The Future of Technological Humanity

At a certain point, though it started out gradually enough, humans got the idea that they could be like machines. They could replace all parts and organs and even computerize their brains. They would still be able to simulate pleasure and a kind of satisfaction, as if they were very fulfilled and successful humans, but would be able to pretty much do away with pain, including the pain of death, because the machine could last indefinitely and any thoughts of death or of pain in general could be programmed out or simply erased before they consciously registered in what was still called human consciousness. There were problems with this idea of computerizing and robotizing themselves, of course. Though living became convenient, as if one were a kind of temperature-controlled, automatically defrosting refrigerator, the elements of love and truth had to be included in the human algorithm. And humans still had to be organic enough to reproduce and consume food, and, more importantly, to want to reproduce and eat. Interestingly, there were adjustments that could be made so that eliminating food was more or less mechanical, like switching the bags in a vacuum cleaner. But something vital to humans was lost in the process; the ability to give birth stopped, at least in the "technologically advanced" areas of the world. It was then that the less technologically developed areas were adapted to reproduction; the females were fed well and kept virginal as long as possible and were then impregnated by sperm from males of the technologically developed parts of the world. This worked for perhaps twenty years but due to the mechanization of the males and to their lack of interest in having actual families, the sperm count diminished substantially. By this time the adult male population in the lesser developed areas had been removed to do manual labor elsewhere, and the global birth rate fell dramatically. So it became expedient to further the race through purely technological means. Humans were so technologized and computerized that they were now clones who were programmed to believe they were in fact human, even with so-called hearts and so-called blood in their veins. The human race had actually ceased organically and then the clone human robotic race ended with the great solar storm in 2087 that destroyed all satellites and shut down Earth's electronic grid which, at that point, powered every human. Some had prepared batteries and underground nuclear energy for such an emergency but all systems were so interlocked that nothing survived.