A book about our struggling past, our technological future, and our tendency to build gods.
for a long time now, the process will soon come to fruition. When it does, what will man's position in the universe look like? How will we make sense of conscious artificial intelligences, nanotechnology, and the ability to rewrite our biology at will? How to Build a God begins by looking at how complexity works at a fundamental level, and goes on to build a picture of how our species will develop based on the evolution of complexity. We will examine genetics, robotics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, mind-uploading, technological superintelligences, backwards causation, faster than light travel, and all manner of potential future technologies and their impact on our species.
Moreover, if machine intelligence is a natural step in the evolution of matter, we can begin to build a whole new picture of the universe at large. Instead of finding ourselves in a dying universe devoid of all meaning, we can begin to cast it in a new light. The cosmos, as well as all of the matter and energy contained in it, starts to look instead like a complexity engine, producing more and more instances of novelty as it ages. If we're an intrinsic part of the process - as we certainly seem to be - then humans begin to look less like the measure of all things, and more like a race of unwitting godbuilders.