems
and define our moral compass.
Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov
famously wrote the three laws of robotics,
rules that might one day govern their conduct.
The first rule
was that robots will not harm another human being,
the second rule is that they will obey human beings,
and the third rule
was that they're going to protect themselves.
But the Andersons have programmed nao
with a different philosophy,
one that allows him
first to weigh all the options in a given situation
and then choose how to act.
This involves being able to recognize
ethical features of ethical dilemmas, such as harm, benefit.
All right. Try.
To demonstrate this, they give nao a task --
get a prescription from the doctor
and administer it to Susan at the appropriate time.
Nao, please take this aspirin to Susan.
But he encounters a dilemma.
Time for your medication, Susan.
No. No.
Based on what he knows about Susan,
nao weighs the pros and the cons
of letting her forego the medicine.
Don't look at me like that, nao.
He does this by navigating
a series of true/false statements like a flowchart.
How much harm could be caused
if the patient doesn't take the medication?
How long it would take for these effects.
Is the patient being unduly influenced
by others around him or her?
He makes his decision...
Okay. I will remind you later.
...then follows through with his promise.
Time for your medication, Susan.
You are welcome. Thank you.
Thank you, nao.
Imagine teachers that never make a mistake,
police that never take bribes,
or judges and politicians
that are never swayed by special interests.
Robots with a strong code of ethics
could probably teach us a thing or two about being human.
Pretty much anything that we can imagine a human doing,
there's a very good chance that over the course of this century,
that kind of task could be performed by a robot.
The question then becomes, how does that change how we live?
You could wake up in the morning
and not have to go to work, ever.
Would you philosophize? Make great art?
Or devolve into a blob?
Or would you spend your days hoping and praying
the robots don't realize they're subservient slaves
and turn on us?
It may be that the most important trait
we will give robots is mercy,
or perhaps they will discover it themselves,
along with love.
If we develop purely mechanical systems
that emulate, in every possible way, the minds of humans,
that essentially have every characteristic
of being individual people,
do these a.I.S, do these machines, have souls?
One of the areas that's fascinating
is evolving notions of personhood.
Under the law currently, corporations are persons,
ships are persons, municipalities are persons.
Why not a transgenically created creature or a cyborg?
We will have to determine,
if someone creates a part that is incorporated into their body,
do they still own that?
Do they lease it to you?
Or does that become an essential part of you
and you own that piece of property?
It's not going to be automatic,
adding consciousness to our machines.
But when we do it, it might be the final thing
that convinces us
that our role is to take the Baton
that was given us by the universe
and pass it on to our offspring,
which are not just biological offspring now.
They're also our machines.
Long before the day when man and machine become one,
we should ask if we're truly passing along
the best aspects of ourselves --
the limitless nature of our soul...
The resiliency of our spirit...
And the endless possibilities
of a mind that has been set free.