There is no coherent way to demarcate between allowing *any* technological research and allowing humans to re-engineer themselves to the point where they are... no longer what they were, no longer human. The only thing that stands in the way is engineering - in genetics, bioscience, nanoscience - which are all rapidly advancing in any case. Even though the mechanisms that create sentience are not understood (if indeed those processes are mechanistic), there is nothing preventing the causality of sentience being probed - it's just hacking genetic codes, an order of magnitude more complex than hacking algorithmic code perhaps, but not really different, especially with the aid of machine intelligence platforms.



Ultimately, that which emerges from all this will bear no more resemblence to us than we do to an amoeba - we will share *something*, but not much.



At the extremes, the alternatives on offer seem to be between a global, ossified, ISIS-type quasi-religious dystopian society forbidding all technology, back to the horse and plough - or a tech-driven maelstrom where humans finally have no choice but to metamorphose themselves just to survive in some form, in order to avoid being superseded by their own inventions, be it us injecting machines into us or us injecting us into machines (I include genetic re-engineering of ourselves via our own stem cells in "machines").



The truly spine-chilling thing about these scenarios is that they are no more than a half a dozen to ten decades away.

