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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

gizmodo.com

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#31

Post by neilv »

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 the few people who'd wander the halls of the Lab, at all hours, striking up impromptu intellectual conversations (new AI methods, transhumanism, philosophy, economics, etc.) with random students. (Basically, much of what I imagined MIT would be like, they were it.)

Tragically, Sascha died way too soon. I don't know how much this impacted the future of Transhumanist thought, but I'm sure he'd have done more to advancing that and whatever he saw that thinking should be evolving into.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#32

Post by taco_emoji »

danjoredd wrote: post #2

Does anyone working in tech ACTUALLY thin transhumanism is a good idea? It seems like a field ripe for criminal exploitation and hacking, even in an optimistic future. Unless I lose a limb, or an eye, keep my body offline.

Does anyone working in tech actually think it's a PLAUSIBLE idea? The idea of a computer being able to work AT ALL similarly to a human brain is laughable to me. The brain is a physical organ that we barely understand. Simulating a human mind would probably require simulating interactions at a molecular level, which may not ever be possible.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#33

Post by frostwarrior »

danjoredd wrote: post #2

Does anyone working in tech ACTUALLY thin transhumanism is a good idea? It seems like a field ripe for criminal exploitation and hacking, even in an optimistic future. Unless I lose a limb, or an eye, keep my body offline.

IMHO Technology has the potential to be awesome.

It's just that we're focusing most of the engineering effort on selling ads and generating dark patterns in phones.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#34

Post by wongarsu »

danjoredd wrote: post #2

Does anyone working in tech ACTUALLY thin transhumanism is a good idea? It seems like a field ripe for criminal exploitation and hacking, even in an optimistic future. Unless I lose a limb, or an eye, keep my body offline.

In a way I already use my smartphone as an extension of my body. Compared to the pre-smartphone era I remember fewer facts, knowing that I can easily look them up. I outsource even moderate arithmetic to my smartphone instead of calculating it myself. I use pictures and notes to aid short-term memory.

Of course that's dangerous (just imagine the gaslighting potential), but also very useful. The only real drag is the awfully low bandwidth between my brain and my phone. The display-to-brain connection over the visual cortex is ok-if-wasteful, but the input with touch is a real drag. How cool would it be to just have a math-coprocessor implanted that I can communicate with at the speed of thought. Or a knowledge database that I can query with my inner voice?

Is it incredibly dangerous? Yes. But many things are, and hopefully we will learn to mitigate the dangers.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#36

Post by neilv »

chejazi wrote: post #24
kanzure wrote: post #17

Reposting a comment of mine from 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731696 Extropians are everywhere. Many names come to mind, like Assange, Hal Finney, Jurvetson, Carl Feynman, and many others. I hope that something like this group comes back, but with a vengeance. Call me an optimist, but if they had put their minds to it, they could have accomplished much more than a mailing list, which has unfo…

> Cypherpunks write code- but what about the extropians? As Jim McCoy said, it takes Evil Geniuses to really get the job done.

Circa 1999, the Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS) startup had a group called Evil Geniuses.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#37

Post by jazzyjackson »

coenhyde wrote: post #10
danjoredd wrote: post #2

Does anyone working in tech ACTUALLY thin transhumanism is a good idea? It seems like a field ripe for criminal exploitation and hacking, even in an optimistic future. Unless I lose a limb, or an eye, keep my body offline.

I'll be keeping my body offline. But I think fusion with AGI is inevitable if we want to remain somewhat in control of our future. Otherwise we will be super ceded by super intelligent AI and become their pets.

where do people get this idea that a flat plane of silicon can ever out-compete the chemical interconnectivity of fractally-folded grey matter (don't get me started on performance-per-watt)

AI's greatest risk is people assuming it's superior while being little more than a charismatic magic 8-ball

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#38

Post by spywaregorilla »

taco_emoji wrote: post #32
danjoredd wrote: post #2

Does anyone working in tech ACTUALLY thin transhumanism is a good idea? It seems like a field ripe for criminal exploitation and hacking, even in an optimistic future. Unless I lose a limb, or an eye, keep my body offline.

Does anyone working in tech actually think it's a PLAUSIBLE idea? The idea of a computer being able to work AT ALL similarly to a human brain is laughable to me. The brain is a physical organ that we barely understand. Simulating a human mind would probably require simulating interactions at a molecular level, which may not ever be possible.

It's also not just your brain. Like... what are you without your stomach?

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#39

Post by jakzurr »

ethbr0 wrote: post #23
elliotec wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pessimistic and myopic view of transhumanism. Where it becomes a good idea is a context that humanity is limited in its current (biological) form. There are lots and lots of things that could kill our species over the next several thousand years and the transhumanists simply think it is worth investing in looking into how we could potentially use technology to adapt to those threats or enhance the human expe…

Working in tech + have a pathologist for a father. Unequivocally yes, I think transhumanism is a good idea. Arguing against transhumanism is arguing that you believe either (a) the body was created perfectly or (b) that we'll do more harm than good if we tinker with it. The body is a machine. A bloody complicated machine, with many parts we don't understand, but a machine nonetheless. I don't believe in a future wher…

Thanks, and well put. It's amazing how people who think, "I don't want to mess up my body," will come to a different conclusion, once they are facing death or disability.

Perhaps experience really is the best teacher. ;)

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