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Astronomer Royal says this could be mankind's 'last century on Earth'
climate change to an over-reliance on technology, that it is hard to see how humanity can survive. READ MORE: AI will become Earth's 'dominant life-form' and keep humans 'like we keep plants'Some others who feel the same way as the 80-year-old, who was was elevated to a life peerage in 1995 and sits in the House of Lords, say that uploading ourselves into immortal robot bodies could be the answer to our long-term problems.Lord Rees agrees with those who see a post-human future where humanity merges with AI, telling the Cheltenham Science Festival earlier this year that mankind would almost certainly be “superseded” by artificially intelligent super-robots within the next millennium.But, he told New Statesman magazine, that development will bring with it a serious philosophical question: “To what extent is it still going to be you?,” he asks.“Because we are linked to our bodies and they could make multiple clones of this electronic thing, so which one is going to be you?”Predicting that when we eventually meet an extraterrestrial intelligence it is more likely to take the form of an AI robot than a flesh-and-blood creature, he says that the post-humans of the far future – if there is one – will barely recognise us.Humans seem very likely to “transition from flesh and blood towards electronic entities,” he wrote in his 2018 book On The Future, but he said that he had “zero confidence” that the vastly modified humans of tomorrow, or their AI companions “will have any emotional resonance with us”.While we are some “forty-five million centuries into the history of Earth,” he said, if mankind manages to survive its current challenges our future could be “at least as long as the past”.“We may not even be at the halfway stage in
