Good one, F6. Some uncertainty as to the when and what in this of yours
--- "I don't think the end of all biological life as we know it is inevitable, whatever the case proves to be in terms of how long we'll still be around (keeping in mind that even if we're not just wiped out, end of story, by them or climate or both together or an asteroid or whatever, the time'll still come when we, homo sapiens sapiens, are gone simply because we've further evolved into a new human subspecies or species [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae#Taxonomic_history , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_humans ])" ---
gives me some solace in that i was having trouble with date scenarios, as 2045 which oops i cut 5 years off here .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=108452907 .. as the timelines put up over years for our 'demise' basically was one of the things that troubled me most about it all .. i'd like to thank you for finally helping to get me to finally reading about the
(grrrr, i got there only about a week ago) and really .. lol .. when i see how long the idea has been around (18C) we all could have got to it many years ago .. this bit ..
--- In 2005, Ray Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near, which brought the idea of the singularity to the popular media both through the book's accessibility and through a publicity campaign that included an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The book stirred intense controversy, in part because Kurzweil's utopian predictions contrasted starkly with other, darker visions of the possibilities of the singularity.[original research?] Kurzweil, his theories, and the controversies surrounding it were the subject of Barry Ptolemy's documentary Transcendent Man.
In 2007, Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that many of the varied definitions that have been assigned to "singularity" are mutually incompatible rather than mutually supporting. For example, Kurzweil extrapolates current technological trajectories past the arrival of self-improving AI or superhuman intelligence, which Yudkowsky argues represents a tension with both I. J. Good's proposed discontinuous upswing in intelligence and Vinge's thesis on unpredictability .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#History_of_the_idea. ---
gives hope in that apparently Kurseil's vision is not as dark as some others are .. i haven't found the complete Transcendent Man .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendent_Man .. yet ..
Transcendent Man Film Trailer
TEDxManhattanBeach - Barry Ptolemy - Transcendent Man
interview - Ray Kurzweil and Barry Ptolemy - Transcendent Man Australia Premiere
Anyway .. thanks again .. here is another i just picked up ..
Predictions for the Year 2514: Dystopia That Feels Like Utopia
Posted: 09/03/2014 8:36 pm EDT Updated: 11/03/2014 5:59 am EST
Humanists typically look toward the future with extreme pessimism, assuming conditions of technological oppressiveness: Surveillance is rampant, the human being has been shorn of dignity, the state is overpowering, and individuality is a lost cause before the powerful onslaught of the collective. Zamyatin and Orwell are prime examples of this kind of extrapolation. There are also instances of humanist utopias (beginning with Thomas Moore and continuing with the socialist utopias of William Morris and Edward Bellamy), but they tend to be curiously bloodless, lacking the conviction and richness of the dystopias.
Scientists, on the other hand, tend to feel very optimistic that technology will be liberating rather than confining: It will be the final realization of the humanist project that began with the Greeks, was revived in the Renaissance, and received its current formulation in the Enlightenment. Ray Kurzweil, with his belief in the coming singularity (which he thinks is likely to occur around 2030), where machines smarter than humans take over and allow the human race a form of immortality, is a recent example.
I recently wrote a novel about the feline-human relationship, encompassing different stages of transformation in human civilization, from early agriculture to postmodern modes of living, and presenting an arc from prehistory to the distant future, all from our smarter friend's point of view. For the section on the future, I had occasion to revisit, after many years, different branches of science, especially those where research holds the most promise of breakthroughs; the frustrating dead ends of research in the last 15 or 20 years were a revelation to me, though one doesn't often hear about this in popular media.
My intuition says that the future will be an extreme form of dystopia, encompassing all the tendencies the humanists-pessimists have amply illustrated over the course of the 20th century, with added restraints imposed by new developments in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. But it will not appear as dystopia to our descendants; rather, it will appear as the fulfillment of utopia. This radical rupture between reality and perception is already evident to a large extent in the management of human affairs, as capitalism perfects its skills at making us eagerly swallow what used to be unpalatable not very long ago.
I remain highly skeptical of the utopian promises of nanotechnology (which, it is said by the optimists, will do away with all forms of material scarcity, since we will supposedly be able to create any product ex nihilo) and artificial intelligence (I do not think that we are anywhere near real intelligence on the part of machines, despite all the credit given to the continued inexorability of Moore's law -- that is, the doubling of computing capacity every two years). I think there is a greater possibility that genetic engineering might perhaps lead to a real extension of the human lifespan (perhaps 120 years, or 150 years, or even 200 years or beyond) resulting from changes in the human germline; this too is a far-fetched notion at the moment, but it seems to have a chance of happening.
It has seemed to me for a long time -- and my recent researches only confirm this impression -- that science, under the current paradigm, has run up against a wall in answering any of the fundamental questions about life, the Earth, and the Universe. In physics the more research is done on a gargantuan scale, the more we confront unanswerable questions (given current research methodologies). This should give utopians a lot of pause.
We simply have no idea (though you're not likely to hear scientists tout their failure) about any of these things: What is the nature of matter? What is the Universe? What is it made of? How did it come into being? (The more you think about the Big Bang, the more it sounds like a rationalization of things perceived by limited human intelligence rather than something that intuitively convinces.) Where is it going? What is its true nature? What is consciousness. (We have absolutely no clue on this one.) What is the essence of time? What is life? What animates it? Can we think of it differently than we do now?
I think that what this dead end means is that science, increasingly, is in the service of the manipulation of thoughts and emotions, a methodology for capitalism to orient the human mind toward fulfilling its needs. Of course, technology always has the potential to be liberating, as was the case with the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, flight, and, most recently, the computer and the Internet. However, many have noticed that after the discovery of quantum mechanics, the rest of the 20th century was a mere elaboration of what had already been discovered, not the discovery of any new paradigm.
Science, increasingly, is big business, it is managed and promoted accordingly, and its results, not surprisingly, now tend to benefit its immediate patrons rather than humanity at large. When science is run in the form of a super-corporation (rather than as an expression of society's collective liberal curiosity), the possibility that it will yield discoveries of the nature of the telegraph or the phonograph or the light bulb or penicillin is quite remote. Today, for example, medicine pursues, on a Brobdingnagian scale, the illusion of gene therapy rather than try to prevent human sickness and pain in rather obvious ways.
There is something to the idea that scientists must be humanists first, or whatever they discover or refine will end up being fodder for oppression. The lone inventor operating in his garage, the mythical amateur proud of his independence, fits the bill as far as the tradition of humanism is concerned, but probably not someone who is part of a collective enterprise so large and overpowering (and purely capitalist) that there is little room for expression of individual values.
We might make the claim that science, as we used to know it, or as romantic mythology would have it, has come to an end. Another way of saying it is that only dystopian (because hypercapitalist) tendencies will henceforth find realization, because whatever liberates the human (utopia) is not only impossible to realize but cannot even be conceived anymore. But because it is hard to reverse the ingrained notion that human freedom is of paramount importance and science must pay tribute to it (regardless of the reality), dystopia must be presented as utopia; many current examples suggest that this project is not difficult at all, as with the perception of the dystopian aspects of social media as utopian.
I believe that the future -- say, half a millennium from now -- will be one where every last bit of space for expression of individuality has been so thoroughly squashed that it won't even be an academic question anymore, and that we will live in unreal metropolises of incredible density and efficiency, without a trace of original, unpredictable thought; however, forms of virtual reality will allow us to imagine that we inhabit peaceful, tranquil, even tribal and medieval, small villages where our identity is well-known and where there is all the scope in the world for us to be free the way we want to be.
We will move in an ether -- as we already do, to some extent -- that lets us see ourselves as we would like to be seen, though the mirror will reflect nothing but a projection from far beyond our control, with nothing "real" about it. The least equal, those with nothing to their name, will feel the most powerful, the most liberated. Political resistance, in this manifestation, appears in the negative (i.e., all efforts to resist only strengthen the unreality; this is already very largely true).
This same reality/unreality split will be manifest in every single aspect of our existence, from longevity and procreation to modes of residence and forms of travel to acquisition of skills and forms of "work": Needless to say, work, as we know it, and also the family and worship and rituals and leisure, will have absolutely ceased to exist in their present form of unpredictability and chaos, though their outward appearance will continue. It simply cannot be that science, afflicted by gigantism and loss of values, can permit such unknowability to exist. It will create an overarching veneer of sanctity (i.e., freedom) to everything it permits, but the logic of the current form of symbiosis between science (and here I include the human sciences too, in their academic manifestation) and capitalism permits no other prediction. Only the forms will persist, humanity having made itself redundant, except as an incarnation of play to itself.
It is always hazardous to extrapolate from the present, simply project exponentially based on current experience, as any number of forecasters over the centuries have had cause to rue. There is always some new paradigm -- political, social, scientific, economic -- that interrupts such projections, and mine is as subject to this disruption as any other futurist's, but barring some abrupt civilizational change, I think we're headed toward this dystopia that will look for all the world like utopia. We may already have entered this new paradigm and be well on the way toward its irreversibility, which has profound consequences for individual and social action, and for making the best of this moment of transition that may well last centuries.
The coming utopia might well feel pleasant and endless; it might even be positively fun. But it won't be real.
Anis Shivani's recently finished novel is A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less. Forthcoming books include Karachi Raj: A Novel (2014) and Soraya: Sonnets (2015). Novels in progress include Abruzzi, 1936 and An Idiot's Guide to America.
PS: i've just heard in the interview video above 'the best idea is to build in defenses against the abuse of' .. and how to build defense from unfriendly AI? .. Kurzweill is saying one of the good things is that the research is being done in the open, and that overall these technologies make us wiser ..
Do you know what? I'm getting this in spurts and dead times. Things come to me . .not AT 'the time' I'm wondering about them.. .but later, some thought from what I've read before jumps at me and then this thing makes a more perfect sense. As to my question --WHY? Why are we pressing on toward this scenario whereby it is inevitable that we destroy all life as we now know it? Sometime after I asked you .. maybe two days or so .. .These jumped at me, which I posted back in Feb. this year. The Extinction made perfect sense to me then when I read her interview and what Al Gore had to say .. and the famous people who were commenting on her book. It made a perfect sense, but I NEVER connected that to the 'robots' being a part of our 6th extinction. Well, I can see it now. I can see how the robots are and will be a part in it, mostly I believe at this minute due to the fact of the climate change. As you so lightly point out .. ;) that they indeed will fare 100 % & we will not. --and re climate change -- won't bother them nearly as much as it's gonna bother us, if indeed they'll give much of a shit at all Yes, I believe you are correct. Here are the links for the two articles posted in Feb. in which I didn't relate to the robots at all, didn't EVEN think about them being a part of this or being so necessary to even their survival.
Chasing the Biggest Story on Earth
‘The Sixth Extinction’ Looks at Human Impact on the Environment
Now___I rather suspect it won't take them long at all to decide that they are the first true form of life, relegating biological life to be held in perspective as just, nothing more than, a fancy form of rust that just happens within one or more certain envelopes of ambient conditions (which in truth it is, and thus are we) -- not only different in kind from but also exponentially more capable than even the most spectacular occasional spurt of intelligence and creativity that happens to shoot out of biological life This part you wrote made me smile as I swear .. I thought a heard a small, very small group of Robots, knowingly lock arms while jolly well praising Jesus... ;) . .forgive me .... it just made me laugh. Loved the youtube. Thanks for helping me to sort this out. I don't understand why everyone on this board isn't a part of this conversation. In my opinion it is an important one and an Interesting one . .I mean, what is the matter with these people? . .everyone just stuffed with too much mashed potatoes or what? But You've been posting about this long before this year, so I just don't get it.. I mean .. it's probably THE MOST important topic of our time .. and MOST on ihub are mum. I just don't understand. And If I am way off base, tell me, I need to know that is why we have talks on message boards. It's to Learn.
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