Transhumanism

[kuniqs]

Read The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. It's a bit pedantic and repetitive, but it's a good primer on the background for a lot of this stuff.

On his deathbed Kurzweil will be shouting "Singularity! Coming next Tuesday!"

 

[Holdek]

On his deathbed Kurzweil will be shouting "Singularity! Coming next Tuesday!"

When he says "near" he means decades from now, but yeah, still, he's on the liberal end of such projections.

 

[TowinKarz]

The proposed timeline always puts the singularity juuuuust a few decades off.....

Usually, it's framed as us being 90% of the way there already, what with our amazing technology right now we'd be worshiped as GODS if we went back in time and appeared before the ancients, we just need that one little technological advance that hasn't juuuuuuuuuuust yet happened, that trivial missing piece, and bingo! We're there!

So, it's totally reasonable to assume that with our never-before seen computer networks that span the globe, we're *this* close to making that breakthrough!

Yeah

When I was a wee kid there were crackpots talking about this too, and they had the projected date of technology-enabled immortality juuuuuust a few decades from now, because, surely, the development of the floppy disk that can store incredible amounts of information means that breakthrough can't be far off!!!

And you could read old science books from the 60's and 50's that, likewise, predicted that the singularity was juuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a few decades from now.... because with the invention of the integrated circuit, the ability to create an artificial brain surely can't be that far off!!

And you could read even OLDER science books from the 30's that said that surely, the vacuum tube meant that artificial "electric brains" weren't far off!

And... I'm sure at least a few clueless ancient Egyptians thought that since they could preserve dead bodies so well, it's only a matter of time before they find a way to do the same to a LIVE one! It can't be that far off!!!

I think you can see where this is going.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

I think that transhumanism is going to increase economic inequality as only the rich will be able to afford designer babies. It won't be as bad as some predict because probably for the first century or so the designer babies will only be at the levels of above average but still normal people as opposed to superhumans.

EDIT:this may be a better response to this thread https://kiwifarms.net/threads/a-future-i-dont-want-a-rant-by-connor.3228/ but I couldn't figure out which thread to post it in

 

[kuniqs]

You could argue Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are already 'designer babies' by the fact that mean IQ among them is higher on average that mean IQ of white people.
IQ is not everything, though. Both Asians and Jews have their own problems whites don't have.
Keep in mind that 'designing' DNA would be pretty much like breeding dogs, in that you get a dog that's great at running 100m but terrible at most other things than an average mutt, and riddled with genetic diseases to boot.

I guess once humans start living in a world of pure technology (say, inside Great Underground Vaults, or inside spaceships 100% of their lives), DNA design will become norm because people will be already living in 100% hermetic, designed environments.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

You could argue Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are already 'designer babies' by the fact that mean IQ among them is higher on average that mean IQ of white people.
IQ is not everything, though. Both Asians and Jews have their own problems whites don't have.
Keep in mind that 'designing' DNA would be pretty much like breeding dogs, in that you get a dog that's great at running 100m but terrible at most other things than an average mutt, and riddled with genetic diseases to boot.

But Asians don't have higher IQs in Asia. Asian Americans have higher IQs because there are very few lower class Asian Americans and they just have average middle class IQs.
The same is the case with Ashkenazi Jews, there is a greater possibility as they do have higher IQs but there also aren't many ashkenazi jews in very different environments so we can't say much on it

I guess once humans start living in a world of pure technology (say, inside Great Underground Vaults, or inside spaceships 100% of their lives), DNA design will become norm because people will be already living in 100% hermetic, designed environments.

I don't see why you consider that to be the case or why living in a city doesn't count as that

 

[kuniqs]

I don't see why you consider that to be the case or why living in a city doesn't count as that

You don't choose what air you breathe or whenever you'd have it raining or snowing. Designer DNA, and designed anything in biology has the disadvantage of specialization; If the environment has high variability then specialization is the wrong way to go.
I consider city environment to be a little too specialized. Whatever.

 

[doodoocaca]

Man the past 7 years sure were fun weren't they? Troons really push the transhumanism shit now. Necroing this bitch.

 

[888Flux]

Man the past 7 years sure were fun weren't they? Troons really push the transhumanism shit now. Necroing this bitch.

Troons are the exact opposite of transhumanists. They are self-mutilators and don't mistake them for anything else. They aren't augmenting their body with cybernetics, they're chopping their dick off and taking pills as a part of a sexual fetish.

 

[OKRowling]

Not worth it to necro this thread for these ... 'insights.'

 

[doodoocaca]

Seeing how trends evolve is worthwhile. And believe me, troons, being autists, are good archivists anyway.

 

[Male Idiot]

Transhumanism had been pozzed.

It used to be cool Ubermensch with machine gun in their bellies. Now its trannies with cyberdicknipples and mecha cat claws.

Jews ruin everything.

 

[AgendaPoster]

Transhumanism had been pozzed.

It used to be cool Ubermensch with machine gun in their bellies. Now its trannies with cyberdicknipples and mecha cat claws.

Jews ruin everything.

View attachment 5216915

Nah, it was always plagued. Cybernetics must be manufactured by a corporation, chips must be programmed and firmware must be updateable.
Ubermensch or not, you cannot fight against the belly machine gun turning on your brains if you disobey orders.
The dangers ahead, we never had any solutions for them, just optimism that until they are technologically possible, we will know how to regulate and control. Well, we don't.

 

[Male Idiot]

Nah, it was always plagued. Cybernetics must be manufactured by a corporation, chips must be programmed and firmware must be updateable.
Ubermensch or not, you cannot fight against the belly machine gun turning on your brains if you disobey orders.
The dangers ahead, we never had any solutions for them, just optimism that until they are technologically possible, we will know how to regulate and control. Well, we don't.

That is why you trust the State comrade!

But mutts made corpos rule the states so we are all fucked.

Disney Dominion and Amazon Alliance will fight for the favour of Blackrock Empire.

 

[Hyperbola]

What we wanted:

175 year old cyborg that replaced his failing organs with prosthetics or clones that are better than the originals. Takes NZT with his morning coffee so he can keep up with his professional reading at his 150 IQ biomedical job. Lost his eye in a laser accident, but doesn't care, because he just screwed in a new one with better resolution and infrared modes. Takes the suborbital shuttle for a 45 minute hop to the other side of the planet when he wants to vacation.

What we got:

Trannies. Idiocracy. East-palestine tier infrastructure decay. Debt-serfdom. Politicians might be 100+ years old, but they're also Faustian mockeries of life.

 

[IKOL]

Man the past 7 years sure were fun weren't they? Troons really push the transhumanism shit now. Necroing this bitch.

You're mistaking compensation of the weakness and fragility of the human flesh by better (and mostly purely artificial) parts with intentional self-harm often caused by batshit broken fecal matter that is inside of troon's brain.

I for one adore an idea of humans to ascend into new evolutional branch that would utilize the benefits of combining biological and techological tissues fused together in symbiotic, beneficial bond.

But seeing what the hell is going on all around my predicament is that this kind of thing will happen never. Or rather when we all will be long gone.

 

[doodoocaca]

Yes yes yes spergicus mechanicus I get it. Do you?

You, right now, have access to training your body and mind. Do you do so? Do you even have a baseline of training that would be expected of someone demanding more from their body, be it focus and concentration, or emotional regulation on par with a neophyte meditator? Do you train your memory and thinking?

Do you have the strength of a novice powerlifter? Do you have the range of motion of a healthy adult? Are you overweight?

Let's disregard all of that. Biology is such a patchwork that integrating new things into it is going to be, at best, exceptionally challenging. Even if you don't have to deal with rejection or interrupting the many different overlapping systems of hormones and growth and homeostasis, the mind would deal with new appendages or any significant change at all with disassociation unless we have nigh magical ways to remodel the brain and the body.

Since that's so far out, when will you start lifting and stretching, and training your mind to recall and think quickly, thinking laterally, without the constraint of ideology?

 

[Hyperbola]

You, right now, have access to training your body and mind. Do you do so?

Yes.

(It's a point I made before in another discussion that we really want kids to *internalize* the skills, not offload them to poorly understood devices/tools. If we use computers, we should use them for intensive training more than we use them to externalize and forget how to do things like arithmetic, memory, etc etc. The computer can't (even with magic AI) understand things *for* you, and you can't understand things if you keep having to refer to an external device when attempting to construct a concept. A sort of Mentat/"The Feeling of Power" dichotomy.)

Biology is such a patchwork that integrating new things into it is going to be, at best, exceptionally challenging.

This is sort of true. The big thing blocking prosthetics like those retinal spike arrays right now is that neurons are really complex electrochemical devices and don't like sitting next to metal, even something chemical inert like platinum. Over time, nerves adjacent to the interface die off or grow plaques and desensitize themselves to the interface. I think that's probably why some things like the monkey motor-cortex prosthetic control experiments never made it to human trials. Lately people have been trying more flexible nano-tube or lipid-based things - eventually the problem of rejection and necrosis might be solved.

On the other hand, there have been plenty of psychology experiments (vague memories from psychology class ten+ years ago) adding or modifying the senses, and people seem pretty adept at integrating new inputs. One example I vaguely remember was an electrode patch that put out some sort of pulse-width modulation based on a compass that someone learned to integrate as a "direction sense". Another example was the people wearing the glasses that flipped their vision upside down for two weeks, then were just as disoriented when they took them off, and had to basically re-adapt.

The brain is surprisingly flexible at figuring out what its inputs are - another thing we'd do well to try to copy in AI experiments, since we've got nothing like that yet.