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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Humanity's goal should be to build AGI and let robots take over - we're doing it, willingly or unwillingly. No need to have blobs of meat hanging around. Intelligence itself is human thing. Whether it needs to have a body / physical metabolic processes to run by injesting cheetos all day, is totally absurd. Evolutionary processes have given us so much unnecessary baggage. Pure abstract intelligence is pretty damn human. There is already Neuralink and other hybird tech going on. I believe humans will willingly give up physical bodies in the long term (millenia scale).

This is bound to happen. There is no way it wouldn't I believe, ofcourse in short term, we gotta worry about stuff like politics, solving hunger and world peace.

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> Evolutionary processes have given us so much unnecessary baggage

21 years ago, when I started writing a cross-platform digital audio workstation called Ardour, I was convinced that your claim above applied to contemporary mixing consoles. It seemed to be that they had evolved in ways that were deeply constrained by physics/mechanical/electrical engineering, and that there were all kinds of things about their design that was just unnecessary baggage from their crude history.

Two decades later, I understand how that evolutionary process actually instilled those designs with all kinds of subtle knowledge about process, intent, workflow, and even desire. It turns out that the precise placement of knobs, and even their diameter and resistance-to-motion, rather than being arbitrary nonsense derived from the catalog of available parts, rather precisely reflect what needs to be done.

Don't be so quick to dismiss your physical form or the subtle wisdom that evolution can imbue.

There's also the whole "situated action" sub-field of AI, which is centered around the idea that humans build themselves physical environments to embody and maintain knowledge in order to reduce computational load during decision making.

I enjoyed reading your perspective. I find evolutionary processes fascinating contrary to what my original comment imbibes. It’s had a lot of time to optimize :)

This is bound to happen. There is no way it wouldn't I believe, of course in short term, we gotta worry about stuff like politics, solving hunger and world peace.

There will never be world peace, unless humanity is no longer human, or alternately, under the boot of an all encompassing empire ruled by force.

To believe otherwise, is to believe history teaches us nothing, nor our knowledge of human behaviour. To assume that we somehow have a culture which "can do this", that our modern beliefs are "enlightened" enough to allow this, is the ultimate in hubris.

Sure... humanity couldn't do it before, but now? Now, we're just ever so enlightened and perfect enough to enable world peace.

There are only two real ways to enable world peace.

1) Genetically engineer the entire species to become more... social. Kill or prevent any 'old style' human reproducing. End the old species. There are innumerable issues here, including "we're just messing around with what we barely comprehend".

Yet our entire culture is predicated upon how the human brain works, and the human brain works more on genetics, than post-birth learning.

2) Take over the entire planet, killing everyone who disagrees with you, and ensuring that due to the technology involved there can NEVER be a revolution. Further, destroy and hunt down every single person which does not swear fealty ; allow no external empires to form. Ever.

NOTE: I am not happy about this, yet, this is reality. Let me put this another way.

You want world peace? OK! Great!

First, you'll need to end all murders, thefts, all anti-social behaviour. "World peace" is denied because of the genetics that create this behaviour. They're the same problem.

Spectrum of humanity spreads wide and there will never be absolute world peace - in the same way, there is no peace in the animal kingdom. As I write, thousands of animals are dying at this very moment, millions of insects are killed. Nature is fucking brutal, my friend. Unimaginable amount of pain was inflicted in the wilderness during this hour.

We're lucky to be able to communicate to each other in civil manner without ripping each other apart for food. Pretty incredible to be a human!

>We're lucky to be able to communicate to each other in civil manner without ripping each other apart for food.

That will go away once Climate Change reduces the ability of the planet to produce abundant resources needed for the modern way of life. The remaining carrying capacity of the planet will force a move back to subsistence farming and with that comes the inevitable brutal environment.

Personally, I'd hope we end up with something a bit like The Culture - which is perhaps the most positive scenario for any society made up of 'humans' and powerful AIs.

Robots are our next steps, we don't need to hang around.

1) really looks like the world from Brave New World.

I think you overestimate human intelligence. Surely, as of yet we are the most intelligent thing in the known universe, and the human mind can seemingly discover/invent/understand everything.

But knowing that our math itself has a limit, and we are already pushing that limit with some problems it is naiv to think that the human brain is all that much capable. (Interestingly enough we are intelligent enough to somewhat know our limits - like the complexity of ZFC) While once singularity happens, an AI has basically only material limits to the complexity it can manage (though what I found beautiful is that even that would hit a limit not necessarily higher than we do - like there will be a busy beaver number it can’t reason about)

> Humanity's goal should be to build AGI and let robots take over - we're doing it, willingly or unwillingly.

Yes, but better not make them look human. Humans are bad at tolerating more/equally intelligent species, just look at homo sapiens versus neanderthals. Hell, even between races humans are barely tolerant.

Shit, I would simply be happy if humanity had a goal.

LOL as for blobs of meat, well, me and a couple other people I know would be unwilling to part with our meaty blobs, for a whole bunch of reasons ;)

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