Transhumanism - The most dangerous idea on earth?

Dennis M Wright LOL

Pamela is right, after all!

Big thanks to ISPY for letting me know to come over and linking me in. I needed some love after sever ego bashing on and n the homework battlefield Oldfogey, for saying I'd gotten something right, after a night doing HS Chemistry with my daughter it's so nice to hear I'm tempted to swap her for you. Right now I love you more. (Keep it between us though oldfogey...teen girls can be a handful when perturbed. I'll come back when I've had some sleep so I can read the whole thing.

Hopefully this knowledge will coincide with the ability to reach other habitable planets or some other solution that is impossible to imagine at this moment.

Utility fog would make it possible to rapidly terraform the moon and mars while mind uploading is supposed to enable humans to shed their biological limitations.

That's what it says right here on the wrapper.

As for what will actually happen, it seems most likely some tyrant will convert the Earth's biosphere back into primordial ooze in order to save us all from the terrrists, insurgents, enemy combatants, or whatever devil of the day is in in the papers in 2039.

Either way, Logan's Run seems pretty unlikely.

Ahh, Peter... you brought up my favorite topic. Utility fog. I cannot wait for UF to be developed commercially (since it's currently beyond our technological abilities) and used for houses. Granted, I probably will not be around long enough to see it happen -- but I can dream, damnit.

UF is probably no more than a couple decades away if we don't destroy ourselves first. And if you don't think you can last a couple decades ... you know the one word I'm thinking about. Starts with a C.

Shh, don't want to stir up the muggles.

you know the one word I'm thinking about. Starts with a C.

took me a few seconds to come up with something.... does it continue with something you do when you smell onions?

hmmmmmmm cancer. Right? Automated nanobot cancer-killers.

But in under twenty years, really? We have to build complex nanomachines reliably by then, and that's a tall task. And the bot will likely need an onboard molecular computer for navigation and finding its cellular prey. Mark me down for sixty years until we see something like that.

How about two years ago? Advances and improvements are being made everyday. Now, it may be more than 20 years before we have a system of nanobots that constantly stay in the body automatically keeping it clear of pathogens - but it has already been harnessed to target certain cancers.

In 60 years, we will be completely artificial if we choose.

Overpopulation will be a huge problem. We would have to put restrictions on the number of children allowed to be born, unless at the same time we were developing advanced space exploration technology to colonize other planets

Why not start with the oceans? We could bio-engineer a race of mer-people to fill the oceans. Space next of course. But in bodies with no legs and modified to have bones that hold up in zero g indefinitely - takes away the need to settle on a planet, we can just live in space stations.

Will we have gills, or have to maintain some sort of breathing apparatus?

Cryogenics - in 200 years, if cryo labs are still up and running and contain bodies of this generation, why would that generration want to revive us?

I read a story once about a time when humanity had learned to cure old age and all the illnesses that plague us. As a result they were struggling with overpopulation but felt that they had a moral obligation to all the people that had been cryogenically frozen. So they woke them up, cured their diseases, gave them young, buff bodies, then stuck them on rockets and sent them on one way trips to colonize other planets.

Sounds good - so long as you give 'em the young buff bodies after they get to those planet. But this isn't really thinking about what nanotech can do. Drexler's original vision was to make copies of everyone's minds, pack 'em into seeds the size of sand grains, and fire all those at the sun.

Once they get close enough they pop open solar sails. Since mass decreases with the cube but surface area with the square, these tiny sails are enormously efficient and rapidly achieve relativistic velocities.

They shoot off to every star in our galaxy. Once they arrive at a star they use the sails to decelerate, survey all the habitable rocks, and design bodies suitable for the environments that turn up. Then they settle down and make civilizations.

Since our galaxy is only a few hunded thousand light years across, we'd colonize the entire place in less than a million years. Keith Henson suggested lots of tantalizing possibilities then.

Of course the obvious 21st century question about all this is "Why? Why wouldn't we just spend all our time playing 47th Life or whatever it's called?". To which I can only answer, because that would be sad and pathetic. Most likely some sad, pathetic slobs will do that. The sentient equivalent of peat moss.

Overpopulation will be a huge problem. We would have to put restrictions on the number of children allowed to be born, unless at the same time we were developing advanced space exploration technology to colonize other planets.

We already have countries that are reproducing at below-replacement rates, and the evidence is that it is connected with affluence. So there's a good chance that the birth rate will drop enormously with immortality, simply because people will put off having children until later.

If the computers are that smart, why would they allow our race to live any longer? Would we have a three way war between the cyborg humans, flesh and blood humans, and supercomputers?

Conflict is an effect of evolutionary forces. Beings which didn't need to compete in order to acheive preferential survival of their offspring most likely won't have the competitive drive...unless it's purposely programmed into them.

before we start altering the course of things

We've been altering the course of things since we first sharpened a stick so it would poke things better. No way we're going to be able to stop doing that, if anything is in our nature, changing things is it.

stevetherobot - Sounds like a good plan

Peter Merel - I have not heard of Drexler or his work and I am now looking forward to reading more.

Jimmy Havok - Very insightful points. I stand corrected:) The thoughts on overpopulation are especially thought provoking.

Isaac Asimov has some great writings on this topic. Its been a while since I've read his work but our conversation here has really triggered some thoughts. If anyone has not checked out his work, it is very insightful and way ahead of his time, and ours.

P.S. Movie suggestion for this topic: Ghost in the Shell. Anime classic, deals with all these questions, particularly "Whats special about being human?" which I find extremely interesting.

Amen to that. All that makes us human is our DNA structure. No matter how much technology is appended to our bodies, no matter how much gray matter or flesh is left, as long as there is still some human DNA in us, we're human.

as long as there is still some human DNA in us, we're human.

then that doesn't limit "human" status to just humans. what about people who have, say, a heart transplanted from a pig? They technically now have pig DNA, so can you now claim that they're a pig?

or vice versa?

Plainly the problems in creating sentience are deeper than Kurzweil perceives. We can't even make the equivalent of a butterfly brain today.

And that's not because of any limit on the number of transistors we can etch into a silicon chip. We're simply pig ignorant about how to use 'em to make real intelligence. Or even real stupidity - butterflies plainly aren't too bright.

When Kurzweil claims the Limpinwood X-Prize maybe he'll have some ground to stand on. Until then, he's simply part of a big ol' techie cargo cult.

Peter Merel
The thing is that it might not be even be transistors then, it might be nanotubes or computing by reversing the spin of electrons. Today they are already running simulations of portions of the human brain, nothing particularly mind-blowing (no pun intended), but steps towards true AI are being made.

To be honest, I wasnt convinced about his ideas at first either, but the guy has done his homework. If you ever have a chance while you are in Barnes and Noble, pick it up for 20 min. Dont even buy it initially, just peruse through it. You may change your mind.

We're simply pig ignorant about how to use 'em to make real intelligence.

Since we don't even know what "intelligence" is, how can you be so sure? And in the end, we don't need to produce "real" intelligence, just a simulation that is good enough to pass the Turing test.

In other words, if it broke, that would be intelligence.

Um, if we don't know what intelligence is, doesn't that qualify us as pig ignorant about how to go about it?

Reading a lot of the AI speculists leads you to think that if you just had a few quadrillion transistors, hey-presto, intelligence. That's like saying if you just had a few quadrillion algae, hey-presto, a tree.

I'm not aware of any real steps toward AI; the Limpinwood X-Prize has had no serious challengers to date.

I suspect AI will happen unexpectedly.

If you regard intelligence, whatever the hell it is, as a function of computational complexity, then it seems that if we just keep building more complex computers, eventually we'll accidentally build one that seems intelligent, and seeming intelligent is all it really needs to do.

In the meantime, all that AI research is producing some useful results, even if it isn't producing AI.

Sure, and one day someone will flap their arms fast enough to fly to the moon ...

I don't argue that AI is impossible to build; I just think we're barking up the wrong tree thinking that a Von Neumann computer is a reasonable architecture with which to build an intelligent machine.

Computational complexity is actually the best indicator that we are barking up the wrong tree. Every concerted attempt at solving real AI problems has foundered on a complexity cliff called The Combinatorial Explosion.

The reason for this seems pretty clear; our computers and our number systems are not framed to solve complex problems, but only a very large number of simple problems. When we try to attack a complex domain we try to break that domain down into a very large number of simple parts. So it's inevitable that combinatorial complexity limits what the VNA can do.

There are other possible architectures; FPGAs, for example, have been built to perform telecommunications processing without the VNA CPU/Memory distinction. Whether it is possible to encode combinatorially complete systems in an FPGA remains, commercially, an unsolved problem ...

Buy Apple's version.

Fukuyama was also the guy who declared the End of History. It seems that maybe he wants to legally mandate his idea by halting progress here and now.

I don't really agree that "Those on the side of technology come from important fields like technology and science." This is a massive oversimplifiction. Scientists and engineers are great at coming up with new ideas, and many do consider the ethics and implications of new technology, who but not always. Geneticist Dr. David Suzuki, in a paper entitled BIOTECHNOLOGY: A GENETICIST’S PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE (.pdf doc) asks, "Can the important questions be addressed objectively when one has such high stakes in continuing the work? I doubt it."

Ultimately, it's up to society to determine what is ethically acceptable. A desire to consider the possible unforseen consequences and ethical implications of new technologies doesn't make you a Luddite.

On a side note, I'm not necessarily a fan but to clarify, Fukuyama has since distanced himself from the noeconservative movement. "The End of History" refers to his belief that the end of the Cold War signaled the triumph of liberal democracy:

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has "evolved into something I can no longer support". He says it should be discarded on to history's pile of discredited ideologies. Scotsman.com

Here's the thing, "But what will this mean for our souls and what it means to be human?" is not a question that should matter when pursuing policy concerning scientific research. You can say there are dangers like gray goo with nanotechnology - just as the danger of nuclear war came with nuclear energy, but "Isn't this playing God?" is not relevant to any logical discussion.

Fukuyama doesn't want to consider possibilities; he wants to ban research due to possibilities.

Good point. I wasn't agreeing with Fukuyama's position, which appears to be based on theology. Just making the point that these should be issues that are open to policy debate. Technology which has been developed by irresponsible corporations and introduced without any forethought (Monsanto's "terminator" technology otherwise known as "suicide seeds", for example) should be subject to much greater scrutiny.

That said, as a big fan of William Gibson, I might be one of the first in line to purchase that new set of Zeiss-Ikon Eyes ala Tally Ishman.

I'll have to ask my biomedical ethics prof about Fukuyama, looks like he worked with him the whole time he was a member of the panel.

I did a little more reading, and to be more accurate; Francis Fukuyama's call for laws to ban reproductive cloning, creating embryos and fetuses for research are probably not best characterized as a theological argument, although it is a primarily moral one:

"My personal belief is that human embryos have an intermediate moral status: They are not the moral equivalents of infants, but they also are not merely clumps of cells that can be treated like any other tissue samples. My real worries about research cloning are not about embryo destruction, which is one of the things that concerns anti-cloning forces, but about the kinds of slippery slopes to which such research could lead."

"Our Cloning Policy, Hostage to a Stalemate" By Francis Fukuyama 2/15/2004 Washington Post

Regarding his book , "Our Posthuman Future, Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution", he states that:

"The aim of this book is to argue that Huxley [Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"] was right, that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a "posthuman" stage of history. This is important, I will argue, because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is, conjointly with religion, what defines our most basic values. Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal democracy and the nature of politics itself."

Interesting website, thanks for the link.