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
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.
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/
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!
Here's a PDF mirror just in case of /.-ing:
TheNextGeneration.pdf
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
... 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.
I'll be happy as long as I'm never a First Post Human.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
No, wait... it's blackout time, what am I doing here? Pfft.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
That's weird that you missed the Tomorrow People reference then! (I'm not familiar with the show myself, just thought the song was rather appropriate!)
:)
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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
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.
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"...
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)
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
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"...
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."
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
If the past twenty years have been any indicator, then they'll be faster, but with even more bloated, useless software.
But the games will be cooler.
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Understatement of the century! Have you ever thought about what programming would be like if your mind had a window into a computer? Imagine having instant and perfect recall of every line of code and optimization technique, as well as documentation on all the library or API commands being but a thought away?
The downside of course is that developing an effective IDE for the mind would probably be a while in the making. But of course it's an accelerating process.
Ah, how nice to have been born late enough that I may very well live forever!
Dyolf Knip
The book itself describes what might happen if privacy was completely and utterly erased for everyone, even the rich and powerful. It's like the extreme fulfillment of David Brin's transparent society.
Dyolf Knip