63 replies to this topic

[VictorBjoerk]

Imagine the annihilation of only 1 gram antimatter..........

[Luna]

How about none? all are warmly accepted.

It is not the technology which can put fear into me, it is the people.
Humans behind technology are a recipe for a disaster.

Edited by Winterbreeze, 24 July 2008 - 02:14 PM.

[HereInTheHole]

Designer babies, that is pretty insane... I would never want to have a designer baby, the whole thought just creeps me out.

I'd be okay with a designer baby as long as it matched my Gucci socks.

[HereInTheHole]

Artificial Intelligence seems the most dangerous to me. Humans are collectively a bunch of f-ups. I can't imagine that an intelligence we create would be any better. And it wouldn't be limited by flesh. Imagine an AI with the intelligence of George Bush but the power of the Death Star.

[Ben]

Future Media. Packer's puerile piss-poor publications are already pervasive enough.

[EmbraceUnity]

Modifications to our subjective experiences seems to me to be the most dangerous. Apocalypse is a yawnfest compared to a wide number of potential dystopic futures. Our future is likely to be strange, but I'd like it to be strange in a good way.... know what I mean?

Edited by progressive, 08 March 2009 - 09:47 AM.

[.fonclea.]

I would say all . It's not the technology which scared me but who is using it and how. And because i don't trust humans...

[Lazarus Long]

Well maybe it's time to resurrect a thread.

Enough votes have been cast to assess general opinion and a few common threads have appeared. Our community most takes the threat of Evolutionary Competitive AI as the greatest threat, followed by Nano and then GMO, Future media, etc. Most of all we fear abuse in one form or another of technology by fellow humans. A few, like the expressed fear of anti matter reflect the excess risk posed by mistakes if nothing else, but perhaps even a dark antimatter meteor with our meme on it could be making its way to us ever since the big bang and we don't know it. One not very loving spoonful that only needs to run the gauntlet of the galaxy to touch our atmosphere and we are all gone in a flash.

Personally however, since I measure fear in terms of known threat rather than self inflicted injury; I tend to agree more and more with "Future Media" by its ability to impact the greatest number of people at almost the same time, as well as over a prolonged period on a daily basis. It has the highest likelihood of an instance of the worst case outcome for the law of unintended consequence, let alone the crap they pull off intentionally.

To say that big media is manipulative is an understatement. It's the motives which need to be subject to greater scrutiny. Mere profit is perhaps the least objectionable of them and that too says a lot.

On the flip side even the best motives run the risk of the "road to hell being paved with good intention."

One thing from further analysis that gladdens me about our community is that we never really raised the risk here in our community for the more ubiquitous "unknown".

Ironically, whether simply the unknown risk, or the more existential "unknowable risk". Sometimes it happens that a rock from outer space tracking a multi-billion year trajectory hits, and all life on this planet is never really the same again.

I'll probably win the lottery that day.

The odds are that there is as much chance of what you fear killing you as what you haven't a clue about, whether a gamma ray burst en route at light speed or an impaired driver on designer drugs and alcohol.

Nevertheless age is still the greatest determinant of dying and birth the leading cause of death by definition.

Life: live it, learn, love, and nurture vitality. Being alive is not a cause of death but only the living die.

To sum up another shared subtext of the discussion: The future doesn't frighten me, history does.

[lazarian]

To be honest, I find all of the above fairly terrifying.

[Xenthide]

The only one there that I really had any concerns about was Biometric Identification. I really do not like the idea of living in an absolute surveillance state where your every movement and action is monitored and recorded.

I'm not sure why some of those things are on that list. What exactly is scary about Nuclear Fusion? Surely the only frightening thing about that is that we may just never get it to work.

Also I would like to know what the 7 people who voted "Particle Accelerators" are scared of - that has to be the most completely benign and non-threatening technology on that list. Yes, subatomic particles are so terrifying...

[Loveycat]

The concept of 'designer babies' creeps me out in a 'new world order' sort of way. *shudders*

[Logic]

Imagine for a moment that there is a megalomaniac/s with a diabolical plan to take control of the world food supply by designing food crops that can be patented, do not produce seed so you have to buy from 'him' and kills off bees so that alternate foods and herbs are no longer pollenated and also die out.

Imagine that said food crops are also designed to change the DNA of the gut bacteria of consumers, as well as eventually the DNA of all consumers with the end result of a short lived, sickly, cancer prone population.

Imagine that part of the plan is to make industrially produced vitamins and minerals essentially illegal in that they will only be available with a prescription, from a pharmaceutical company and only in minute, ineffective doses.

It sounds like the plot from a James Bond movie doesn't it!?
I hope it is!

http://www.longecity...opinion-on-gmo/
http://www.longecity...clared-illegal/
http://www.longecity...llegal-in-2009/

[Ark]

Add mind control tech please???????

[Turnbuckle]

The explosion in computer memory capacity. Specifically, the NSA's stealing the entire content of the optic cables and storing it in their new zettabyte facility. This is not compatible with a free society.

[empedocles]

Technological advances don't kill humans.... humans do .
I believe every effort should be given to creating artificial intelligence for governance, if history has shown us anything, it is that humans simply shouldn't govern.

[IndigoIlluminate]

I am pro technology but only when that technology is in the right hands. My vote went to nanotechnology because I don't really want to see a micro chipped population. Bio-metrics and future media were close behind though.

[Ark]

Add mind control tech please???????

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[platypus]

Technological advances don't kill humans.... humans do .
I believe every effort should be given to creating artificial intelligence for governance, if history has shown us anything, it is that humans simply shouldn't govern.

I have trouble understanding how we will create a "sane" AI as it has the potential to go from zero to full-psychotic in a tiny fraction of a second.

[Ark]

I still don't see how people aren't worried about items like Project Family Jewels aka mind control of the 50s/60s now if you can imagine what they were working on then, you can get a small insight into what might be happening tools that could make one person kill someone else (aka lee harvey ozwell style) without their knowledge setting up events that tip the scales of the world.

[Ekaterinya Vladinakova]

For concerns over nanotech we will have proper regulations and safeguards put in place to prevent hostiles getting out of hand.
I have MUCH bigger concerns with religious and reactionary terrorists who may try to harm society. I very much doubt there will be a collective organized group, it would IMO likely be individual nuts carrying out their attacks against life extension and merging with machines.

I voted Genetically modified viruses since a terrorist with the appropriate tools and knowledge could make a virus extremely lethal and spread across human society like wildfire. I very much doubt they will be able to do so before we have the appropriate safeguards like nanobot white blood cells, artificial white blood cells which can identify hostile viruses before your natural one would.

Future Media is also a very good choice IMO, considering channels such as CNN FOX had the potential into brainwashing so many Americans into supporting the War in Iraq and that Saddam had WMDs. Or nut jobs like Alex Jones with his anti-technology fear mongering propaganda. What could happen if future media spread misinformation in another international crisis like 9-11? I dear hope the future generations and millennials would be rational enough to not fall for nonsense.

Artificial Intelligence seems the most dangerous to me. Humans are collectively a bunch of f-ups. I can't imagine that an intelligence we create would be any better. And it wouldn't be limited by flesh. Imagine an AI with the intelligence of George Bush but the power of the Death Star.

Reason why I prefer that we merge with AI and become extremely intelligent instead of simply creating them. We humans although brilliant in one way, also make plenty of mistakes, it is for this reason why I feel merging with AI and enhancing our intelligence is going to be critical in the future of humanity.

Edited by Alasuya Lushanova, 02 December 2013 - 04:23 AM.

[william7]

Quantum computers and brain computer interfaces seem to be the great big evil scientists are currently working on for the government. Once the two are connected we'll be satan's puppets for sure. On the up side, there should be less collateral damage in drone strikes. Instead of firing those big, bulky missles they should be able to zero in with a 50 caliber whenever someone starts thinking outside the box. Of course if you're standing nearby you'll likely get splattered with brains and blood, but that's nothing a good shower can't take care of.

[Keizo]

Watching the propaganda-war that's been going on in relation to the Russian-Ukraine conflict (for example, perhaps not the best one I don't know), it does make me seriously concerned about what sort of narratives can be manufactured and proliferated. I guess it always was the case that even the smartest people were infiltrated by ideas that they themselves never rationally examined (for one reason or another).
I guess the internet for now is simultaneously a very strong antidote preventing one single idea from spreading too far in this manner....but who knows what will happen in the future.

Edited by Nume, 17 March 2014 - 10:11 PM.

[123apk]

Designer babies and engineering babies without sperm which might eventually be possible. Both are basically leaving the future of humanity to be designed by a handful of people and as much as we may try to create the perfect human we are such complex beings that it's a massive risk. Plus as a male I don't fancy being made obsolete, but I guess genes of the men who have lived and reproduced in the past will live on in these future single gender humans presumably (whether they be female, some hermaphrodite creation or something that gets engineered in a lab).

 

Other than that the explosion in birth rates in low IQ people. The movie Idiocracy isn't too hard to imagine in the future... I saw something somewhere saying we may actually be less intelligent overall today than in the past and that smart people from ancient times would be considered geniuses today. I'm not sure if I entirely agree because of all the genetic bottlenecks we've had, but I certainly think collectively we like to think we're more intelligent than we really are, most people seem to want to believe it anyway.

Progress in curing and treating diseases and in keeping people alive has enabled more people to survive who would have been wiped out from natural selection in the past. I see it all the time around the council estates in the UK.

[Keizo]

Designer babies and engineering babies without sperm which might eventually be possible. Both are basically leaving the future of humanity to be designed by a handful of people and as much as we may try to create the perfect human we are such complex beings that it's a massive risk. Plus as a male I don't fancy being made obsolete, but I guess genes of the men who have lived and reproduced in the past will live on in these future single gender humans presumably (whether they be female, some hermaphrodite creation or something that gets engineered in a lab).

 

Other than that the explosion in birth rates in low IQ people. The movie Idiocracy isn't too hard to imagine in the future... I saw something somewhere saying we may actually be less intelligent overall today than in the past and that smart people from ancient times would be considered geniuses today. I'm not sure if I entirely agree because of all the genetic bottlenecks we've had, but I certainly think collectively we like to think we're more intelligent than we really are, most people seem to want to believe it anyway.

Progress in curing and treating diseases and in keeping people alive has enabled more people to survive who would have been wiped out from natural selection in the past. I see it all the time around the council estates in the UK.

Francis Galton estimated the IQ of ancient Greeks to be about 120, today the Greek IQ is below 100. I think Richard Lynn did some calculation with actual IQ and ancestry figures, and his estimate added up pretty closely to Galton's.

 

[123apk]

 

Designer babies and engineering babies without sperm which might eventually be possible. Both are basically leaving the future of humanity to be designed by a handful of people and as much as we may try to create the perfect human we are such complex beings that it's a massive risk. Plus as a male I don't fancy being made obsolete, but I guess genes of the men who have lived and reproduced in the past will live on in these future single gender humans presumably (whether they be female, some hermaphrodite creation or something that gets engineered in a lab).

 

Other than that the explosion in birth rates in low IQ people. The movie Idiocracy isn't too hard to imagine in the future... I saw something somewhere saying we may actually be less intelligent overall today than in the past and that smart people from ancient times would be considered geniuses today. I'm not sure if I entirely agree because of all the genetic bottlenecks we've had, but I certainly think collectively we like to think we're more intelligent than we really are, most people seem to want to believe it anyway.

Progress in curing and treating diseases and in keeping people alive has enabled more people to survive who would have been wiped out from natural selection in the past. I see it all the time around the council estates in the UK.

Francis Galton estimated the IQ of ancient Greeks to be about 120, today the Greek IQ is below 100. I think Richard Lynn did some calculation with actual IQ and ancestry figures, and his estimate added up pretty closely to Galton's.

 

 

 

Not sure how they're estimating the IQ of ordinary peasant ancient Greeks though.

[Keizo]

 

 

 

 

 

Not sure how they're estimating the IQ of ordinary peasant ancient Greeks though.

 

I think Galton looked at population achievement and extrapolated a bell curve based on that, but I haven't looked into it.

Today we have figures for various populations so in the simplest case you can draw an X and Y axis for a particular % of ancestry and IQ respectively, put in current points of a population, and then draw trend lines to arrive at another ratio of ancestry and thus arrive at a new IQ estimate for such a population. Assuming a few things including IQ as a mostly linear and heritable effect of genes.

Edited by Keizo, 09 November 2015 - 01:07 AM.

[Antonio2014]

I deleted my vote. What really frightens me now is a future with poorly funded rejuvenation/cryonics research. My time is slowly running out and immortality is still far away.

[Multivitz]

I'm not motivated by fear and having a fair grasp of the things in the list I still am no way scared of anything listed in this thread.
What worries me is the amount of witless fools who buy into any of the fear surrounding it. So to make me feel better, ask yourself what emperical evidence does your fear have, has that fear visited someone you know? I'll exclude GMO, now that s#@t will f☆★☆ you up, or as they say, "no sense, no feeling!". Did you here of the Japanese rejected a shipment or wheat, because it was contaminated with GMO, guess where it came from!?

[Multivitz]

Is there a list of things that we should be embracing? No....that would involve no adrenaline? Depends if it's real or not eh. Lots of Terminator fans I see lol.
Lots of them ideas in the list are twisted imaginations, can anyone throw caution to the wind, and say which ones have large fallacies? Forget their stock market foated cost of expectational worth!

Edited by Multivitz, 16 December 2015 - 09:09 PM.

[Heisok]

Nanotechnology and Future Media are tied for 2'nd place.

 

Future Media, has come into the spotlight. It is here now. There seems to be some outcry about fake news stories being spread. Add to that the issue where "News Feeds" have been challenged for the bias of the content.

 

I would give Longecity a compliment for having identified a problem .