The seed for this novel was planted in 1994 when I met Hans Moravec at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. He gave a speech about the state of the art in robotics and predicted that the memory and processing capacity of computers would someday outperform the computational abilities of the human brain. He suggested that future robotic deep space explorers would have the same independent deductive and interpretive abilities that humans have without the biological needs and limitations. Finally, in front of a roomful of world-renowned biologists, he predicted that the next major step in human evolution might involve the development of electronic offspring that would continue to evolve as purely electronic beings and that it would be that evolutionary leap that would allow us to colonize space.
As a scientist and a dreamer, I wonder now, as I did that night 15 years ago, when the first of us will upload the entirety of our memories, desires, dreams, biases and fears to electronic media where sophisticated software will carry out the same deductive calculations that we now call "thought." Certainly we have bounded, rather than crawled, closer to realizing that possibility over the past decade and I believe that the day is fast approaching when the first human e-clone will be born.
This story is about the dangers we face as we approach that event horizon unprepared, unchecked and unaware of the consequences or freeing a dualistic human consciousness from its own mortality. The characters in this story will face choices about the value of the biomedical and biotechnological advances they work to create. For some, it will become necessary to re-examine their own ideas about boundary between of life and death, the ethics of the modern medicine and the meaning of family.
In a 21st century world where technology is beginning to blur the boundaries between real and virtual lives, The Moravec Threshold will challenge your beliefs in everything.
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