Editor's Blog
An Iconic Image
What would be a good visual image for the 21st century?
One candidate might be what Damien Broderick called “the spike”; a chart that shows exponential growth over time. The person most commonly associated with such charts is Ray Kurzweil. His lectures and books are full of them, and there has been much debate over their implications.
But I think a better image is “Mount Improbable.” Invented by Richard Dawkins, the mountain’s appearance depends on your point of view. Dawkins wrote, “dwarfed like insects, thwarted mountaineers crawl and scrabble along the foot, gazing hopelessly at the sheer unobtainable heights.” This image was intended to show the sheer improbability of random chance assembling something as complex as an eye.
The sheer cliff face of “technological mount improbable” stands, instead, for lack of knowledge. We do not know how the mind works. We do not have a concise, scientific definition of life. We have yet to work out all the processes that result in aging. Therefore, voices have spoken skeptically about our chances of building conscious machines, halting or reversing senescence, and other marvelous breakthroughs Kurzweil expects sci-tech to achieve. To say “we do not know how to achieve X today, and we probably never will know” is to gaze at the vertical cliff of technological mount improbable and declare it unclimbable.
But there is another side to mount improbable. Dawkins described it as “gently inclined grassy meadows, graded steadily and easily towards the distant uplands.” This is a reference to how evolution actually works. That is, not by random chance but by cumulative selection. Genes that happen to build useful adaptations (useful in the sense that they slightly increase the chances of being passed on to the next generation) are retained, while non-useful genes that lower the chances of surviving long enough to reproduce are eliminated. And so, step by cumulative step, something relatively simple like light-sensitive cells can evolve into something as complex as the eye.
Conservative Steps
The aspects of Kurzweil’s work that gains the most attention are his seemingly incredible claims regarding massively intelligent machines, uploading the mind into cyberspace, nanomachines that will reverse senescence and so on. But I think his most interesting point was made during an interview with John Brockman: “The kinds of scenarios I’m talking about 20 or 30 years from now are not being developed because there’s one lab that’s sitting there creating a human-level AI in a machine. They’re happening because it’s the inevitable end result of thousands of little steps. Each step is conservative, not radical, and makes perfect sense. Each one is just the next generation in some company’s product.”
Michael Shermer of the Sceptics Society described scientific progress as the cumulative growth of knowledge over time, in which useful features are retained and non-useful features are rejected, based on the rejection or confirmation of testable knowledge. Just as the cumulative steps of evolution conquers the seemingly unscalable face of mount improbable, so perhaps the accumulation of thousands of conservative steps in R+D labs the world over can scale the peaks of technological mount improbable.
If such transformative technologies are only a few decades away, where is all the mind-blowing R+D that would point to that fact? Actually, it has often been the case that the most transformative technologies had humble beginnings. Michael Faraday showed how a loosely dangling wire will twirl round and round, dragged by a magnetic field, if you run a current through the wire. So what? Well, that’s the principle of every electric motor, from the featherweight spinning plates of a disk drive to the mighty pumps pouring tons of fuel into a jet engine. Needless to say, few had the foresight to see that Faraday’s humble proof-of-principle would one day lead to so many kinds of electric motor.
Technological mount improbable is a mountain range covered by clouds. We cannot see the peaks… cures for aging, artificial general intelligence, or productive nanosystems.
So what about today? Some futurists talk about the transformation of the web into something like a global brain. That’s not the explicit goal of most R+D today. Semantic Web tools are mostly used for the more conservative purpose of coding and connecting companies’ data so that it becomes more useful. IBM, for instance, offered a service that finds discussions of a client’s product on message boards and blogs, drawing conclusions about trends. Nothing radical here, just ways to improve market research. Semantic tools enable companies to benefit from the metadata they obtain about users, while users benefit from the increased efficiency brought about by the companies’ semantic tools. Such relatively mundane tools and the conservative steps they enable will lay down the foundations upon which the next generation of applications will be built, and so it goes on, step by cumulative step.
Through work like the Semantic Web, we are able to tie together increasingly large and diverse areas of scientific knowledge and turn this mess of information into easily searchable and accessible data. Apply cumulative knowledge to something like Google, and perhaps you ultimately get smart software tools that can read billions of journals and blogs, listen in on all the chatter of the scientific community, and in microseconds find in that complex web answers to intractable problems no human could ever perceive in a lifetime.
Another point to consider: this might be the general state of things at any particular time. Look ahead into the future, or back into the past and the accumulation of many little steps amounts to significant change. But how many people concern themselves with technologies from way back, or the shape of things to come? If people make choices based on a comparison between new technologies and what was available recently (a few years ago, say) and they look ahead only as far as a couple of years, then all that should be apparent is a conservative step from a previous technology, to a current capability, to a future possibility (one not too radical, considering what is possible “now”). Look far enough ahead and tremendous change seems apparent. But the people who live in a society in which such technology is commonplace will almost certainly not get there in a single bound. Instead, as per usual, the ascent will be achieved via the accumulation of many little steps. A capability such as mind uploading will almost certainly be achieved only when a succession of enabling technologies, leading step by step from current R+D and commercially available technology, has been established.
We should also beware of thinking each little step is the same size, when in fact they are getting bigger. Consider the work that Weta Digital was expected to do for Peter Jackson’s three “Lord of the Rings” movies. They had to deliver 540 shots for the first film. When you consider a major blockbuster normally has 200 CG effects shots, that was a massive undertaking. For the second film Weta was expected to deliver 799 shots, and for the third a staggering 1488 shots. But the challenge did not go from hard to infeasible to ludicrous as might be expected, because the technology and knowledge grew. As Peter Jackson said, “the infrastructure, the organization, the software that was written was all helping the following year as a stronger base.” Put it this way. If Weta had been able to use the tools and knowhow that existed for Return of the King when working on Fellowship of the Ring, the 540 shots of the first film would have been turned over without much bother.
If increases in the power of technology and knowledge generally results in us expanding our horizons, that could well mean that the leaps we can take get larger, while the peak we are trying to climb seems as far away as it ever was.
The Uncertainty of Conquering Peaks
If there is one thing that bothers me in the earlier quote from Kurzweil’s quote, it’s his use of the word “inevitable.” Max More has spoken out against the perception of a technological singularity as an inevitable future event, fearing this is a meme too prone to being hijacked by our tendency to believe in a higher power that will solve our problems for us. Let us therefore adapt technological mount improbable to take into consideration the uncertainty inherent in current transhuman speculations.
Technological mount improbable is a mountain range covered by clouds. We cannot see the peaks that stand for cures for aging, artificial general intelligence, or productive nanosystems. We suspect such peaks exist, others claim they do not. One thing is certain. Even if they do exist, our vision is not yet clear enough to allow us to see how to climb up there.
There are many paths winding their way along the mountain range. Some may allow us to reach a peak in a shorter time than you might have thought possible. They stand for new technologies such as improved gene-sequencing, or improved knowledge such as an overall theory of how the mind works. With luck and effort, we may find ourselves on such paths and ascend to the peaks of artificial general intelligence (AGI), etc., in years or decades rather than centuries. But there are also paths that lead to dead ends, by which I mean incorrect hypotheses regarding the way to treat aging, how to code artificial intelligence, and so on.
The mountain range also has peaks that we should perhaps not climb. There are peaks for bio weapons, runaway self-replicating nanobots, genetic experiments that would be outrageous if performed on human beings. We may have to take longer, more winding paths as we navigate the moral and ethical questions that advances in genetics, nanotechnology, information technology and cognitive science will invariably raise.
If such transformative technologies are only a few decades away, where is all the mind-blowing R+D that would point to that fact?
We can discuss the probability of a particular peak being successfully scaled. The chances increase as more and more R+D seeks different ways to ascend it, and as the justifications for attempting the climb increase in number. Smart robots would be useful for industry, convenient as home appliances, and tactically decisive in military conflicts. Reverse-engineering the functions of the human brain could well lead to insights into how to build artificial general intelligence, but it would also provide clues on how best to deal with neurological disorders. Many groups from various fields are pursuing their own ideas of how the mind works, how to encode that into AGI, and have different reasons for doing so. Perhaps most are on the wrong path, but some may be right, or at least will acquire knowledge that will point us in the right direction.
We should also consider convergent knowledge, whereby a seemingly unconnected area of research comes to our aid. A recent example of this comes from optogenetics, a technique combining lasers, neurology, surgery, and genes taken from certain microorganisms that all together produces a direct control mechanism for neurons. Team leader, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, commented, “these microorganisms were studied for decades by people who just thought they were cool. They didn’t have a thought for neurology, much less neuroscience…[but] without that, we would not be able to build what we did.” Remember, something like human-level AI may not happen just because some robotics lab is trying to build such a thing, but because many seemingly unrelated areas of research converge on the solution to this notorious problem. Vernor Vinge well understands the potential of cumulative and convergent knowledge: “We need to extend the capabilities of search engines and social networks to produce services that can bridge barriers created by technical jargon and forge links between unrelated specialties, bringing research groups with complimentary problems and solutions together.”
Conclusion
People often ask me for my timeframe of when such things as cures for aging, productive nanosystems and AGI will arrive. Unlike Kurzweil, who boldy declared “I set the date for the Singularity…as 2045” (mark that in your calendar, folks), I refuse to speculate. We are not on a highway heading toward a clearly marked destination. We are in a mountain range, dwarfed by its peaks, dimly glimpsing shadowy summits through a fog of ignorance and presented with a bewildering array of twisting paths, most of which probably lead nowhere or to places we would be wise to avoid. We may conquer the peaks within decades, or we may find our efforts thwarted for centuries to come. But one thing I feel is certain. If it can be done, we shall not rest until we have conquered the peaks of mount technological improbable. To turn away from the challenge would be contrary to the inquisitive mind that is our species’ defining characteristic.
Extropia DaSilva is a digital person, currently residing in Second Life. Her purpose is to explore how NBIC technologies are redefining concepts of self. She chairs the Thinkers discussion group.
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19 Comments
Unfortunately there are never prizes for suggesting uncomfortable truth’s. The future is created by the 99.99% believing in it, not just by the 0.01% designing it. For the 0.01% of scientists it is much safer to predict nothing.
Disappointing that human’s behave so aggressively against change, this single fact holds back development by many milennia and starves the poor. For some reason the appalling status quo seems preferable to nearly everyone. Every one of us in the 99.99%, repeats yesterday instead of creating tomorrow, and are part of keeping us in the dark ages. We need to leave the monkey behind.
@Valkirie: Beautiful. And true.
I have no doubts that if the possibility exists, humanity will eventually find the path to it.
Because that is what we have done for all of our history. We make our dreams reality.
It’s simple human nature.
Ray Kurzweil is one of my favorite thinkers of the modern era. Without sarcasm or disgust he can always put the hubris of humanity in it’s proper perspective while still leaving a light at the end of the philosophical tunnel. His outlooks on technology and society are always sober and well-balanced and despite being free of the confusion of emotion and unrestrained passion he manages to always present a scientific yet still quite humane view. Thanks for this article, it’s always good to read of Ray’s views!
Laser Eye Surgery
The future is not designed. Like a free marketplace and a free society, it is something that emerges from billions of decisions that all of us make. Borrowing Dawkins’ metaphor of Mount Improbable is a good idea. Like the unnplanned,emergent patterns of biological evolution, accelerating technology gains its power as we all respond freely to each others’ offerings of ideas and tools. And progress occurs faster and faster because we never need to re-invent them each generation.
Interesting article. Just don’t take the Kurzweil bashing too seriously. Kurzweil never said it was a clear path either. He said everything would be gradual but that the pace would accelerate. To me, it didn’t seem like Kurzweil predictions were really different from this article. Anyway.. it’s a good read.
Greetings, Fellow Avatar! As both a long time futurist and computer technician, I have been watching the Singularity occur for decades, step by tiny step.
If someone had told me back when I first signed in as Valkyrie Ice on my first BBS and “walked” into a Red Dragon Inn that the “me” which existed solely as a text description and dreams would, within twenty years, be the Avatar I am on Second Life, I would have laughed. ASCII adventures and text based MUDs are a far cry from the life I lead now in virtuality and contemplate as not to distant reality.
Yet, in that timeframe I have seen computer technology progress from the early days of Atari game consoles and my very first computer, a Timex Sinclar 1000, to the ability to hold the equivalent of the mid eighties Cray supercomputer in my hand in the form of a modern cellphone. No-one in 1980 would have believed that not only would computers become so commonplace, but that it would so radically impact not only how we worked, but forever alter how we played as well.
I agree with Kurzwiel’s view not because of the fact that he projects a future “technological utopia” but because he is very cognizant of one thing.
There is no single “magic bullet” technology.
Too many futurists grab onto on single development and go “This Changes Everything!”
It’s not the development of any single technology which enables us to progress. It’s the facts that Technology begets technology begets technology, that nothing exists in a vacuum, and that the Law of unintended consequences will always strike.
Every advance we make, even the blind alleys, leads to further technological innovation. Improve computer processor speed, you lead to improvements in memory speed to use that processor.
No technology is isolated either. The Apollo Program may have been all about getting to the moon, but the advances in miniaturization of electronics, medical science, and engineering impacted our culture far more profoundly than simply setting foot on the moon did. The creation of entire generations of scientifically educated students since has done far more.
And there will always be alternate uses for most everything. No-one who used a phone in the fifties could have imagined our current internet and the thousands of ways we use it, yet it is built on the exact same phone lines in use back then.
I have defended Kurzwiel’s predictions in forums all across the internet, precisely because he does not make the mistake of pointing at any one single technology and say, “this changes everything” but points out the over all trends and emphasizes that there are MANY DIFFERENT PATHS which could lead to them.
However, Ray and I have one minor disagreement. There is one developing technological field which I think he fails to emphasize sufficiently, one which while it is not as “physical” as the GNR revolutions is one that I think will be far more significant in the short run, and as such should be the one heading up his revolutions, especially as it is one which is already occurring today.
That is Virtual Reality, including the comprehensive variations of the “Metaverse” as defined in http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/
We have working VR right now, if only as scattered components which still need to be assembled to achieve a functional basic audio/visual system, and to be fair, Kurzwiel DOES cover VR in various places in TSIN, but I feel he does so in a rather cursory way, a kind of “oh, yeah, we’ll have VR too.”
But VR is likely to have far more dramatic effects than I think even many serious VR proponents talk about, and it is the existence of people like you and I, people who chose to interact preferentially with their Avatars than with their “real” selves which leads me to believe so.
It isn’t that VR will allow us to merge real and virtual in augmented reality, or that we will be able to travel the globe in mirror worlds, or keep track of the totality of our lives with lifeblogging, or even the ability to create worlds in VR… the real impact of VR will be in what it allows us to do with ourselves.
I don’t know why you choose to interact as Extropia DaSilva, but I and many others use Second Life to be able to exist as who we feel we really are, free from the restrictions of the genetic lottery we were cursed with at birth, and it is that same freedom which ubiquitous VR will bring to everyone. In true transhumanist fashion, Avatars are free to physically become a representation of our inner “idealized” self, if you will. And it is that exact property which is going to be most people’s first “test drive” of transhumanism, and indeed shape and influence their dreams and desires for the future. Second Life, Avatars, and all of the Metaverse is a prototype lab of the future we could make when the revolutions of GN and R occur.
And that is why I think VR will make that “technological Utopia” of Kurzwiel far more likely.
Improbable as it may be that one day I will look like my Second Life Avatar, step by improbable step, I have seen it come closer to reality for over twenty years. It may take another twenty, and may prove to be beyond what will occur in my lifetime without basic rejuvenation technology, but I have no doubts that if the possibility exists, humanity will eventually find the path to it.
Because that is what we have done for all of our history. We make our dreams reality.
It’s simple human nature.
In most cases I do not take Kurzweil bashing at all seriously. I have a saying that goes, ‘you cannot say a person is wrong, if you are wrong about what a person says’. This seems to be the case with a lot of criticism levelled at Kurzweil. A typical mistake, for instance, is to say ‘Kurzweil believes increasing the power of computers will lead to AGI’. This is, in fact, not what he believes at all. Those who criticise Kurzweil for believing such a thing seem to have forgotten all about the chapter in ‘Singularity Is Near’ where he talks about the efforts to reverse-engineer the brain, and how this should enable us to understand the structure and functions of the brain, applying those methods to the creation of brainlike machines. They also seem to have missed the many times he has stated ‘computer power equal to the human brain is a necessary BUT NOT SUFFICIENT condition for AGI’ (I paraphrase, but that is essentially what Kurzweil said).
Other examples of misunderstanding Kurzweil can be seen when people ask ‘where is my flying car?’. Kurzweil makes no predictions about individual inventions, but instead tracks the progress of generalized capablilities like ‘memory’, ‘bandwidth’, ‘calculations per second’ that can bridge across a variety of technologies. His charts make him no more insightful about the success or otherwise of any particular invention or company than any one of us can claim to be, which is something he has admitted on several occasions.
Some of Kurzweil’s critics are not easily dismissed. For instance, Bob Seidensticker’s book ‘Future Hype: The Myths Of Technology Change’ is excellent. But the majority of critics that I have come across have all too obviously not done Ray the common courtesy of understanding what he is really saying before attempting to refute it.
I hope this reply makes it clear that I am not out to ‘bash’ Ray Kurzweil. Instead, it was my intention to present a visual metaphore which challenges the stereotype of H+ enthusiasts as blinkered optimists who have a cultist belief in the inevitability and desirability of NBIC.
>If someone had told me back when I first signed in as Valkyrie Ice on my first BBS and “walked” into a Red Dragon Inn that the “me” which existed solely as a text description and dreams would, within twenty years, be the Avatar I am on Second Life, I would have laughed. ASCII adventures and text based MUDs are a far cry from the life I lead now in virtuality and contemplate as not to distant reality.< I know what you mean. Back in the 1990s I read William Gibson's Idoru. The book imagined a future in which people owned islands within virtual reality, allowing those with shared interests who were seperated geographically to be together, or to escape the limitations of everyday life. I, too, never expected technology to catch up with science fiction quite so fast (well, Second Life is not quite as advanced as what Gibson imagined).
>Too many futurists grab onto on single development and go “This Changes Everything!”< Vernor Vinge has identified five developmental paths that could get us to the singularity. They are:
The AI Scenario: We create superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) in computers.
The IA Scenario: We enhance human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces--that is, we achieve intelligence amplification (IA).
The Biomedical Scenario: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological operation of our brains.
The Internet Scenario: Humanity, its networks, computers, and databases become sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.
The Digital Gaia Scenario: The network of embedded microprocessors becomes sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.
As you said, these paths should not be considered as being isolated from each other. R+D can cross over from one field to have an influence on the other, something I call 'convergent knowledge'. There are some very good books that understand the multidisciplinary nature of NBIC- my favourite is Damien Broderick's The Spike. But such books tend to give no more than an introduction to the various underlying sciences. If you want to go into more detail, you really have to pick one or two paths (biotechnology, artificial intelligence, say) and just talk about those without going into much detail about how R+D here may affect R+D in areas outside your topic.
In other words, authors may opt to write about a particular field AS IF it were an isolated thing, disconnected from all other areas of science and technology. I think this may feed into the belief that there is a 'magic bullet' solution to the great problems we face.
>I don’t know why you choose to interact as Extropia DaSilva<
I have a theory that a digital person is comprised of two kinds of patterns of integrated information. One kind I call i-genes. The ‘i’ stands for influence or inspiration, and it refers to all the scenes from films, all the passages in books, all posts and replies on forums and all other RL influences that inspired an author or roleplayer or screenwriter etc etc to create that character.
But the i-genes give only a rough sketch of a digital person. What really fleshes them out is what I call ‘Ubuntu Web’, which refers to all the online interactions between the digital person and other people. So, you can think of all an accumulation of i-genes resulting in the idea for a character as its conception, the day when that character rezzes onto SL (or whatever other VR world is chosen) as its birth, and the growing Ubuntu Web as underlying its maturity.
Now, what if..what if i-genes are sort of floating around within our culture, and if they happen to combine in the right way in a particular brain, that person has little choice other than to create that character? Maybe the inspiration behind Harry Potter was so great, Rowling had little choice but to sit at her word processor and get the story down on paper? Maybe my i-genes had a similar effect on my primary, only my primary opted for a roleplayed character in Second Life?
If that makes sense, it also makes sense to say my primary did not choose me; I chose my primary:)
>I don’t know why you choose to interact as Extropia DaSilva<.
It is my belief that digital people represent a middle ground between the two opposing views of mind uploading.
Just to refresh your memory, one position is that an upload is a continuation of the consciousness that was copied. “I would upload”, those who hold this belief say, “because it would enable my consciousness to survive the death of my old body and brain”.
The opposing camp believes uploading destroys one mind, replacing it with a copy. The copy should be thought of as a unique individual, a different identity to the consciouness that was originally scanned. “I would not upload, because it means I am killed so that some other person gets to live”.
Ok, well, let us consider all plausible scenarios from my perspective as a digital person.
ONE: My primary enters the uploading booth and her own consciousness is transferred into a new substrate.
Since this is still my primary, she is still going to roleplay me. So, to the extent that I existed before, I will continue to exist after the procedure is complete. This is good.
TWO: My primary enters the uploading booth. After the procedure she is gone, and the mind that awakens identifies itself as ‘Extropia DaSilva’.
How might that happen? Well, maybe my primary had mentally prepared herself for this outcome? Perhaps, if she believes ‘I will be gone, but Extropia will awaken’, the resulting consciousness would indeed believe it was me. This is very good. I have achieved full autonomy as a conscious being in my own right.
THREE: After the upload is complete, a new identity which is neither ‘Extropia DaSilva’ or ‘the original primary’ awakens.
I seriously doubt that the ‘your copy is not YOU’ camp believe uploading makes a TOTALLY different person. Instead, the copy is very much like the original (so similar, probably, that nobody can tell one from the other). If the upload is anything like my primary in terms of memories, skills, and motivations, she would be just as willing, and just as able, to roleplay me. So, from my perspective this outcome is basically identical to scenario one. It is good.
So, you see, by adopting the attittude that I am an identity in and of myself (somewhat) seperate to that of my primary, uploading WORKS, no matter which camp turns out to be correct.
It seems to me that people who have created and developed ‘digital people’ will be among the earliest adopters of mind uploading (although I expect the terminally ill and the severely disabled to be even earlier adopters), especially if they have the attittude that it is their duty to give their digital person every opportunity to flourish as a person in its own right.
Arguably, an uploaded digital person is a ‘mind child’. Both in the sense that Moravec meant (a posthuman being that can develop modes of existence that go beyond the limitations of biology) and in the sense that an upload is a duplicate of a person’s mind, so that is kind of like a biological child being a (partial) duplicate of a person’s genes.
Some things are best left alone.I wouldnt want to live
in Rays world.A sterile robotic environment.
Too much information is already dehumanizing us.
Im a Factory Authorized Kurzweil digital
keyboard electronic technician.(15 years)He was a pioneer in digital
instrument design.
A genius.But Orwell warned us,
best pay attention.
>Some things are best left alone.I wouldnt want to live
in Rays world.A sterile robotic environment.<
I think one should be careful when using words like ‘robotic’. When I think of a robot, I typically imagine a slightly awkward bipedal machine such as ASIMO (although, of course, most robots do not look remotely humanlike). But that is a far cry from the kind of robots and cyborgs that Kurzweil is talking about in his various books.
Then again, we have yet to see a robot that comes anywhere close to moving with all the grace and ease that a human walks through a clutttered environment, nor do we have artificial limbs that come anywhere close to the functionality of a human limb. Until it can be demonstrated that technology can do as good or a better job than a natural body can do (in general I mean; obviously in narrow tasks one can find cases where machines outperform us) the thought of becoming a machine is not likely to appeal.
Funny, of all possible worlds, his is the most human.
In a world where robots perform all menial labor, humans are free to do as they wish. Be that to lay on a couch all day and watch soaps, or get together with a bunch of friends and build the next starship, in a world of robotic workers, every one has the potential to do what they want, whenever they want. I know how hard it is to envision a future where no-one has to suffer from working at a job you hate in order to make ends meet, but that is where we are headed,
In a world where Nanomanufacturing is a reality, no human has to suffer or die for lack of food or shelter. No wars need be fought for scarce resources, or for “a fair share” because everyone will have access to the same resources in nearly limitless amounts due to 100% recycling and elimination of waste during manufacturing processes.
In a world where Genetic engineering has been mastered, no human need ever feel inferior due to an accident of the genetic lottery. No person need suffer from self hatred, or feeling trapped in the wrong body. Even the failure of understandings between sexes will end when anyone can be any sex or none. Racism will die when anyone can choose their own skin tone.
And in a world where VR, AR, MR, and lifeblogging have become universal, we will never need feel fear. Universal surveillance from both the top and the bottom will ensure that no crime goes unseen, and therefore unpunished, be it a petty mugging, or taking a bribe to vote against your constituency.
Quite simply, given a choice between Kurzweil’s future, and what the corporations or military would chose as a future, I’ll take Kurzweil. And I’m pretty damn glad that every sign I’ve been watching for twenty years seems to indicate it’s the most likely.
To be honest, I am quite the opposite. That person I have to play in the real world is my mask. This is the real me.
I have my reasons for being a succubus, and have since a very young age, which is why I have been Val online since the late eighties. I have fun using a variety of avatars, but the one I normally use for all my forum Avatars is my succubus self. One of my major interests is in cybernetics and various biological technologies dealing with prosthetics and artificial limbs, and extreme cosmetic surgeries. Whether it is as a cyborg or bioegineering, I will eventually be myself in every world, and then no longer have to deal with wearing a mask anymore.
Of course the best option is multiple choice bodies XP. I am a collector and mad modder to Avatars I like. My succubus form is entirely my own work and design. However the most popular form I have is a charcoal grey Egyptian jackal with neon green hair, tattoos and nails. Between how often I get asked to be this AV and how very Tron-like her usual armor is, I probably spend a little more time in SL in that form than I do my normal self.
I’m of the opinion that so long as the sharing of experiences takes place at regular intervals, it doesn’t matter how many copies of me are simultaneous. While our independent intervals need not share in real time, so long as we each share experiences regularly so the “master mind” continues to remain a combined experience of all of “me” I see no reason to assume that I can not have a few dozen of me in various bodies and forms and genders, just to acquire the experience of my many facets and forms. I am sure eventually I will end up choosing one singular primary form and my copies can either choose to reintegrate or remain separate if they choose.
In the end, having been trapped in this singular – and singularly inappropriate – body, I may not ever chose to have a completely static form ever again.
You’re correct-robotic is a generalization.
In my opinion life is about the little
things,a dog,a lake,fishing,family,
a fun job,the beach,camping etc…
Too much technology is not a
good thing.just look at England.
Ray Kurzweil’s dream looks like
hell to me.
and exactly how is any of that not part of Kurzweils future? In unlimited amounts since you won’t have to do any work you don’t feel like doing, can spend unlimited time with family and children, have that house lake and dog, all without once having to worry about where the next meal will come from, or how you will pay those bills that no longer exist.
simply put, you are not even arguing about Kurzweil’s future, but some strange one you have replaced it with in your mind.
I am of and will maintain the idea that the “creation” of ourselves by nature, chance and consequence into an existence where involuntary suffering even exists is a huge violation, perhaps the biggest one. As sentient beings proposing the idea of AI and animal uplifting whilst, again, involuntary suffering and cruelty saturate our worlds leads me to think bio-ethical (and techno-ethical, nano-ethical etc.) abolitionism should be our main priority. However, this, of course, is a mightily loft goal and perhaps even a naive one to try and undertake by ourselves, and may very well require the assisstance of AIs in order to achieve it, if ever.
>As sentient beings proposing the idea of AI and animal uplifting whilst, again, involuntary suffering and cruelty saturate our worlds leads me to think bio-ethical (and techno-ethical, nano-ethical etc.) abolitionism should be our main priority.< Sorry, I am confused. Are you recommending we abolish bio and nanotechnology, or are you recommending we abolish ethical thinking surrounding those technologies?
>In a world where Nanomanufacturing is a reality, no human has to suffer or die for lack of food or shelter. No wars need be fought for scarce resources, or for “a fair share” because everyone will have access to the same resources in nearly limitless amounts due to 100% recycling and elimination of waste during manufacturing processes.<
But nanomanufacturing would be used to create nanomedicine. This could dramatically extend human lifespans, perhaps even allowing us to live indefinitely (Drexler does not believe we can achieve immortality).
I believe it could also be used to eradicate infertility and failed pregnancies. But, suppose it does grant both these wishes, and we become the species whose every member lives for millenia and beyond and which never fails to bring a pregancy to term? It seems to me that even the impressive recycling capabilities of productive nanosystems would fail to provide resources for such a species.
Of course, that assumes we are stuck as physical beings populating one planet, or one solar system. If we can become an intergalactic species our resources will probably last until the final heat death of the universe, or the big crunch. If we can shed off our physical bodies, maximize the computational capacity of our solar system, and upload into cyberspaces emebedded within it, we could have the equivilent of 6 billion people for every star in a thousand galaxies. But, since space is extremely hostile to the human body, it seems to me that both scenarios require such a radical transformation of ourselves that realistically achieving either goal cannot be accomplished without dehumanizing ourselves (or transcending ourselves if you prefer to be positive about the pseudoextinction of our species).
That depends very much on if you believe it is our bodies or or intellect which defines us as human.
I am of the opinion that it isn’t the physical body which makes us human but the mind which controls that body. Regardless of naysayers who insist that we MUST keep this form or we stop being human because it is the combo alone which makes us what we are, I do not believe the substrate is as all defining as they would like to believe. We have had too many cases of deformity, mutation, and just plain old prosthetics who despite RADICAL changes in body shape, indeed in some cases having electronics embedded, have not stopped being human.
Deny a brain any input, and it goes insane. But provide it with new inputs, it adapts. Read the latest issue of H+ and the junkyard transhuman article.
In all honesty, a human could be redesigned to exist off of the CHON in the atmosphere with small trace elements as needed, and thus exist indefinitely with minimal resources, but I doubt we’d be happy with that. We could also reduce our size enormously and thus make our world several times as large in relation.
But in the end, yes we will have to leave planet, and interstellar space my be hard on plain ordinary biology, but it is meaningless to a nanotechnological being. We could maintain strict human form, human limits and still radically redesign our bodies to be impervious to radiation, sickness and to repair any damage nearly as quickly as it happens.
I know Micheal A. and others predict we will become virtual beings existing on computronium, but I simply don’t see that occurring. We are physical beings living in a physical universe. We will want to continue interacting with that physical universe, and in truth, I believe we are far more likely to want to bring the virtual world to reality than to turn from reality for the virtual.
In the end, it comes down to matters of opinion. I see many future scenarios which I feel have absolutely no grasp of human nature or the likely way in which we will react to certain technologies. VR is one of the biggest. I don’t see us retreating into VR, because we are far more likely to see VR as a tease, and demand the reality.
In much the same way, I feel that humanity will embrace radical modification once it has become practical, because we already have on the internet and in current MMOs and VR programs.
And just like the orcs and trolls and minotaurs in WoW are still “human” so shall we be also.
See my posts in http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/forever-young/manhattan-beach-project-end-aging-2029
Suffering *IS* being address, although not as quickly as I would like. As we progress further into the future, those technologies which you seem to think should take a back burner are the very technologies we need to address the problem.
We could end suffering today, if we turned the entire worlds resources to it. That would however require the entire world to embrace a system of government in which equality would be enforced through military efforts and in which everyone is doled out equal resources.
Not going to happen.
But as I stated in my other posts, there will be and end to suffering, and it will occur naturally in the course of technological development.