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There's the prospect, if it is a prospect, that the kids—and not likely us—will face something extremely traumatic: the Singularity! This is the postulated point in the not very distant future when we shall be sharing our living space with entities, either electronic or biological, much smarter than ourselves, entities whose cognitive abilities are in relation to ours as ours are to a chimp’s, or a dog’s, or perhaps (see below) a fruit fly’s. There are three ways we might encounter superminds. We might: 1) Make them. 2) Become them. 3) Hear them. To make them, we need to realize the dream of true artificial intelligence, presumably by reverse-engineering the brain, working out a few improvements, and instantiating the result in some kind of electronic device. To become them, we shall have to take control of evolution and crank it up, compressing a million years or so of brain evolution into a couple of generations. To hear them, we need some results from SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. http://www.takimag.com/2142/