Wearable and nearby personal technologies that continuously monitor your health won’t just be able to save you during medical emergencies–they’ll be able to diagnose problems at their early stages, allowing you to seek treatment. Dealing with health issues early on is always more effective, cheaper, and less stressful than waiting until late. In so many small ways, human welfare will benefit from gadgets like smartwatches and robot servants that know what to look for in you.
Ultimately, neuroscience and cybernetics will let us switch our emotions on and off at will. While this would be an enormous boon to human wellbeing since it would let people experience prolonged bliss for nothing, it would also let us block out negative emotions, robbing us of a fundamental aspect of human existence. For instance, if your child died and you could click a button to banish the resulting heartache and obsessive thinking, you’d be committing a grave injustice. My big fear about that kind of technology is that it will lead to the near-total atomization of the human race, where indulging in various mental states and interacting with AI’s customized for you will be so much better than dealing with real humans that you won’t bother to at all.
As advanced brain cybernetics become common and humans gain the ability to share thoughts and sensations with each other, we’ll become more aware of how variations in brain structure, genetics, and other individual factors affect subjective experience. A baby eating a strawberry for the first time in its life will feel it more profoundly than an old man eating one for the millionth time. Eating any kind of food is probably more pleasurable for chronically obese people.
This means that there will not be a single “what a strawberry tastes like” file on the future internet for people to download into their minds; there will be many versions of it representing the various ways humans experience it. Knowledge of these (largely) genetically-rooted variations in acuteness and perception could lead some people to genetically engineer themselves to be capable of higher degrees of pleasure or unique types of pleasure. We might discover there are types of and heights of pleasure that Homo sapiens like us are too limited to experience. Multiple generations of evolutionary pressure towards this goal would produce “humans” who would be as alien as those optimized for superintelligence.
The first humanoid robot butlers will probably cost around $10,000. For the people unwilling to pay that much, I’m sure there will be cheaper deals allowing them to rent the robots for short periods of time each week. Once the robots get advanced enough, they will be able to fix themselves and each other, so they will take decades to wear out like home appliances and cars do. This longevity will boost their population growth rate, and eventually they will be so numerous that a secondhand one will be cheap enough for even poor people to buy.
It’s possible there’s an “equation for intelligence,” but that it’s too complex for the human mind to understand. By the same token, right now there are many, well-documented math proofs that you couldn’t understand even if you spent years studying the requisite math courses. You’d hit your IQ ceiling before you achieved the necessary foundation of knowledge.