Of course, that's assuming that there is an optimum form of life. Most people look at evolution and natural selection as having some purpose or goal. It doesn't. It's simply organisms reacting with the environment,
trying to continue to exist. There is no optimum form of life, just like there is no external meaning to it. Meaning and goodness are applied to life by intelligence, trying to make some sense of it. There is nothing
intrinsically better about being a human, or being a cyborg. If a human thinks they are better off being a human, then that's fine. If a human thinks that they're better off being a cyborg (or a pure computer) then that's fine.
Just don't force everyone else into it! This singularity may be able to think faster, or be more creative, or whatever. It doesn't matter. Progress is defined by ourselves. It's not needed, and it isn't even really very
important. It's just a filter through which we see change. Yes, it's a good way to measure movement towards a goal, but always remember that these goals are never external, never fated, always created by ourselves.
Unfortunately there are goals for example if I say I want to be able to live for 100,000,000 years and not have to eat, drink, or even sleep then I would want to be a cyborg.
The optimum form of life would be something that was able to have all the attributes that humans have in terms of what they can do and enhance them by several trillion times while reducing the error of these things.
These are all external boundaries - things we can do or things we can manipulate. None of them are boundaries in the fundamental structure of our mind, which is a boundary of a wholly new kind. People think in pretty
much the same way today as they did when the Ice Age finished, and yet we're coming up to a point where it may be possible to alter this constant.
In theory all you have to do is change brain chemistry and you can go from a stable rational person to a complete psychopath. In fact this has happened many times in the past it's called going crazy.
But then we won't be human any more. We are defined by both our capabilities and our limitations, and any attempt at altering the mechanisms of our conscioussness is invarably going to alter the very nature of who we
are and how we think.
Hmmm I remember when I got a comptuer and was able to actually have the magic of writing a document without needing to get correction fluid on a piece of typing paper and have to basically have nearly perfect typing skills. Now it's almost routine to have mistakes and then to use the backspace/delete combo.
I remember when I got my first graphing calculator and was able to focus on the ideas not the rather hideously boring procedure of graphing by hand.
Will this be for the better? I doubt it, I think that it will merely be different. But the point is, it won't be human in a very real way. And what's the point of improving yourself if you end up alone and apart from all you
knew and believed in?
Apart from what? The computer isn't a suitable method to replace human interpersonal interaction. The internet allows for more and more means to communicate. I personally write more postings to slashdot than I talk to real people (and in more depth) then in real life half the time. It's just easier to talk to people in an online manner than in real life half the time.
The chances that humanity can alter quite radically their own existence is foolish. If you look at the basic problems that face our lives: need for food, water, air, love, companionship, belonging, knowledge, curiousity. These things havn't really been eliminated in any form. Maybe you just don't see them all the time but often times they are there always working behind the scenes.
Technology will never be able to cheaply offer to enhance humanity. How do I guess this? Well what about something simple like replacing a limb witha prostetic. The cost of prostetic legs is roughly according to one man I know who has one about ~$10,000 per leg and those are the older models.
Computers fail so much that it's impossible to be at one with the computer. Take a program I am writing now. I try to program the computer to do what I want and I look over the line that the compiler is barfing on and it just dosn't make sense. The computer is my adversary, my evil deamon. In fact until people can interact and in fact feel that their comptuer is actually a part of them and can be their friend and companion rather than a tool you will never have a problem like this. Even the best attempt at Eliza like programming called B Alice/C Alice is still basically just a regular expression system that I can trick into failing without too much difficulty.
Ok let's assume that you are right and that it's possible to have your life altered by a computer in a substantive way. Well maybe someone who might otherwise go crazy or kill themselves if they had to live in the world they have but in a better artificial one. No granted of course that this type of thing really takes a lot of immagination and belief and that the artificial world is in fact not a world at all.
This article is basically just someone bragging about his extremely expensive machine that I almost guarantee nobody on slashdot can even afford on a good salary.
Now take this for what it's worth but here is my analysis of the problem at hand.
When I last looked at physics as a career path (I did indeed consider it) the main problem was that although it did pay well the DoD basically had cut down on much of it's funding and thus had to release a bunch of people who had jobs. Take into account the industries that were tied to defense and you get a whole lot. (this was in about 97-98 or so).
Well so suppose you get a bunch of physics experts (Russia immediately springs to mind thanks to their really, really great ecconomy) comming aboad. Well if they are indeed smarter than you what is to say that they suddently have your job.
Ok what then? Well thanks to the small market you are whistling Dixie there.
That is ultimately the point. There are in fact a finite quantity of jobs and until all of our jobless/homeless/poor are filled I think that it's ethically unfair to hire a bunch of much smarter people to work in our jobs.
For goodness sake they have people live village idiots and Cletus the slack jawed yokel in India, Russia and the like too. You just see the competent people. It's fair when I can compete with Cletus and say Albert Einstein but is it really fair to have everyone like Albert taking my chances for a job?
It's sad you've ruled that option out of your life. Sure bad things happen, but I work with many expatriates and they've mostly benefited from working abroad when you ask them what they think.
1. I don't speak any language above a gutteral
Me Tarzan You Jane level except English. That would limit my choices of effective movement to Australia, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the like.
Do you plan on never taking any business trips abroad?
My family and I have never had anyone with a desk job for roughly 3 generations. I have never had a senior level management position and that pretty much rules that out.
Also, what about your fellow Americans who want to work abroad? If you stopped immigration, it would make them look hypocritical.
Then I guess it just sucks. If you want to leave the country then leave but don't think you can have any illusion that you still have the same rights as a US citizen just because you once lived there.
What's your position on working abroad for multinationals?
Whatever country that you currently live in is the country that you are in fact actually allied with and have citizenship in. You don't have any other citizenship in reality unless you are living in that country and are a citizen.
Maybe all the people you deal with have a great deal of free time/money to mess around with Robby Leech and the crew of lifestyles of the Rich and Fameous but from where I stand international travel is for the rich and well to do.
Yeah and what happens to all those workers in the country that hires the cheap foreign labor? They get sacked and then you have to look for a (nonexistent) new job.
Do you *really* think you are so terribly smart that you are better than everyone in the world at a particular task? I mean really don't kid yourself you can't be *that* good. It's just simple math.
I never plan to leave my country of origin mainly becuase the immigration is tight in other countries and because it's harder to get a job there. The expense is also huge. I remember one of my father's friends who basically ended up stranded in another country when his employment panned out. Not a pretty sight.
Looking at this from a mathmetical perspective you have this. If you look at the number of good jobs and then you look at the number of people in the world who are in the upper 1% of ability you quickly realize that they could eliminate almost all enjoyable employment. Not an accademic slouch by any means there are some people who apparently in the world have been trained to enjoy suffering and pain and hence work harder and harder.
Those minority of people will keep most others from getting jobs that are any better then McDonalds or worse.
Do you really want to be dealing with people who are Jeopardy candiates every day vying for a job.
That what happens when you have a lot of people with the same skill set. You get a problem with getting a job. That is the real problem. A overubundance of labor for the job category in question.
Last I checked there were homeless and poor people a plenty living in various tenement slums and the like that would love to do the work that you describe and yet for the life of me those people aren't living any better.
I think it foolish to think that anyone who actually wants to have a fair chance wants to create an even harder set of circumstances for anyone to deal with.
With more and more people in the pool your efforts become less and less important.
If someone wants a job they look for one in their own country. Also I doubt that some place oh like China would exactly allow me to immigrate to their country.
And there is the possibility that you may not even *get* a paycheck let alone a devalued one.
A job in the US without being a citizen is not a right at all.
Think about this critically. What happens if the labor market starts to bring thousands of people from overseas to work here? It means that if you want a job you can't get it because it's already filled. Rather grim in my opinion.
Nanites are still a pipe dream if you have to move minute chemical bonds with the precision of a swiss watch just to get it to work. Also that could take a *long* while to get just *one* machine that may eventually break down.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the difference between "progress" and "Progress".
Called Lifestyles of the Rich and Fameous or something like that. Gave the life and lifestyles of exceedingly rich men/women. Quite boring.
What is the real enemy is the lack of technological power and the means to understand it.
Of course, that's assuming that there is an optimum form of life. Most people look at evolution and natural selection as having some purpose or goal. It doesn't. It's simply organisms reacting with the environment,
trying to continue to exist. There is no optimum form of life, just like there is no external meaning to it. Meaning and goodness are applied to life by intelligence, trying to make some sense of it. There is nothing
intrinsically better about being a human, or being a cyborg. If a human thinks they are better off being a human, then that's fine. If a human thinks that they're better off being a cyborg (or a pure computer) then that's fine.
Just don't force everyone else into it! This singularity may be able to think faster, or be more creative, or whatever. It doesn't matter. Progress is defined by ourselves. It's not needed, and it isn't even really very
important. It's just a filter through which we see change. Yes, it's a good way to measure movement towards a goal, but always remember that these goals are never external, never fated, always created by ourselves.
Unfortunately there are goals for example if I say I want to be able to live for 100,000,000 years and not have to eat, drink, or even sleep then I would want to be a cyborg.
The optimum form of life would be something that was able to have all the attributes that humans have in terms of what they can do and enhance them by several trillion times while reducing the error of these things.
These are all external boundaries - things we can do or things we can manipulate. None of them are boundaries in the fundamental structure of our mind, which is a boundary of a wholly new kind. People think in pretty
much the same way today as they did when the Ice Age finished, and yet we're coming up to a point where it may be possible to alter this constant.
In theory all you have to do is change brain chemistry and you can go from a stable rational person to a complete psychopath. In fact this has happened many times in the past it's called going crazy.
But then we won't be human any more. We are defined by both our capabilities and our limitations, and any attempt at altering the mechanisms of our conscioussness is invarably going to alter the very nature of who we
are and how we think.
Hmmm I remember when I got a comptuer and was able to actually have the magic of writing a document without needing to get correction fluid on a piece of typing paper and have to basically have nearly perfect typing skills. Now it's almost routine to have mistakes and then to use the backspace/delete combo.
I remember when I got my first graphing calculator and was able to focus on the ideas not the rather hideously boring procedure of graphing by hand.
Will this be for the better? I doubt it, I think that it will merely be different. But the point is, it won't be human in a very real way. And what's the point of improving yourself if you end up alone and apart from all you
knew and believed in?
Apart from what? The computer isn't a suitable method to replace human interpersonal interaction. The internet allows for more and more means to communicate. I personally write more postings to slashdot than I talk to real people (and in more depth) then in real life half the time. It's just easier to talk to people in an online manner than in real life half the time.
The chances that humanity can alter quite radically their own existence is foolish. If you look at the basic problems that face our lives: need for food, water, air, love, companionship, belonging, knowledge, curiousity. These things havn't really been eliminated in any form. Maybe you just don't see them all the time but often times they are there always working behind the scenes.
Technology will never be able to cheaply offer to enhance humanity. How do I guess this? Well what about something simple like replacing a limb witha prostetic. The cost of prostetic legs is roughly according to one man I know who has one about ~$10,000 per leg and those are the older models.
Computers fail so much that it's impossible to be at one with the computer. Take a program I am writing now. I try to program the computer to do what I want and I look over the line that the compiler is barfing on and it just dosn't make sense. The computer is my adversary, my evil deamon. In fact until people can interact and in fact feel that their comptuer is actually a part of them and can be their friend and companion rather than a tool you will never have a problem like this. Even the best attempt at Eliza like programming called B Alice/C Alice is still basically just a regular expression system that I can trick into failing without too much difficulty.
Ok let's assume that you are right and that it's possible to have your life altered by a computer in a substantive way. Well maybe someone who might otherwise go crazy or kill themselves if they had to live in the world they have but in a better artificial one. No granted of course that this type of thing really takes a lot of immagination and belief and that the artificial world is in fact not a world at all.
I really don't get it.
I mean you have to have a *lot* of drugs sold to do that.
This article is basically just someone bragging about his extremely expensive machine that I almost guarantee nobody on slashdot can even afford on a good salary.
Then it works well.
Let's sue sips....hmmm well send the lawyers to rural Siberia and make him pay!
If you have something objectionable you don't tell them where you live.
You are *always* going to have someone better than you or at least *as good* as you. There is no best in a world of 6,000,000,000+ people.
Now take this for what it's worth but here is my analysis of the problem at hand.
When I last looked at physics as a career path (I did indeed consider it) the main problem was that although it did pay well the DoD basically had cut down on much of it's funding and thus had to release a bunch of people who had jobs. Take into account the industries that were tied to defense and you get a whole lot. (this was in about 97-98 or so).
Well so suppose you get a bunch of physics experts (Russia immediately springs to mind thanks to their really, really great ecconomy) comming aboad. Well if they are indeed smarter than you what is to say that they suddently have your job.
Ok what then? Well thanks to the small market you are whistling Dixie there.
That is ultimately the point. There are in fact a finite quantity of jobs and until all of our jobless/homeless/poor are filled I think that it's ethically unfair to hire a bunch of much smarter people to work in our jobs.
For goodness sake they have people live village idiots and Cletus the slack jawed yokel in India, Russia and the like too. You just see the competent people. It's fair when I can compete with Cletus and say Albert Einstein but is it really fair to have everyone like Albert taking my chances for a job?
It's sad you've ruled that option out of your life. Sure bad things happen, but I work with many expatriates and they've mostly benefited from working abroad when you ask them what they think.
1. I don't speak any language above a gutteral
Me Tarzan You Jane level except English. That would limit my choices of effective movement to Australia, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the like.
Do you plan on never taking any business trips abroad?
My family and I have never had anyone with a desk job for roughly 3 generations. I have never had a senior level management position and that pretty much rules that out.
Also, what about your fellow Americans who want to work abroad? If you stopped immigration, it would make them look hypocritical.
Then I guess it just sucks. If you want to leave the country then leave but don't think you can have any illusion that you still have the same rights as a US citizen just because you once lived there.
What's your position on working abroad for multinationals?
Whatever country that you currently live in is the country that you are in fact actually allied with and have citizenship in. You don't have any other citizenship in reality unless you are living in that country and are a citizen.
Maybe all the people you deal with have a great deal of free time/money to mess around with Robby Leech and the crew of lifestyles of the Rich and Fameous but from where I stand international travel is for the rich and well to do.
Yeah and what happens to all those workers in the country that hires the cheap foreign labor? They get sacked and then you have to look for a (nonexistent) new job.
Do you *really* think you are so terribly smart that you are better than everyone in the world at a particular task? I mean really don't kid yourself you can't be *that* good. It's just simple math.
I never plan to leave my country of origin mainly becuase the immigration is tight in other countries and because it's harder to get a job there. The expense is also huge. I remember one of my father's friends who basically ended up stranded in another country when his employment panned out. Not a pretty sight.
Looking at this from a mathmetical perspective you have this. If you look at the number of good jobs and then you look at the number of people in the world who are in the upper 1% of ability you quickly realize that they could eliminate almost all enjoyable employment. Not an accademic slouch by any means there are some people who apparently in the world have been trained to enjoy suffering and pain and hence work harder and harder.
Those minority of people will keep most others from getting jobs that are any better then McDonalds or worse.
Do you really want to be dealing with people who are Jeopardy candiates every day vying for a job.
That what happens when you have a lot of people with the same skill set. You get a problem with getting a job. That is the real problem. A overubundance of labor for the job category in question.
Last I checked there were homeless and poor people a plenty living in various tenement slums and the like that would love to do the work that you describe and yet for the life of me those people aren't living any better.
I think it foolish to think that anyone who actually wants to have a fair chance wants to create an even harder set of circumstances for anyone to deal with.
With more and more people in the pool your efforts become less and less important.
If someone wants a job they look for one in their own country. Also I doubt that some place oh like China would exactly allow me to immigrate to their country.
And there is the possibility that you may not even *get* a paycheck let alone a devalued one.
A job in the US without being a citizen is not a right at all.
Sorry about that you see that's *temporary* for a reason then you can get back to doing whatever you need to do in your home country.
Think about this critically. What happens if the labor market starts to bring thousands of people from overseas to work here? It means that if you want a job you can't get it because it's already filled. Rather grim in my opinion.
battery charger that is only good for charging it's own batteries right?
Nanites are still a pipe dream if you have to move minute chemical bonds with the precision of a swiss watch just to get it to work. Also that could take a *long* while to get just *one* machine that may eventually break down.