What ever happened to the transhumanists? • Hacker News Board

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#191

Post by kragen » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 1:57 AM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #11

daoist_shaman wrote: post #6

I used to identify as a transhumanist and believed that technology could do no harm. I was an adolescent donning rose-colored glasses, with a burning passion for science, technology, and improvement of our species. Only after an electrical engineering degree, 10-15 years of more wisdom, and dabbling in biohacking have I realized that we really have no clue about the massive deleterious impacts that technology has on…

There's a reason why literally every fiction work on transhumanism is a dystopia, even those were transhumanism is just a generic stand-in for technological advancement.

There's a reason why Batman is fighting costumed supervillains in literally every fiction work on him, but it isn't because costumed supervillains are a real thing, or because Batman would really be fighting them if he existed.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#192

Post by kragen » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 1:58 AM UTC

notsapiensatall wrote: post #49

IMHO it's in a trough on the hype curve. Tech needs to improve before it'll rise again. The promises of devices like neuralink are decades away from widespread voluntary adoption, at least. You can get small things done today, as you could 10 years ago, but they aren't ready for primetime. Anecdotally, I got a small coated neodymium magnet implanted in a finger during my youth. It was cool as a college student, I cou…

What did you coat the magnet in, and how big was it?

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#193

Post by kragen » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #31

The article mentions Steve Mann. At the same time Mann was at the MIT Media Lab (as one of the first "Wearables" computing people, along with Thad Starner, Bradley Rhodes, and others), more conspicuously involved specifically in Transhumanism thought and discussion at MIT was Sascha Chislenko. Sascha was associated with Marvin Minsky and Pattie Maes, and (like Minsky's protege, Pushpinder "Push" Singh), was one of th…

Like Push, and like my friend Aaron, Sasha killed himself: https://transhumanism.fandom.com/wiki/Alexander_Chislenko

We need to figure out how we can have what you imagined MIT would be like without driving our best thinkers to suicide.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#194

Post by svnt » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:10 AM UTC

revolvingocelot wrote: post #139

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granite breaks down about as fast as plastic. No, plastic is not very different from, well, almost the entirety of the planet earth. But for a thin skin of muck. Geodes and dissolved heavy metals and salts and on and on -all entirely 'natural' and been there forever - don't chemically interact, much. Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. Nature is not some wonderful synchrony of cooperative organisms. Everything i…

You aren't reading, or possibly understanding, what I'm writing. Granite seems fine to me, and even if it isn't, it is localized in ways plastic and PFAS aren't. Plastic is very different from almost the entirety of the planet earth. It doesn't occur naturally, and doesn't break down naturally; just like PFAS. You can obscure this fact all you like, but it's trivially true. >Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. N…

Your definition involves setting humanity apart from nature and then inverting the implicit superiority in doing that. Once you’ve taken those steps you can say anything people make that isn’t made by other animals is worse because it is unnatural.

To me the essential idea is we have the scale and capacity to move global homeostasis in ways that few animals (at least since dinosaurs) have.

Plastics are not unnatural. They are produced by animals. Humans are animals. Just more dangerous than others on a global scale.

Wax moths and bacteria both have already naturally mutated and evolved to consume plastics. Evolution and life are perhaps less fragile than you think.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t behave responsibly, only to say we also shouldn’t panic every time someone creates something that kills some stuff. That too is natural, and drives evolution.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#195

Post by kragen » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:11 AM UTC

concinds wrote: post #112

adastra22 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I being dense? What does VR have to do with transhumanism? Seems like a total non-sequitur.

See my answer to bufferoverflow. Also: virtual reality isn't just a heads-up display or an iPhone camera feature. Augmented ears that can hear things normal humans can't hear, augmented eyes, or an augmented brain inherently means you lose sovereignty over your own mind since there is a necessary and irreducible degree of trust you need to have in your government and in corporations: trust that they are not interferi…

Why wouldn't free software solve this? Where it is successful, it keeps your government and corporations from making you run software you don't want or keeping undesirable features (like interfering with what you hear or see) secret from you.

It's true that some backdoors or vulnerabilities might go unnoticed, but you can choose firmware with an extremely low chance of those. If your enhancement needs are modest, you might even be able to write your own firmware from scratch.

It might be convenient for you to choose to trust some little-known firmware that hardly anybody has vetted, in order to get extra functionality. And there's always the possibility that all the supposedly independent people who have vetted some firmware are part of a conspiracy to hide its antifeatures. But that's very different from it being necessary to trust governments and corporations.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#196

Post by xwdv » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:13 AM UTC

I think transhumanists eventually just grew up, realized how silly the whole idea was, and then were never replaced by some younger generation that shared the same naive optimism about technology that they had in early years. We’ve learned to look at technology with a more cynical eye these days. It’s like for any technology you imagine, I can instantly see how to exploit it at the expense of the human experience.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#197

Post by jccalhoun » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:13 AM UTC

I was hoping this would be more specific and do followups on people who were featured in places like Wired. For example they have a picture of Anders Sandberg wearing an eyepiece and carying around a computer. Does he still do that? I've heard about people implanting rfid chips in their hand. Do they still use them a few years later?

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#198

Post by svnt » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:23 AM UTC

myownpetard wrote: post #168

walterbell wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we did so without fully understanding feudal society. No human understood feudal society? What about the leaders of those societies?

There is probably some folk theorem about this. The emergent structure of a society is always more complex than the analytical tools available in that society are capable of modeling. As the tools become more sophisticated, the same technologies and institutions that enabled their development results in a correlated increase in complexity in the social structures. Forever keeping true contemporary introspection out o…

I don’t disagree with the emergence/complexity progression statement but the issue is more fundamental: you cannot accurately model a system within that system.

The thought experiment doesn’t work because the hedge fund would need to be transported back with networking and information access they can’t get in 1985. They would show up, try to get onto the trading floor, be rejected, have to get re-trained, have to hire an army of data entry folks, and they would still get beat by the good old boys network and insider trading that wasn’t yet being identified and prosecuted.

That’s all if they weren’t just investigated and arrested for cheating while their computers worked through their planned obsolescence timeline in some closet.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#199

Post by xvilka » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:34 AM UTC

> face a new feudalism, as control of finance and the power that goes with it will be at the core of technological human enhancement, and democracy…will be dead in the water.”

While there's a significant risk of it to happen, it's not a given. Brain augmentation connecting people to each other might give a rise to the direct democracy when hundreds of the collective decisions take place every day: from desiding if your local road needs an upgrade between community members to voting for the national parliament members.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#200

Post by svnt » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #113

With our current relationship with tech, nobody on their right mind would want to anticipate transhumanism. Fix tech first, then people will start to hype it again.

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