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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#81

Post by pixl97 »

aliqot wrote: post #55
mellosouls wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. He is only famous because of the callous methods he used to get his paper published.

Within the confines of this thought experiment: I wonder sometimes if anybody would have read it at all had he not committed these crimes. Obviously the gravity of his crimes overshadowed any bit of sense in what he wrote, and effectively nullifies all ability in most people to even bring reason to the words as they read them. That being said, there is undoubted truth in some of what he said regarding the perils of m…

Many people have wrote what Ted wrote in one form or another, you don't know their names.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#82

Post by [deleted] »

pixl97 wrote: post #59
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #46

Is there a pre-agricultural movement I could sign on to? It seems like every development post-hunter-gatherer has been in service of extending our lives while simultaneously making them (and the environment) worse. We talk about quality of life, but what kind of life is it to sit inside a box 2/3 of your life, or breaking your back in a factory, or on a farm? Most hunter-gatherers actually have more leisure time and…

And were completely at the whims of nature around them. Yea, this is great when you live in a nice stable climate oasis, but most places on the planet are not like that (and that's even before we add in man made climate change). It's all fun and games until you stub your toe and get an infection that could be treated with antibiotics, well except by choice you don't have any and you get to watch your body rot until y…

[deleted]

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#83

Post by trebbble »

camdenlock wrote: post #69
concinds wrote: post #58

It was replaced by Virtual Reality. The transhumanist philosophy was transcendental. Man, armed with innovative genius and deep technological knowledge, could one day remake himself and transcend his limitations. It wasn't so much a "philosophy" as a prediction of an inevitable and obvious future, which they were simply impatient to reach. Freedom from all biological, physical, intellectual constraints! Today, people…

Quoted post unavailable.

Zero progressives I know want that. Most distrust technology generally, and hate surveillance especially, government or otherwise. You've created a straw-man.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#84

Post by revolvingocelot »

FFRefresh wrote: post #48
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…

I think I agree with the thrust of what you are saying, in that we do need to think about the negative externalities of different technologies before scaling them out as a species. I am getting a little tripped up on your usage of 'the natural world' and 'environmental destruction' though. Aren't humans 'natural'? And if we are natural, shouldn't anything that springs from us also be 'natural'? We are subject to the…

Are you serious?

An ant hill or a beaver dam are mere reorganizations of known matter types, and could be analogized to humans building things like walls. Stone, and even some types of mortar, participate in the great cosmic dance of Gaia [0], just like the works of the animals cited above. They decay, they are broken down by various processes over time, they are fashioned of things found in the environment.

PFAS, by comparison, does not, cannot, and is not, respectively. It doesn't break down, and was never present in any ecosystem nor any part of the water cycle until a few decades ago -- an fraction of an eyeblink in the sort of evolutionary time it'll take for PFAS' presence to be integrated into the cosmic dance of Gaia, and until then it's just gonna cause cancer.

I can agree that invoking the naturalistic fallacy isn't good argumentative practice, but some things are decidedly unnatural. Creating novel waterproofing chemicals that don't have naturally-occurring ways to break down and then dumping them into the water supply isn't something beavers, or ants, or birds, can do. Humans have transcended the natural world. I can tell because of all the new types of things we're adding to it.

[0] should be read less as some pseudoreligious thing and more a handwave about the ancient, stable systems that repurpose atoms from moribund things into newer, more vital things: microbes, fungus, rot, uptake of substances by plants, etc

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#85

Post by adastra22 »

concinds wrote: post #58

It was replaced by Virtual Reality. The transhumanist philosophy was transcendental. Man, armed with innovative genius and deep technological knowledge, could one day remake himself and transcend his limitations. It wasn't so much a "philosophy" as a prediction of an inevitable and obvious future, which they were simply impatient to reach. Freedom from all biological, physical, intellectual constraints! Today, people…

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

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#86

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #46

Is there a pre-agricultural movement I could sign on to? It seems like every development post-hunter-gatherer has been in service of extending our lives while simultaneously making them (and the environment) worse. We talk about quality of life, but what kind of life is it to sit inside a box 2/3 of your life, or breaking your back in a factory, or on a farm? Most hunter-gatherers actually have more leisure time and…

It looks like we're going to get a pre-agricultural culture soon, whether we want one or not.

A species that spends more time living in a techno/economic LARP fantasy world than dealing with very obvious and real problems has extremely limited survival prospects.

From that POV the transhumanists already won.

Practically - here we are, self-defined as a huge success while our cities flood and/or burn.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#87

Post by danjoredd »

frostwarrior wrote: post #33
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.

My main area of concern is hacking. Imagine how easy it would be to jack someone's life up because they bought a "smart arm" or got AR eyes. Where technology exists, bad actors will exploit it.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#88

Post by pixl97 »

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.

People are already transhuman now. I have two pieces of technology glued to the outside of my body as we speak, they are monitoring my blood glucose levels and adjusting the amount of insulin my body receives in near real time.

Could someone hack it and attempt to overdose me with insulin. Yes, it is a risk.

But it is a risk I'm a thousand percent willing to take because life before it was chore where you risk falling to sleep and never waking up again.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#89

Post by danjoredd »

elliotec wrote: post #5
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.

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…

My main area of concern is people who can exploit these augmentations for political, personal, and profit reasons. Even in the best scenario possible, these things are going to happen. All code is flawed in some fashion. Unless we plan on keeping these augmentations completely offline, they can and WILL be exploited by hackers. Imagine how giddy North Korea would be to be able to mess with the President's body, or having a competitor hack your eyes to see corporate secrets. Or a disgraced lover wanting revenge. These are already real threats with current technology to an extent...how much more deadly will these threats become when we can't just throw the tech out or modify them, because they are parts of ourselves?

Even better yet, what happens when those parts of yours no longer get support? There are already people who were able to gain sight through robotics, but lost vision again once the company that sold them the eyes went out of business. We can't just blindly think about the best case scenario and call it good. We need to think of worst case scenarios to provide a safer future.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#90

Post by pixl97 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #37
coenhyde wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because that fractally folder grey matter has only been generated via random walk and what survives to breed. It is also filled with massive stupidities that can end an individuals life in a moment.

You're also thinking quite 2 dimensionally and limiting yourself to one medium. Carbon nanotube computing, chemical computing, even computing with DNA are all platforms that we can harness and have the potential to master.

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