Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of theimagined future, driven—this time by great financial rewards andglobal competition—despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating whatit may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome ofwhat we are creating and imagining.

If, for ex-ample, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequalspecies using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threatenthe notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

My personal experience suggests we tendto overestimate our design abilities.

After a few years at Berkeley I started to send out some of the soft-ware I had written—an instructional Pascal system, Unix utilities, anda text editor called vi (which is still, to my surprise, widely used morethan 20 years later)—to others who had similar small PDP-11 and VAXminicomputers

Moravec’s view is that the robots will eventually suc-ceed us—that humans clearly face extinction.