11 replies to this topic

[Mind]

http://www.usatoday....friend/1918689/

The title of this thread is deliberately provocative and no doubt many would argue about it, however, I think it touches on an important topic in our modern world.

That is, how transhumans view themselves. It might be a stretch to call Oscar a transhuman AND his special abilities might have had absolutely nothing to do with the tragic shooting of his girlfriend (he might be completely innocent), but according to a biographer who followed Oscar's story, he viewed himself as somewhat of a "super hero". His blades allowed him to be one of the fastest people on the planet - in certain races. So fast that the "natural" Olympics did not want him to participate/compete.

I am just wondering if other transhumans in the near future who have much greater abilities than Oscar, might view themselves as "super heroes"? I wonder how they will view their place in society?

Edited by Mind, 17 February 2013 - 10:50 PM.

[Droplet]

I once read a brilliant short story about a post-human world where people really were no longer human. They could regenerate their own limbs and spent a lot of their money on their upgrades, tattoos etc. They find a dog, the last living dog on the planet and take it back with them largely because it was a novelty and it was a dystopian future where humanity had wrecked the natural world. They try caring for the dog but upon realising how weak the life form is and how they would have to bother ordering in special food pellets for it, they kill it and eat it on the beach.

I just hope that we can build a world a lot better than that and with more compassion for other life forms no matter how advanced we become. I think that we will need legislation much like that we have against discrimination of the disabled etc. for those without "super powers." I don't think everyone will want an upgrade and also that people will upgrade in different ways and varying degrees. Also, perhaps cost will play a role like it does in many things.

[Julia36]

This is a tragedy and we speculate in extreme instances as part of denial.

I speculate Oscar was on steroids. However that's a wild, unsubstantiated guess.
Supplements available legally are latter banned eg Cocaine.

I cant imagine what loosing my legs would do to my mind.
However futurism is a well worked philosophy with many attributes of a religion.

What is very hard to judge is specific tine predictions will fulfil and they seldom occur as predicted..

[Lister]

It seems like the augmented human will continue as it has been so far, with the augmenting of disabled people. This is why sometimes when I see a disabled person seeking pity for their disability I can’t help but feel like we’ll be looking to them one day for the same thing. We the able bodied will be inferior compared to those once disabled people whom will end up augmented in a way that advances them beyond our natural limits.

But then if the blind can obtain new digital eyes that allow them to see better than 20/20 how long will it be before we’re replacing our natural, functioning eyes? The same goes for artificial limbs that are faster, stronger and better than natural; and the same goes for any other human part.

I’m sure some of the very first people to do it may view themselves as superhuman though as augmentation becomes common the view of being super human would likely trail off.

“Ghost in the Shell” is a perfect example of this type of future. Almost everyone is augmented as it’s cheap and easy.

Edited by Lister, 20 February 2013 - 01:32 AM.

[Julia36]

Lister I see the issue as bravery.

WE need courage to self modify.

But there is no resting plateau - no end point where we say 'Now I have done my modifying'

We will keep on for the foreseeable future modifying more.

Three classes of people are needed at present, but they will soon be swept away by progress;

1. Money makers

2. Technology makers.

3. People who need human-modification technology.

The trend technology is accelerating on is said to be 'double exponential'.

It certainly looks it:

eg Moore's Law is a doubling of computing power every 18 months (cost of transistors on a chip per $1/ against time)
but time is shortening.on a trend.

That trend is a common trend in technology (the Law of Accelerating Returns)

Using that to plot with in significant (relevant) technologies, we have less than 14 years before everything imaginable in technology (by present human minds) has been achieved:

we have hit the knee of the curve of tech growth.

Suspendees now frozen will be restored, planets colonised, time travel achieved, the dead risen, immortality achieved, new universes formed etc


If this is fantastic, is has to be believed if trends hold, because Superintelligence will happen.

To argue against that you would have to show trends that have held for centuries will bust.

the sole danger is we'll blow ourselves up.

[Lister]

As long as we avoid any significant disaster natural or otherwise we’ll see some insane jumps in the coming century. I wouldn’t say that 14 years will be the limit, not even nearly. That 14 year time limit assumes barriers restricted by our current understanding of the universe; which is at best limited.

In computers we are presently limited by size. We will see chips in the next 10 years reaching 5 nanometer architecture. As we cannot go smaller than this, this will end Mores Law in terms of today’s conventional chips. That’s all fine and well but then we’re well on our way to having grapheme based computer chips which will likely last us another decade or two. Then we get to the really big stuff: Quantum Computers.

Current models of a mere 300 atom Quantum Computer Crystal have computational powers similar to that of a conventional computer the size of the known universe! And then if we bring this threads topic into it, it gets even more ridiculous.

At present we design future computers on present computers and this adds an exponential growth element; fast computer makes faster computer which makes even faster computer. That’s great but what if we double that effect?

As computers grow our understanding of our own brains grow too. If we were to augment our brains with quantum computers for example think of the possible effects of this! Developing faster computers on faster computers using a faster brain!

And we’ll need augmented brains to keep up. It’s challenging enough already to keep pace with todays growing trends!

So to summarize: Not 14 years. More like 400. Still it’s an incredibly short amount of time!

[Julia36]

I cant agree with 400 Lister!

Quantum computers are due according to ibm by 2022.

Quantum Computers which IBM expects to be ready after 2022 and do near infinite calculations in a few seconds, may be passed by the new maths of super-recursive algorithms.

Superintelligence (as AGI) is being attempted and institutions already government sponsored eg

cser and ieet exist to contain it, see: the hawking protocol

One successful Superintelligence build will deliver post human accelerating intelligence.

I restate 14 years tops.

However prediction can be out by many factors.

Your guesses are probably linear intuits which are not correct as technology is developing double exponentially (this is provable and not conjecture).

Trends work counter-intuitively...demonstrably so.

This shows mechanical calculation in floating sums per second in Supercomputers

Exponential growth is hard to grasp instinctively. It is a doubling of performance.

But at one second to midnight...only one more doubling remains, but the task is only half done.

This next doubling completes more than all the preceding progress, like wheat grains on a chess board.

But the tech trend is double-double exponential growth, and machine intelligence is breaking.

The human brain project will complete in 10 years where the brain will be reverse engineered.

there are others racing to reverse engineer the brain:

:

The US Gvmt SYNAPSE project aims at mimicing the human brain.

This will play into quantum computing and super-recursive algorithms.


.
Ray Kurzweil has plotted trends of speed up and declared a Law of Accelerating Returns is valid. The underlying acceleration of technology is faster than it seems.




see the law of Accelerating Returns...which is a testable thesis.



A major stumbling block is to reverse engineer and map the neural synapse.

This is the most complex machine known and essential- to artificial intelligence via that route:

The synapse...the most complex machine known- and still a mystery.

An artificial synapse has been attempted in Germany 2012

Edited by stopgam, 21 February 2013 - 02:56 PM.

[Brainbox]

That is, how transhumans view themselves. It might be a stretch to call Oscar a transhuman AND his special abilities might have had absolutely nothing to do with the tragic shooting of his girlfriend (he might be completely innocent), but according to a biographer who followed Oscar's story, he viewed himself as somewhat of a "super hero". His blades allowed him to be one of the fastest people on the planet - in certain races. So fast that the "natural" Olympics did not want him to participate/compete.

I am just wondering if other transhumans in the near future who have much greater abilities than Oscar, might view themselves as "super heroes"? I wonder how they will view their place in society?

In case he actually is guilty, this might be linked more to the abuse of performance enhancing drugs, especially steroids, than the psychological effects (or stress) of the notion alone of being a super hero.

It's difficult to judge specific situations and we do not know what Oscar is guilty of or what circumstances did lead to his act. But it is a nice case for a more in-general and in-depth discussion about human enhancement technologies.

My take on it.

Applied technologies do have unintended or impossible to anticipate side effects. Allways. Add to that the human nature of being somewhat paranoid, that is effective for survival tactics in natural bush environments, but that is somewhat outdated as far as our current circumstances of living is concerned.

Most performance enhancement technologies, like for instance steroids, do emphasize nature more than nurture. It enhances strength but also the psychological effects that are almost directly chemically linked, like aggressiveness and paranoia. It enhances our capabilities the easy way and hence the wrong way. It turns the clock "backwards" in the sense that the capabilities that were important thousands of years ago are enhanced and not the skills that are needed for survival in complex societies like ours today. They are even dumbed down!

For the simplified conditions that are valid for the playing field of athletics steroids work, but outside this simplified social structure it creates major problems regarding adaptation to modern societal requirements. Requirements that are a major challenge for any individual to begin with.

Our abilities to deal with modern societal challenges do not develop sufficiently fast.

So instead of enhancing simple capabilities like muscle and brainpower, power to jump extraordinary heights or calculate primes with our bare brain, we should focus on other more complex human capabilities. Like checking where your girlfriend hangs out before you start shooting inside your own home…. and in line of that our insufficient notion that the earth we live on is our collective home and that every silly thing we do in that home affects all of us.

[Julia36]

I'd love to legally argue 'No case to answer' via Quantum Archaeology.

ie his girlfriend is NOT dead, therefore he did not murder her.

i think he could only be prosecuted for nuisance??

[nowayout]

Well, you don't need to be on drugs to be paranoid in South Africa. I wouldn't even call it paranoia, because the threat is very real. I find Oscar's defense plausible, and I feel very sorry for him as well as his girlfriend's family.

In the past few years, female family members of mine have on no less than four occasions been in a robbery, carjack, or hostage situation where they thought they were going to be either killed or raped or both - if there had happened to be a male family member in the house at the time, he most probably would have been killed by the robbers, because that is what they do there. The news are filled with scores of home invasions every week where people were killed for no reason. In contrast, when one such case occurred in Connecticut a couple of years ago, it was in the U.S. news for weeks.

I think it is difficult, if not impossible, for a non-South African to understand what that does to people.

Edited by viveutvivas, 22 February 2013 - 10:02 PM.

[Mind]

Brainbox, great take on the enhanced future we face. Thanks for taking the time to post.

Also thanks for an on-the-ground assessment viveutvivas.

Edited by Mind, 22 February 2013 - 10:10 PM.

[Julia36]

Hi viveutvivas,

Sounds difficult in SA. It shodn't stay like that as technnology hots up.

Pistorius' case is like when the first robot killed a man.

Nothing much in itself but it puhes questions about what it is to be human.

If machines modify faster than men, they will have seniority at law over them.

They may even keep us as pets.

Neuroscientist Hugo de Garis sketches this out (wiki)

De Garis believes that a major war before the end of the 21st century, resulting in billions of deaths, is almost inevitable.^[2]:234 Intelligent machines (or 'artilects', a shortened form of 'artificial intellects') will be far more intelligent than humans and will threaten to attain world domination, resulting in a conflict between 'Cosmists', who support the artilects, and 'Terrans', who oppose them

It's probably the issue will be fleeting because of the speed of change which is quickening.

Things you'd think would take 40 years will be done in 4 years as technologies converge (see
The Law of Accelerating Returns)


This acceleration on an acceleration of technology wont be limited to California or Stanford, but will be worldwide.

Africa is getting air conditioning powered by solar and gearing up isn't it?

I dont see law enforcement as being done by men but using machines with vast deduction and observation capabilities.

Crimne and Problems like poverty are linked aren't they?

Education is getting easier, like this easy vid about robots (Stanford):

https://www.youtube....h?v=NwSk-laDr14