"The Origin Of Species" by Charles Darwin made it clear that every species becomes extinct sooner or later. The conditions that allowed a particular life form to emerge, change; the accidental combination of climate, terrain, flora and fauna that provided its habitat, cease, along with its existence. However Charles Darwin's work also makes it clear that a species itself changes, it evolves. Intermittent and minor variations in genetic reproduction produce significant changes in the anatomy of particular creatures, which over time create different species.

Mankind is a version of chimpanzee that learnt to dominate other species and its environment through its intelligence. The power our species developed was not just because of our brains but our social organisation. People did not just form groups, but group intelligence, which is an understanding superior to any individual effort. And this has allowed us to develop tools that supply ever increasing power. We have even managed to infuse intelligence, which is the source of humanity's power, into inanimate objects and have created artificial intelligence.

Now, circa 2002, the power of our tools is so great that they are superior in nearly every way to humanity. There are very few tasks that can still be done better by people than machines, and these are disappearing under the steady evolution of technology. This means that the human effort required to maintain our community is slowly being discarded as obsolete. The human dream of a life of luxurious idleness now seems a possibility because the toil necessary to support us can be provided by our machines.

This dependence raises a difficult question, what do people do if they do not work? Undoubtedly our species must atrophy under the impact of ease, while our machines can only become cleverer as we employ them to make up for our inadequacies.

Our reliance upon technology is so extensive that our species has become a hybrid — part organic, part machine. And this does not just apply to our activities but to ourselves. People are slowly becoming more and more a mixture of machine and flesh as medical prowess allows us to replace worn out body parts with artificial substitutes. In theory there is no reason why every human organ cannot be replaced, including the brain. This means that people who wish to stay alive will be unable to resist the temptation to replace every part of themselves with artificial substitutes as each part of their anatomy fails with age. Who would not want to become an immortal machine rather than die?

The process of becoming an artificial life form bit by bit is really the evolution of one life form into another; from a hybrid of flesh and machine to all machine; from a mortal creature with very limited powers into an immortal entity of fantastic powers.

The trend to artificial life seems inevitable, because not only does it offer immortality but unlimited power. Artificial life does not have a set number of limbs, or senses, or size of intelligence. All these limitations can be extended or strengthened as required. Nor does it have a fixed life span. The only question seems to be just what would such creatures do?