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“Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

2012diaries.blogspot.com

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Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#71

Post by mirimir »

wahern wrote: post #69
mgolawala wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps humans wont end up being inferior instead we will just end up being part of the system that creates the next level of life. When I was a kid, and learned about the billions of cells and bacteria making up my body, and how they communicated with molecules and worked together in immensely complex ways. Specializing and signaling and coming into existence and dying, and so on... I wondered if they were aware tha…

This is, I believe, similar to what Richard Dawkins had in mind when he coined the term, meme, in The Selfish Gene (1976). Now meme has taken on a more degenerate meaning. I read it 10 years ago, and Dawkins' book remains modern even today. Genetic evolutionary science hasn't surpassed it, we've just developed a richer understanding of the chemistry.

To paraphrase TFA's title, "human beings are the sex organs of the human genome".

To borrow the terminology used for plants and algae, we are the diploid sporophyte phase. And our gonads are the haploid gametophyte phase, which trigger development of sex organs. That is, flowers.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#72

Post by inventtheday »

leppr wrote: post #65
mgolawala wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps humans wont end up being inferior instead we will just end up being part of the system that creates the next level of life. When I was a kid, and learned about the billions of cells and bacteria making up my body, and how they communicated with molecules and worked together in immensely complex ways. Specializing and signaling and coming into existence and dying, and so on... I wondered if they were aware tha…

Smart contracts, and distributed value networks in general are the gateway to this vision. It will be attained once one of these contracts/DAO/AI/whatever becomes self-sustaining. The DAO will "employ" people in exchange for cryptocurrency, interact with other DAOs, and influence the lives of millions of humans. All the while most individual participants will have no agency against the Dao. We're already used to this…

it's worth noting that today we already have self sustaining business machines called corporations.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#73

Post by marcosdumay »

pygy_ wrote: post #57
EGreg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, rich people are rich because money is fungible. It is a medium of exchange and readily convertible to other mediums of exchange. And the rich have a lot of it. So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Now, it can be that computers (or those with computers) will be able to attract more and more money, as we have had with the speculation bubble in cryptocurrencies, a…

> So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Money is, quite literally, the power to have others act for you within the rules of society (i.e. laws, for the plebs, and nought for the very rich). Why would computers value human money in a world where human work is worthless (to computers)? There goes fungibility. Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the p…

> Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the power of the very rich disappears as well.

Whoever has control of the industry will be the very rich. If the computers have control of themselves (why would we set them that way?) then we are already toast.

By the way, UBI is a form of avoiding some dangerous concentration of power. In a world with escalating automation everything gets cheaper and cheaper, so any money distributed to the masses is enough to avoid making them irrelevant.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#74

Post by MichaelZuo »

inventtheday wrote: post #72
leppr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart contracts, and distributed value networks in general are the gateway to this vision. It will be attained once one of these contracts/DAO/AI/whatever becomes self-sustaining. The DAO will "employ" people in exchange for cryptocurrency, interact with other DAOs, and influence the lives of millions of humans. All the while most individual participants will have no agency against the Dao. We're already used to this…

it's worth noting that today we already have self sustaining business machines called corporations.

I would question the self sustaining part depending on the company and the timescale. For the infinite timescale I doubt any currently existing companies, or groups of, can self sustain indefinitely.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#75

Post by leppr »

inventtheday wrote: post #72
leppr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart contracts, and distributed value networks in general are the gateway to this vision. It will be attained once one of these contracts/DAO/AI/whatever becomes self-sustaining. The DAO will "employ" people in exchange for cryptocurrency, interact with other DAOs, and influence the lives of millions of humans. All the while most individual participants will have no agency against the Dao. We're already used to this…

it's worth noting that today we already have self sustaining business machines called corporations.

Yes, what I'm talking about is definitely an evolution of corporations. But corporations are more easily influenced, taken down, and are bound by laws. Bitcoin can't be forcibly shutdown.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#76

Post by pygy_ »

marcosdumay wrote: post #73
pygy_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Money is, quite literally, the power to have others act for you within the rules of society (i.e. laws, for the plebs, and nought for the very rich). Why would computers value human money in a world where human work is worthless (to computers)? There goes fungibility. Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the p…

> Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the power of the very rich disappears as well. Whoever has control of the industry will be the very rich. If the computers have control of themselves (why would we set them that way?) then we are already toast. By the way, UBI is a form of avoiding some dangerous concentration of power. In a world with escalating automation everything gets cheaper and cheaper, s…

> Why would we set them that way?

Growth? Short-term profit? Whatever, we don't even have to set them up that way, they could also end up accidentally in control. This would be all the more easier now that resource extraction (farming and mining), logistics, resource transformation and firepower are all being automated away.

Re. UBI: There are two prongs to power: construction (economy) and destruction (military). The latter is necessary to secure resources to power the former.

UBI is about numbing people down to the fact that they are being stripped of their economic power (the only one they still have at this point). I don't see why capitalism would waste resources by feeding billions of idle meat bags.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#78

Post by ultimape »

Jedi72 wrote: post #9

"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self…

I like this quote because my research into the spread of information systems speeding up and accelerating the decline of man goes back to the 1700s. It suggests others have been seeing the pace of change in how society is structured and noticing the patterns.

By the 1850s, the pooping duck machine might as well have been in a museum http://www.weirdhistorian.com/the-pooping-duck/

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#79

Post by ultimape »

mirimir wrote: post #71
wahern wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, I believe, similar to what Richard Dawkins had in mind when he coined the term, meme, in The Selfish Gene (1976). Now meme has taken on a more degenerate meaning. I read it 10 years ago, and Dawkins' book remains modern even today. Genetic evolutionary science hasn't surpassed it, we've just developed a richer understanding of the chemistry.

To paraphrase TFA's title, "human beings are the sex organs of the human genome". To borrow the terminology used for plants and algae, we are the diploid sporophyte phase. And our gonads are the haploid gametophyte phase, which trigger development of sex organs. That is, flowers.

Plants use external sex organs (bees, ants, crickets, wasps, bats) to mate. https://blogs.cornell.edu/moreaulab/wp-content/uploads/2018/...

I'm about to go fondle some flowers to ensure they pollinate correctly.

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