Cognitive Enhancement Will Yield Conflict - VR or Mind Uploading a Necessary Transition Dan Faggella

Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near peaked my interest when he posited his reasoning for why there is likely no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. By a mere matter of odds, most of us assume (likely myself included) that there simply must be some kind of super-intelligent species "out there somewhere." One of the many postulations made (the book is more than worth reading), is that species might – at the point of attaining a certain degree of capacity or intelligence – destroy themselves. Could be bombs, could be nanotechnologies, could be super-intelligent computers – but something batters them back to the stone age – or worse. In thinking recently on topics related to ethical enhancement and human enhancement in general, I came to the notion that this "self-extermination theory" might pan out in some other interesting and less considered ways.