Manuel Alejandro Crespo Rodrguez

The continuous techorg revolution: two million years to become cyborgs and beyond.
Exponential growth is a real thing. Almost two millions years ago some primates started
walking upright. A million years later they discovered fire. Five hundred thousand years later
they started making better tools and using more complex symbolism, and 100,000 years later
they started to use language, and with it culture was born. Fifty thousand years later started
agriculture, and 30,000 years later civilization was born. Every time knowledge was duplicated
and now exponential growth is increasing at an alarming rate. We are truly discovering that we
are techorgs.
What is a techorg? It is a technological organism. To put it in Jason Silva's analogy,
technology is the true skin of this organism. Humans are the first species to be categorized as a
techorg.
I differ with Silva in something: we are not cyborgs, or at least not yet. Cyborgs have
augmented abilities or cybernetic upgrades inside the organism, while the techorg I argue,
may have cybernetic upgrades outside of the organism. In this sense a techorg isn't telepathic, it
just uses external technologies that enables it to communicate beyond its organic range.
Nevertheless, we can become cyborgs and beyond. There's a law popularized by Ray
Kurzweil, the law of accelerating returns, which explains that technological advances duplicate,
and now it is duplicating at a notable rate. We may become cyborgs and, when the singularity
comes1 the rate of expansion will go beyond our human comprehension. AGI would then become
the next techorgs, the same as we can become cyborgs; human cyborgs would be techorgs, and
AGI and superhuman intelligence would be techorgs. This just reverberates some of Nietzsches
ideas: the bermensch2, the Will to Power3.
We are in a paradigm shift, in an eon where we will understand the true implications of
being a techorg. Our grandchildren will have a different culture, for they will experience the
1 The singularity is a hypothetical time in history when AGI (artificial general intelligence, also called
Strong AI, which is artificial intelligence at human level) surpasses the combination of all human
knowledge.
2 The bermensch, translated the Overman or Superman, is a desire to overcome the human condition, to
better ourselves but not in a metaphysical way, but in a pragmatical way. The Overman is to man as a man
is to monkey. Man needs to overcome himself because, according to Nietzsche, man has killed God.
3 Will to Power is an idea never completely defined, but it is derived from Shopenhauers Will to Live.
Will to Power is, according to Nietzsche, the core of human desire or ambition. It makes possible
Nietzsches ideas, such as the bermensch.

singularity. Alarmingly, they could also experience what Hugo de Garis calls gigadeath, the
death of billions of people in an hypothetical war called the Artilect War, a war between cosmists
(people who want to build artilects, artificial intellects) and terrans (people who oppose the
building of such god-like machines). Nevertheless, Im more optimistic. Technology always
gives us more, and for that technology is always good, even if it means that we become the next
missing link.
Humanity is, inevitably, a continuous techorg revolution, one that has lasted for two
million years and that it will not stop or at least will not stop for the next couple of million
years. Just as Foucault said, humanity is dead but a more important idea is that humanity never
existed, because the continuous techorg revolution never stops: it is always at the boundaries of
what it means to be human.