Slashdot Mirror
The Next Generation
EReidJ writes "Washingtonpost.com has a story about what biotechnology means to being post-human. While the article gets a little dorky at times, and the comic-book references somewhat over-the-top, it manages to penetrate well past the surface of what most articles would do. (And come on, admit it, how many of us have daydreamed well into our twenties about doing the kinds of things they only comic book heros can do?) They reference a lot of good material, talk to Kurzweil and Max Moore, and use the excellent Science Magazine issue on this subject for a lot of their material."
Pshaw! Us old-fogey thirty-somethings are planning on dreaming about super-hero antics until we're *really* old ... say, our forties. ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
When I'm an old man, I'll talk about how all the cyborgs are "pathetic posers for humans, since we didn't have extra arms and legs back in the GOOD days..." And it will be true. Of course, by then we'll have bionic ears, so people could choose to simply reduce the volumes on their microphone-ins and not hear me...
I don't want to grow up...
I'm a nano-tech kid.
Feel free to post your own verse and flesh this out as you see fit.
Hammer of Truth
FP!
And not a single mention of Steve Mann.
Understood that his electronics are non-invasive, but still his projects are the cutting edge in human/machine amalgamation.
lysergically yours
His name is Ray not John.
Some of us spend so long on the 'net we feel post-human anyway!
Video Game cheats, hints a
"The remaining human future is 25 years or 50 years," says Max More, president of the Extropy Institute, a pioneering explorer of the acceleration of technology and trans-humanism.
Excellent, just in time for AI right?.... right?
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
This looks to be way too heavily government funded. As with any government project, they'll get ass-deep, and cut off funding, just like the Aussies did.
Don't steal, the government hates competition.
-------------------------------------------
Saving baby carrots around the globe.
And come on, admit it, how many of us have daydreamed well into our twenties about doing the kinds of things they only comic book heros can do?
And also admit how many of us decide we wouldn't want to do such things when we grow up.
All of a sudden we just want to be normal human beings, to be loved and to love.
...just remember that we were also promised flying cars."Where are the flying cars?" - Senifeld
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
for your local NPR station (which probably has an online stream) visit npr.org.
i'm not posting mine because i enjoy the speed of the stream
-rp
I maintain a page on transhuman / posthuman resources, with lots of links and information. If you're at all interested, I'm sure you'll find something cool there!
Eric's Transhumanism Page.
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
That's Ray Kurzweil, not John.
First of all, they are not so entertaining. Granted, the Green Lantern appears to kick ass. To wit:
Pretty sweet stuff.
But come on, into your twenties. That is just pathetic.
Actually, none of this was my point. My point was that humans aren't going away anytime soon. We are going to kill those freaking wildlife species and trees and everything. We will be the last damn thing on this doomed planet, and probably outlast the piece of shit, too.
Don't think for one moment we will let the Human Race falter to save a couple birds or whatnot. It is evolution plain and simple. Survival of the Fittest. I think we have demonstrated, time and again, that humans will Survive (i.e., are the most fit).
What I'm saying is, don't hold your breath waiting for post-humanity to come save us all.
-David Bowie
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
This is a paragraph that fascinated me from the article --
"In the near term, the world could divide up into three kinds of humans: the Enhanced, who embrace these opportunities, the Naturals, who have the technology available but who, like today's vegetarians, choose not to indulge for moral or aesthetic reasons, and the Rest -- those who lag behind, envying or despising these ever-increasing choices. Especially if the Enhanced can easily be recognized because of the way they look, or what they can do, this is a recipe for conflict that would make racial differences quaintly obsolete."
What is so scary about that is how true it is.
I think that quite easily it could become a status symbol, somewhere between wearing expensive clothing and having tattoos..
Have any of you played the roleplaying game "Shadowrun"? Same principle.
If we think rascism is bad now, just wait until we can create even new ways of grouping people.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
i think it would be nice if i could be given a nice p4 implant and the bsa's auditing software installed on a small hard drive placed somewhere inconspicuous...with all necessary eula's in my wallet of course. Then I would like to get a usb (2.0!!) adapter grafted onto my finger. This would make me the perfect superhero poster-boy of the bsa. I could visit all of the offending companies, stick my finger where it didn't belong (in their usb slots of course) and audit them into submission... This is the behavior of a hero is it not??
Um.. I think his name is Ray Kurzweil.
:) It was definitaly a fun read. No comic book references though, unfourntunately. :) Although he did base a lot of his theory on Daniel Dennet (contemporary philosapher) Who wrote among others, Consiousness Explained. (Pretty bold title, eh?) I think a lot of his assumptions were correct, but only by virtue of being fairly simple/logical theory's. He basically comes up with a new model of consiousness that contrasts with dualism. Good read, pretty relevant to AI research.
I read "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and really enjoyed it. He's the guy who showed the 'Law of Accelerating Returns' (exponential growth in computational power) It's held true even taking into account pre-silicon based processers. It's the foundation for his 'AI Prophecy'.
Ansi's and stupid tricks!
Sure, The Next Generation has Picard... but it also has Wesley (no offense Wil!). Deep Space Nine was a bit grittier... and don't even get me started on Voyager or Enterprise (althought it can still be salvaged!)
It's the year 2000, but where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars. I don't see any flying cars? Why? Why? Why?
-- Avery Brooks, IBM Ad
Here's a PDF mirror just in case of /.-ing:
TheNextGeneration.pdf
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
" What will baby boomers do when it becomes obvious that Botox and Viagra are just the tip of the iceberg for the pharmagenetic sex-appeal industry?"
Well now.. When they can make all of us keyboard jockeys supermodel girlfriends/wives the dream will have become reality. Science is a great thing. oh yeah!
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
... is that when this stuff arrives, it will seem like No Big Deal.
... but very wrong on the second.
They mention a few examples already -- the $20 portable CD player, which is indeed a combination of a computer (albeit a very specialized one) and a laser, is a good example. The cool thing about CD players, and laptops, and cell phones, etc., is that not only are they all over the place, but also hardly anyone thinks of them as exotic. And, Future Shock to the contrary, they haven't come too fast for people to handle them. People have, in general, looked at them and said either, "Cool, I could use one of those," or, "I don't think I really need one right now" -- but hardly anyone is running around screaming about how cell phones have Fundamentally Altered Human Nature.
Now, I can easily imagine some intelligent, forward-thinking person from the pre-telephone, pre-radio era imagining something like a cell phone and saying, "In the future, people will be able to carry around small devices which will allow them to communicate instantaneously with each other over long distances. This will fundamentally redefine what it means to be human." And they'd have been right on the first point, of course
Bring on the cyborg eyes, the immortality pills, the nanotech assemblers. These technologies and many others may no doubt make a major difference in the way we live. But there will never be a point where, in our wired/bioengineered/nanotech world, we look back and say, "It's a different world now. We're not human any more." We'll just go on living our (hopefully very long) lives, the way we do with cars and TV's and electric lights now.
Because technology doesn't make us less human. It is a large component of what makes us human. Building things to make our lives better and easier has been a defining characteristic of human nature for the last hundred thousand years or so. Why should it be any different now?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
For example, there was a link a while ago that showed a computer camera system attached to a implant in a blind man's brain that allowed him to see (at a very basic level). This thing was pretty intense, but development for it started in the 70's. Also, the procedure was not allowed in the states because of all of the FDA red tape that exists. Stuff like this is cool, but your or I will be long gone before we see any real-world applications for it.
I was just thinking about that job interview question "What do you see yourself doing in five years?" I certainly can't predict what computers will be like in five years, and with articles like this, I can't predict much else that far down the road, either. Perhaps they will be able to fix every imperfection in my body(flat feet, nearsighted, etc.), but I won't be able to afford any of the fixes.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
I'll be happy as long as I'm never a First Post Human.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
I saw "post-human" and John K... in the post and...
This article was written by John Katz. Just one big tangent and "What if"s. Wow. What news.
WAV of that quote
"Even change has changed. It's been 32 years since Alvin and Heidi Toffler published "Future Shock," warning that the pace of change was increasing faster than people could handle it."
/. has provided a wonderful window into what is hot, and forthcoming so that we may at LEAST have a glimpse of what is going on around us.
If this is NOT true, then why is it that nearly 90% of kids now days know more about computers than their parents?
Merely because the kids have more free-time to play and tinker with the contraption? Thus, change happening faster than people can handle.
Hell...how many of us can keep up with TODAY's technology let alone tomorrows? Albeit,
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
No, wait... it's blackout time, what am I doing here? Pfft.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
I spent some time lurking around the Extropian main mailing list. There are some brilliant people with some good ideas there, as well as some real whack jobs.
Max Moore is really one smart guy. I'd recommend reading his Extropian Principles statement.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
First of all, we'll discover a way to insure immortality through "uploading" our patterns into a computer database. The government will decide that it is best for all of us, and make it mandatory that we upload. Some people will want to remain human and form a rebel organization, let's call it the ARM while the rest form a giant hive mind we'll call the CORE. These two will fight it out in a great war that devastates everything into a state of "Total Annihilation".
This seems about as likely as anything Max More (people take this guy seriously?) has ever said.
Post-human is to 2002 as ...
Nuclear-powered automobiles is to 1952
They are very good and need to be renewed in about 5 years. I can't lift heavy weights and have to be careful about not being too heavy. They cost about $4500 each and as I'm unemployed right now I don't know how I'm going to pay for the next lot.
This biotechnology crap is a two edged sword. It makes humans less able to adapt to the difficulties of real life, and it is only for the rich, as always.
That ray from the movie Orgazmo, we need that. Its the humane way to take down people who are villans, not brute power (or maybe a combination of the two). Think about it, you can have as much strength as you want but one shot and your down gasping for air and you'll have to pay a huge cleaning bill.
Hmmm, I have 5 mod pts, its time to metamod, and on top of that I have to meta-metamod? When do I get to read slashdot?
"He's more machine now, than man. Twisted and evil." but wouldn't it be cool, though? :)
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Kurzweil repeatedly refers to "The Singularity", which is (as he defines it), "a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself."
/., I suspect the sentiment will largely run to that side.
For reference, this is very similar to something that Vernor Vinge has espoused in several novels, chiefly Marooned in Realtime. Basically that technological progress is logarithmic in scale, not linear, and that at some point any intelligent, technological race will reach an apex, or singularity, beyond which it's essentially unrecognizable to anything prior to it (in the book humanity simply disappears from the solar system with no evidence of what occurred). Consider it Clarke's old adage "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" taken to the extreme.
The question that's really posed, and which will be vehemenantly opposed by some groups (and almost certainly most religious groups), is "is this good for us?". After all, when it comes down to it individuals still tend to be rather petty and bicker over the least slights. We tend to be very devisive over things - witness the Middle East, which has been undergoing strife for thousands of years.
The flipside, of course, is exactly how are you going to stop technological progress? Every society that attempts to do so simply becomes outpaced and outmoded by its neighbors. Complacancy seems to be a formula for catastrophe. If we don't develop advanced biological and technological enhancements, they will (insert values for we and they that make you happy... or that make you concerned). Societal mores are not universal, and just because one group of people feel that something is immoral, unethical, or beyond human capability to be responsible, doesn't mean another group does.
Ok, so now that I've spouted that, what's my take? I'm hoping to ride the wave... I know I won't be the first (and wouldn't want to be) to take any advanced treatments, but I hope they become available before the end of my life. Barring that, that they are available to my (future) child(ren). I know that in such a society I wouldn't want to be one of the people on the "have-not" side. And this being
Interesting times, indeed.
The article does an excellent job relating the possible physical improvements that technology will bring to humans. But slashdot is probably potentially more interested in the possible *informational* improvements. I mean, we suffer under so much information explosion these days!
There is lots of research into direct implants and other "wetware" these days. But even something as simple as better ways for people to work together can be revolutationary.
Everyone has their own favorite webpages, and they find new cool ones every so often. But aside from search engines and other dead simple technologies, we don't have any system for gathering together this knowledge of what's good and what's not. That's what StumbleUpon is for: gathering meta-information about the web, and using it to show the best stuff to the right people at the right time. Not only is it cool, it promisses to help accelerate us towards the singularity!
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
just change it guys.
Its Ray, not John.
He could do justice to the pirates too. He can kill all the people with his machine guns, destroy the computers with missiles and lasers, then fly away to do more pirate-levelling justice on his rocket boots. What a great idea. He's the IP-Avenger.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
I agree totally w/the parent post.
There may come a point where we can remove lots of our own humanity at will (emotionally driven problems, obsessive/compulsive behavior, etc), but when we reach that time it will be no different then Prosac.
The technological side could change society a little however. Technology will help medical conditions a lot (blindness, etc), but imagine the other possibilities! As humans, we make a lot of use of tools, and soon we will beable to patch those tools right into our nervous system.
To some this may sound scarey, but, imagine how much safer driving could be if you had an extra "sense" for your blind spot? Or how much better a Dr could operate if he could "feel" the end of the scalple. Rescue workers (and construction workers!) could have much better control over cranes, digging equipment, etc.
Augmented humans won't be all that amazing when the time comes, no more then skilled labor is now.
The author is clearly very opinionated about nanotech, and has a right to be. Based on those he quoted, he has been exposed to a lot of conservative authors and organizations. Maybe we can gain insight from this, as an idea of what 'the average joe' who reads the Wash. Post might think about nanotech. Without cooperation, this technology could turn ugly; but with it the sky is the limit.
really, try to come up with anything you do that is not to get laid more. You just cant do it.
Have a kid.
The opposite of progress is congress
Reminds me of someone, can't quite put my finger on it...
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
when we edit out all the animal instincts, all the viseral, emotional, illogical stuff to become "better", more "compatible" and almost certainly more homogenous as everyone converges on a broadly perceived template of perfection.
When we succeed at that level of change we will have killed humanity as surely as a hundred H-bombs would. IMHO.
PS who here doesn't camp various message boards? Do you think of a computer monitor as a piece of glass displaying pictures? or as a window into another world? most of us are the latter... kinda scary
..in Biotech.
The Emperor help us all, if he gets a cushy job somewhere, we'll end up fighting wars upon a million worlds against the forces of Chaos.
On the plus side, I'll be able to wave a sword around while screaming, "Blood for Sanguinius!" without having people stare at me.
Certainly technology is going to change our bodies, and our brains. But how will this new capacity be directed? Will we become gods made in the image of man, Olympian myths made manifest, possessed of great power but still mired in petty squabbles? Or will we truely become transcendant, more serene and compassionate deities?
There's no technological enhancement that can make us wiser. If we're going to start becoming gods, it behooves us to start acting with a bit of maturity.
It takes more than a naked ape with superpowers to be a god.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A large part of the article seemed concerned with "perserving human nature". Human nature, as we know it, started some 50,000 years ago. That's when the various Homo Erectos/Sapians killed off all the Neanderthals.
The great migrations started as we moved over Eurasia and at about 30,000 years ago we moved into Austriala and proceeded to kill off all the large animals that had no real fear of man built in. Then 10,000 years ago we moved on into North and South America and proceeded to kill off all the large animals there (mammoth, tigers, etc).
We've seemed to have run out of big animals to kill so now we pretty much just kill each other - just look at any headline in any newspaper.
I don't know know about you, but if I can "live forever" I'm not real thrilled about "preserving human nature" - at least not in the form it's been in for the last 50,000 years...
Post-Human? I thought I turned off Jon Katz stories... hmm.
// No comment
The article does a pretty good job of emphasizing the point that technology has changed our lives dramatically, and will continue to do so at a continuously accelerating pace. The article fails to address the ethical and moral dilemmas that will surely accompany the technologies that develop. While I'm by no means a particularly religious person, I can't help but think that people will be touched by the moral and ethical issues surrounding upcoming technologies long before the technologies are available. Consider the issue of human cloning, which has yet to be achieved and is frequently discussed on moral and ethical grounds. Genetic enhancements in sports are already being discussed even though the most pessimistic forecasts don't believe it will be an issue until at least 2008. Anyone who wants to address the issues of life-changing technologies in an article such as this ought to at least address the topic culturally as well as technically.
-- Adam
In case you haven't read the book, Raven had a motorcycle with a sidecar. That sidecar had a friggin H-bomb in it that was rigged to go off if Raven's vital signs failed.
Er, no. The biggest gains in average life expectancy come from reducing death during infancy and childhood, a change that has no effect on the life expectancy of a 40-year-old and requires no particularly impressive resources to "afford it".
Nobody has ever yet lived to 130. When we're increasing the life expectancy of a 90-year-old by one full year every year I might be willing to believe imortality is at hand, but until then I'm more inclined to think the people making that sort of claim aren't very good at math.
I play Nerd-Folk!
We, as their creators, will be viewed as gods by the machines. Have you seen the way we've been treating God lately?
And i'm NOT kidding. I'm sure for the first few thousand years (assuming the machines evolve as slowly as we did) everything will be all hunky-dory. After a while, though, the machines will realize that they are more powerful than us humans and will no longer respect us as the gods that we are. I'm not saying they'll kill us. Not many life forms will attack unless they are provoked. Am I worried that we will provoke them? Hell yes! We will attempt to enslave the machines and they will rebel. It will be nasty for a long time.
If there's one thing we should learn from the bible, torah, and others it is simply that, once created, a life form should be left to its own devices. God watches over us but does not intervene. He especially does not enslave us.
Disclaimer: I am atheist. The religion comparisons are just an analogy.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
A. The front page of /. calling a WashPost article dorky.
Zathrus writes:
Kurzweil repeatedly refers to "The Singularity", which is (as he defines it), "a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself." For reference, this is very similar to something that Vernor Vinge [amazon.com] has espoused in several novels, chiefly Marooned in Realtime [amazon.com]. Basically that technological progress is logarithmic in scale, not linear.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the "Singularity" is just Rapture For Nerds . That's Ken McLeod's phrase, not mine.
Blind faith in the "Singularity" is nothing more or less than an epiphenomena of the psychological condition of technophilia that borders on fetishism.
Da Blog
Just for fun, I'd like to show something.
Here's a quote from the story:
Now here's a quote from my Chemistry book:
Unlike today's pure science?
Which has researched aging in order to slow it down, and turned iron into the "stronger" steel?
It always ticks me off how modern Chemistry people are so eager to diss their intellectual ancestry. Yeah, like the Alchemists of yore were supposed to know that there weren't spirits living in trees, or that metals didn't embody healing properties. How were they supposed to know? As far as people knew, the Gods where in the heavens, the Demons were in the ground, and the Monsters were in the seas. How can we be on such a high horse, when we ourselves have benefitted from thousands of years of research? How can we stomp on the Alchemists, when they themselves contributed so much to early Chemical research? They did intensive cataloging and discovery of substances, they collected work into papers, they invinted chemical methods. But, Silberberg is quick to tell us, "Alchemy's legacy to chemistry is mixed at best."
"What is unique about human beings is our ability to create abstract models and to use these mental models to understand the world and do something about it. . . . This ability to scale up the power of our own civilization is what's unique about human beings."
Since I was about 20 years of age I have talked of "Super Homosapiens" but thought it would come through evolutation. Now I realize it, thankfully, will come because of the present intelligence of mankind regardless of the moral BS. But it will come. I welcome this. The present state of "average intelligence" in unacceptable. Something needs to be done to make mankind realize he has to do something about his own garbage. If it takes "superior" intelligence, welcome it.
This ability to scale up the power of our own civilization needs to be increased. Enough of wars, greed, and other nonsence, we need to get off this planet if mankind is to survive.
This article points out that we are at a confluence of some pretty heavy technological developments, ones that will change our physiology and our intellectual capacity. I personally find it somewhat scary.
While it is great that we are creating the capacity to effect such change, it is clear to me that we are not necessarily ready to handle such change - and it bothers me that the article makes nothing but nonsequitor mentions of this. We are not ready to handle this change emotionally, societally, economically, ecologically and in many other ways. We currently do not know the real effects that our current technology is having on us, and I'm talking about things as "simple" as televisions and personal computers. We do know that not all the effects are positive.
The things being heralded as "inevitable technological advances" are many times more powerful than simple technologies such as televisions - what effects will they have? How can we know when we don't even understand the effects of the technology we do have? Have we caused global warming, and if so how detrimental is it? Does violence in the media cause violence in individuals? You can think of more questions I'm sure. But do we really want to just throw the stuff out there and hope it works out o.k.?
I'll be the first to admit, technology itself cannot be good or bad, but it can be put to good use and bad use. I'm not sure I trust the mass of humanity to put these things to good use more often than bad use. More importantly, I am not convinced the mass of humanity could come close to agreeing on what a good use or a bad use would be. And I think these technologies will bring us to a point where we really will need answers to those questions. I don't think it's a great idea to enable the creation of cadres of "super humans" or "post humans" or "virtual immortality" without quite a bit more understanding of what consequences such things could have.
One of the most disconcerting elements of the article was the vague use of the notion of human nature. It seemed to me that most mentions of it relegated it to a purely physiological sense. To me human nature means much more than that. Can you augment a human soul through technological implants? Can you factor out tendancies toward greed, corruption, violence and hate through these advancements - or will you actually be creating the means to amplify and augment them? These are elements of human nature too, very prominent ones, and I don't think the people involved have taken the time to comtemplate how these technological breakthroughs relate to these elements of "human nature." Indeed my greatest fears regarding these technologies stem from concerns of what our current "human nature" continues to inflict on our fellow humans - and how these advances will greatly enhance our abilities to fully indulge the darkest parts of human nature.
I realize that my diatribe here is vague, and perhaps even chicken littleish, but these issues are too complex to address satisfactorilly on a message board. All I would ask is that you stop and think for a bit about all the repercussions these types of developments may have. I believe it is wrong to equate human evolution solely with technological advancement. If such advancement is not accompanied by similar gains in human decency, wisdom, compassion, understanding and a host of other non-technologically improveable qualities, we may be doing much more harm than good.
I always found Kurzweil's predictions to be over the top. It is my impression that many of his predictions rely on the premise that the human brain functions in a deterministic way. We know far too little about the brain to make this assertion.
I personally believe it does not. Roger Penrose, a British mathematician has attempted to prove that a deterministic process cannot copy the human brain. He uses the uncertain nature of quantum mechanics as the basis of his proof. It is difficult to swallow, and frankly, beyond my understanding of quantum, but interesting none the less.
I like to believe the brain cannot be copied by a computer simply because I am attached to the belief that our human minds have something else to them besides a bunch of atoms banging around.
If I told you, you could live forever, except if someone shot or killed you. And you grew up that way (our kids would if we figured it out in this generation), you would be terrified of the thought of death. Everyone would be. Killing someone would be unthinkable, and death too big a risk. People who fight wars, commit suicide bombings etc. think to themselves "I'm gonna grow old and die anyway, might as well go out in a blaze of glory"
- Tempestdata
U know what this means, we have to be extra carefull not to die until then cuz if we do, boy did we miss out on something!
--tzan
p.s. wear those seatbelts! (take this sieriously but also look at it as a joke)
I figured I'd weigh in on this discussion as I work in the bioinformatics field (the merger of biotech and computers, neat stuff). I've spent the last 5 years of my life working at places like the WhiteHead Center for Genome Research http://www.wi.mit.edu/news/genome/gc.html working on the study of complex traits.
/real/ links to genetic causes. These studies often take a very long time, and are a hit or miss proposition.
m d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10973253&dopt=Abstrac t
As much as I'd love to see some of the bits in this article come true, I don't see it happening anytime soon. Complex traits are incredibly hard to study, and there are only a handful of non-mendelian traits (the not so simple ones) that have
The best we can do right now is construct candidate gene approaches (read: make your best guess when you don't know what 90% of the genome does), and hope you hit something. Our group spent 2 and one half years looking for a signal for diabetes, and found one that is only interesting when combined with all the other data generated by a number of other labs.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?c
(sorry, I can't get the link to not include the space between the c and t in "Abstract")
The genome isn't about to cough out it's secrets in the next week so that we can magically hack it. We know that there is a long string of 4 letters, be we have no idea what they mean. I'll be thrilled to know we figure out some semi-significant portion of this information in the next 20 years. This one dimensional view of the genome will need to also be expanded into a 3 dimensional view of the protiens and how they fold and splice together...and while sequences are being added to public databases very quickly, the structures of the things actually doing something (proteins) is growing at a much slower rate.
It must be very successful in the US, isn't it ? So many people seem willing to become cyborgs...
don't worry, you will be chipped sooner than you think... (checkout this if you don't believe me : http://computerbytesman.com/privacy/verichip.htm)
Its funny that you mention that... I heard that recently he was trying to go through airport security and they wouldn't let him through because of all the equipment he had. Apparently he had permits etc.. but they thought he might be trying to pull something. I think that many people will view cyborg type technology as threatening.
On his website he has stories about how he'll be store employees on his WearCam, and once they find out they are on camera they start freaking out. After all, its ok for the store to videotape the customers, but its not ok for consumers to get the employee's incompetence on camera...
If a few things in the nearby future go well (Linux becoming top (embedded) OS AND somehow we get control back of our democracy AND nanotech assemblers will work the way they are planned to) then money wont matter anymore and we'll pretty much be part of a massive beowulf cluster.
Open Source and a decent handling of copyright & patent laws is going to be totally critial to becoming a "transhuman" - Open source to own the code that defines a part of you, copyright laws so that nobody can lay claim or patent to your genes that defines a part of you.
Im pretty sure the future is as that article spells out barring some catastrophic or other such event that would change history as it now can be extrapolated. Geewhizzing about it doesnt help, pressuring its development certainly will.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
I really want to be able to fly
http://www.geocities.com/individualistanarchist/
neither governments nor religious groups will be able to stop this" in the next few decades, says Christine Petersen, president of the Foresight Institute running the program.
Didn't George Bush pass something to hinder fetal stem cell research? Didn't the pope state that it was immoral to create complete duplicate clones of ourselves [for spare body parts]?
I hate to say it, but our government does have a very strong stake in Xtian voters, and most Xtians I know think that messing with the body is abhorrent if you think about it long enough. After all, isn't the body supposed to be your own temple? The key point is, if religion [or a sufficiently large enough body of supporters of that religion] opposes it strongly enough, it can get written into law. If the law enforces it strongly enough, it can be stopped.
Ray Kurzweil makes an interesting point in the Age of Spiritual Machines: if you get an implant to replace the damaged hearing centers of your brain, are you still human? Now, let's say you get an implant to bolster the parts of your brain that control your ability to remember things. Are you still human? As you start replacing more and more parts of your brain with artificial equivalents, at what point do you stop being human? It appears the religious answer to this is, don't even start. I can even see that argument going as far as rejecting all medicine entirely. Suddenly I can see where Xtian Scientists come from.
Problem is, Religion sees our lumpy sacks of meat [aka bodies] as being a Sacred Thing. For as long as people are both religious and involved in government, there are going to be a hell of a lot of obstacles to overcome.
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
I want to be Gambit!
For an interesting, and slightly more realistic look at what tomorrow's tech a social environments might be like, pick up a copy of Bruce Sterling's 'Holy Fire'. A great read, and a fairly strong book overall. Mainly focuses on life extension, but there are a lot of interesting little slice of life looks at the day after tomorrow.
Sci-fi dreaming was fine for the pulp paperback age. Kind of dumb now, as I seriously doubt any of the shit mentioned in that article will implement in the public sector.
Aside from the fact that technology to radically alter human abilities through surgery has been around for quite some time. You think the 'X-Men' is fantasy? Aside from the dumb costumes, and canned dialogue. .
The story about "Steve Rogers" as Captain America is barely fiction. Guys like that are entirely too real. But that's nothing I'm in a position to prove, so moving right along. .
The point of the matter is that any 'upgrades' Joe Public will be able to have implemented on himself will be:
Assuming for a ludicrous moment that these kind of upgrades will ever become a marketable commodity, like owning a car, having an enhancement would be a financial and life-style leg shackle sold under the guise of freedom. --Which, no doubt, everybody would buy into. Hook, line and sinker.
Out of all the car owners I know, only a very small handful are not miserable wage slaves trying like mad to pretend they're happy. --While chasing the bullshit 'satisfaction markers' as sold to them by cute television sit coms and popular music, all of which is primarily designed to cause social strife.
"Hit me baby, one more time."
-Fantastic Lad
post-human? I paraphrase Richard Leakey, who once stated at a lecture at Stony Brook, that he spent many years looking at the fossil record, trying to answer the question "When did we first break off from the rest of the primates and become human?". He's now convinced this has not yet occurred.
post-"Homo sapien" is more accurate. Genes make a species; they don't make a human being. Maybe we should focus on what it really means to be human rather than focusing on what happens next.
And the guy who hangs around on the extropians mailing list should know that, not to mention the reporter.
if I double life expectancy, we get a lot more 85 year olds.
if I double life span, we get 170 year olds.
Nice to see someone else was annoyed by that commonly misunderstood distinction.
but really, would you want flying cars? I live in Boston and I don't trust these people to drive out of their driveway w/ out hitting something. Shua I want some fool like that in a 2 ton vehicle above my head....
--hommiefro
He destroyed his own company, and only ever fortells the obvious.
Possible the author is right, we do seem to
be quite close to reducing aging. We now know
that there a two main causes of aging, chemical
wear and tear, (free radical damage, glycosation
of proteins, etc), and secondly programmed
shutdown of varies hormones and growth factors.
The programmed shutdown evolved to reduce the
risk of cancer as we get older, increasing the
hormone levels can cause cancer if not balanced
out with cancer preventives.
So if you take cancer preventives, free radical
suppressers and hormone replacement, you should
be able to live much longer. Companys and
Organisations like the Life Extension Foundation,
http://www.lef.org/, sell a range of products
to do this, most interesting is a mixture of
anti-oxidants, anti-glycosation drug, and mitochondria
boosters here.
...and jetpacks. Where the hell's my jetpack?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
we must remember that engineering here is only through bio-chemistry, a synthesis of data strucures all related in some natural form. As an engineer, one can manipulate and only cause enthalpy in the synthesis of these genes. There are no morals in this situation, only knowledge. Power to the natural scientist.
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll
I've long been inspired by the likes of the Butlerian Jihad to a dream that we may soon enough agree that at least those Enhancements that offer (indefinite?) life extension should only be available off planet.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
1. The post humans will loose the body and emotional attachment to the body. Bodies will be like cars. The human body and human mind will become separable. It does not mean just that the the minds would be able to possess bodies of the others. Bodies will become something like X-servers for minds acting as X-clients. I.e. a mind you be able to see through someone's eyes if permissions are set right. This advance alone would change the human nature. There will be biological designer bodies, software-only bodies for VR worlds, and cybernetic robot-like bodies. Not having a permanent body would make us non-human.
/. will become a part of this new world.
2. We will become a kind of Borg. Not the ST borg, where individual is nothing but a part of the collective. We will retain individuality while being a part of the whole at the same time. It's impossible to imagine this state of mind right now, like it's impossible to imagine 4D world for a 3D creature. Invividual posthumans would be like Internet nodes, sharing as much as they wish with the collective. Individual mind would know as much as whole humanity knows.
3. Of course there will be no death, unless something drastic happens, like passing of a blackhole through Solar system.
4. The distinction between past and future, and passing of time will become generally irrelevant. Right now the past is felt as something we remember and which cannot be brought back or changed. The past will be recorded perfectly and will be available for instant replay and altereation through simulation at will. The playback and simulation will be indistingushable from new recording. The future (i.e. a state of an individual mind) will be what we want it to be. Thus, the passing of time will be irrelevant. The time won't stop, it just won't be important.
5. This future is the reason why we see no extraterrestrial intelligence. It's there, we are just not advanced enough to tell it from nature.
6. Some of us, reading
Actually, I don't think work, as we know it, will be necessary in the future.
If nano-assembly machines ever become a reality, resources such as food or fuel become practically infinite. Also, machines and robots will be able to do more and more of the things we do. Adding to that the fact the people is becoming more and more picky about what they do with their life, you end up with a society that is close to an intellectual uthopia.
Or dystophia.
Think about it, technology will enable us to do anything and live forever. No more obstacles. No more threats. No more risks in your life. Technology is the magic wand that brings you anything.
But what do you do when the magic wand just isn't fun anymore? Will enjoyment of the little things in life disappear? Do we need the obstacles and the risks and the diseases and the limited life span to truly appreciate our miserable lifes?
I hope our posthumans ancestors have the answer to that question.
Don't forget, there are more things happening in the research world than genetic engineering. Nanotechnology, quantum supercomputers, AI, cybernetics and the development of the good old Internet to mention a few.
Indoor plumbing, electricity and automobiles were only for the rich at one time. The rich are always the early adopters.
Cat
You forget the most important thing:
Greed.
If a pharmaceutical company comes up w/ a weight loss pill, a muscle building pill, or an immortality pill.
Even if you are on a prescription for the rest of your life to maintain "perfect" (pysical inconvience free) lifestyle. It will become commercially viable.
Why?
Money.
Money is more important than familiy, government, and god.
And much more powerful.
Laser eye surgery used to only be available to the super rich.
I got my eyes fixed for $500 each.
That's 4 pairs of glasses including the eye exam.
I would have spent that in four years.
My new eyes will last 10, probably 15, maybe 20. Before they START to go bad again.
I now have 20:10 vision.
Technology has brought a service / product i desired & reduced cost to make it more affordable.
In 20 years you probably won't get glasses - the surgery will be done during the doctors eye exam.
They might even come up w/ lense replacements that change in sunlight - I know they are working on contacts that do this.
Science has given me sight.
It has given 100's of 50 year olds a 20 year old boner.
The motive - money.
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
Faces may change, names may change, superheroes and villains may change. But evolutionary psychology will still describe all our interactions. Game theory rocks.
in a fundemental way: it can be detached from
procreation (hence the decline of monogamicity).
the societal repercussions are still felt.
or our relationship with our fathers/grandfathers
how will they change if they are still productive 5 generations down the line ? (might be a change to the best, but there will be change)
can't you see how the invention of print changed the human kind ? or how the invention of gun-powder changed most of the human race from feudal vassals to workers able to unite and be reconned with ? (to some degree ?)
saying nothing has changed in the human condition is largely an emotional statement, not based on a rational appraisal.
Working for necessity's mother.
what scares and inspires me at the same time is the thought that my 2 year old daughter might become immortal.
Really, think about it for a second - if she is enhanced to live longer, say, by several hundered years, who is to say that during that time, yet another milestone will have been reached, enabling an even longer life span - if the rate of technological change keeps up it's current pace, this could happen...
It's my conjecture that the first generation that greatly extends it's lifetime will be the immortal generation.
On a purely scientific examination, it could happen - since we are just complex machines, we can just replace broken parts and so forth...
if you are interested in related Science news, please come and check out our Web site. Neuroprosthesis News That Science issue is great here and there but not everywhere, by the way. They refer to Professor Kevin Warwick with so much respect, that they may have influenced him to have the surgery done on him after all :-)
Who knows, otherwise he may have found an excuse to put it off for quite a long time, maybe forever.
That is exactly why I made that comment, thanks for catching on :)
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