No death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you thought race was a problem, wait until we have multiple species of humans. Pfizer people may not interbreed with Novartis people.
What you are discussing is the common dillusion that society or civilization has declined from some bygone era. Socrates despaired of the declining morals of youth compared to their forefathers thousands of years ago and you lament an imaginary decline in the integrity of our genes.
Back in reality selection in a species that takes 20-30 years to reproduce is really really slow and civilizations allowing the genetically weak to survive and gasp even breed hasn't done much to change us as a species in the last few hundred years.
What you are expressing is mostly seen in the lies of nazis and rascists who desire to promote the right kind of people breeding. If you will do more research you will discover that it lacks any scientific basis.
In fact, I don't exactly see coders being very discriminating on keyboard quality overall. The main people who seem to care a lot about keyboards (and who keep the high-end mechanical keyboard makers in business) are gamers, not coders.
Seemingly less and less so as time goes on.
In fact, I don't exactly see coders being very discriminating on keyboard quality overall.
There's a reason why some coders are Thinkpad fans. You don't have to be very discriminating for coding, but a modicum of ergonomics does make a difference.
The main people who seem to care a lot about keyboards (and who keep the high-end mechanical keyboard makers in business) are gamers, not coders.
Interesting idea. I wonder what the percentages are of clicky keyboards versus switches like Cherry blacks?
Some != majority. Sure, I've seen some who are Thinkpad fans (or, like me, Dell Latitude fans). But they're a minority. I'm sure I've seen more that were Apple fans, even the ones doing Linux coding.
Do you think we should be drawing spreadsheets or talking to the machine like Scotty... Oh computer!
Nobody who complains about this seems to have a serious idea about a better way to program a computer than a keyboard thus far. If you have anything novel to share I'd be interested.
Keynote at O'Reilly: https://wp.me/P9TsXm-53
"2030". They are deluded. We're not even close to that sort of understanding. We're not even vaguely close to "genuinely intelligent computers and AI systems" let alone the rest of it.
After all, there's animals and other organisms out there that are effectively immortal (like the naked mole rat). I believe it won't be too long before we figure out how to eliminate aging in humans, perhaps requiring regular treatments of some sort, which isn't all that different from getting regular teeth cleanings (without which many of us would not have all our teeth).
Also, "around 2030" does run out to, say, 2035 if you push it. That feels less implausible to me than, say, 2030-01-01.
Again, I'm not saying he's right. I'm mainly saying that he expects your or my surprise when he opens his mouth, and has something like the explanation I sketched out at the ready.
The objective of creating AI is to create a computer that is 'self aware'. The problem being that we have no way of defining self awareness. We humans have been struggling with the problems of self awareness for over 2000 years but still seem to be no nearer to coming up with any clear definition, explanation, or measure.
Even research using our latest, greatest, brain scanning and imaging technology instead of making things clearer seem to be muddying the waters even further by suggesting that our self awareness may, at least in part, be an illusion.
There is no test we can give right now that can prove beyond doubt that even another person is actually self aware. We all assume everyone else has the same sense of self awareness that we do, but we have no way of verifying that. And then look at something like the octopus. We have enough evidence from their behaviour to suggest that they may possibly have some form of self awareness, but they are so alien to us that we currently have no possible way of finding out.
So how are we supposed to replicate something that we don't understand, don't know how to recognise, can't measure, and don't even know if it exists?
Obviously, I could be wrong. In the last 50 years our world has been transformed beyond the most wild imaginings of our grandparents when they were children. But if you agree with my statements above (of course you may not agree) then you have to agree that 12 years seems insanely optimistic. Even 20 or 30 years seems rather optimistic to crack one of the most fundamental mysteries of our existence.
He keeps pushing the dates further and further away yet close enough that he could conceivably be alive at that date.
Going by Gibson's old maxim "the future is here, but it is not widely distributed" I wonder what promising tech we have today that could be widely distributed by 2030.
3D printers - cheaper than 10 years ago but still quite limited in capabilities
DNS sequencers - cheaper than 10 years ago but still limited
About the only thing promising is Alpha Zero which is only a small part of the puzzle.
We still need some massive new tech/science developments to achieve Kurzweil's vision. Distributing/improving existing tech will not cut it.
Heck, we can't even replace most organs and essentially transhumanism boils down to a brain replacement. If we can't make a spleen or a liver, we aren't making brains.
However, and this is why I side with GP, Kurzweils predictions are all veeeery conveniently made such that he himself will escape death, because he is absolutely obsessed and terrified by death, so I think he's succumbing to wishful thinking. He likes to publish future predictions, and his track record over the last decades is pretty meh.
My response to all things Kurzweil has always been barely interested dismissal.
However, a few years ago I read an in-depth piece, with interview, wherein he pinned almost all of his motivation on his early, traumatic experience of his own (beloved) fathers death.
Now my response is a very deep sadness for him. What he wants is so simple and easiy achievable - to have a child of his own.
Literal immortality (at the species layer, not the (cancerous) individual layer) was there for him all along - and it included all of the love and care and devotion that he has spent his lifetime mourning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Chrome
How about, "No Death, and No Life?" Sounds like a good title for a book or a TV show. Scenarios already come to mind.
For example, there are problems with obesity and poorer people having limited access to healthy food. Well, imagine if they didn't need to care what they ate?
If you could just eat whatever you wanted in any quantity and you'd never get things like diabetes or put on weight because of it? That'd be the kind of miracle human society could really benefit from. Same if exercise wasn't needed at all and people could just have a sedentary without any risk to their health. Ways to reduce or remove tiredness. The possibility of existing in a vacuum. The ability to survive far more trauma than originally possible, to the point you could be hit by a car at high speed and walk it off.
Make it so humanity goes beyond its limitations, not just perfects them. So genetic engineering and transhumanism are the default, not the outlier.
Is that crazy? Probably, but so is most science and technology when you think about it. Tell people a few hundred years ago about cars, planes, smartphones, the internet, virtual reality or anything else like that, and they'd think you were nuts too.
It was fun being able to pick up things like screws and small parts, and it was cool being able to feel when a laptop was about to slow down as the fans and sometimes hard drive spun up.
But I have to be honest, it was also stressful in a weird and latent way that I have trouble describing.
For one thing, my body can deal with a lot of problems, often without any sharp alerts that it is doing so. I accidentally cut myself? No problem, it'll be fine in a day or two. Whanged my elbow on a corner and bruised it? Not a problem. But if I slam the magnet in a drawer, that could easily require a trip to the ER and maybe even a lost or damaged finger. My body didn't care about its inert coating, but I doubt the immune system would appreciate a large disc made of neodymium, boron, and nickel.
Even if that weren't the case, I'm not sure if I could have stopped being aware of it. It was very solid, and its presence was almost insistent. Other attempts at taking advantage of haptics and neuroplasticity, like wearing garments with sensors and vibe motors all day and night, didn't give me the same sort of apprehension.
I never ran into any problems or pain with the implant, but when I eventually got it removed after a few years, I still felt enormous relief. The tech told me that the new ones are basically slivers which were much lower-profile, but it'd probably still lose its magnetism over time and they also said that they wouldn't have felt comfortable trying to remove one that they couldn't easily find.
That's just mildly interacting with what I guess you could call the "application layer" of my body. And people are seriously discussing things like cryogenics and brain uploading? I could be pessimistic, but it seems unlikely for this generation. Better to just keep striving for the benefit of those that follow, don't you think?
Deluding themselves as far as the viability, or as far as whether it would be a good thing? I have serious doubts that it will happen in my lifetime, but I am definitely sad about that. I'd much prefer to have the option to live forever.
Both? I think that most people would like to avoid dying if you gave them the option, but even if it were possible, who's going to pay for that with all 7 billion of us and counting?
Nobody - there isn't enough money in the world. It'd just be yet another mechanism of multi-generational oppression and exploitation.
Welcome to the party!
Transhumanism, make no mistake, is just a fancy name for common sense. Change for the better is good, right? Common sense. It's what we humans do in our scattered finer moments - we work to change things for the better. It's common sense to fetch in the harvest on wheels rather than on foot, and it's common sense to repair the biomolecular damage of Alzheimer's before the mind begins to rot. It's common sense to build perfect immune systems from nanomedical robots, and it's common sense to develop the technologies of regenerative medicine to their logical end.
It takes work, but what is work compared to a world of suffering? Choosing not to attain these goals makes about as much sense as standing out in the rain to spite yourself.
New technology cannot set slaves free, remove poverty brought of corruption, make the willfully blind see, or the unhappy bring themselves to good cheer of their own free will ... but it can remove the limits placed upon us by evolution, and it will one day give us all much, much more time in health and life to work on our other, very human issues. You can't rid the world of poverty when you're sick, decrepit and aged to death. The limits to our lives that we cannot negotiate away by talk and travel are the most confining, don't you agree?
Transhumanism, common sense with a slick name, is really simple humanism - which is also really no more than a name for common sense. It is only humanist to work to give people the choice to live without suffering, and without death. To live, for without life, there is nothing.
People often further respond with something like: "I don't know about you, but I'd prefer that me and my loved ones die - the universe would get boring after so long". Of course, the vast majority of these people would still yearn for life even on their death beds at age 97 - and if technology and medicine allowed us to have sound minds and bodies by that age, the yearning would be even greater.
Who wants oblivion when eternal adventure could await us?
Consider that you will no longer need to procreate to have kids. They can and will likely be engineered. You'd probably not think the same way about families. Emotions could be something you can more readily control and so on...
I'm up for the challenge of trans-humanism, but I'm also okay with death if that's what comes to pass.
Certainly most people wish that they could relive their childhood, do things differently, treasure how carefree it is to be a child, without the responsibilities of adulthood. But that is not what childhood is: the ignorance of what is to come is what gives childhood its essential character. Life, likewise, derives its character from its immutability: our inability to experience more than one Everett branch. That immutability is what gives our decisions meaning: they are truly final.
Immortalism is, I think, an obstinate rejection of life's finitude. The immortalist would like to live ten trillion lifetimes, sampling all varieties of conscious experience. But this is not compatible with a single continuous lifespan. To properly experience all that reality has to offer, the immortal would have to "start over" countless times, erasing their memory and transferring their consciousness into every variety of body, human and non-human. What distinguishes this process from death as we know it?
In other words: maybe you already are the Immortal.
The answer I came up with: quite simply, the difference is that you don't ever die. Old memories fade away and are forgotten. But we have experience with that already in our limited lifetimes and a lot of it is not too horrible, compared to dying. If it's slow and gradual, and you always retain the recent memories that are relevant to your current life, this "continuous dying" may not be such a bad alternative.
Tell me, what is it you believe that hypothetical future dictator will do that is worse than killing billions?
If the richest man alive can pay whatever is necessary to preserve his own life, indefinitely, it stands to reason that some portion of his wealth and power would be permanently dedicated to preserving that privilege.
If the rich man withdraws from society, and dedicates some or all resources to preservation of the self, society then acquires an interest in supporting those who would murder him and take all his stuff, thus returning it to market circulation.
Prior to clinical immortality, you can always count on a change in estate financial management, because everyone who owns stuff will eventually die and cede control of it to others. You don't have to murder, because time and entropy do it for you.
We don't have immortality now, and actually we probably live longer that we ever did in the past. Yet our history is full of true horrors perpetuated by horrible leaders: just look at the horrors of WWII. These days, people are living longer, and we don't have those horrors any more (we still have some horrors, but overall things are much more peaceful than they were in the 1930s-40s). A cult of assassins could have really come in handy back then, to prevent 10s of millions of dead.
I'm sorry, I see no evidence to back this idea of yours that longer lifespans will lead to worse societies. If anything, the opposite seems to be the case. Back when people didn't live very long (e.g., Medieval times), wars were extremely common, and some of the larger causes of death were war, fighting, crime, etc. Now people in developed nations don't have to worry so much about these, and need to worry a lot more about Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease, and car crashes.
>If the rich man withdraws from society, and dedicates some or all resources to preservation of the self, society then acquires an interest in supporting those who would murder him and take all his stuff, thus returning it to market circulation.
This is why we have things like property taxes. You don't need to murder rich people, you just need to raise property taxes on people who have far more property than normal people. This can be done any time with laws. The only reason we don't pass such laws is because common people refuse to demand such laws, or to vote for people who would pass such laws. Blame the voters.
Rich people can and do seize political power for no greater purpose than to lower their own taxes, and possibly also loot the treasury in the process. The voters do want higher taxes on the rich. But the rich own the news media outlets, and buy the attention and gratitude of the legislators, judges, and prosecutors, and own the contractor businesses that provide elections services to counties and municipalities. Whenever someone asks, "why are we not raising taxes on the rich?", someone has already been well paid to divert the conversation into an acrimonious distraction. Note that the wedge issues commonly used for this purpose are universally of low importance to the wealthy class.
What makes you think that the rich will pay what the poor ask of them, when they have no effective means of enforcing their will?
The answer isn't limiting peoples' lifespans. Indeed, we've had autocratic rulers in our history who were considered excellent leaders, and people who lived under them experienced a "golden age". The problem was usually when they died, and their incompetent heir took over.
The answer is to come up with better governmental systems, not rely on limited lifespans. Doing the latter certainly didn't spare us from the horrors of the wars in the first half of the 20th century.
Here's the real truth of that: We don't let people get away with it for long. Point-like aggregations of power aren't easily workable. Even absolute totalitarians need help from factions and need to keep their minions well paid. Such rulers can't buy loyalty, and so depend on blood relatives for that as well, which means they are very constrained in this precious resource. It's only the wide dispersion of power that is workable and stable, long term.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
The wider the dispersion, the better off the common person and society.
Here's a metaphysical puzzle for you. If we are just meat machines, as no doubt these transhumanists believe, and there is no teleology in nature, then how does one discern what is augmentation? Without teleology, such judgments are impossible in principle. The transhumanist might retort "Well, I think this and this is better". To that I respond: "Lo! Who speaks? Who be this I? Are you not but a machine? Are your preferences not as replaceable as anything else in that pile of parts only incidentally moving together? Replace those preferences to prefer no such transhumanist quackery."
There is zero intellectual sophistication in transhumanism, even less sophistication than there is in the bankrupt lick of a metaphysics it rests on.