Worried about what will happen in mankind's future

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Being human is overrated, If I was converted to synthetic life, I don't think I'd be bothered about losing my humanity.

The ability to upgrade my senses? Yes, thank you. Possibly thinking faster than the cleverest human ever has? Yes, please. Functional immortality? On balance, yes please.

I think the perception altering implications would make (post)humans much better people than homo sapiens ever have been, up to now. We would still be people, just very different, and what is wrong with that? I am different, anyway, to most people. Why should I care about being human or not?

Who the heck wants to be stuck as a fragile ape for 100 years tops, when you can be so much more?

I wouldn't count on strong AI any time soon. The field hasn't really advanced so much as it's found new ways to apply the same tricks to give the appearance of independent thought. My concern would be more along the lines of someone with nefarious goals getting access to a sufficiently powerful weak AI.

Likewise with all the post-human stuff, it all sounds well and good until you realize what a security risk that stuff poses. If someone manages to hack into your computer, sure they might be able to pull off some identity theft but it doesn't endanger you directly. Whereas, if someone gets into your fancy brain implants... they could pull all sorts of nastiness. I think once people realize this, the idea would become much less appealing.

If you're really concerned, try and think of something you can do about it, that always helps. Write and publish a book warning about the dangers of this stuff, or consider going into the burgeoning space industry (which might give future generations a place to run).

For strong AI of the "person" variety it would need to be a massively parallel self contained "brain" in a locomotive chassis(not necessarily humanoid), and sensory lattices impregnated into the surface connected through atomic sized routers(equivalent to nerve clusters). The unit would be a closed system. Although that can be hacked by external interfacing.

In some ways so can a human brain....

Always connected strong AI, interacting with others of it's kind, would go nuts with dissociative qualia. It wouldn't know who it is....

how close are we to robotics/AI sufficiently advanced to where we have to implement Asimov's 3 laws?

Minimum self aware ai...20 years. More likely 50 years... True androids, maybe 100 years.

I thought that the year 2142 was a bit too optimistic [by about a century] for that movie "AI."

I wouldn't be too worried about robots or androids just yet. I also wouldn't be too concerned about meaningful progress to transhumanism just yet either (at least until we get quantum computing properly figured out - to the best of my knowledge, it took the best part of a decade before those fancy new 64bit processors were actually capable of being used as advertised and quantum computing -a closer analogue( ) to how the mammalian brain functions- is a significantly more complicated change).

Like nuclear fusion, the development to a 'singularity' isn't guaranteed, but surely it would be beneficial to everyone? Anyway, I don't think that such worries are currently rational. I think therefore that there must be other reasons that you may be losing motivation. Try to consider what you would like to achieve and what your first step towards that might be. Additionally, what has happened recently that you would consider to be 'good'?