It’s not too hard to see that as we improve our technology, getting down to the smallest scales, and removing everything that seems redundant, that we might wind up with something that looks just like a physical process that already happens in nature. So does this mean that in the ultimate future, with all that great automation and technology, all we’ll achieve is just to produce something that’s indistinguishable from zillions of things that already exist in nature? -Wolfram<p>All technologies and discoveries in nature we make are ultimately re-purposed for human evolutionary values. We augment our intelligence, communication, transportation, survival, and other abilities to gain a competitive edge over other species and other forces of the universe (ie, asteroid deflection). What is the ultimate logical extension of this, you might ask. Lets imagine we become these immortal brains floating thru the universe; we have augmented all our potentials to their fullest. What then? We will still extract energy from the universe in order to calculate and alter the matter of the universe along some value system. We will value augmenting some matter while decreasing other parts of the universe. All forms of life value their survival and expansion. It's likely that we'll value augmenting matter that promotes our growth and the growth of life generally. In some sense we'll be like a computer virus that follows a system of logic to rearrange your data as it expands its way through all our files.<p>We cannot escape ourselves. Yet, in becoming aware of ourselves as a value algorithm that runs as a process through the universe, we might ask ourselves "is this desirable to continue" -- why do we go on, marching robotically towards the singularity and countless other future things, constantly refining and improving the value-impact we have on the universe. Why is it desirable to continue this activity?
It's desirable because that's how evolution works.<p>Deciding not to go on -> Not around to decide not to go on.<p>Deciding to go on -> Still died off, but raised future generations with the same sentiment.