Percent of a Species

The idea of machines mixing with humans to make people who are as much machine as human and machines who are for the most part human, creates many different problems in categorization of species.  Mixing two different types of life results in a creation of an ambiguous being, and in the end the categorization or percent make up of these beings does not matter.

Measuring the exact percentage of human vs. machine in a being is not only a ridiculously difficult, and tedious task but also one that is not worth doing.  To some extent it is desired to know where a certain living being came from, but only a general knowledge of the origins of some thing are needed, extensive looks into where exactly some thing came from is overkill. For example, if a human happens to be part French, German, Hungarian and Scandinavian tracking the percentage of each heritage is not worthwhile. Even though this person may have a mix of different origins and having ancestry in these certain places may affect the way they speak or act breaking down this person into some percent French versus some percent Scandinavian is irrelevant.  Even though this percentage of a human's heritage may be able to be found it is trivial. 

At the point where humans and machines are being mended together into one creature, crossbreeding or cross manufacturing, the differences between human and machine will slowly decrease. Before technology reaches a point where machines and computers surpass human life, machine life will be very close to human life. As technology increases, the gap between human and machine will be slowly closed to a point where human and machine are almost the same. The difference between human and machine in the future may be so little that it mirrors the difference between a person with French heritage and a person with Scandinavian heritage.  If it is known that a being is part machine and part human and their actions do not distinguish the being as either one specifically, then the percentage of human versus machine simply does not matter.  This is a scary thought though, thousands of people with indistinguishable origins, and almost no way of tracing them.  As startling as this may be to human life, this idea of a whole planet filled with unidentifiable machine-people must be accepted before machines are mended with human life. To accept the combination of human and machine, it must also be accepted that the human race and machine life is no longer separate at all, but combined in all aspects, and indistinguishable from each other.

However, this period of indistinguishable life between man and machine is only temporary.  The amount of time that it takes for this period of ambiguity to pass is dependent wholly on human development as well as development of technology.  Looking back to what I proposed earlier, just as the gap between human life and machine life will slowly be closed to the point of being the same, once human life and machines become equal, machines will surpass the intelligence of human life, unless there is a great development in human intelligence, which I see as unlikely. After the equality point, machine life will become more and more different from human life again but, as superior. This makes the difference between humans and machines easier to distinguish, but still difficult to pinpoint when it comes to percent human and percent machine.  Even if a being that is more machine than human that is easily viewed as superior, it is difficult and almost pointless to try and figure out the percentage of how much of this being is human and how much is it machine.  This enforces the idea that the percent human versus percent machine simply makes no difference in the long run because of the development of technology and the changing relationship between human life and machines.