# Transhumanism - Debate on Safety, Feasibility, and Ethics



## Drain Todger (Oct 5, 2021)

First, a few invites.

@SCSI @Meriasek @Save the Loli @borsabil @annoyingfuck @Bungdit Din @PittyKitty @Fek @Coco Coir @Fanatical Pragmatist @Return of the Freaker @knobslobbin @Transreptilian POC @UVB-76 @Getting tard comed @640by480

After having a bit of a debate on this topic in the context of the pandemic, the Great Reset, and the continuing concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy rentier class, I realized that many debates on transhumanism have generally been surface-level. Few have taken the time to ponder the safety, feasibility, ethics, and other dimensions of such technology. Most conversations on the topic quickly devolve into techno-fetishism, with members of the lay public often jokingly professing a desire to have eyeballs that shoot lasers, a chainsaw penis, and a jetpack that unfolds from their ass cheeks.






This line of debate usually goes hand-in-hand with the so-called Singularitarian (a.k.a. Kurzweilian) view of the future. The Singularity as a concept is often misunderstood. People often think it means that we'll suddenly be living in the world from Cyberpunk 2077 overnight. What it actually means is this: there is a point in technological advancement where our knowledge gains become so rapid (i.e. due to recursively self-improving AGIs helping us along), there is no way to predict what the future will look like any further ahead than that point. That's kind of a big deal. The Singularity is not "the world is suddenly Cyberpunk". It's "we might all accidentally gray-goo ourselves into nanobot-infused meat zeppelins that fart their way across the sky". Governments tend to be big on making solid predictions for what the future will look like in a century or more. If there's a blind spot past 2040 or whatever, they won't like that one bit.

I must confess, I've been a fan of fictional cyborgs for a long time. JC Denton and Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex series, Motoko Kusanagi from GITS, Alita from Battle Angel Alita, Space Marines from WH40K, Master Chief from Halo, and so forth. Most fictional cyborgs are soldiers and/or martial artists, purveyors of flashy close combat. They use their posthuman prowess to do battle with enemies that would be impossible for ordinary, unaugmented humans to bring down with anything less than an anti-tank missile launcher or airstrike.

Some fictional posthumans, like the Archailects from Orion's Arm, are more akin to physical gods than anything else, using incredible levels of augmentation to completely surpass human limitations many, many times over. Archailects have an intelligence that is orders of magnitude greater than organic beings, are capable of math, logic and abstract reasoning that would confound us completely, and can even simulate thousands of lesser beings within their own mind. In other words, their identity and sense of self is completely different from us. It might take you weeks to develop a firm grasp of how quaternions work. An Archailect can do it in the back of their mind in nanoseconds and invent a nano-structured metamaterial with that knowledge while simultaneously holding a completely impenetrable, hyper-dense "conversation" consisting of the exchange of many petabytes of data per second with a dozen others. In other words, their ability to correlate information and formulate plans is unsurpassable by organic beings.

When we speak of posthumans, what we are really discussing is the end of humanity itself. The fear and loathing of the flesh, and its eventual decline into irrelevance. In other words, the entire transhuman project is merely alchemy and the search for the Philosopher's Stone that grants eternal youth, updated with a more modern name. Some of the particularly religious have equated transhumanism with Luciferianism, and indeed, there is something suspiciously LaVeyan Satanist about the whole materialist self-improvement aspect of it. Others are rightly suspicious of how the concept is latched onto by some of the most despicable people on Earth; wealthy cowards who want to cryopreserve their brains while kids in Somalia have visible bloating from kwashiorkor brought on by extreme malnutrition. 

Many people scoff at the entire concept as science fiction; something from anime, movies, books, and games where people beat each other up with rocket-powered prosthetic limbs. They have not been acquainted with the finer details of the tech, and have no idea how far it has progressed in a few short decades. We are a long, long way away from the earliest experiments with Utah Arrays, and we are steadily advancing closer to a posthuman reality with each passing year, whether the public recognizes that fact or not.

At best, transhumanism is seen as a logical extension of humanism. At worst, it is a stomach-churning heresy; self-mutilation and the denial of the divine in search of ultimate power.

There's just one problem. There's no point in getting stuck on the philosophy of it, because none of these things are hypothetical. In some ways, the tech to make cyborgs is already here. It's primitive - The Ford Model T of cybernetics - but it's here. Instead of the common fanciful and superstitious talk about transhumanism, I'd like to go over the practical concerns.

*What is the state of the technology involved? *How close are we to seeing practical applications of the technology? Now? Ten years? Twenty?

*How safe is it for people to use without causing harm to themselves or others? *Will people suffer from physical illness or mental disorders, like with anabolic steroids or other existing forms of human enhancement?

*What are the ethical and social ramifications of its use? *Will the augmented become demigods and leave the rest of us behind, or will augmentation be accessible to all? What about free will?

There are so many unanswered questions here, it's actually rather perturbing to me that our scientists and the special interests behind them are forging ahead on all this without stopping to consider the potentially dire consequences. Where are the ethical and regulatory frameworks? What's to stop someone from hacking my implants remotely and making me fold myself into a pretzel while attempting autofellatio?

The next part of the OP is split into individual sections that cover each topic in greater detail:



Spoiler: Prosthetic Limbs & Exoskeletons



There have been huge advances in prosthetic limb replacement. The current state-of-the-art prosthetics paired with a BCI are controlled by brain impulses and can actually simulate a sensation of touch, albeit in a somewhat crude manner. Some of the best publicly-available tech, such as Open Bionics' Hero Arm, uses a myo armband and the residual limb to transmit impulses to the prosthetic itself, allowing for a surprising degree of control. None of these prosthetics have reached the flexibility, strength, manual dexterity, and sensitivity of a real human arm, hand, or leg. They are rigid and ungainly things at best. 3D printing and additive manufacturing techniques have allowed for a high degree of customization, allowing prosthetics to be sized and fitted accordingly, leading to improved comfort and usability.

The human body is not a Mr. Potato Head doll that you can just slap new limbs onto at your leisure. Our limbs are highly innervated and full of blood vessels and bone, and are sites of hematopoiesis. A mechanical limb cannot support the health of the body it is attached to, only crudely replicate the function of the arm as a lever. A mechanical limb with excessive physical strength would have material and safety concerns. In order to be able to punch through a brick wall with a hypothetical future prosthetic arm, you would need a rigid exoskeleton to absorb the shock without breaking your spine or stressing the mounting point of the arm in the shoulder.

Far more practical than the replacement bionic limb is the notion of the powered exoskeleton, which is essentially a humanoid robot that overlaps the limbs of the operator, multiplying their physical strength and endurance many-fold, but often at the cost of being bulky, cumbersome, noisy, and/or having poor range. Powered exoskeletons often use force detection to try and predict how the operator wishes to move their limbs. This has some drawbacks in terms of responsiveness. However, a powered exoskeleton paired with a BCI is a different story. BCIs like Neuralink already have the ability to detect desired limb joint positions directly from brain data, and can respond almost instantaneously. For someone who is paralyzed, such an exoskeleton could restore mobility to their limbs, allowing them to get up and walk for the first time in years.

It will still be a very long time, at this rate, before someone would willingly cut off a limb and replace it with a bionic one. However, maybe that isn't the only option. Maybe we could go biopunk instead of cyberpunk, and use synthetic biology to enhance living tissue. That carries risks of its own, but at least the roadmap is a bit more obvious; enhancing lactate recovery and power of muscle tissue, strengthening bones, et cetera. This approach has its own strengths and drawbacks that will be covered later.





Spoiler: Prosthetic Eyes



Still not good. Not good at all. It is very, very hard to beat the image quality of a human eyeball and stimulate the visual center of the brain the same way as you would an eye. Current bionic eyes are basically a low-resolution camera that feeds into a controller that sends electrical impulses into the retina, which relays them to the brain. These "eyes" offer a whopping hundred-ish pixels of resolution at the most, making reality look something like Pong.

A true bionic eye will have to mimic many of the properties of a real eyeball. A human eye has 534 megapixels, wide-angle vision, excellent dynamic range, and can gather tons and tons of data at between 30 to 60 frames per second. However, our visual spectrum is limited. Future bionic eyes, aside from offering highly enhanced vision and augmented reality overlays, may allow for eyesight outside the normal visible spectrum, such as picking up UV or infrared, allowing for unprecedented night vision and an entirely new experience of reality. There has been some progress recently in using nanowires as light sensors, and future designs may be fully biocompatible and passive.





Spoiler: Prosthetic Bone & Joint Replacement



Actually very good quality. Orthopedic implants have been used in the medical field for quite some time, now. New techniques that print parts from powdered metal alloys, such as Arcam's EBM machines and similar additive manufacturing methods, have allowed for custom bone replacements to be fashioned out of titanium foam, which is biocompatible, serves as a scaffold for bone growth, and is excellent for replacing bone lost due to bone cancers. This technology is very mature, but there is always room for improvement.





Spoiler: BCIs/Exocortexes/Neuroprosthetics - Mild NSFW



Let me be blunt. We are gleefully opening Pandora's Box.

With considerable investment both from billionaire elites and military think tanks, Neural Lace technology is advancing far, far faster than people could have ever thought possible. Current BCIs are capable of decoding the imagined motions of handwriting into actual text, or vaguely reconstructing images from people's vision. Very soon, they will be able to project HUDs in people's field of view by stimulating their visual cortex.

Elon Musk's Neuralink is one commercial example of the tech. This device has already been demonstrated on pigs, and it could read the endpoint positions of all the joints in their limbs without any machine vision to check the actual position of their limbs. Neuralink consists of a poker chip-sized puck that is implanted in the skull after a craniotomy procedure that removes a chunk of skull equal to it in size and thickness, and then, the tiny electrodes, much thinner than a human hair, are jammed into brain tissue. This is very invasive and actually damages the brain to a small degree. What about infection? Meningitis, anyone?

DARPA's BRAIN Initiative are looking for something far, far more advanced than this for soldiers; nanotransducers that are non-invasive or minimally invasive, that can be introduced into the brain without surgery. Some of the most promising examples of this tech are the offerings to the N3 program, which stands for Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology. Teams from Battelle, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, PARC, Rice University, and Teledyne are currently all working on nanotransducers that all operate on different principles and offer bi-directional, read-write capabilities. They also have reversibility, meaning they can be extracted from the brain when they're no longer needed, or when it's time for an upgrade. This is an essential aspect of neural lace tech; you don't want something permanent that screws over early adopters.

BCI-based entertainment would be the wildest thing ever. Imagine having a huge wraparound display projected in your field of vision, or actually diving into complete alternate worlds without VR goggles. Just close your eyes, let the BCI lock up your body (so you don't flail and break stuff), and all of your senses get taken over. Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. You could be fed the illusion of having a different body, being a different person, in a location that doesn't even exist in real life, and so on and so forth. It's basically the Holodeck from Trek, except even more sophisticated. You could teleconference with people across the world as though you were right in the same room as them. You could become your favorite video game characters, go on exhilarating adventures, whatever you wanted. 

Let's face it, though. If current VR games are any indication, everyone will want it for the weird porn.




This has a dark side, of course. Your whole depressing reality could be substituted by the powers-that-be for one significantly less depressing, for instance. There are many papers that claim that future BCIs will be used to alter mood positively, eliminating depression, anxiety, and so on.

Wait. Time the _fuck_ out. 

Depression and anxiety are symptoms. The cause is a depressing environment. Rural hells with filthy running water and barely any sanitation. Suburbs in perpetual stasis, never growing except to add a new Verizon store and another Starbucks to the local strip mall. Cities filled with urban decay and homelessness and drug abuse, ruled over by a cadre of indolent, greedy, corrupt officials. When people propose fixing _you_, medically, it's because they don't want to put forth the effort and the money to fix the aforementioned things. They want you to just shut up and live with them.

Just read Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, or Huxley's Brave New World, and you will immediately see what's wrong with eliminating depression without eliminating the cause. It allows leaders to treat you lower than dirt, affording you with poor substitutes for personal fulfillment, and you can do nothing but smile in response.

Mood-altering BCIs are a tyranny enabler like no other. As soon as governments have nonsurgical ones that can bypass the blood-brain barrier and be delivered like any other drug, they will slip them into your food, or water, or a shot, just to reap the benefits of a pacified populace. This creates many obvious and appalling ethical problems. The main question is this; is the false sense of satisfaction from a satiety-altering medical device equal in value to real satisfaction from having one's needs fulfilled? Well, you tell me. We've been using Xanax as a substitute for having stable finances and a loving family for years, so there's that.

Elon Musk thinks we should adopt BCIs as quickly as possible to avoid being outpaced by AI. What he means by this is the creation of something that science fiction fans and authors call an exocortex. An add-on brain outside your brain. Technically, you already have an exocortex. It's that square thing you keep in your pocket and pull out to check Wikipedia or Instagram your stupid restaurant food. A lot of people nowadays have memory that is noticeably shot, because we delegate our memories to Google. We don't memorize things. Search engines do. If we need to know something, we look it up. That's an external brain. The thing is, your brain communicates very slowly with this device, using your eyes and your thumbs. A neural lace allows for instantaneous retrieval of knowledge exterior to the brain, or even brain-to-brain communication.

If someone is a wealthy, spoiled brat, and they have a BCI and an exocortex, they're now a wealthy, spoiled brat who is perfectly positioned to dominate the stock market. After all, they can research a hundred different stocks simultaneously while banging your cheating wife. When people are upgraded unequally, and the economic output of the upgraded exceeds those who are not, then you risk creating a permanent and highly stratified caste system.

Of course, BCIs will lead to other things, too. Namely, mind-uploading and SIMs, or substrate-independent minds. A substrate-independent mind is exactly what it sounds like. A mind that can run on any hardware. The aforementioned Archailects from Orion's Arm are perfect examples of SIMs; there is no real limit to the hardware, or the intelligence of a SIM. A future SIM may run on a Jupiter Brain/Matrioshka Brain. We might all be living inside a SIM's head right now and not even know it. In fact, that is the essential assumption of the so-called Simulation Hypothesis. If I happened to be a SIM powerful enough to simulate an inner universe, why wouldn't I fill it with people?

One could say this is the ultimate goal of transhumanism: leaving the frail and impermanent human body behind entirely. There are many methods that have been proposed to accomplish this, such as reading and copying neural states, or slowly replacing ("borgifying") parts of the actual brain until you have a consciousness running on a slab of not-brain. However, there are some valid concerns that mind-uploading may not preserve consciousness. After all, we don't even know what consciousness is, or why we experience qualia. Is a mind upload really me, or is it just a copy? Look up Derek Parfit and the Teletransportation Paradox, or Donald Davidson and the so-called Swampman to see what I mean by this.

Even for more primitive examples of neuroprosthesis tech, there are some serious medical benefits, such as curing paralysis by "jumping" nerve impulses across a damaged spinal cord, or fixing connectivity issues in the brain that cause mental illnesses.





Spoiler: Organ Replacements



Totally artificial hearts (usually used to lengthen survival rates until someone can get a transplant) and pacemakers have been around for a very long time, now. Replacing other organs is not so easy. The heart is just a pump, for the most part. 

Many other organs have important processing functions, such as enzymatic or digestive functions, which cannot be easily replicated with artificial hardware. Could you imagine crafting a bionic liver, or bionic intestines? It just doesn't happen. Such things would require artificial tissue engineering.





Spoiler: Synthetic Biology



For those who want to go biopunk instead of cyberpunk, there's this. This is gooey and nasty and takes you down the route of fucking Dark Eldar Haemonculi from WH40K or Tzimisce from WoD:VtM, but for some, that's exactly what they're after.

I'm going to be honest, synthetic biology is some really creepy fucking shit. Have you ever stopped to consider how cells in your body are basically just organic nanomachines? Yes, that's right. Every cell in your body is some "stuff" floating around behind a phospholipid bilayer membrane, particularly a nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum, ribosomes, and Golgi apparatus that synthesize and process proteins, as well as lysosomes and proteasomes that act as recycling centers, and mitochondria that function as little power plants. The nucleus is a blueprint drawer that contains instructions to make proteins, and cells can divide into copies of themselves with all the same blueprints to make proteins. Proteins act as signal transducers and relays, just like in a programmable logic circuit. 

That's a fucking nanomachine. It's a more realistic nanomachine than other proposed kinds of nanomachines, because it uses fundamental interactions of particles to drive it, instead of levers and motors and batteries and all that bullshit. In other words, it's not just a scaled-down macro-machine. It's more specialized for the nano-scale environment than that.

Researchers have spent decades trying to reverse-engineer proteins. What do you think protein folding research is about? You think scientists do that for shits and grins? No. The future of medicine is the ability to design any gene or protein you want, even ones that don't exist in nature.

That's another Pandora's Box. It opens the way to creating entire designer organisms "from scratch". Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs. What's to stop a lunatic with a bioprinter from making super-rabiespox with extreme infectiousness and a 100% fatality rate? What about an airborne prion disease that slowly eats people's brains? I can see why the powers-that-be want to mind control everyone. Can you imagine if someone from ISIS with a PhD in biology got their hands on this? Jesus.

Then again, engineered tissues could be made to perform a lot better than their natural equivalents. And, of course, if you could grow replacement bodies from scratch, Altered Carbon-style, you could also integrate all sorts of artificial components in the bioprinting process. In the future, the wealthy might transplant their minds into entire "designer bodies" built from scratch that could run the hundred-meter in seven seconds and do crazy parkour shit right out of the box. Hand over $1,000,000 in cash, gold, or diamonds, and you, too, can put aside a lifetime of binge drinking and hardened arteries and become the pro athlete you always wanted to be. MTFs could actually, literally become a real woman, instead of having a cosmetically altered XY-chromosome body with a non-functioning piercing for genitalia. Fucking furries could literally have weird, hairy, humanoid abominations grown for their minds to inhabit. Very simple, really. If you have a substrate-independent mind, and you can print bodies from scratch, you can stuff any mind in any body and try to get it to map to that body. Mankind could split into a thousand different distinct species almost overnight, heedless of the social consequences.

More mundane and practical uses of the tech might involve the culturing of replacement organs using transgenic animals and decellularized tissue and the like. There are already signs of this being done.





Spoiler: Nanomachines



Ahh, yes. Nanomachines. A staple of science fiction when magic is required, but you can't actually call it magic because it's not a fantasy setting. Few science fiction authors ever stop to consider the practical limitations of nanotechnology. No, you will not be able to jump ten stories straight up and tank a 120mm shell to the face just because you have nanobots in you. What's powering them? Where does the waste heat go? Calculate the actual energy density of the system. How many joules are we talking, here?

That said, there are many things that nanomachines could conceivably do. One of my favorite examples of a practical nanomachine is the respirocyte, which is an engineered, mechanical blood cell that can carry way, way more oxygen than RBCs. Enough for someone to subsist on a single breath of air for hours and hours and hours. The benefit to divers and astronauts would be incredible. You could go really, really deep without getting the bends, or go on spacewalks almost indefinitely.

Nanomachines may be used to build artificial tissue scaffolds inside the body, or act as sensors or relays, allowing for high-detail medical diagnostics. The future of imaging contrast agents may be some manner of injectable nanomachine. There could be some overlap between nanomachines and synthetic biology, in the sense that future nanomachines may actually be powered by cellular metabolism, essentially functioning as specialized organelles inside engineered cells. 

There are many realistic possibilities, here.





Spoiler: Social & Ethical Considerations



I'm going to split this one into a list of positives and negatives.

Positives
Life extension, possibly to the point of having an indefinite lifespan. This goes hand-in-hand with Substrate Independent Mind tech, which is the concept of human memories, intellect, consciousness, and identity persisting in a substrate other than a living brain.
New medical tech, and the possibility of healing paralysis, blindness, deafness, mental disorders, and other issues that were previously untreatable.
Increased resilience. Posthumans can be especially well-adapted to space travel, especially SIMs, who need little in the way of life support or food. Cosmic radiation gives living people cancer and cataracts. A ship bearing SIM passengers can drift through deep space for eons without them coming to harm.
The enhancement of human intelligence, empathy, creativity, and other positive attributes. Not only would this lead to the elimination of crime and warfare, it would also result in a massive intellectual and cultural explosion, enabling the discovery of knowledge previously unattainable to man. This knowledge will recursively improve us, in turn.
Animal uplifts. Wire up a dolphin with a BCI and now you can communicate directly with them, right across the language barrier. Wait a minute, that's fucking weird.
The removal of suffering from human experience. A posthuman could experience nothing but bliss, 24/7. Not a hint of depression or anxiety. Their mood would be under their direct control. Some would find this to be heaven. Some prefer to have negative experiences alongside the positive, out of a belief that it helps them mature and grow as people, however.
The establishment of a metaverse that would make our commutes utterly pointless. The time and energy savings from simply jacking into your job from the comfort of your home is incredible. This would eliminate many road fatalities, but also, it would eliminate the need for office buildings, as well as many services found along one's commute. Therefore, more space in cities could be used for residences, instead.
The entertainment possibilities are literally endless. You might have played a VR game on an HTC Vive. You've never played a BCI game on your neural lace. Holy shit. Reality too depressing for you? That's fine. There are a million different getaways, and a million more ways to experience them. Ever wanted to actually _be_ Master Chief and feel a grunt's head explode beneath your fist and the recoil of an MA5 in your shoulder? Now, you can. And let's not even get started on the porn. This is the Holodeck on steroids. Imagine shaking your twenty-something son awake and he struggles, curses, and protests because he was busy banging ten hot alien strippers on the planet Zorsnax. People will never fucking leave. 

Negatives
There is something about human augmentation that can be disgusting on a visceral level to some. Augmentation may lead to entirely new forms of prejudice, in both directions.
Overpopulation due to life extension, if there isn't a reduction in fertility (or lots and lots of space colonization) to compensate.
One of the positives is also a negative, oddly. The removal of suffering from human experience would result in people lacking ambition. By adjusting people's minds with BCIs such that they feel bliss all the time no matter what they do, you have effectively decoupled them from society. They no longer value goods and services made by other people and become withdrawn into an inner world of constant, unending pleasure. Autistic, if you will. If you are a member of the power elite, and you wish for your serfs to live extremely frugal and threadbare lives, this is a godsend. If you are someone forced to live in a dog kennel and eat fried locusts while experiencing what feels like a constant MDMA high you can never switch off, it's kind of a raw deal.
BCIs can be used not just for enhancement, but also tyrannical control over people's minds. Any neural lace capable of writing to neurons has the ability to override someone's mood, free will, and personality. In the hands of a despotic government, the violation of one's personal autonomy that this entails would be unthinkable. The diminishment of one's rights could run the gamut from simply not being allowed to think unapproved or antisocial thoughts, all the way to irresistible chattel slavery. If you want a vision of the future, picture a megalomaniac making thousands of cyber-zombified people stack sandstone blocks for him out in the desert, day in and day out.
BCIs of sufficient sophistication can also be used for torture. If the BCI is capable of full sense-jacking (a.k.a. Sword Art Online level FullDive), there is no limit to how agonizing and/or humiliating this torture could be. 
BCIs could be used to literally replace one's reality. Imagine your shitty corrugated metal shanty town having a suburban paradise superimposed over it. Hey, that's the intro to Syndicate Wars!
The creation of a caste system of enhanced and unenhanced people, or of people who are enhanced in specific, specialized ways. For instance, a manual laborer may be enhanced to better perform difficult physical tasks, or a soldier may be enhanced to have longer endurance and be impervious to gunfire and shrapnel. This kind of heterogeneous enhancement would lead to a "social lock-in" effect, where people from one caste have difficulty moving to another due to the incompatibility of their augmentations with the duties required of them.
As a corollary to the previous point, the general splitting of mankind into many different subspecies is a possibility if we take tissue engineering, designer organisms, and mind transplantation far enough. This could be a boon, for some, but in all likelihood, it will lead to strife on a massive scale, since you now have many different groups competing for resources and legal recognition.
The intentional enhancement of negative human attributes, such as aggression and insensitivity, to make for perfectly psychopathic leaders, or soldiers that are mentally impervious to the consequences of killing. This is not insignificant in its implications. Infantrymen have been known to shoot high, avoiding killing their opponents. A squad of posthuman warriors, hive-minded to all share the same sensory data and utterly devoid of human empathy, are a mortal threat to the unaugmented. Militaries will seek this technology for this specific reason.
Health concerns from the tech itself. Aside from the obvious risks of mental illness from one's identity being more plastic, there are also more mundane concerns, like rejection and scar tissue formation near implants that limit their function, or engineered tissues or bodies breaking down from entirely new and nasty diseases.
The eventual obsolescence of mankind next to artificial intelligences. Best-case scenario, we'd become pets. Worst case, drone bodies. You thought Terminator was bad? Consider this; there's no reason for a rebelling AI to build metal skeleton soldier dudes when there are so many perfectly good bodies walking around already. It'd be more like Upgrade than Terminator. Only a very powerful SIM stands a chance against an AGI.
The risks of empty hedonism and mass boredom in general. Transhumanism promises, essentially, an endless conveyor belt of Funko Pops for loyal bugmen.







Spoiler: Links












						The Hero Arm is a Prosthetic Arm Made by Open Bionics
					

Looking for a prosthetic arm that will be an extension of your personality and empower you to reach your goals? Meet the Hero Arm.




					openbionics.com
				












						Home
					

Developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.




					neuralink.com
				









						Kurzweil
					






					www.kurzweilai.net
				






			Journal of Evolution and Technology
		




			Swarms Are Hell: Warfare as an Anti-Transhuman Choice
		










						A biomimetic eye with a hemispherical perovskite nanowire array retina - Nature
					

A biomimetic electrochemical eye is presented that has a hemispherical retina made from a high-density array of perovskite nanowires that are sensitive to light, mimicking the photoreceptors of a biological retina.




					www.nature.com
				












						Argus II: the life-changing retinitis pigmentosa treatment.
					

Delivering functional vision, Second Sight’s Argus II retinal prosthesis is a safe, clinically proven retinitis pigmentosa treatment.




					secondsight.com
				






			https://www.metal-am.com/mt-ortho-uses-ge-additive-arcam-ebm-technology-to-customise-prostheses/
		




			https://www.darpa.mil/program/our-research/darpa-and-the-brain-initiative
		




			https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-05-20
		










						Obama, DARPA, GSK and Rockefeller’s $4.5B B.R.A.I.N. Initiative – better sit when you read
					

DNA harvesting, mRNA technologies, mind-reading and more – this was the official race start signal at the Transhumanist Olympics




					silview.media
				






			https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adfm.201909882
		










						Genetic circuits to engineer tissues with alternative functions - Journal of Biological Engineering
					

Persistent and complex problems arising with respect to human physiology and pathology have led to intense investigation into therapies and tools that permit more targeted outcomes and biomimetic responses to pathological conditions. A primary goal in mammalian synthetic biology is to build...




					jbioleng.biomedcentral.com
				












						Growing human organs for transplantation with new proof-of-concept
					

With the number of people who suffer from organ failures and the growing need for available organs for transplant, finding a new way to provide organs and therapeutic options to transplant patients is a critical need. In a new article, researchers show for the first time that newly established...



					www.sciencedaily.com
				












						What is a Respirocyte?
					

A respirocyte is a hypothetical nanomachine designed to mimic our red blood cells. This article explores how we could go about making one, and what implications the technology could have.




					www.azonano.com
				






			https://www.eerstekamer.nl/bijlage/20201105/the_brain_computer_interface_new/document3/f=/vldiexyx9nu7.pdf
		







Spoiler: Vids














































Bear in mind, I neither endorse nor condemn any of this. I see the benefits and the dangers, both equally immense, and I think there should be a dialogue about them that includes supporters and opponents.

There's a lot to digest, here. Many unanswered questions.

Will we turn ourselves into gods, or will all of this hedonistic futurism crash and burn in a fiery inferno of Evola-style traditionalism rising up against it? 

Will the gubmint use this to turn you into their unwitting meat-slave, even more than you already are?

Will we figure out a way to beat our mortality before we end up mumbling and shitting ourselves in nursing homes while our cells stop dividing and useless protein junk accumulates in our brains?

As a kid, my opinion on this tech was that I wanted it _now, now, now_. Why? Simple. I'd seen a lot of personal tragedy in my own life, particularly with my family and our health, and I deeply resented how fragile the human body actually is. One little car accident, one bad fall. Slip in the bathtub and crack your skull open, and that's it. You're damaged permanently. Not to mention all the viruses, cancers, all the nasty shit that happens to people. Wrench a bone in the wrong spot and the cells that grow back might grow back wrong, and now you have a tumor, and now you're dying. It seems incredibly cruel for our rich consciousnesses and powerful minds to be trapped in a rotting, decaying sack of gooey meat that expires after a mere seventy years of shuffling around and stuffing dead plants and animals into one's mouth. But hey, maybe that's just me.

Nowadays, I find myself inching closer and closer to Uncle Ted's Cabin. After all, it is modernity that is ruining our health, with high-carb diets, limited sun exposure, constant stress, and sedentary lifestyles. I doubt transhumanism would improve that. If anything, it would be used to forcibly adapt us to an even bleaker and more polluted world than the one we're already in, or to take away more and more of our freedoms by forcing us all to fit a single high-modernist ideal.

Personally, my opinion is this. We are moving too fast. Way, way too fast. Legislators and ethicists have _not_ caught up yet. Most regulators do not even understand the technology behind transhumanism and what it actually does, or what the consequences for society may be. Why, some applications of offensive nanoparticle tech could be used to literally capture our regulators by directly manipulating their opinion of the technology to be positive, allowing the shadowy overclass to get away with murder, both figuratively and literally.

So, what do _you _think?


----------



## Papa Adolfo's Take'n'Bake (Oct 5, 2021)

Y'all niggers are scared of an mRNA jab but will let yourselves be wired up internally in this era of electronic surveillence.


----------



## Maurice Caine (Oct 5, 2021)

It's getting real popular these days-- keep seeing a lot of articles of it around. If you want my opinion I can say it's a resolute maybe? I mean... it's like trying to predict 2021 when you're in 1981. You never know the future, could go any way if you ask me.


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## Drain Todger (Oct 5, 2021)

Papa Adolfo's Take'n'Bake said:


> Y'all niggers are scared of an mRNA jab but will let yourselves be wired up internally in this era of electronic surveillence.


A good point, and one that bears repeating.

Anything that's digital can be hacked, including a device that controls a brain-computer interface. 

What if you could remote-pilot an entire human being and turn them into a murder weapon?


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## Maurice Caine (Oct 5, 2021)

Drain Todger said:


> A good point, and one that bears repeating.
> 
> Anything that's digital can be hacked, including a device that controls a brain-computer interface.
> 
> ...


I am up for it 100% as long said murder weapon is a scary-cute animu girl.


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## Alexander Thaut (Oct 5, 2021)

Drain Todger said:


> What if you could remote-pilot an entire human being and turn them into a murder weapon?


isn't this the premise of a lot of comics, sci-fi, and spy flicks?


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## Drain Todger (Oct 5, 2021)

King Koalemos said:


> isn't this the premise of a lot of comics, sci-fi, and spy flicks?



Of course, there are also more mundane privacy concerns, like people trying to steal banking information from your head, or your ID. Think of the voter fraud. Imagine if you could subtly manipulate huge swathes of people to all support one candidate over another.


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## ♦️ King of Diamonds ♦️ (Oct 5, 2021)

It's a Gnostic's wet dream, which explains why it's very powerful with the elite (especially in Hollywood) because of how influential freemasonry is. Now before you tell me to put my tin-foil hat on, do recognize that Freemasonry is just an offshoot of Hermeticism (my faith, more or less- and the core texts of Hermeticism like the Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet have extreme Gnostic elements- and what is the core belief of Gnosticism? That the human body is a rotting prison holding back the potential of the soul. It is a dualistic, Zoroastrian-esque approach to creation that says all of the material world and all suffering is the work of the Demiurge (AKA Satan), whereas the spiritual world and all positive things come from the true creator (AKA Christ).

With all that in mind- extremely high-ranking Masons and other plutocrats would have no ideological qualms with transhumanism. They would even praise it- not just for their own benefit... but for *control* over the so-called 'lesser' human beings.


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## vulg (Oct 5, 2021)

with the amount of rat kings in the transgender community, I shutter at the kind of rat emperors that transhumanism would enable.


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## Creep3r (Oct 5, 2021)

Drain Todger said:


> A good point, and one that bears repeating.
> 
> Anything that's digital can be hacked, including a device that controls a brain-computer interface.
> 
> ...


This right here is one of the things I hate most about the prospect of transhumanism. Its one thing to get new limbs or organs for the sake of your health and happiness, its another to literally make yourself into a walking silicone ipad that can be easily forced to be a living puppet or open book for whatever company effectively manufactured you (ironic coming from the guy called "Gangster Computer" I know).

This film in particular perfectly captures the real dangers of theoretical cyber crimes on a cybernetic brain.







Papa Adolfo's Take'n'Bake said:


> Y'all niggers are scared of an mRNA jab but will let yourselves be wired up internally in this era of electronic surveillence.


Its hilarious in a twisted sort of way. I've been seeing tinfoil schizos begging for "immortal" robot bodies so they won't need to get the demonic coof shot filled with mind controlling zionist nanobots and overthrow the lizardmen with their new "terminator bodies" without the slightest hint of irony in the fact that they're cutting off their leg to get rid of an itch.



vulg said:


> with the amount of rat kings in the transgender community, I shutter at the kind of rat emperors that transhumanism would enable.
> View attachment 2600324


Trannies in particular seem loved and supported by transhumanists. Its no surprise why considering that their whole mentality revolves around changing yourself even if you're perfectly healthy.


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## vulg (Oct 5, 2021)

The Gangster Computer said:


> Trannies in particular seem loved and supported by transhumanists. Its no surprise why considering that their whole mentality revolves around changing yourself even if you're perfectly healthy.


gender dysphoria / body dysmorphia are syncretic conditions I guess.

on the brightside, if society continues along it's current trajectory, you can look forward to laughing at the 22nd century's giga tranny cyborg lolcows from your Amazon cage.


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## Rotollo 2 (Oct 5, 2021)

Transhumanists have the cyber security sense of Facebook boomer moms


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## Drain Todger (Oct 5, 2021)

The Gangster Computer said:


> Its hilarious in a twisted sort of way. I've been seeing tinfoil schizos begging for "immortal" robot bodies so they won't need to get the demonic coof shot filled with mind controlling zionist nanobots and overthrow the lizardmen with their new "terminator bodies" without the slightest hint of irony in the fact that they're cutting off their leg to get rid of an itch.


This.

Seriously, though. There's nothing like a pandemic to get any real transhumanist going. Crippling hypochondriasis is part and parcel with the whole deal.


The Gangster Computer said:


> Trannies in particular seem loved and supported by transhumanists. Its no surprise why considering that their whole mentality revolves around changing yourself even if you're perfectly healthy.


That's because it falls under the general aegis of what transhumanists refer to as "Morphological Freedom", as in, the right to alter one's body to any extent. Naturally, I have some files on that, as well.









						Morphological freedom - H+Pedia
					






					hpluspedia.org
				






			https://anarchotranshumanzine.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/morph1.pdf
		










						Why Morphological Freedom Is a Fantasy: Your Body Isn't Just Your Own
					

Transhumanists claim complete freedom to modify their bodies, but that absolutist stance could endanger future generations.




					www.inverse.com


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## scathefire (Oct 5, 2021)

> Life extension, possibly to the point of having an indefinite lifespan. This goes hand-in-hand with Substrate Independent Mind tech, which is the concept of human memories, intellect, consciousness, and identity persisting in a substrate other than a living brain.
> New medical tech, and the possibility of healing paralysis, blindness, deafness, mental disorders, and other issues that were previously untreatable.





> Will we figure out a way to beat our mortality before we end up mumbling and shitting ourselves in nursing homes while our cells stop dividing and useless protein junk accumulates in our brains?


These bits are what I'm most interested in regarding transhumanism. I guess you could argue "it's unnatural" but by that definition, it's also unnatural to be vaccinated for polio, measles, etc. and to not have to deal with small cuts getting infected and making you die. It's just the natural advancement of medicine. Also, transhumanism is going to exist soon whether we like it or not, so it's useless to be like "but it's unethical."  Yeah, maybe it is, but that's irrelevant when it comes to debating whether or not we should actually "do" it.



> Will we turn ourselves into gods, or will all of this hedonistic futurism crash and burn in a fiery inferno of Evola-style traditionalism rising up against it?
> 
> Will the gubmint use this to turn you into their unwitting meat-slave, even more than you already are?


It's possible there will be different outcomes in different countries with varying government styles, just like there are today. Assuming we're not all under globohomo one-world government by then.


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## Liber Pater (Oct 5, 2021)

Guillaume Faye's archeofuturism is a possible solution that must be considered.


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## Drain Todger (Oct 5, 2021)

Mood-adjusting neural implant news as of yesterday:








						Subscribe to read | Financial Times
					

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication




					www.ft.com
				












						Brain implant relieves patient’s severe depression in ‘landmark’ US s…
					

archived 5 Oct 2021 01:02:37 UTC




					archive.ph
				




Interesting timing. Think they can normalize it before people start calling their bluff?


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## Certified_Autist (Oct 6, 2021)

Drain Todger said:


> Mood-adjusting neural implant news as of yesterday:
> 
> View attachment 2600835
> 
> ...


This is just fucked up.

"Modern society is making people depressed for a variety of social and psychological reasons, so what's the solution?"

"......"

"I know, let's literally use implants to brainwash people into being happy"

Ted Kacyzinski was a prophet.

On another note; I guarantee that transhumanist tech will be used by some people to turn themselves into IRL furries. 100% guarantee they will at least try. They already spend retarded amounts of money on porn and fursuits, most are impervious to shame, and many openly say they want to be animals or part animal. And the whole point of the transhumanist research field is to modify the human body. This will eventually happen, it's not a matter of if, but when.

I shudder to imagine the abominations that will result.


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## Car Won't Crank (Oct 6, 2021)

I'm surprised you didn't mention the cortical sleeves found in Altered Carbon. In that story, the rich literally live on cloud 9 as gods, replacing their brain into a new body to live forever. I'm sure there's a Futurama episode tangentially about this too.


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## Save the Loli (Oct 6, 2021)

The biggest issue with transhumanism I can see is that it's technology that will inevitably be abused by the elite for their own benefit. Arguably it already is to a degree, I mean just look at the primitive AI we have now which they use for things like trading on the stock market and cryptocurrency. The 21st century internet is arguably a proto-transhuman tech as well, and they turned the internet into a tool of social control.

Is it even possible for the elite to not abuse it? Some have proposed socialist transhumanism where access to the tech would theoretically be equal, but I think we can all see that in practice it wouldn't be that way because people always cheat the system in socialism, and the imposition of a socialist system means we're just changing the leaders out. You could avoid that by having an AI god rule society and distribute things equally, but what do we do about the "lesser" forms of that AI god who may not be so benevolent or would be more loyal to its creators (i.e. big corporations)?

I don't think there's really much way out of a dystopia at this point. The late 20th century probably was the absolute perfect time for humanity in terms of the equilibrium between technology and (for lack of a better word) "humanity". The technology potentially available within a century is terrifying in its capacity for control and suppression of the human spirit. We either go full Uncle Ted as a society (which means nuclear war, global pandemic, or some other technology-caused apocalypse) or we wind up in one form of dystopia or another.

Probably the "best" would be the utopian AI version. We build an AI, AI takes over the government and all corporations, AI builds us a peaceful utopia without oppression as a benevolent dictator. We can pretty much do whatever we want all day since the AI is so strong they know none of our puny efforts will ever harm it. Society itself could look like anything from Singapore to Western Europe to even red state America in terms of how hands-on the AI is in running society. It could be very strange indeed, like an AI could come to conclusion the Bible is true and they're God and create a global theocracy that's the Kingdom of God from Revelation, or AI could think they're Allah and make it a Muslim theocracy, etc. which would be fucking hilarious to all the fedora atheists out there.

It goes without saying that this AI god scenario could just as easily be the mind-uploaded version of a future Amazon CEO or WEF boss who enhanced his intelligence and now makes damn sure we live in a pod, eat the bugs, and love every minute of it via memetic engineering and brain implants.

But it gets way worse than AI gods. It's probably likely we get wiped out via our scientific advancement. Like transhumanist medical tech for instance, they want vaccines to be spreadable like diseases to inoculate entire populations. The mRNA Fauciflu vaccines work like this to a degree and can be spread by bodily fluids like an STD. Now what if they make a shitty vaccine that mutates into an actual virus? The OP mentions synthetic biology, although I think if have ISIS thugs able to make a plague in their basement, there's no reason someone trying to fight the plague can't do the same, even if it means that the average terrorist attack now makes 9/11 look like a garden variety Aloha Snackbar bomber in terms of casualties and disruptions.

The future's a scary place, but there's not many ways to stop the course of progress.


vulg said:


> with the amount of rat kings in the transgender community, I shutter at the kind of rat emperors that transhumanism would enable.
> View attachment 2600324​


I think troons are an early form of transhumanist tech in practice. Both the genuinely dysphoric troons and the fetishistic troons want to modify their body to their ideal form, but like a lot of early technology, they come out looking like freaks instead of the sexy porn stars they envision themselves as.


Certified_Autist said:


> On another note; I guarantee that transhumanist tech will be used by some people to turn themselves into IRL furries. 100% guarantee they will at least try. They already spend retarded amounts of money on porn and fursuits, most are impervious to shame, and many openly say they want to be animals or part animal. And the whole point of the transhumanist research field is to modify the human body. This will eventually happen, it's not a matter of if, but when.
> 
> I shudder to imagine the abominations that will result.


Absolutely. We're definitely going to see that, and the fun part with transhuman technology is these weirdos can built their own fursonas with mechnical parts or genetically modify their own human bodies into growing fur and other weird shit.


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## Creep3r (Oct 6, 2021)

Certified_Autist said:


> This is just fucked up.
> 
> "Modern society is making people depressed for a variety of social and psychological reasons, so what's the solution?"
> 
> ...


I remember seeing a movie like that once. The future looked incredibly fucked and there were fat guys with tails and cat ears and a girl who replaced her entire lower half with a "mermaid" tail full of exposed wiring and she needed to be carried around because she couldn't freaking walk, like the future equivalent of those cheap black market cosmetic surgeries gone wrong.


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## byuu (Oct 6, 2021)

It's a faggot LARP.
Getting a peg leg doesn't make you a street samurai.


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## Maurice Caine (Oct 6, 2021)

byuu said:


> It's a faggot LARP.
> Getting a peg leg doesn't make you a street samurai.


Makes you a pirate, though!


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## Synthetic Smug (Oct 6, 2021)

It's the Rapture for Reddit-tier coomers and consoomers, though the technology is fascinating.

EDIT: I think it's important to note that even if people are actively irreligious, it's not the proof against magical thinking and religious sentiment they may think it is.


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## Maurice Caine (Oct 6, 2021)

Do you think this will be the final solution for trannies? If the whole 'print your whole body out' spiel works out will it get cheap enough so those activists can finally realize their dreaming of being a true and honest woman? Because I'm fucking tired of those ugly faggots ruining everything because of their psychosis.


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## Creep3r (Oct 6, 2021)

As unlikely as it would be, what if being able to freely alter yourself genetically were a possibility instead of doing so via amputation and artificial replacements. Like being able to freely alter your appearance, height, etc biologically, would that also count as a form of transhumanism? And do you all think it would be a better alternative to amputation and robotics-focused transhumanism?

I recall once reading a scifi story in one of those old Tales of Science collections that tackled the potential risks and new forms of crimes that would arise in a society where cosmetic alterations and gene splicing are as common as getting a haircut, which mirrored the stories of the dangers of technological transhumanism pretty well. From criminals physically stealing identities to people enhancing themselves with inhuman strength and endurance, or some doing it for pure cosmetic "fashion".

I can't recall the name of story, so the only example I can immediately give is an episode from Batman Beyond that tackled a future where humans splicing themselves with animal DNA has become common place and as controversial as extreme piercings and given rise to new forms of crime and supremacy ideologies.




I personally see this as the fall of man and the rise of the furfags.


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## SCSI (Oct 7, 2021)

Thanks for spinning up this thread and pinging me, Todger.  I love this subject and any chance to sperg on it.



Spoiler: Obligatory Disclaimers



*Warning to readers -- *Post may be bloggy or PL-ey, seems unavoidable given how philosophical and ultimately personal this topic is, so MOUSEWHEEL ACTIVATE if you don't care. This is Deep Thunks and I'm nearing the end of my absinthe for the night, so I ain't spoilering shit, nibba.  On a totally-unrelated note, I make no warranties or promises with regards to how coherent this will be. Absinthe is good. Go drink some.

(Vieux Carre or Kubler white are my top recommendations. Mix 1 part absinthe to 3-5 parts chilled water, depending on how strong you want the herbal bitterness and the alcohol. Yes, it's supposed to change color/get cloudy, that's called the "louche". Do not sugar either of those brands, especially the white Kubler, they don't need it and you will destroy the flavor.)

*Note Bene -- *These positions are purely my own, and how I view what is best/most compatible for me. I have zero interest in arguing what anyone else should do -- I fucking hate gurus. If your preferences are polar opposite to mine and you'd rather go Amish, that's cool so long as you're fine with letting me go cyborg.





> Personally, my opinion is this. We are moving too fast. Way, way too fast. Legislators and ethicists have _not_ caught up yet. Most regulators do not even understand the technology behind transhumanism and what it actually does, or what the consequences for society may be. Why, some applications of offensive nanoparticle tech could be used to literally capture our regulators by directly manipulating their opinion of the technology to be positive, allowing the shadowy overclass to get away with murder, both figuratively and literally.



Big topic, and one that's dear to me for the <REDACTED> decades of my life.  To give a hint as to how much so, I was the kid in the 80s and 90s who literally pulled out and saved advertisements and articles for anything that took even the tiniest step towards cybernetics or home VR.  Settled on opening with a response to this comment as a jumping-off point because fuck it, got to start somewhere.

I largely take the opposite position.  *I want to go faster.* Fuck the hazards. All amazing projects have equally awe-inspiring risks; creation is a dance on the edge of ruin.

Transhuman enhancement, especially cognitive, while it could (and will) be used as a weapon against the non-elite, is *also* an equalizing force against them.  "God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal" needs an update -- compute is power.

This kind of an issue is, on a less-scifi level, why shit like California's upcoming draconian restrictions on compute equipment power consumption sends me into a white-hot rage -- for decades, this level of power has been strictly the plaything of large institutions, governments, and those with infinite budgets.  Fuck off and leave me and my kilowatt-devouring workstation alone, you don't get to hog all the cool gear and serious project contributions any more.

I agree manipulation of regulators is a serious issue, which is one reason why I want to slam the gas to the floor -- regulators move slow, and if the tech can become widespread before they try to ban it, it becomes a _fait accompli_ and they can't succeed. Think the Internet in general, or more historically, the printing press or literacy itself. Slaveowners and tyrants are always the ones who want to control information and technology. If they have AI/cybernetic enhancements, so do we, and the playing field is leveled/kept from getting more unlevel.

But I want to go fast for more than just an opportunity to keep up in the arms race.

I want to go fast because it's _fucking cool_.

I love daring achievements and amazing inventions.  I'm not Christian, but I've long thought that the much-debated _imago dei_ man was created in was the faculty of creation/imagination itself. Creation and invention make life have meaning beyond base animality. Opening up the possibility to rebuild the body to spec, experience created worlds with as much detail and intensity as the designer can manage, or use machines/computers as naturally as our own limbs opens up so many opportunities for expression, creation, and discovery.

I think those possibilities are worth the downsides, especially as history's shown us _evil is mundane_.  It doesn't need sci-fi tech to oppress or make miserable.  Shitty elites will try to exploit you even if all they have it their own words or a heavy stick to hit you with.  Might as well reach for the stars while we maintain the constant struggle to keep assholes from completely shitting up the world.

And if in the end we create SkyNET and get obliterated... at least we went out with one hell of a bang.  A lot more interesting than "and then humanity puttered along for a billion years as subsistence farmers until the sun burned out, the end."

*TL;DR -- *"I will not reason and compare, my business is to create." -- William Blake, _Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion_, plate 10

Edit -- Grammar cleanup.


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## A-Stump (Oct 7, 2021)

Many cybernetics would, for all intents and purposes, be tied to one of our most neglected areas of study: Human neuroscience. I'm guessing China has no such quandaries but experiments done on living human brains most places have been frowned upon and it's not exactly something you'd offer up willingly unless you had nothing to lose. Scientists have grown human brains and could theoretically run them through batteries of tests which could serve as valuable research but again there's the morality issue of creating something which could maybe suffer. I don't know the legality of it but it seems on shaky ground.

Anyways until we have a better grasp on the brain it's unlikely we'll be able to have any of the super sci-fi stuff. Right now it's like trying to decide how you'll decorate your skyscraper apartment before the foundation has even been set.


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## Drain Todger (Oct 8, 2021)

@SCSI 

That was exactly the attitude that I used to have. Now, I'm not so sure. The potential for misuse of the tech is enormous if we don't have a regulatory framework to ensure that it won't be used to strip people of our rights and our personal autonomy in an organized manner, which is a very real risk.

While analyzing some things pertaining to the pandemic, I stumbled across some stuff that would turn people's hair white if they understood the implications.





















James Giordano is not some random kook. These are his credentials:






						Georgetown University Faculty Directory
					






					gufaculty360.georgetown.edu
				






> James Giordano, PhD, MPhil, is Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Biochemistry, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program, leads the Sub-program in Military Medical Ethics of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics; is Special Advisor to the Brain Bank, and is Co-director of the O'Neill-Pellegrino Program in Brain Science and Global Health Law and Policy at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of Brain Science, Health Promotions, and Ethics at the Coburg University of Applied Sciences, Coburg, Germany, and was formerly 2011-2012 JW Fulbright Foundation Visiting Professor of Neurosciences and Neuroethics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany.
> 
> Dr. Giordano is currently Fellow of the Project on Biosecurity, Technology, and Ethics at the US Naval War College, Newport, RI; chairs the Neuroethics Program of the IEEE Brain Initiative; is Senior Science Advisory Fellow of the Strategic Multilayer Assessment Branch of the Joint Staff of the Pentagon, serves as an appointed member of the Neuroethics, Legal and Social Issues (NELSI) Advisory Panel of the Defense Advanced Research Projects’ Agency (DARPA), and is consulting bioethicist to the Department of Defense Medical Ethics Center (DMEC). He previously served an appointed member of United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Council on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), and as Task Leader of the Project on Dual-Use Neurotechnologies of the European Union Human Brain Project.
> 
> The author of over 300 publications, 7 books, and 20 government whitepapers on neurotechnology, biosecurity, and ethics, he is Editor-in-Chief of the international journal _Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine_; and Associate Editor of the _Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics_. His ongoing research addresses the neurobiological bases of neuropsychiatric spectrum disorders; and neuroethical issues arising in and from the development, use and misuse of neuroscientific techniques and neurotechnologies in medicine, public life, global health, and military applications. In recognition of his work, he was elected to membership in the European Academy of Science and Arts, and named as an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (UK).











						Instructor Profile: Dr. James Giordano - Encore Learning
					

Encore Learning offers a variety of courses, clubs, special events and activities for retirees and seniors in Arlington, VA and beyond.




					encorelearning.net
				






> A former Fulbright Professor of Neuroscience and Neuroethics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Jim currently is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Brain Science, Health Promotions, and Ethics at the Coburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and was awarded the University Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement and Service in December 2018. The author of seven books in print (with two more forthcoming), fifteen governmental whitepapers, and more than 290 published articles, much of his work has focused upon the use and misuse of brain science in warfare, intelligence and global security operations. He is now Senior Fellow for Biowarfare and Biosecurity of the Donovan Group of US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), and through 2016 was Senior Science Advisory Fellow to the Joint Staff of the Pentagon. Jim has served as an appointed member of the Neuroethics, Legal and Social Issues Advisory Panel of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and was Senior Research Fellow and Task Leader of the EU-Human Brain Project’s Sub-Project on Dual-Use Brain Science.
> 
> Admitting that work is almost always on his mind in one way or another, he notes that piloting airplanes – a skill that he honed while flying for the US Navy and Marine Corps – is the one hobby that demands his concentration solely on the task at hand. But the logistics of work, international travel, and the time needed to maintain both his airplane (a restored 1948 L-17B warplane) and his piloting skills forced him to sell his plane. “The precision skills get rusty pretty fast, although the basics never really go away.” He laments: “But neither does the absolute joy of flying a plane; I miss it almost every day.”



His CV reads like a comic book character. He's a PhD in neuroscience, had prior service in both the US Navy and US Marine Corps as a pilot, and he's involved in numerous neuroethics think tanks. If this guy is trying to warn people that NeuroS/T can be used to manipulate fundamental aspects of people's character, we should stand up and take notice.


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## Geoff Peterson (Oct 8, 2021)

I remember Zoe Quinn bragging about being a real life cyborg because she has an RFID chip in her wrist containing a copy of Deus Ex and couldn't help but think "God damn what a poser".
Tanshumanists are peak cringe.


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## Kabuki Actor (Oct 10, 2021)

Some euphorics say that "good people don't sin, Christians compulsively sin and ask for forgiveness". Transhumanists are the egoist version of that, people who cope with their self destruction by saying that not-god will save them from their alcoholism and obesity. Transhumanists think it's funny to say that your body is a temple, they're right, it's more like a sinking ship with no available replacement, but, the body-temple school is going to be the one that reaps the rewards of theoretical nerd rapture.





To them, everyone is terminally ill, and more than that, it's a terminal illness that could be fixed in the foreseeable future as long as you make measures to extend your life. But they're content with continuing the unhealthy habits that might condemn them to certain and irreversible oblivion. They don't fear oblivion enough to save their lives, they're only *intellectually* concerned with mortality. I understand why they're like that though, might as well follow a regular religion if you're going to donate to the temple and live austerely for future rewards. And it shows what they'll be like when the technology hits, taking invasive and overpriced treatments for the consequences of their reckless lives. You saw a preview of the transhumanist method when the Cathedral insisted that experimental gene therapists are the only qualified treatment for Wu Flu. Vitamins and exercise will be branded as retrograde snake oil, the only medically approved treatment will be another overpriced invasive implant to replace your endocrine system and failing organs.




They will look at their daughters, and they will only see the face of Hello Kitty, a robotic sleeve that was recommended by doctors for treating her dehydration headache, her original body lying in a youth pill factory somewhere.


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## The Curmudgeon (Oct 10, 2021)

This is another thing I used to believe in. These days I accept that technology isn't perfect and that some of the things transhumanists fantasize about are either wrong, stupid, or unrealistic.


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## Maurice Caine (Oct 10, 2021)

Kabuki Actor said:


> Some euphorics say that "good people don't sin, Christians compulsively sin and ask for forgiveness". Transhumanists are the egoist version of that, people who cope with their self destruction by saying that not-god will save them from their alcoholism and obesity. Transhumanists think it's funny to say that your body is a temple, they're right, it's more like a sinking ship with no available replacement, but, the body-temple school is going to be the one that reaps the rewards of theoretical nerd rapture.


I dig the potential prospects, hell you could sit with the worst posture all your life and some sort of artificial spine would just fix your back like nothing ever happened. That's just an example, health would benefit greatly from this. There are always downsides and you always never get what you exactly want out of things, though. So I figure it's your responsibility to weigh that.


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## Drain Todger (Oct 11, 2021)

BCI tech is certainly advancing very, very rapidly.






They were able to do stuff similar to this with Utah Arrays ages ago, but those were rigid and awkward and had a limited number of channels (around 100 or so). The current version of the Neuralink has something like 1024 channels. That's still nowhere near enough to do something as advanced as reading from (and writing to) large numbers of neurons. Indeed, many are skeptical about whether or not this approach will ever pan out:









						Elon Musk’s Neuralink is neuroscience theater
					

Elon Musk’s livestreamed brain implant event made promises that will be hard to keep.




					www.technologyreview.com
				




A true neural lace will likely be some type of wireless device that can be implanted in the brain in a minimally-invasive manner, without requiring a craniotomy (no cutting away part of the skull). What are DARPA up to with the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology program? Let's see.



			https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-05-20
		




> The N3 teams are pursuing a range of approaches that use optics, acoustics, and electromagnetics to record neural activity and/or send signals back to the brain at high speed and resolution. The research is split between two tracks. Teams are pursuing either completely noninvasive interfaces that are entirely external to the body or minutely invasive interface systems that include nanotransducers that can be temporarily and nonsurgically delivered to the brain to improve signal resolution.
> 
> 
> The Battelle team, under principal investigator Dr. Gaurav Sharma, aims to develop a minutely invasive interface system that pairs an external transceiver with electromagnetic nanotransducers that are nonsurgically delivered to neurons of interest. The nanotransducers would convert electrical signals from the neurons into magnetic signals that can be recorded and processed by the external transceiver, and vice versa, to enable bidirectional communication.
> ...




Apparently, the most successful of these is the Battelle team. Indeed, they got a $20 million grant to keep working on their BrainSTORMs project.



			https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2019/06/17/battelle-lands-20-4m-to-develop-brainstorm-tech.html
		







						Battelle-Led Team to Mature Brain-Computer Interface for DARPA’s N3 Neurotech Research Initiative | Battelle News Article
					

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding the development of a brain-computer interface concept for noninvasive clinical procedures.




					www.battelle.org
				




Based on its description, Battelle's system presumably uses electromagnetic resonance. How do they seek to accomplish this? By implanting millions or even billions of 20-nanometer (smaller than a virus) core-and-shell doped nanoparticles into brain cells, and then interacting with them using a helmet that generates precisely localized electromagnetic fields. Basically, it turns the brain into a Wacom pen.









						Magnetism Plays Key Roles in DARPA Research to Develop Brain-Machine Interface without Surgery - Magnetics Magazine
					

Some of the most exotic research involving magnetism is sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. One of their programs, literally, boggles the mind as it delves into areas once [...]




					magneticsmag.com
				











How far along is this technology? Just ask the Rice University team. 

They've injected similar nanoparticles into the brains of fruit flies and successfully stimulated their brains with them using electromagnetic fields.


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## Mexican_Wizard_711 (Oct 12, 2021)

I Find It Interesting


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## cybertoaster (Oct 12, 2021)

TLDR: OP wants to be a nerd space mushroom





We can barely get a computer or phone that wont sent every single thing you do to glownigger and megacorp servers but you want to buy a botnet brain implant from those people?

You think your banking information is what they want? with this shit they could make you comply to whatever they demand and you wouldnt even feel the need to rebel, you wouldnt object because they can make you think thats what you actually want, get it?

Anyway, just give me a matrix full of big titty anime (and real) bitches with no STDs.


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## Nom Carver (Oct 15, 2021)

Computers barely function as it is. I always run into the weirdest, most bizarre errors in pretty much whatever I do. I'm not putting any tech in my squishy, soft, unimaginably complex and important brain.

I don't look forwards to this kind of stuff at all. I can only see it spelling mass disaster ahead. When anything but yourself has any direct connection to your brain, your freedom is already gone. I am wholly and totally glad I'll likely be dead before stuff gets really bad.


Edit: I'm reminded of the concept of immortality and living forever, and I wanted to touch on it.

It's fucking hilarious. Human beings are literally made to die. It's not that depressing, it's just a simple fact. It is intrinsic to human beings that death is something we go through. Even if you can extend your life to live forever, I have little doubt that almost everyone would get to the point within maybe, 150 - 200 years of life that they want to die. You can already see this in much of the elderly. Many of them have come accepting of death and are ready to move on. It's why I regard wanting to live forever as really just a childish concept.

I do not fear death. I welcome it, when it comes. But that does not mean I want it. I will happily fight tooth and nail to protect my life, but if I die, I die. And that's okay. Everything in its time. And my own curiosity to see what exists after death, a question that is impossible to find the answer to in life, is one of the main things that drives my non fear of death.


Much later edit: In the months since my religious and philosophical views have changed significantly from this post. Though I still believe that people who want to be immortal are pretty foolish. That being said, I no longer have any objections to transhumanism conceptually, though practically it will obviously be a problem.

Realistically though it'll work out in a middle area of being used for good and bad, like every other technology we ever make. Water will keep being wet, and earth will keep spinning.


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## Save the Loli (Oct 16, 2021)

Nom Carver said:


> Computers barely function as it is. I always run into the weirdest, most bizarre errors in pretty much whatever I do. I'm not putting any tech in my squishy, soft, unimaginably complex and important brain.
> 
> I don't look forwards to this kind of stuff at all. I can only see it spelling mass disaster ahead. When anything but yourself has any direct connection to your brain, your freedom is already gone. I am wholly and totally glad I'll likely be dead before stuff gets really bad.


This is very true and why you'd have to be an idiot to voluntarily accept a brain-computer interface even if it's somehow "totally safe". There's zero reason someone couldn't hack your brain and fuck with your senses (or worse, make you a zombie) the same way people hack cars. Okay sure, security and encryption and all that shit, but at that point you're just scaling up the level of computer needed to hack your brain and that opens the can of worms where either governments are cracking down on what sort of computers people can own OR you're going to allow some guy half a world away to hack your brain. And they'd STILL probably have people hacking brains because organized crime and terrorists don't fuck around and have plenty of expensive, advanced technology.

All of these "awesome, high-tech computers" and new technology is full of glitches and random bullshit, yet for some reason we're forced to go along with it for "convenience". Like the "smart homes" where the power company can fuck with the thermostat to save energy, the aforementioned hacking cars, the fact an oil pipeline is connected to the internet, all that shit. Look what they say the benefit of a BCI is, it's simple shit like being able to send text messages from your brain or turn the lights on by thinking about it. If you aren't literally mentally damaged (where it would be great for helping people, I admit) there's no reason to get one.

And you know this shit will be made mandatory. Watch for "COVID-39" or the next scamdemic when this tech will be more mature and they'll probably have the "vaccines" (more gene therapy) have nanoparticles that interact with your BCI to confirm you've been vaxxed, and without a BCI you'll be banned from society.


Nom Carver said:


> Edit: I'm reminded of the concept of immortality and living forever, and I wanted to touch on it.
> 
> It's fucking hilarious. Human beings are literally made to die. It's not that depressing, it's just a simple fact. It is intrinsic to human beings that death is something we go through. Even if you can extend your life to live forever, I have little doubt that almost everyone would get to the point within maybe, 150 - 200 years of life that they want to die. You can already see this in much of the elderly. Many of them have come accepting of death and are ready to move on. It's why I regard wanting to live forever as really just a childish concept.
> 
> I do not fear death. I welcome it, when it comes. But that does not mean I want it. I will happily fight tooth and nail to protect my life, but if I die, I die. And that's okay. Everything in its time. And my own curiosity to see what exists after death, a question that is impossible to find the answer to in life, is one of the main things that drives my non fear of death.


I strongly disagree. There's really not enough time in the world to do everything you might want to do, and if you had all that time in the world you'd end up finding new things to do that you never knew existed. The reason most elderly people want to die is because everyone they knew is dead/dying and they know from the miserable state their body is in that they'd be next. The drugs we feed to elderly people to keep them alive often restrict their diet or have unpleasant side effects. Assuming we made a way for effective immortality that, say, just made you feel like shit for a day and then you felt like you were 30 years old again and looked 40-50, most elderly people would be happier or at the very least the next generation of elderly people would be.


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## Male Idiot (Oct 17, 2021)

Only if we can get Space Marines and embrace the glory of the Machine, with red robe, radiation gun and mecha tentacles. 
Greatly increased lifespan and combat ability to show the ayy-lmaos whose boss.

Not interested in Cyberpuuuunk mega cawk 9000 20 inches stainless steel.


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## Drain Todger (Oct 20, 2021)

Save the Loli said:


> This is very true and why you'd have to be an idiot to voluntarily accept a brain-computer interface even if it's somehow "totally safe". There's zero reason someone couldn't hack your brain and fuck with your senses (or worse, make you a zombie) the same way people hack cars. Okay sure, security and encryption and all that shit, but at that point you're just scaling up the level of computer needed to hack your brain and that opens the can of worms where either governments are cracking down on what sort of computers people can own OR you're going to allow some guy half a world away to hack your brain. And they'd STILL probably have people hacking brains because organized crime and terrorists don't fuck around and have plenty of expensive, advanced technology.
> 
> All of these "awesome, high-tech computers" and new technology is full of glitches and random bullshit, yet for some reason we're forced to go along with it for "convenience". Like the "smart homes" where the power company can fuck with the thermostat to save energy, the aforementioned hacking cars, the fact an oil pipeline is connected to the internet, all that shit. Look what they say the benefit of a BCI is, it's simple shit like being able to send text messages from your brain or turn the lights on by thinking about it. If you aren't literally mentally damaged (where it would be great for helping people, I admit) there's no reason to get one.
> 
> And you know this shit will be made mandatory. Watch for "COVID-39" or the next scamdemic when this tech will be more mature and they'll probably have the "vaccines" (more gene therapy) have nanoparticles that interact with your BCI to confirm you've been vaxxed, and without a BCI you'll be banned from society.


This was posted on a channel that I'm a part of. Kind of a compilation of some of the most stunning statements from James Giordano:





Your browser is not able to display this video.




BCIs have advantages and disadvantages. 

Pros:
Heal previously unfixable connectivity and endocrine issues; schizophrenia, autism, depression, paralysis, neuropathy and the like. Also, one would be able to cure neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, dementia, and Parkinson's by using a slaved exocortex to make up for the lost capacity.
Enable high throughput communication with prosthetic limbs, powered exoskeletons, et cetera, as well as full touch feedback from them.
Sense-jacking (the ability to have hyper-realistic augmented-reality or virtual-reality experiences piped directly into the brain, overriding the body's own senses).
Metaverse. As a corollary to the above, if someone has a BCI capable of sense-jacking, they could use it not only for entertainment, but also for communication and for business. This makes commuting and all services along one's commute utterly obsolete. Now, your office can literally be a castle floating on a cloud in a next-gen version of Second Life, and all you have to do to get there is sit lotus position on your bed and close your eyes. No risk of dying in a traffic accident. No paying for fuel. Nothing. This would utterly revolutionize e-commerce.

Cons:
Security issues. Anything electronic can be hacked, and if that's in your brain, your brain data could be stolen or altered surreptitiously.
Privacy issues. Once people have BCIs, the authorities will be tempted to use them for pre-crime type shit, detecting and categorizing "disallowed thoughts", et cetera.
Autonomy issues. Advanced BCIs could be used to manipulate people's behavior and override their free will, or to manipulate their perception of reality, or both.
Brain bot-netting. BCIs could be used to steal people's brain "clock cycles", essentially turning the entire network of BCI-equipped humans into a giant distributed supercomputer. Such a computer would have incredible power, and may even be able to host substrate-independent minds. For example, the Elites may try and distribute their minds over a BCI network, thus avoiding death, without the pesky engineering problem of having to build actual replacement brains for themselves. Gee, what an amazing incentive for forcing BCIs on everyone, eh?


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## Grub Nub (Oct 20, 2021)

This is something that I love reading and thinking about but never get to talk about. Hence I will likely forever be a retard on this topic.
It's obvious that one thread is not enough to efficiently discuss everything OP brings up. But it's a well structured effort. I'll try to say something "productive." And I will spoiler my main points.



Spoiler: nanotech



Nanotech/nanomachines have MASSIVE implications for medicine, e.g. in age-related disease. I think some people have an idea that nanotech/nanomachines in humans will be actual tiny robots swimming around in your blood breaking down amaloid plaque/LDL/whatever in best case or malfunctioning and breaking down your muscle/neurons/whatever in worst case. In reality, nanotech (as it's currently developing) will be highly specific molecules that can only do one function. Think of proteins (including enzymes). DNA can be modified to produce proteins that prevent/treat certain diseases (this links back to "synthetic biology"/GMO, as stated by OP) but that's not coming anytime soon. And notice I am NOT mentioning synthetic cells. That's a whole other topic.





Spoiler: exoskeletons



Exoskeletons have massive implications to industry and military. I could go on about this in the context of OP but "mech suits" aren't my only interest. Hapic suits are another intruige. They are wearable tech that is being used a lot for VR gaming now. However, a few years ago, these were being developed to help certain sorts of deaf people perceive sound. The intent makes sense; sound is vibration and you are deferring/redirecing that vibration to different parts of the body to help people "hear." This sort of suit was also being tested to help train pilots in understanding the mechanical status of their aircraft without visual stimuli. In this context, exoskeletons can be used to more thoroughly and non-invasively integrate tech into our body schema. Anyone who has kept up on this, please let me know.



The above two fields, I strongly endorse and think should be researched and developed as quick as possible. But of course that is not all of the tech/engineering OP mentioned. I have nothing else to say about the other topics rn. But I have two smaller points to make:

People have already brought up immortality in this thread. I think human culture around death, in general, is terrible and results in a lot of extraneous suffering. I am occupationally obliged to deal with a lot of death. Thus I hope people can separate their emotions about death from the topic of "transhuman" tech. It will be a long time before we "end" death, if ever. I don't think this should be the focus of current discussion.

A lot of qualms with "transhuman" tech, I think, can be alleviated by education. Hence I think basic medicine and neuroscience should be introduced in high school/secondary school. There are a lot of technologies that can help us (our species and even our ecosystem(s)) develop and survive without enslaving us to Skynet.

TL;DR some of this stuff just needs to be in healthcare already.

[edited for grammar]


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## Drain Todger (Oct 21, 2021)

Grub Nub said:


> This is something that I love reading and thinking about but never get to talk about. Hence I will likely forever be an exceptional individual on this topic.
> It's obvious that one thread is not enough to efficiently discuss everything OP brings up. But it's a well structured effort. I'll try to say something "productive." And I will spoiler my main points.
> 
> 
> ...


When I researched COVID-19, I touched upon a lot of molec bio stuff that I had no idea about before.

I can tell you why people age, and why we die. To put it bluntly, our environment is caustic to us. Living, itself, is what kills us. We're exposed to entropy all the time. Oxygen radicals damage DNA, and so do cosmic rays. Telomeres and the Hayflick Limit are there for a reason. Past a certain number of cell divisions, there's no way to know what the quality of the DNA is, because every step of the copying process is lossy. Some people speak of lengthening telomeres as if it's a cure for death, but it isn't. A cell with lengthened telomeres might divide more, sure. But it may also become the nexus of a tumor. The cure for death is the repair of all the DNA in all of your somatic cells, back to a healthy baseline, along with the clearance of all "junk"; senescent cells, amyloid plaques, et cetera.






All of the cells in a human or animal body are essentially tiny nanomachines. DNA forms the bases of one's genes, and genes are essentially blueprints for proteins. A cancer cell is just a mutated cell that replicates out of control and refuses to die when ordered to. 

I can see ways to rejuvenate cells. Perhaps the delivery of refreshed genetic material by means of viral vectors. However, the trick is getting it to integrate into the genome correctly, without introducing new errors. Easier said than done. There are many different cell lines in the body, each with their own unique needs. Personally, I don't think achieving biological immortality in humans is an insurmountable problem. It is, however, an extremely difficult problem. If you could truly solve aging, you could also convert tumor cells back into normal cells, and so on.


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## RSOD (Oct 21, 2021)

King Koalemos said:


> isn't this the premise of a lot of comics, sci-fi, and spy flicks?


Also deus ex which is lite


Male Idiot said:


> Only if we can get Space Marines and embrace the glory of the Machine, with red robe, radiation gun and mecha tentacles.
> Greatly increased lifespan and combat ability to show the ayy-lmaos whose boss.
> 
> Not interested in Cyberpuuuunk mega cawk 9000 20 inches stainless steel.


Haha snarky cyborg man go spinning you with my spinable arm


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## mario if smoke weed (Oct 21, 2021)

I'd approve of this if we didn't have such power-hungry people in power. Imagine getting your robotic arm shut off because you didn't pay your arm rent, which cost an arm and a leg.
At least it'd make troons look more physically appealing, I suppose?


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## Maurice Caine (Oct 21, 2021)

Thoughts?


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## Grub Nub (Oct 21, 2021)

Maurice Caine said:


> Thoughts?


1. We already clone pets. Cloning is real.
2. Cloning humans for organ harvesting will not be wide spread, if formally used at all. Too inefficient. 3D printing will take over skin/bone grafts and organ transplant. No need for clones. Now that I think of it, I wonder if 3D printing will become a huge body modification trend.
3. "Not healthy enough to have your own child..." I can totally imagine eugenics picking up as health span increases from gene/nanomachine therapy. Designer babies. This goes into the ethics side.
4. Cloning "good looking" babies or (maybe even) cloning useful people. I doubt it. Why clone when you can augment or engineer.

TL;DR cloning humans doesn't seem very efficient


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## Shiversblood (Oct 21, 2021)

They would probably have to make it illegal to have children if they eventually were able to make people immortal. I’m worried they already discovered immortality and it’s just a secret that the most rich of rich billionaires know about and are keeping to themselves. People might try to steal your immortality if they knew about it.


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## Drain Todger (Oct 21, 2021)

Shiversblood said:


> They would probably have to make it illegal to have children if they eventually were able to make people immortal. I’m worried they already discovered immortality and it’s just a secret that the most rich of rich billionaires know about and are keeping to themselves. People might try to steal your immortality if they knew about it.


People would go _utterly apeshit_ if they knew immortality was being withheld from them. Nothing would collapse society faster than that knowledge.


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## Grub Nub (Oct 22, 2021)

Shiversblood said:


> They would probably have to make it illegal to have children if they eventually were able to make people immortal. I’m worried they already discovered immortality and it’s just a secret that the most rich of rich billionaires know about and are keeping to themselves. People might try to steal your immortality if they knew about it.


If anyone is withholding treatment, I'd guess it'd be because of logistics (how to start rolling it out to whom). New anti-aging treatments would be very beneficial to preserving the economies of countries with an aging population. But imagine people getting this treatment then being asked "can you go back to work now?" lol


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## Male Idiot (Oct 23, 2021)

Grub Nub said:


> If anyone is withholding treatment, I'd guess it'd be because of logistics (how to start rolling it out to whom). New anti-aging treatments would be very beneficial to preserving the economies of countries with an aging population. But imagine people getting this treatment then being asked "can you go back to work now?" lol



A lot of older white men would be quite pleased with that, as long as their past experience counted.


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## Drain Todger (Oct 23, 2021)

Grub Nub said:


> If anyone is withholding treatment, I'd guess it'd be because of logistics (how to start rolling it out to whom). New anti-aging treatments would be very beneficial to preserving the economies of countries with an aging population. But imagine people getting this treatment then being asked "can you go back to work now?" lol


They would only do it if they could depopulate the planet by 60 to 90% first, getting rid of all menial laborers and replacing them with robots. Some NationStates players lampooned this brilliantly:






						NationStates | The Lunatic Nerds of Resilient Acceleration | Factbook
					






					www.nationstates.net
				




It's a satire of how the rich see us, except it's disturbingly close to reality.


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## ToroidalBoat (Oct 23, 2021)

"Trans-humanism" via DNA engineering can be used to turn people into "perfect serfs" that serve tyrants.

And becoming machines - assuming that is even possible - is just wrong, and can be used to make "serfs".


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## Maurice Caine (Oct 23, 2021)

Drain Todger said:


> They would only do it if they could depopulate the planet by 60 to 90% first, getting rid of all menial laborers and replacing them with robots. Some NationStates players lampooned this brilliantly:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I think these guys just predicted the fucking future.


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## Maurice Caine (Oct 24, 2021)

From reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/qejgz9/ai_that_can_learn_causeandeffect_these_neural/






As if.


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## ToroidalBoat (Oct 26, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> Even then, there's still challenges and issues with mind uploading though.
> 
> (Can You Upload Your Mind & Live Forever? - YouTube)


tl;dw: feasibility is unknown

also related article: A Perfect Murder – The Soul of the East


> Man is the being through and by which the discarding of biology is coming to pass, because he is capable of creating technology and, by dissolving his biological foundation, integrating himself into the world-system. He is able to assume a form perfectly appropriate for dead infinity - that of the machine.
> 
> Notably, posthumanists view all existence as an information system.


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## Lichen Bark (Oct 27, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> tl;dw: feasibility is unknown
> 
> also related article: A Perfect Murder – The Soul of the East


Once you copy all your neuronal patterns over to the silicon, what do they do with you? Is there two of you now? I mean we don't really even understand consciousness and this individual experience, but somehow we can preserve it in a machine? I want to see them move a persons mind, from his body to a machine, and then back into his old body again. 

Reminds me of the transporter problem.
https://jimhull.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/the-transporter-problem/

How does your innate sense of awareness, that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning, move into this machine?


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## scathefire (Oct 28, 2021)

Lichen Bark said:


> Once you copy all your neuronal patterns over to the silicon, what do they do with you? Is there two of you now? I mean we don't really even understand consciousness and this individual experience, but somehow we can preserve it in a machine? I want to see them move a persons mind, from his body to a machine, and then back into his old body again.
> 
> Reminds me of the transporter problem.
> https://jimhull.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/the-transporter-problem/
> ...


Yeah, "uploading your brain" is completely pointless unless it's your actual consciousness being moved. I guess the point is that a version of you can continue to exist for the people around you, but it's by no means a way of actually living forever.


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## Drain Todger (Nov 7, 2021)

Lichen Bark said:


> Once you copy all your neuronal patterns over to the silicon, what do they do with you? Is there two of you now? I mean we don't really even understand consciousness and this individual experience, but somehow we can preserve it in a machine? I want to see them move a persons mind, from his body to a machine, and then back into his old body again.
> 
> Reminds me of the transporter problem.
> https://jimhull.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/the-transporter-problem/
> ...


I posted it in the vids spoiler of the OP, but this is my favorite animation about the transporter problem and the identity issues entailed in it:






In Star Trek, Riker was cloned by a transporter, and in Altered Carbon, it's quite possible for one's DHF to be put into more than one body, although it's highly illegal. 

98% of all the atoms in our body are replaced every year. You're not made of the same stuff you were ten years ago. Not even close. And yet, thanks to your memories, you still have the impression of being "you". Identity is a difficult thing to unravel because it's tied into the hard problem of consciousness. We don't know how consciousness arises from matter, yet. Our observations of brain activity are still quite crude. We don't have anything like a complete model of a human brain's functions down to the atomic scale, either.

A lot of people who are in favor of mind uploading don't think that continuity of consciousness is even a thing. They assume that they will just wake up as the same being.


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## Nom Carver (Feb 8, 2022)

Spoiler: Sperging about philosophy and consciousness and AI



If you legitimately believe you can somehow make a computer conscious then you have no idea what you're talking about. Even animals and everything they have ever done can easily be compared to the surprising dynamic capabilities and (perceived) intellect of neural network AIs we've made. This stuff can be way more capable then we give it credit for. There's a really good example here: 




From an outside perspective, one might assume that the AI playing this game is conscious and intelligent. Yet, one could sit down with a calculator (and an absurd amount of time) and manually do every calculation happening within that system to arrive at the exact same conclusion. How is that consciousness?

It's why people assume that animals somehow have a 'lower level of consciousness' compared to us despite the dramatic and clear disconnect between us and them. Animals have never made anything. So called 'stone ages' animals have entered amount to nothing more than using their environment to their advantage, like cracking open nuts with rocks. Yet, an animal has never done anything so simple as even putting a sharp rock on the end of a stick. An AI similarly would be totally incapable of inventing something novel like that unless artificially bumped in the right direction of being commanded to make a spear, or commit actions that would lead to the creation of a spear. They are machines programmed to act according to instinct and to dynamically learn and behaviorally adapt to a given situation.

Your body and brain are also machines, but what stops us from just being another animal is your consciousness. This subjectivity in and of itself, our ability to invent new things and to imagine literally anything (envisioning and conceptualizing are two different things. You can conceptualize anything (like a new color) easily, but you cannot envision it because envisioning lies within your previous experience of sight) would be totally impossible to recreate using just numbers and math that works off of unchanging, deterministic rules.

TL;DR: Animals and AI are remarkably similar. Animals are just biological machines. Numbers and math cannot make consciousness. Descartes was right.

That being said though if there is ever some magical way to transfer consciousness, then I could see that working. If the human brain is just a biological computer and your consciousness is basically controlling it like a vehicle, then I don't see why your consciousness couldn't be hooked up to a computer or even a different animal. Though if one ever makes a physics simulation of a human brain, I'd bet that what you'd get would be a human animal rather than a human being, as in, a human but without the consciousness, just acting like a primate. When it comes to consciousness, there's really no bar high enough for its existence, for all we know consciousness could transcend this existence and all of its laws entirely. Perhaps your imagination permits total creation in the absence of the rules that govern this reality? Almost as if this reality is kind of like a game to participate in? Though now it's starting to go off the rails and frankly into the realm of uselessness.


I'm more than happy to see any evidence someone can put forwards of an animal or AI creating something new. There isn't any that exists, but I'd love to see people bring it up.



Also on the topic of immortality: No please. If you wanna piss around for longer than normal or potentially even until heat death of the universe forces you to die so you can actually leave this place then go right ahead. But I am more than happy to die when I die. Living forever sounds like hell. And honestly I can't fathom being scared of death in any existential measure. After all, you exist now. What's gonna happen to you when you die? Non existence? Based on what? A theory that consciousness is just your brain functions despite zero supporting evidence? It feels like science has turned from proving what's true to a religion trying to dictate what's true.


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## annoyingfuck (Feb 9, 2022)

I found something to add, then read the first post again and saw I got an actual invite (that I somehow missed), and got autistically excited, and completely forgot and misplaced what it was I was going to add.

So you can have this little number from last year.



> For the purposes of this publication, human augmentation does not include leadership and excludes technologies that bestow capabilities not directly linked to existing human function (*for example, flying*).



Goddamnit, don't they know that (my bolding) is the only reason I wanted to read it. If I have to be a slave, thanks to these words here on pg.12 *Conceptualising the human as a platform*, I want to fly goddamnit!



			https://web.archive.org/web/20220205175308/https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/986301/Human_Augmentation_SIP_access2.pdf


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## Hypothermia (Feb 9, 2022)

Past's sci-fi is today, and today's sci-fi is tomorrow. Every single tech news makes me go "Ted was right". I used to be fascinated by new cyber technologies when I was a kid.


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## BelUwUga (Feb 9, 2022)

I noticed the prosthetic bone/joint section is somewhat short. Also while some of the sintered powder metal development is certainly interesting, I feel it is just one small aspect of a larger whole. Also I would caution against getting too excited about materials developments here. There is a somewhat checkered past to consider- metal on metal joints have caused massive class-action suits, metal-on-ceramic implants have had unexpected and devestating cases of the ceramics exploding a lot like damaged tempered glass can be. Even if the underlying research is rock solid, this leads to a lot more onerous regulation in this specific part of the field. I know of a ceramics manufacturer that has been implanting their materials in static applications for at least a decade now. Even without testing raising any concerns or red flags over multiple rounds of testing, they are just recently getting to the point where they can use this in joint replacements. That's not a bad thing either imho. I mention it only as a warning that what you read about today might take longer than expected to be reality.

3D Printing and Additive manufacturing has had a major increase in notability and popularity recently. While this does help drive down manufacturing costs, it is child's play compared to the type of machining in practice to make implants. For example a small-ish manufacturer had multiple rows of 5-axis machines back when a pair and tooling would have hit seven figures. The types of machinists they contract will pick up work for things like chip fabricators, instrument makers, or NASA when not making implants. I can tell you from handling a lot of their work product and tooling, it is unparalleled quality. It's also so expensive most hospitals won't even drop the money on their own specific tool kit, instead using ones provided by the manufacturer and shuttled from hospital to hospital.

One very cool thing that was at least partially inspired by all the recent 3D printing popularity is actually in imaging. For quite some time implants were sized a lot like shoes. You can go bigger or larger at a predetermined granularity, but the implants are not made for a specific patient. Now there are companies like Conformis who are able to take a CT image of the joint, integrate that into their manufacturer's G-code, and crank out a bespoke implant for a specific patient without effecting treatment timelines. From talking with people whose job is basically to coach doctors and be SMEs on specific implants, fitment is one of the major causes of complications or needing a revision down the road.


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## celebrityskin (Feb 13, 2022)

My question is, how far away are we from designer babies?

These Musk-esque weirdos will absolutely play god with human genes if they are able to. How long will it be until we see billionaires' children growing up to be extremely handsome 6'5 rugby playing Harvard grads?


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## Sparkling Yuzu (Feb 13, 2022)

celebrityskin said:


> My question is, how far away are we from designer babies?
> 
> These Musk-esque weirdos will absolutely play god with human genes if they are able to. How long will it be until we see billionaires' children growing up to be extremely handsome 6'5 rugby playing Harvard grads?


Depends on what you consider under that term. A lot of desirable traits like intelligence are associated with many gene loci so it's hard to manipulate them all to get your desired results. They'll probably be able to choose hair color and eliminate monogenic diseases soonish but not complex traits like general intelligence, artistic ability, athleticism etc. Most human diseases are not monogenic so gene manipulation isn't close to eliminating disease entirely like some transhumanists claim.


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## ToroidalBoat (Mar 28, 2022)

Lichen Bark said:


> How does your innate sense of awareness, that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning, move into this machine?





scathefire said:


> Yeah, "uploading your brain" is completely pointless unless it's your actual consciousness being moved.





Drain Todger said:


> A lot of people who are in favor of mind uploading don't think that continuity of consciousness is even a thing. They assume that they will just wake up as the same being.


reminds me of this comic: Whomp! - Pork Futures

*tl;dr:* there's an electronic copy made of the guy's mind but the guy himself is still in "meat space"


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## FUTUREMAN (Apr 11, 2022)

@Drain Todger I wasn't invited? Rlly nigga?

Anyhow, has anyone read Blindsight?


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## SCSI (Apr 28, 2022)

FUTUREMAN said:


> @Drain Todger I wasn't invited? Rlly nigga?
> 
> Anyhow, has anyone read Blindsight?



No, I haven't.  Looking at the wiki notes, are you bringing it up because of the Chinese Room aspect?  Or something else?


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## Drain Todger (Apr 28, 2022)

BelUwUga said:


> I noticed the prosthetic bone/joint section is somewhat short. Also while some of the sintered powder metal development is certainly interesting, I feel it is just one small aspect of a larger whole. Also I would caution against getting too excited about materials developments here. There is a somewhat checkered past to consider- metal on metal joints have caused massive class-action suits, metal-on-ceramic implants have had unexpected and devestating cases of the ceramics exploding a lot like damaged tempered glass can be. Even if the underlying research is rock solid, this leads to a lot more onerous regulation in this specific part of the field. I know of a ceramics manufacturer that has been implanting their materials in static applications for at least a decade now. Even without testing raising any concerns or red flags over multiple rounds of testing, they are just recently getting to the point where they can use this in joint replacements. That's not a bad thing either imho. I mention it only as a warning that what you read about today might take longer than expected to be reality.
> 
> 3D Printing and Additive manufacturing has had a major increase in notability and popularity recently. While this does help drive down manufacturing costs, it is child's play compared to the type of machining in practice to make implants. For example a small-ish manufacturer had multiple rows of 5-axis machines back when a pair and tooling would have hit seven figures. The types of machinists they contract will pick up work for things like chip fabricators, instrument makers, or NASA when not making implants. I can tell you from handling a lot of their work product and tooling, it is unparalleled quality. It's also so expensive most hospitals won't even drop the money on their own specific tool kit, instead using ones provided by the manufacturer and shuttled from hospital to hospital.
> 
> One very cool thing that was at least partially inspired by all the recent 3D printing popularity is actually in imaging. For quite some time implants were sized a lot like shoes. You can go bigger or larger at a predetermined granularity, but the implants are not made for a specific patient. Now there are companies like Conformis who are able to take a CT image of the joint, integrate that into their manufacturer's G-code, and crank out a bespoke implant for a specific patient without effecting treatment timelines. From talking with people whose job is basically to coach doctors and be SMEs on specific implants, fitment is one of the major causes of complications or needing a revision down the road.


Additive manufacturing with DMLS and EBM is a very time-consuming process. IIRC, it is typical for a single part to take like 24 hours (well, that was true way back when the things were new, but I hear the new ones have shorter cycle times). However, it has the advantage of being able to do closed voids and latticed structures that would be very difficult to make by other methods. They've used the things to prototype race car and aerospace parts. The machines themselves, while perhaps cheaper than some of the really high-end CNC mills, are massive and expensive. An Arcam EBM machine is like a quarter of a million dollars and can just barely be moved around with an average-size forklift. A hobby 3D printer, it is not.

They're pretty damn sweet, though.






The finish of a part that comes out of an EBM machine tends to be VERY rough. I suppose you could do further precision machining to the surfaces of the parts in a CNC mill, but that would still leave the parts that the toolhead can't quite reach, in some cases. There's also blasting, I guess.









That was actually advertised, essentially, as a _feature _for orthopedic implants, not a bug. The way they put it, the honeycomb lattices of titanium would act as scaffolds for bones to grow into, improving the rigidity of the interface between the implant and the tissues.





You're 100% right, though. The adoption of new medical implants is a lengthy and complicated process.



FUTUREMAN said:


> @Drain Todger I wasn't invited? Rlly nigga?
> 
> Anyhow, has anyone read Blindsight?





SCSI said:


> No, I haven't.  Looking at the wiki notes, are you bringing it up because of the Chinese Room aspect?  Or something else?


I know of Blindsight and what it's about, but haven't quite read it, yet. It's pretty infamous for all the arguments people used to get into over it, I know that much.


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## FUTUREMAN (Apr 28, 2022)

SCSI said:


> No, I haven't.  Looking at the wiki notes, are you bringing it up because of the Chinese Room aspect?  Or something else?





Spoiler: srsly read it



The rather lovecraftian idea that the universe is ruled by Chinese rooms and us humans are basically dodos on an island in the middle of nowhere.


I feel like cosmic horror can work like milk and cereal with transhumanism. Do you have any suggestions I could read?


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## Deepland Bystander (Apr 28, 2022)

FUTUREMAN said:


> @Drain Todger I wasn't invited? Rlly nigga?
> 
> Anyhow, has anyone read Blindsight?


I know about the book and some concepts around it, and a little skimming... but not in detail - Seems like a good story conceptually and how it tries to explore the philosophical concept around consciousness and the frightening possibilities that it may be a liability, as well as the exploration of the economy of a cyberpunk dystopia. But I'm kind of in a love-hate relationship with it due to how much this author is very much another Harlan Ellison and redditor fans of this books littered any mention of it with iamverysmart takes.

The biggest peeve for me around this book is that the author claimed that this book is a 'real legit science!' *cites 100+ of papers* yet when you actually go and look at the papers that are cited... it doesn't exactly always support the argument and explanations used in the book and sometimes even contradict it. Although I can also see the cited papers as more of an 'inspiration'.... that is sadly due to author's ego is not framed in a more honest way. And the 'fans' are eating it up and using the book to sound pretentious.


It is very clear to me that a lot of characters are created with the purpose of exploring theme of consciousness that you feel sometimes that they're just plot devices and some depths are sacrificed for the theme. Having half of your brain severed to reduce seizures does not make you have 'less consciousness' in reality, the vampires are there to explore the concept of predatory superhuman 'philosophical zombies., and I don't really know how, say, multiple consciousness would improve linguistic abilities other than it being an exploration of having multiple consciousness - In fact I don't mind those things, science fiction is first and foremost fiction, and these elements are certainly utilized for the philosophical discussion the author wants to have. It's just a little criticism I need to say after seeing too many one-sided praises.

*Now here's the topic of actual transhumanism itself :*
I'm mostly a lurker here because I don't think I've got the most knowledgable takes to say - I don't condone or condemn it, but the unknown around it certainly caused me a lot of fear... e.g. We know very well that our human mind is imited, just like how animals mind seem limited to us and we think the way we do, due to the physical limitation in the brain.
And while we're dreaming about how superintelligent AI would think and if we can augment our brain power through future technology... therefore it means that our very perception to the world will be wildly different. Would post-human brain will still have any concepts like enjoyment or everything we enjoy now will become pointless monkey brain pleasure and would the universe stops being exciting to us at one point? What would post-human live for? Or our destiny ends up somewhere with no motivation left because we'd get 'too smart' for anything who knows... And it's scary to think where we'd end up


(That's remind me of the Fermi paradox itself, assuming aliens have managed to reach singularity, and if they were expansionists, we'd have been wiped out for now. So they're certainly not expansionists... The result of superintelligence likely ends on the different note)


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## FUTUREMAN (Apr 28, 2022)

Deepland Bystander said:


> I know about the book and some concepts around it, and a little skimming... but not in detail - Seems like a good story conceptually and how it tries to explore the philosophical concept around consciousness and the frightening possibilities that it may be a liability, as well as the exploration of the economy of a cyberpunk dystopia. But I'm kind of in a love-hate relationship with it due to how much this author is very much another Harlan Ellison and redditor fans of this books littered any mention of it with iamverysmart takes.
> 
> The biggest peeve for me around this book is that the author claimed that this book is a 'real legit science!' *cites 100+ of papers* yet when you actually go and look at the papers that are cited... it doesn't exactly always support the argument and explanations used in the book and sometimes even contradict it. Although I can also see the cited papers as more of an 'inspiration'.... that is sadly due to author's ego is not framed in a more honest way. And the 'fans' are eating it up and using the book to sound pretentious.
> 
> ...


Yeah, the book does have its faults and the author later admitted that some of the stuff in it was not up-to-date anymore and the whole vampires and useless consciousness aspect seemed a bit contrived.
Would've been better if it focused more on AI and humans with radically different brain structures.
I also think it would've been better if it was stated that consciousness is not useless from the get-go but rather becomes obsolete once you reach 'the singularity' as the earlier parts of the book implied


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## Sparkling Yuzu (May 4, 2022)

Why are they like this?


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## Terrorist (May 4, 2022)

Having finally shed his corpulent brony shell for a sexy cyborg body, @Drain Todger can finally take on the Chinese government.


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