Why Transhumanism should be the Norm. When thinking about whether to publicly identify as “transhumanist”, “techno-progressive” or some other label in my work, it occurred to me that the idea of being a transhumanist would need clarification for any people who might view it as an unnecessary imposition. Why should they accept this “ism” rather than the many other “isms” floating around? Or should they add this “ism” to other “isms” they have included in their pallet? This leads me to the discussion in this article. Transhumanism, in spite of the “ism”, shouldn’t really be taken as an ideology, even though it could be posited as being an ideology.
Should I consider it radical or strange of me to take a transhumanist stance in a mainstream publication, or a publication where the transhumanist approach is not well known? However, transhumanism isn’t a novelty at all, because it is itself fundamental to being human. Transhumanism ought to be seen as the norm, not the exception. Clearing Up Misconceptions About Mind Uploading. Franco Cortese Substrate Independence The term substrate-independence denotes the philosophical thesis of Functionalism – that what is important about the mind and its constitutive sub-systems and processes is their relative function. If such a function could be recreated using an alternate series if component parts of procedural steps, or can be recreated on another substrate entirely, the philosophical thesis of Functionalism holds that it should be the same as the original, experientially speaking. However, one rather common and ready-at-hand misinterpretation stemming from the term “Substrate Independence” is the notion that we as personal selves could arbitrarily jump from mental substrate to mental substrate, since mind is software and software can be run on various general purpose machines.
The term substrate independent minds should denote substrate independence for the minds in general, again, the philosophical thesis of functionalism, and not this second, illegitimate notion. How Much Longer Until Humanity Becomes A Hive Mind? Earlier this year, researchers created an electronic link between the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles .
This was just another reminder that technology will one day make us telepaths. But how far will this transformation go? And how long will it take before humans evolve into a fully-fledged hive mind? We spoke to the experts to find out. I spoke to three different experts, all of whom have given this subject considerable thought: Kevin Warwick , a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading; Ramez Naam, an American futurist and author of NEXUS (a scifi novel addressing this topic); and Anders Sandberg, a Swedish neuroscientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. They all told me that the possibility of a telepathic noosphere is very real — and it's closer to reality than we might think. Connecting brains My first question to the group had to do with the technological requirements.
Bridging the gap. Utilitarianism is immoral and inconsistent with transhumanism. Posted: Thu, April 25, 2013 | By: Reeve Armstrong Utilitarianism is immoral and inconsistent with transhumanism Everyone does philosophy at some point. Although most people probably care less about questions to do with philosophy of mind or the ontology or reality and care much more about questions to do with morality (What is good? What is bad?) And meaning (What is the purpose of life?). Even if the questions aren’t put explicitly into those terms, people will contend with them at some point. (At least people who don’t have to fight every day just to feed themselves and their family will contend with these questions.
To clarify, then, this is not aimed at people who are starving to death. Anyone who has been keeping up with the train of sophisticated thought, handed down to us by the intelligentsia elite, knows that secular humanism is in vogue at the moment. I am going to be criticizing some common elements I’ve noticed in secular humanism. So to the questions of meaning and morality. Google's Glass Castle: The Rise and Fear of a Transhuman Future. Terrifying Tech? What if Technology gave us direct access to information, directly through our bodies? What if the world of information sat there on our pupil, ready for us to access with the twitch of an eye or the swipe of our finger? That’s the premise of new webseries H+, a story directed by the memorable X-Men (2000) director Brian Singer.
The show starts off by introducing H+, a piece of tech that takes the recently developed concept of “Google Goggles” (glasses that access information while you walk) to its exaggerated outcome; a chip-like device that places the Google Goggle directly in the eye of the human. What’s interesting about this webseries is that we are so close to its premise—that we could directly implement technological developments in the human body that would in fact have long-term consequences. To most contemporary minds, this idea sounds like fiction, as though it’s a fun premise for science fiction, but certainly not something that could happen in real life. Hostile AI: You’re soaking in it! I was in a Facebook discussion about “Friendly Artificial Intelligence” — this is a buzzword from the Singularity Institute people.
They believe in their heart of hearts that artificial intelligence of literally incomprehensible power is just around the corner, and they see their job as somehow assuring that it is “friendly”, that is, having its interests more or less in line with human interests. (book-length pdf) Now, there are about three major things wrong with this, and the discussion was started by someone writing a school paper on just what those problems were. I chimed in: I am generally on the side of the critics of Singulitarianism, but now want to provide a bit of support to these so-called rationalists. Corporations are driven by people — they aren’t completely autonomous agents. Corporations are at least somewhat constrained by the need to actually provide some service that is useful to people. The financial system as a whole functions as a hostile AI. Mini. Quiet Babylon | The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations. One of my favourite recurring tropes of AI speculation/singulatarian deep time thinking is mediations on how an evil AI or similar might destroy us.
Here’s a recent example, Ross Anderson on human extinction as quoted/linked by Kottke. It’s a discussion about how a benign AI might be poorly designed and lead to our downfall. What happens is the AI is given a goal that is proximate to helping people but not identical to (because no one even knows what that means). The scenario imagined is one where there is a button that humans push if the AI gets an answer right and the AI wants to get a lot of button presses, and eventually it realizes that the best way to get button presses is to kill all the humans and institute a rapid fire button-pressing regime. You would have this thing that behaves really well, until it has enough power to create a technology that gives it a decisive advantage — and then it would take that advantage and start doing what it wants to in the world.’
The Transcension Hypothesis, John M. Smart, 2011. For my Ever Smarter World blog posts on the hypothesis, see: The Transcension Hypothesis: Do Advanced Civilizations Leave Our Universe? , Nov 2011. The Race to Inner Space: Humanity's Faster, Smaller, Smarter, and Wealthier Future, Dec 2011. For a lovely two-minute illustrated video riff on on the hypothesis by futurist Jason Silva, see: The Transcension Hypothesis: What Comes After the (Tech) Singularity?
, YouTube, Apr 2011 For earlier work, see: Smart, John M. 2008. Highlights: • Evolutionary developmental (evo devo) biology is used as a model for universal evolution and development. • A developmental process is proposed that takes universal intelligence to black hole efficiency and density The transcension hypothesis has significant and testable implications for our current and future METI and SETI agendas. Fortunately, transcension processes may be measurable today even without good physical theory, and radio and optical SETI may each provide empirical tests. Sections 1. 1. 2. 3.