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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is so scared of all of this, but where do you all realistically see humanity in 200 years? Living like we do now? I mean do you realize how different things were in 1817 compared to now? Unfathomable to them [1].

I know HN hates techno groups, but this kind of thing is not new at all to folks who consider themselves "Transhumanists."

How is this not an obvious eventuality for everyone here? It seems pretty clear that the whole vector of humanity is to functionally merge with our engineered system in a symbiotic way and then probably see the extinction of the human species in (relatively) short order.

We're gonna go extinct anyway, so what's the alternative?

edit: Used a slightly different time horizon on suggestion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1817

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1917 was a lot like today in the most developed areas. The New York City subway system was running. Electric lights, telephones, and telegraphs were available. Running water. Indoor plumbing. Movies, even. Cars were being driven around, and airplanes were flying. Railroads were everywhere. NYC had skyscrapers with elevators. IBM was already in business.

Compare 1817. No useful railroads. A few steam engines here and there. No electricity. Running water and indoor plumbing were rare. Steel was as rare as titanium is now. Nothing moved faster than a horse.

100 years ago was still an extension of the industrial revolution, where solutions were designed for the masses: mass media, mass education, mass production... there were mass produced standardized solutions that you had to adapt to.

The information age or post-industrial society we live in today an inverse process: a process of decentralization and customization, where consumers want personalized solutions rather than adapt themselves to an average/massive solution.

The world is far from post-industrial. Industry has just self-organised into clusters that have little overlap with the industrial clusters of old.

Post-industrial society is when services have a more important role in the economy than manufacturing. Doesn't mean manufacturing doesn't exist.

Now, the world isn't uniform with respect to progress. There are still pre-industrial societies where most jobs are concentrated around agriculture, and industrial societies where all jobs concentrate in manufacturing.

In 1817, we sat in chairs like we do new, drink out of glasses like we did now, talked with close friends and relatives over coffee or tea, enjoyed music and books, etc etc.

Of course things will change, but many things stay largely the same. Not only will most things stay the same, but the things that are unpredictable.

Where do I see humanity in 200 years? It's totally unfathomable to me (although I'd bet on drinking glasses and chairs still being recognizable as similar to what our ancestors used).

I don't see why despite it being unfathomable to people 200 years ago, the future 200 years from now is not only fathomable, but predictable and even inevitable to you. That's some pretty extreme arrogance.

Sure, I'm sitting in a chair right now, but I'm using my fingers to communicate with a person on the other side of the planet in real time. I daresay that's a bit more crazy than what object I'm resting my ass on.

While some things are the same, some things have drastically changed. It's all too easy to pick out the things that stay the same and declare "Look, fundamentally we haven't changed!" because the things that have fundamentally changed we are already used to.

Predictions that were "obvious" to small groups of people and not to anyone else have a poor track record historically.

That's not an argument against, but it justifies significant skepticism, and helps explain why your "but it's obvious" argument isn't going to convince anyone to take you seriously.

Poll ten transhumanists, get ten mutually incompatible futures, all "obvious".

Well it's not just transhumanists, or small groups. It's basically every legendary computer scientist ever that assumed this would be an outcome - Minsky, Turing, Shannon, Knuth, Von-Neumann etc... so my point is that on a technologist site like HN, most people here would have been exposed to these people and what pretty much all the greats assume is an eventuality.

They didn't necessarily advocate or want it, but they saw it as an eventuality.

First, I don't think any of those greats had such a specific vision as this as an inevitable future:

"functionally merge with our engineered system in a symbiotic way and then probably see the extinction of the human species"

You can probably find quotes that will confirm your belief, but from a neutral viewpoint there is no such consensus between these people about the future.

Secondly, even if there was, we have 60+ years more experience than they did with these systems, and we should be able to make better predictions than they did.

There are many potential future outcomes, and it's reasonable to think about them and to try to mitigate certain possibilities. It's not reasonable to say that a certain outcome is inevitable and you know what's going to happen. We just don't.

There are many potential future outcomes, and it's reasonable to think about them and to try to mitigate certain possibilities.

Let me rephrase then:

If you evaluate the written history of humanity, there is the unavoidable trend that humans will create tools which replicate and obviate human actions in a more optimized manner.

Stone Tool > Controlled Fire > Shelter > etc... to the point that the ultimate boundaries of human capability including things like creativity (Generative Adversarial Networks are the frontier right now) - which is one of the few remaining distinguishing features of humanity by the way - are being mechanized.

Eventually they all will be, because there are people like me trying to make it happen.

So while you are right that it's not inevitable, you can rest assured that we're working hard on it and the trends are in our favor.

There are people like you trying to cure cancer, too, and trying to make money on Wall Street, trying to solve outstanding problems in physics, trying to make it to Mars, solve global warming, win wars, and so on.

The trend you identify is that there will be a breakthrough and everything will change, but we have no way of knowing what it will be. When it comes, it might make your field irrelevant. Arguing that the breakthrough will come from the field you happen to be working in is understandable but it doesn't carry much weight with anyone outside your field.

Right, and if you look at all of those problems, they have one thing in common: They are progressing the fastest in places where they are applying machine learning. Literally, I mean really they are.

If you solve AGI you solve all of those problems. That's the whole point here. It's not a standalone technology it's really something that changes every industry.

Well, yes, at the moment machine learning is scooping up low-hanging fruit in a lot of areas. Whether that will lead to AGI somehow is pure speculation.

It is of course true that solving AGI solves most other problems (while creating new ones that we are by no means ready to handle) but that doesn't mean it's likely to happen. Hopefully it doesn't anytime soon.

There are other possible breakthroughs. Just as a random example, humanoid robots with effective IQ 60 that could be trained to do all our current manual labor. That would completely transform society and we would be sorting it out for decades. Or it might become possible for someone in a garage to synthesize infectious biological agents and intentionally or accidentally wipe us all out. Or we could get cheap energy beamed down as microwaves from solar-powered satellites. While it's true that AGI changes everything, it's not the only thing that can change everything, and you can't predict what will happen once everything changes.

Only ten? Bostrom must not be in your sample!

Everyone is so scared of all of this, but ...

This will be used for control. 50 pieces of senators want to sell you online thoughts already (internet history). And yet, you are willing to live in an alternate reality where this doesn't happen and it's all for good.

Everything is/was going to be used for control since the start of times, what's the alternative?

Legislation that protects citizen from abuses of power. There are governing bodies that actually do this

Lemme know when legislation catches up with state of art technology.

I post this periodically, but I think this is the most compelling and intuitive vision of the future I've heard (and simultaneously a solution to the Fermi Paradox): http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html

Read the full original paper, summaries fall short. But briefly, due to always finding use for more power/computation, primary gains coming from increasing density, and the speed of light limiting galactic colonization, intelligent civilizations that don't go extinct eventually find themselves living in a computer in a black hole leaching energy directly from a companion star or on a course to merge with other black holes.

There's a lot more to it though, hence my suggestion to read the full paper.

Yes I remember coming across this in the late 90s on one of the USENET alt-compsci groups or something like it.

I find the idea of black-hole as hypercomputing environment interesting for sure.

edit: I am thinking of something different that I read in the 90's that was similar. I will have to look at this more in depth as it is different.

Life wasn't that different in 1917, 1817 or even year 17. I started writing a reply but realized Nassim Taleb does a better job at explaining this than I could. Here's an excerpt from The Future will no be cool http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_fu...

I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge — something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability — with all due respect to your imagination.

[...]

Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries.

Except that's a bullshit analogy.

Restaurant's are are completely different today than they were even 10 years ago - from the POS to the bluetooth tracking, menu printing (or maybe even e-menu on an ipad like in airports), logistics for raw food delivery, availability of food, cost, sous vide in the kitchen...I can go on.

Shoes are completely different - again, the cost, supply chain differences so you can get exotic materials, who and how made them.

Sliverware metallurgy is totally different, availability is totally different.

Point is, it is a totally myopic argument that misses what 99% of innovation is about.

It's like saying - hey we still use fire, and eat with our original teeth and see with our original eyes, so I guess pretty much everything is like it was 2Million years ago.

The problem with personal perspective is its inherently myopic...

What Nassim describes can be considered a luxury event similar to going to a Renaissance fair to some. Your daily life is far more amazing than it was even 20 years ago. Here is my day:

wake up to the sound of an alarm synchronized to a global satellite network with ~100 nanoseconds of GMT. turn on a light source powered by nuclear energy produced hundreds of miles away. put on clothing made of synthetic fibers that keep me warm and dry on a winter morning. heat up a food source, processed and irradiated of bacteria, enriched with extra nutrients and vitamins, using microwave energy. sit in front of a bank of liquid crystal displays showing 18+ million colors at 4k resolution. Read 20 different news articles from around the world while drinking my coffee, which was shipped and processed in a global trade market. made using water that was pumped to my house, going through ~10 different filters to remove toxins. Now that I'm done with my coffee I'm preparing for a weekly HD video conference with 20+ people around the world to discuss new technologies we have to prepare the network infrastructure for. I'll then spend time analyzing TeraBytes of data stored in a cloud database that is updated in realtime. The meeting was about how that dataset will be PetaBytes by next year and ExaBytes soon after.

If predicting the future 200 years from now is arrogance, then saying nothing has changed is hubris. We are still trying to convince some people that evolution is real. That makes it hard to even consider the idea that we can predict the path evolution and technology will take.

prediction and evolution rely on one thing, probability. Someone else in this thread brought up the Fermi paradox, the ultimate 50/50 split. After accepting that, you are either an optimist or a pessimist. A pessimist will never accept odds better than 50/50 cause failure happens. So be it.

The probability that your, or ANY individual's, prediction of successful technological evolution is very low. If you are an optimist though, the probability of SOMEONE's vision of the future out of EVERYONE's ideas being a winner is near 100%. THAT is the power of survival of the fittest. THAT is why trans-humanists call this inevitable. We are optimistic of our chances. But we have to be open to new perspectives and adapt.

I will embrace these technologies when they are available to me. I will even attempt to contribute.

But I will also still enjoy drinking from Phoenician meal technology with friends. And paddling across a lake in a native American river craft. And chopping wood for a campfire in the forest. I like camping during my vacation. My daily life will continue advancing forward. You don't have to forget the past to live in the future.

I think that's still too low level. On the higher view, in in average people still do this: Born on the planet; eat and sleep; raised by parents; work and try to get wealthy; find partner and create family with them; get old and die;

This really hasn't changed much since the 2000 years ago. Romans had complex society with lawyers, education, citizenship, money and finances etc. Yes, big things happened: we became more mobile and information now travels much faster. But it still didn't change the most basic flow of life that much, it's some change but quantity still didn't materialized into quality. And we're now on the threshold where those things can really change. It's hard to predict how society as a whole will change because of this.

> How is this not an obvious eventuality for everyone here?

I remember immersing myself in the Guggenheim's exhibition of Italian Futurism, 1909-1944 [1]. It was a rich display of the future course of humanity, per Italy's interwar and war-era fascists. F.T. Marinetti's Electric War: a Futurist Visionary Hypothesis [2], which I read in the Guggenheim's upstairs reading area, comes to mind:

"Up there, in their monoplanes, using cordless phones, they control the breathtaking speed of the seed trains which, two or three times a year, cross the plains for a frenetic sowing. ––Each wagon has a huge iron arm on its roof which swings horizontally, spreading the fertile seeds everywhere."

I remember the Aeropittura paintings, putting the fascists' obsession with planes front and centre [3] [4].

What still stands out is how certain they were in their airplane-based civilization and "abnormal growth of plants, as a direct result of artificial, high-voltage electric power" [2] future. Spending a few hours in that reading room, I could suspend disbelief and start convincing myself that this future was not only possible, it was inevitable.

They were wrong. Linear extrapolations are a good starting point. They're bad for long-term predictions. Don't put too much faith in what you think is obvious in the long run.

[1] http://exhibitions.guggenheim.org/futurism/

[2] https://books.google.no/books?id=c-B9EJGYbAMC&pg=PT210&lpg=P...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeropittura

[4] https://www.pinterest.com/salvador_vico/aeropittura/

"abnormal growth of plants, as a direct result of artificial, high-voltage electric power"

Erm? http://gpnmag.com/wp-content/uploads/LED_Lights_in_Basil_Gre...

Transhumanism in terms of belief in the coming of AGI / immortality / mind uploading / genetic enhancement / etc is just a new secular religion. They're taking it on faith that those technologies will arrive soon without any hard evidence. Surely the Messiah is coming soon, right guys? Right?

I think this claim would be more credible if there were the any other characteristics of a religion present. Namely: Doctrine, rituals, totems, prayer, and above all it would require that there is some credulity to a higher power/state such as heaven/nirvana that will never be seen by humans.

I'd be interested to see some of those as I haven't yet and I've been in the community for a while.

What I will grant is that, there are those who speak in the same structure as religious people. "In the future there will be no poverty because machines will make everything we need for free" sounds a little too close to "In heaven, you can eat all you want and never get full!"

However similar they sound though, they have radically different theoretical roots.

In fact though there is plenty of hard evidence for progress on all of the accounts you mentioned:

AGI: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08734

Immortality: http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-successfully-rev...

mind uploading: Not sure about Whole Brain Emulation progress right off the top of my head.

genetic enhancement: http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-reverse-sickle-cell-d...

Are they solved? Not by a long shot. Do we know when they will be? Of course not. There is progress though.

As far as I know, nobody is making hard progress on when Jesus is coming back.

    > Namely: Doctrine, rituals, totems, prayer, and above all
    it would require that there is some credulity to a higher 
    power/state such as heaven/nirvana that will never be seen 
    by humans.

The Doctrine: Belief in the Singularity.

The Rituals: Writing talks about Singularity.

Totems: Arguably this is the lacking part.

The Prayers: Their talks about Singularity.

This is a pretty strained analogy. I consider it likely that smarter-than-human (*more capable of achieving goals) AI will at some point become possible and cause very unpredictable but hopefully directable results.

So presumably that makes me a secular-religious nut by your estimation, but I don't observe any of the religious customs you specify above. Perhaps the first, if you use a wide definition.

It would be more interesting if the criticism of transhumanist ideas explained why these ideas are unlikely or impossible, rather than dismiss them with the quasi-ad hominem of comparing them to religious ideas that are either outright wrong, or completely outdated in their real-world impact.

>I think this claim would be more credible if there were the any other characteristics of a religion present. Namely: Doctrine, rituals, totems, prayer, and above all it would require that there is some credulity to a higher power/state such as heaven/nirvana that will never be seen by humans.

It doesn't have those, but it does need lots of money, just like religion.

Not that i'm against the idea

> I'd be interested to see some of those as I haven't yet and I've been in the community for a while.

Never been to Less Wrong, eh?

I've been to Less Wrong though, and this is not the place to look for transhumanist-as-a-religion believers.

Calling LW a cult is a stupid meme based on ingroup/outgroup thinking and a few cases where they may have got carried away too far with considering logical implications of the theories they were developing.

The difference is that most of those things are not known to be impossible. Immortality exists in nature, genetic enhancements have been demonstrated in the lab for simple cases, and building a machine that works like a biological brain also doesn't sound impossible. Mind uploading might still be thwarted by the no-copy-theorem, if our minds depend on quantum states.

The things transhumanists believe are possible are engineering problems. Historically we managed to solve those when we put our minds to it.

Immortality doesn't exist in nature for any complex organism. Geneticists can prevent certain diseases caused by a small number of genes but that doesn't enhance human capabilities beyond the current baseline. AGI researchers might eventually succeed in understanding the human mind well enough to build an equivalent machine but there's no evidence to suggest that such a device will be smarter (or more rational or less insane) than humans. For all we know, current humans could represent the maximum intelligence possible due to undiscovered fundamental physical limits. A human level AGI would still be a huge step forward but it won't bring about a Singularity (geek rapture) as the transhumanists seem to expect.

All of these are far from being engineering problems yet. We're still solidly in the basic science phase.

I still see a major shift, in that we're passing the point of human abstraction levels. Before, everything was at best a tool. An peripheral for the same kind of humans ever to use. Now we're changing ourselves. It's a lot more different.

ps: btw, "good life" hasn't changed to me. Who wants to go to the country side, walk in the forest, sit down a fire with friends, look at the sun, the sky; animals. Enjoy a disconnected cabin ? To me the basics of happiness didn't change, and tech doesn't really improve that either; in a way .. tech is often pornographic in substance; an excitation in "more" (more capabilities, more bandwidth, more speed).

Looks like the vast majority of people calling themselves 'hackers' are digusted at the idea of merely hacking their brain.

Shouldn't that be one of our main goal in life, as 'hackers'?

Hackers are intimately familiar with the fallibity of technology. If hackers shun something, maybe it's because they have reason to.

Maybe because if hacking a brain, is as easy as hacking a toaster or a heart transplant, we're fucked - pretty much.

I get what you're referring to: 'don't brick the firmware' or 'don't mess with the MBR'. But we're talking about a device for which the main caracteristic is, arguably, its neuroplasticity.

We can do better than blindly compare hacking a brain to hacking a piece of technology made in Taiwan (with all my respects to Taiwan).

Neuroplasticity won't protect you from someone generating 0.1A inside your body. You only need 4.5-5V battery to generate a killer current.

Also it can't stop someone from bricking your heart.

You have 'hackers' and the young code-me-a-website rockstars that are now also called 'hackers'. Those two groups have vastly different areas of interest.

SV just can not be trusted with biology. The mottos of failure is OK, lawsuits are cheaper than following laws, move faster than the ramifications, force it to be all or nothing, and just ignoring the fact that there will be fallout. I don't want to be a plaything experiment of a Silicon Valley psychopath.

The brain has so many moving parts, no security, and just far too trusting of what's in it to start injecting thoughts and information into it.

I'm not scared by all this - I think it's positive. I find death at the moment a bit of a downer and merging with tech a way to improve things.

> It seems pretty clear that the whole vector of humanity is to functionally merge with our engineered system in a symbiotic way and then probably see the extinction of the human species in (relatively) short order

As a transhumanist myself, I don't think that either of these things is obvious.

Your focus on the "vector of humanity" is where you err. What we can see when we view the history of life - complexity - on Earth is the evolution not of humanity but of intelligence.

This entails two questions:

Are humans the endpoint of that evolution process? There is no rational reason why the answer should be yes.

What, then. would be the next evolutionary step in intelligence? Two answers - genetically-enhanced humans, and machine-based intelligent actors.

The fascinating - and distinguishing - thing about humans is that we will be the first organism in the history of the process (at least on Earth) to consciously create our evolutionary successors.

More realistically I think will be genetically selecting super smart babies. Most likely this is already being done today. As it proves to be effective people will get better and better at it until we start genetically selecting and even engineering superminds.

There's no free lunch when it comes to genetics. If it was possible to be a lot smarter without negative consequences then we probably would have evolved it already. Most likely there are some downsides such as increased risk of depression, autism, schizophrenia, etc.

Perhaps. Another explanation might be that it doesn't produce enough evolutionary advantages in the context of a human society.

One could also argue that the medical advancements of the last 100 years or so have greatly reduced the evolutionary pressure created by "bodily weakness", and I'd imagine similar arguments could be made in the opposite direction when it comes to other factors (like the norms of a society and its influence on the advantage of mental capabilities of some kind).

It would be very interesting to see in what ways societies "skew" the evolutionary process. Does anyone know of good research/data in this direction?

Those lines of research are usually shut down because of claims of racism. Researching genetic differences between different societies is frowned upon. There are for example people who claim that Jews tend to excel in science because historically they have been banned from many trades and retreated into more intellectual fields like banking.

There's nothing stopping researchers from searching for correlations between certain genes and intellectual ability (or at least performance on standardized tests as a proxy). Bringing race or ethnicity into the issue doesn't add anything.

Hm, yeah. If the research is focused on specific cultures I can see that being a problem in that regard.

According to Kurzweil (and I don't see anything wrong in his logic), improvements due to genetic selection will pale in comparison to exponentially growing intelligence that's outside our biologic brains (but may be interconnected).

This makes me wonder at what stage we can actually start to draw parallels to Huxley's Brave new World... Or are we already past that threshold?

These ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

It does seem likely. I mean, look at how quickly smartphones have become ubiquitous.

But there's a downside. Why will augmentation be any more egalitarian than wealth is now? In Hannu Rajaniemi's vision, the Sobornost are the ultimate 1%.

You may enjoy reading about the world of Numenera: Earth, billion years in the future.

http://www.numenera.com/what-is-numenera/

Every Western faith has its eschaton.

The Amish will abide.

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