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In the far future, robots or humanlike cyborgs may even grant us
the gift of immortality. Marvin Minsky adds, "What if the sun dies out,
or we destroy the planet? Why not make better physicists, engineers,
or mathematicians? We may need to be the architects of our own future. If we don't our culture could disappear."
Moravec envisions a time in the distant future when our neural architecture will be transferred, neuron for neuron, directly into a machine, giving us, in a sense, immortality. It's a wild thought, but not
beyond the realm of possibility. So, according to some scientists viewing the far future, immortality (in the form of DNA-enhanced or silicon
bodies) may be the ultimate future of humanity.
The idea of creating thinking machines that are at least as smart
as animals and perhaps as smart or smarter than us could become a
reality if we can overcome the collapse of Moore's law and the commonsense problem, perhaps even late in this century. Although the fundamental laws of AI are still being discovered, progress in this area is
happening extremely fast and is promising. Given that, I would classify
robots and other thinking machines as a Class I impossibility.