However, she also envisions something she calls a whole-body prosthetic, which, along with our uploaded consciousness, will act as a backup or copy of us in case we die.“This will be a way to ensure our personal survival if something happens to our bodies,” she says.Others, like Boston University bioethicist George Annas, believe Kurzweil is wrong about technological development and say talk of exotic enhancement is largely hype.“Based on our past experience, we know that most of these things are unlikely to happen in the next 30 or 40 years,” Annas says.He points to many confident predictions in the last 30 or 40 years that turned out to be unfounded.“In the 1970s, we thought that by now there would be millions of people with artificial hearts,” he says.Currently, only a small number of patients have artificial hearts and the devices are used as a temporary bridge, to keep patients alive until a human heart can be found for transplant.More recently, Annas says, “people thought the Human Genome Project would quickly lead to personalized medicine, but it hasn’t.”

Faggella, the futurist who founded TechEmergence, sees a dramatically different future and thinks the real push will be about, in essence, expanding our consciousness, both literally and figuratively.