@SCSI
The ruling class will never, ever let us have anything good. If people could walk into a surgeon's office, purchase superpowers, go under the knife for hours, and come out of it with 300 IQ, the ability to see in the dark, enough strength to crush bricks in their hands or leap two stories straight up, and the ability to fire laser beams from their butt cheeks, the authorities would have a conniption fit.
Imagine if it was just expanding people's intelligence with a BCI and an exocortex, giving them perfect recall and doubling their intelligence. Imagine if one of those people decided to become a terrorist or criminal mastermind. How would you even stop someone like that? Ted Kaczynski evaded capture for years and years because his IQ was 167 and he knew how to cover his tracks completely. What do you do about someone who's twice as intelligent, but malevolent? You might try arguing that they could simply augment the guys hunting him to be equally intelligent, but that only covers information that is known and can be accessed by both parties. It does not cover unknown unknowns.
Imagine it's the year 2060. Abdul the Rascally Islamic Radical knows that enhancing oneself is
haram because it perverts the glory of Allah's perfect design
, but he agrees to be the group's sacrifice. He goes and gets his intellect boosted with gene therapy, induced pluripotent stem cells, and the installation of an exocortex on his skull. He's now smarter than Einstein and Tesla put together. He scours molec bio textbooks, devouring information and recalling it with perfect accuracy. Within a year, he's developed methods for building a DNA printer at home from scraps. He constructs a gene transfection dart gun from old medical equipment and hand-crafts a viral genome to load it with. As he's walking down the street in New York, he skulks away into an alley and shoots a passerby with his makeshift weapon. That person develops airborne rabies. Within weeks, millions of people are dead.
Wait. My bad. You don't need enhanced intelligence to do that. In a matter of a decade or two, any idiot will be able to do this.
Evans said the creation of synthetic horsepox “isn't trivially easy.” He said he was not seeking publicity and wished that news organizations would not make a “fuss” about his work.
“Whether you can make the virus, or whether there are these hidden stocks of virus, doesn’t change the fact that in the case of smallpox, we have to be prepared for it,” he said. “I don’t know whether the risk has gone up or not. The fact we’re talking about it is to some extent increasing the risk.”
Tom Frieden, former head of the CDC, said the breakthrough was not surprising but probably makes the debate over destroying the existing smallpox stockpiles less relevant. He said it highlights the need to monitor more closely “dual-use” experiments — research that could be used either for protective purposes or, in theory, to create a deadly pathogen.
The most dangerous technology is nano-enabled biotechnology. While the nexus of these two sciences has already produced extremely effective medicines for certain types of cancer and will likely cure other diseases in time, the same technologies that can cure disease can also be perverted to cause it. With the “Rosetta Stone” for the human genome only a handful of years away, the world is entering an era when it is possible to design a perfectly lethal virus for which no immunity exists. By 2030 this capability could reside in the hands of a master’s degree holder in microbiology.
Furthermore, it is entirely possible for a sufficiently wealthy individual to destroy all the surface navies in the world using current technology. All you would need is a couple million dollars, a narco sub factory, some microcontrollers, GPS chips, and sensors, and some skilled AI coders. For about $10k a pop, you could build autonomous semi-submersible torpedoes each filled with a thousand pounds of ANFO. Build a few hundred of them, link them together with swarm AI and sensor fusion capabilities, and send them at surface vessels. Nobody can stop 'em. ASW assets would let more than half slip by. CIWS guns would struggle just to target them. One single hit at the waterline, and a multi-billion-dollar nuclear-powered carrier is sitting on the bottom of the ocean. That's what one sufficiently angry and resourceful drug kingpin could do, right now, with technology that already exists.
Transhumanism isn't misguided because of the human augmentation aspect of it. There's nothing inherently ignoble or wrong about wanting to enhance the human lifespan, or our mental faculties, or our physical strength and resilience. We arguably already do this with medical implants and performance-enhancing drugs. The problem with transhumanism is that it cannot actually exist as a social phenomenon without wreaking havoc. After the ruling class have spent decades with RAND Corporation types tugging their ears and telling them all the ways that society will collapse due to "disruptive" technology, they're paranoid about "existential threats". Everyone looks like a terrorist to them, now.
Governments are sustaining themselves on a carefully-crafted illusion of power. You cannot control a society of tech-MacGyvers, biohackers, and post-humans. They're ungovernable. A couple decades after the NWO seizes power, no one will be able to buy anything that could be used to build a drone or model aircraft, or do gene sequencing at home, or anything too disruptive. People's implants will be used to track them and analyze their behavior and give them access to their bank accounts,
not enhance their capabilities. Anything that provides people with enhanced faculties just makes them that much harder to track, to cage, and to discipline.
The problem with technology is that the excuse for tyranny is built right into it. You can't have more tech without more tyranny, because it would produce absolute chaos. Augmenting oneself is power. It's power that the ruling class will never let the peasants have, because if we did have it, then they would be immediately overthrown and displaced. Why would the Overclass spend years and years brainwashing people in public school to accept their rulership as inevitable and immutable, only to let people take cyber-shrooms and mentally unshackle themselves in an afternoon?
They already don't allow us any agency at all. How much agency do you think they'd allow you if you were augmented? They'd keep you in a dog kennel, my friend.
The Overclass know that their days are numbered if they do nothing. People are waking up to their evil faster and faster. The internet allows people to share information about Elite crimes and government malfeasance on an unprecedented scale. Stuff like Wikileaks scared the shit out of them. Why do you think they whine so much about the Wayback Machine and its ilk? They don't like it when people can retrieve cached pages whenever they like. They want the power to memory-hole and stealth-edit whatever they want. Even without the benefit of archived shit, it's trivially easy to assemble a picture of what they're doing, from the things these WEF people say publicly about themselves.
The WEF mind-set assumes that these things are good and desirable because they solve the problem that ever vexes the technocratic class: the mulish refusal of the lumpenproles to adjust their behavior when requested. We asked you nicely, but what did you do? You ate a hamburger and got on a plane. Really, you’ve no one to blame but yourself. This pillow-soft scientific fascism appeals to the romantically unsuccessful urban journalist in search of a cause, and the next thing you know, the media write stories with headlines like “Smart Underwear Will Use Bluetooth to Report Your Carbon Output.”
These people are very status-quo-minded. They talk about change, about improving society, but they don't actually want anything to change at all. They want to preserve the wealth and power of an unaccountable, ossified Elite at all costs, even if it means diminishing our quality of life.
A sufficiently augmented post-human is
basically indistinguishable from a nation. It's the ultimate libertarian fantasy; to become a sovereign being. This is the exact opposite of what the Overclass want for the vast majority of people, and the evidence is in their actions: more tracking, more globalization, more collectivization, fewer individual liberties, fewer property rights, fewer privacy rights, et cetera.
A
true post-human can't be tracked, commodified, or have laws imposed upon him from above. Everything he touches is his property. This is a power that the Overclass will reserve solely for themselves, of course.
There's something broken with your brain when you think that "humans are just like other species and so we will die out too". Well, the shark has been around for hundreds of millions of years essentially unchanged. And humans can solve problems. Like maybe the problem of our own extinction.
It's just such a hopeless thought. It takes a sick mind to obsess over "yes, we will all die... let me keep writing about it... death is coming for us all... it's inevitable..." the way you people do.
The best thing for the two of you death-lovers would be too seek out your own deaths so your sickness doesn't spread to other people, but you can never do that. You don't love humanity or your fellow humans so you'll happily lead them astray. But you love yourselves so you'll keep writing your doom slop for attention.
God exists. That simple fact negates all that you say. But according to your calculations he can't exist because that would mean you hadn't figured it all out. And you wouldn't be the very smart boy who predicted that everything is bad and will never get better.
It's just a lifetime temper tantrum with you types. Jim Jones but without the sex, drugs, or rock and roll.
If we assume that evolution is correct, then humans eventually will go extinct for the simple reason that we would be replaced by our evolutionary descendants over a hundred thousand years from now. Our genes are mutating all the time. Our offspring are a little bit different from us, and their offspring, and their offspring, and so on. Humans have changed profoundly in terms of skeletal structure even in the past five thousand years, reflecting our continuing "domestication". If we were somehow able to escape that by genetically engineering ourselves to lock in our current genetics (not inconceivable; actually quite feasible technologically), then our next checkpoint in entropy hell world is somehow avoiding being wiped out by a GRB or cataclysmic asteroid impact.
If we can manage that, then in 600 million years, C3 carbon fixation will end, most plant life on Earth will die, and then, sometime within 600 million to a billion years from now, Earth will revert to having basically no oxygen in its atmosphere. At that point, the maintenance of humanity would necessarily come from building megastructures around long-lived celestial bodies like red dwarf stars and black holes and hoovering up asteroid belts for resources, a process that will last us some trillions of years before the universe grows dark and cold, or rips itself apart, or collapses in on itself.
If you happen to believe that
black hole cosmology or the many-worlds hypothesis are true, we might be able to escape the death of this universe by somehow generating a traversable wormhole and sending ourselves (or information representing us, if our physical forms cannot survive the journey) through it and into a young universe. Good luck engineering the device to do this.
The point is, barring absolutely herculean effort on our part (and some undiscovered or otherwise impossible physics), we're all basically dead anyway after the passage of sufficient time and all of our greatest works of art and culture are practically guaranteed to disappear. Yes, even that of the post-humans.
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