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."

Comments

Ye gods

[Rand Race]

We have as much a chance of predicting the eventual post-human as a chimp would have had predicting a human a few million years ago. If he had known (and had the capacity to know) that the super-chimp involved losing body hair, standing up strait, losing muscle density and almost total loss of natural weaponry he'd have called bullshit on the idea. But here we are.

"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?

And how many of us grow up?

[line-bundle]

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.

from the article..

[sniepre]

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.

The main thing I think the article misses ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... is that when this stuff arrives, it will seem like No Big Deal.

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 ... but very wrong on the second.

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?

Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...

[Junks Jerzey]

... is that when this stuff arrives, it will seem like No Big Deal.

And there's a high, high, probability that this is all just like robot housecleaners and flying cars and all that other nonsense from seventy years ago that never came to pass. Kurzweil may have been brilliant at some point in his life, but he's been indulging in pointless fantasizing and rambling, most of which has no basis in reality. I mean, yeah, it's easy to say that in fifty years we could dump someone's brain to a computer, but that ignores the fact no one has the remotest understanding about how the mind actually works. All of the writings in the field are vague at best, like Chemistry textbooks from the 17th century, back before there was even enough knowledge to call the field "Chemistry."

Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...

[rnelsonee]

I'll have to agree with you there. I have yet to witness a gadget that will fundamentally alter human nature.

I mean, look at our daily lives in the last 1,000 years.

• We wake up in the morning after 7-8 hours of sleep.
• We wake up the kids and go to work
• We work (usually looking forward to coming home)
• We come home and have dinner
• We entertain ourselves with family/friends
• We go to bed
• Rinse, lather, repeat

When is that going to change? Sure, cell phones and computers make it easy to connect to other people, but was it that hard to simply go outside and say "hi" to your neighbors? I know I still haven't met my neighbors to either side of me. For all I know, they're the experts answering the questions I post on USENET.

And biotech advances? Sure, less disease, better life exectancy is great, but it's not like we're going to have hordes of genetically superior humans enslaving the 'norms' or anything.

Meh. I'm going back to work. I hope dinner's waiting.

-- Rick

The Singularity

[Zathrus]

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 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 /., I suspect the sentiment will largely run to that side.

Interesting times, indeed.