Does anyone working in tech ACTUALLY thin transhumanism is a good idea? It seems like a field ripe for criminal exploitation and hacking, even in an optimistic future.
Unless I lose a limb, or an eye, keep my body offline.
Unless I lose a limb, or an eye, keep my body offline.
Of course that's dangerous (just imagine the gaslighting potential), but also very useful. The only real drag is the awfully low bandwidth between my brain and my phone. The display-to-brain connection over the visual cortex is ok-if-wasteful, but the input with touch is a real drag. How cool would it be to just have a math-coprocessor implanted that I can communicate with at the speed of thought. Or a knowledge database that I can query with my inner voice?
Is it incredibly dangerous? Yes. But many things are, and hopefully we will learn to mitigate the dangers.
Could someone hack it and attempt to overdose me with insulin. Yes, it is a risk.
But it is a risk I'm a thousand percent willing to take because life before it was chore where you risk falling to sleep and never waking up again.
There are lots and lots of things that could kill our species over the next several thousand years and the transhumanists simply think it is worth investing in looking into how we could potentially use technology to adapt to those threats or enhance the human experience.
Unequivocally yes, I think transhumanism is a good idea.
Arguing against transhumanism is arguing that you believe either (a) the body was created perfectly or (b) that we'll do more harm than good if we tinker with it.
The body is a machine. A bloody complicated machine, with many parts we don't understand, but a machine nonetheless.
I don't believe in a future where substantial body modification doesn't make us better, in all objective senses.
And we do it today: vaccinations, pacemakers, artificial hips and joints and valves, cochlear implants, the myriad of drugs to modify various bodily processes, limb replacements, mRNA drugs.
The body is programmable: it's just very complex. But that hasn't stopped up as a species from achieving other equally difficult things.
Perhaps experience really is the best teacher. ;)
Even better yet, what happens when those parts of yours no longer get support? There are already people who were able to gain sight through robotics, but lost vision again once the company that sold them the eyes went out of business. We can't just blindly think about the best case scenario and call it good. We need to think of worst case scenarios to provide a safer future.
I think that companies are capable of making secure systems when they have the right incentives. The Xbox One, launched 9 years ago, has never had its security broken such that it could play copied games. That's even though customers have physical access to the hardware and ample incentives to hack it. Microsoft prioritized security because it's directly aligned with the money the ecosystem makes from game sales. Implants don't need to run all the complicated software a modern game console does (which includes a web browser and video players as well as actual games), so they could have a much smaller software attack surface in the first place.
Even Microsoft's security isn't perfect...a group of hackers found the full specs and software for the Xbox One months before it was released or details were announced. Look up "XBox Underground." Even if the device itself is safe, there are other alternative ways of jacking things up. Imagine if the eyes you use are safe...but the server they connect to isn't, and some creep decides to watch you and your lover having sex.
No but...as long as technology advancement proceeds at a faster pace than evolution, human obsolescence is bound to happen someday. Transhumanism was an optimistic movement that humans could somehow stay in control as cyborgs (when it is much more likely that artificial life replace humans without human components).
Or we could go all conspiracy theory and suggest that we already are pets. ;)
AI's greatest risk is people assuming it's superior while being little more than a charismatic magic 8-ball
You're also thinking quite 2 dimensionally and limiting yourself to one medium. Carbon nanotube computing, chemical computing, even computing with DNA are all platforms that we can harness and have the potential to master.
I personally wouldn't have called those things "intelligences" - more like clashes of unintended perverse incentives and ignored negative externalities.
That said, I didn't think you were talking about a hypothetical deity - it's just what your metaphor made me think of.
Why, though? By which criteria they are not intelligent beings?
They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems.
IMO. YMMV.
Are you sure you don’t do things that appear stupid to your cat?
>They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems.
That’s a weird sentence. It’s written as if there was some fundamental difference between the two.
Do these have something to do with intelligence? I see power and intelligence as largely orthogonal. Ditto control and intelligence.
See Donald Trump during his presidency, for instance. Mountains of power, control of the nuclear arsenal, massive private wealth. People threw their careers away to tell lies for him.
Still an idiot.
> Are you sure you don’t do things that appear stupid to your cat?
Not at all. I see your point here and it's a valid one (though I still can't do anything but reason from the reference frame I've got).
Though I'm not sure my cats even have a category for "stupid".
> > They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems.
> That’s a weird sentence. It’s written as if there was some fundamental difference between the two.
I'm not sure there's a fundamental difference, but I'm also not convinced there isn't.
Certainly the output I've seen from image recognizers, GPT-N, image generators and similar have seemed recognizably different to me from skilled human makers.
They're occasionally quite good at aping a particular style or topic, but I don't remember seeing anything so far that reminds me of the flashes of inspiration, insight, and understanding I'm used to seeing from other humans while they're problem-solving.
I've also seen people much more informed than I make cogent-seeming arguments that DNNs are necessary but not sufficient for something like human intelligence, and that we'll need other paradigms to combine with them before we really see progress.
I've seen the opposite claimed too, in a reasonable and coherent way - that DNNs are all we need and they just need more scale than we've been able to throw at them so far.
I'm not sure which stance I think is right (if either - not too sure human intelligence is actually a tractable problem, given that we don't even have a coherent definition of it, nor a clear idea of whether the not-understood nature of consciousness may have anything to do with it).
[0] https://roboticsbiz.com/the-history-of-brain-computer-interf...
It's just that we're focusing most of the engineering effort on selling ads and generating dark patterns in phones.