Randal Koene has been the world’s most vocal, steadfast and successful advocate of the idea of “mind uploading” or, as he now prefers to call it “substrate-independent minds.” In this interview he gives a wonderful overview of the current state and future prospects of R&D in these areas.
Transhumanists seek enhancement in all aspects of existence. Or so they say. The average H+ers want better bodies, better and more deeply embedded tools for living, smarter brains and so on. But do the supermen and women want enhanced knowledge or awareness of themselves?
Walking down 33rd Street, under the shadow of the Empire State Building, Frank Capri heads towards his usual Starbucks on the corner of Fifth Avenue while a multitude of human bodies pass him by. Some of these people are tourists; some of these people have a myopic fix on getting to work. Capri makes small talk to the familiar barista, then takes his chai latte to a window table where he sits alone and ruminates about whether all this human interaction will disappear in the near future as robots will have a bigger role in society.
I’m a Deus Ex fanatic. Ever since the first game debuted in 2000 (well before I identified as a transhumanist), I’ve been hooked on the techno-futurist setting and the idea of body customization through implantation. Even though the games are heavy on the conspiracy angle, the designers do a great job of fleshing out the story and forcing the player to make tough ethical decisions given options that have no clear right answer.
How old is the transhumanist desire in man? We suspect very old indeed. The desire of transhumanists is to avoid death. Death is the enemy. It, to a transhumanist, destroys continuity of thought, interrupts research and learning and separates us from loved ones.
A century is an exceptional life for a human, but far greater spans of years will be made possible by the technologies of the 21st century. I’ll plant a flag way out there on the field and claim a million years: a life of a length hard to envisage. I am an advocate for engineered human longevity, and I started on the path that led to Fight Aging!, Open Cures, and other projects from the position that (a) immortality would be an unalloyed good if achieved, and (b) our understanding of cosmology does not yet rule out a damn good attempt at actual immortality — the “no death, ever” dictionary definition — or at least a life span of millions of years on the way to that end goal.
Transhumanism seeks to bring about a radically transformed future, one in which every aspect of our human existence is changed for the better. The ideology, though not explicitly dependent on any one culture, is in practice tightly bound with Silicon Valley way of life: intellectual, elitist, Americentric, secular, and technophilic.
The Singularity is probably near – and the outcome is radically uncertain in almost every way. How can we, as a culture and a species, deal with this situation? One possible solution is to build a powerful yet limited AGI system, with the explicit goal of keeping things on the planet under control while we figure out the hard problem of how to create a probably positive Singularity. That is: to create an “AI Nanny.”
Are Bill Clinton and George W. Bush sociopaths? Probably not, but since both men’s presidencies gave them control over thousands of nuclear weapons it would’ve been nice to have some hard data on the question before they each took office. Thankfully, in the near future presidential contenders’ DNA will likely be scrutinized for signs of sociopathy.
Robotics technology is advancing wonderfully and rapidly — but is it advancing in the right direction? Contemporary industrial robots are great for certain narrowly specialized applications, but lack the flexibility needed (in multiple senses) to perform many of the tasks that come easily to humans or animals. Nearly all robot research takes place in robot labs, in carefully constructed and isolated environments intended to work around the limitations of current robot technology.
