Are you really ready for your new overlords, should science end humanity? NPR talks Post Humanism a - Polidicks

[QUOTE=HWECQI;46521921]It'd be one thing if you were assuming the negative economic effects or moral consequences of such a thing, but being enslaved by machines isn't what a singularity is meant to be[/QUOTE]sure, but can you be absolutely certain that it will not become just that?

Honestly, if a super-computer could force us to get our shit together? I'd totally be fine with hailing or silicon-based Overlords :v:

[QUOTE=Joazzz;46521966]sure, but can you be absolutely certain that it will not become just that?[/QUOTE] No, I'm not. For all I know it could go completely bonkers and instead of singularity lead to human extinction, or it could go the other way and be the perfect evolutionary stepping stone. The process is a very gradual thing though and I think assuming it'd be something as severe as extinction or complete control is a little silly. Yes, it's possible, but the benefits it can bring are just as possible, and I feel like we have enough sense to at least be able to sense when something bad is coming.

I just want sexbots.

[QUOTE=joost1120;46518530]And then we get some Ghost in the Shell-ish stuff where terrorists start hacking brains and fuck shit up.[/QUOTE] I find the crazy ass doll things scarier. I should rewatch that.

[QUOTE=Vitisus;46519601]I thought that the Singularity ideal had some abundance-of-materials shit goin' on, as in, you couldn't be scalped for all your money and dying in a ditch because the system wouldn't actually work that way by that point. But, hell, I haven't read about it much lately.[/QUOTE] Well one thing you could do is start tearing apart space rocks, asteroids are up to their tits in rad materials that are hard to dig up on earth. [editline]19th November 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=kiloy;46520278]I thought the point to cryo was to preserve your body for the whatever hundreds of years to travel[/QUOTE] Yeah but if you've uploaded your mind, you're basically the geth and you can build yourself a sleek ass body customised to whatever shit storm of a planet you're gonna go play space tourist on.

[QUOTE=spekter;46517047]Hope more articles like this start popping up. I am sick to death of the highly drawn-out "Fear the future" message that has been coming from media for the last X amount of decades. To truly survive and thrive as a species we NEED to change.[/QUOTE] I think we need to change our behaviour towards each other before we go changing technology and such. Not to say technological progress isn't needed, but we should know how to use it or what to do with it before we actually have it.

[QUOTE=Matthew0505;46519536]There's a limit to how much unemployment though, it's hard to sell things if the majority of your population has no job.[/QUOTE] In the current scheme of things, yes. I think that ideas such as a Citizens' Income will gain popularity as a result. A lot of jobs merely exist as an excuse to give someone an income anyway (give this a read [url]http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/[/url]) so why not just give them the money without wasting resources and their time doing useless stuff? They'll have the same or more consumer demand then so even if they don't do much or work they'll still be contributing in that respect.

Honestly, I'm fine with augmentation if its required. But all this 'bettering ourselves' crap is just that, crap. There's no clear expectation of fairness, there's no real way to regulate it and there's too many power and security issues to reliably do anything about it. We're going headlong into several sciences that we haven't even done enough research yet to understand the impact.

For all this singularity talk, we have yet to developed a program with 1/100th the creativity of a human brain. Plus the idea that a sufficiently advanced machine will go about creating a more advanced one is not very well rooted either, Moore's law might say its inevitable but at the same time that sufficiently advanced machine better have the ability to make ground breaking discoveries in processors and manufacturing because I can garentee anything we make that is somehow that intelligent will be the bleeding edge limit to our technology, its intellectual existence will be limited purely by the physical computer hardware. Spreading out amongst multiple computers would not work either as it may work for long extensive computations but the latenacy between machines will make it impossibly to ever fully utilize a cloud based approach

[QUOTE=Sableye;46529108]For all this singularity talk, we have yet to developed a program with 1/100th the creativity of a human brain. Plus the idea that a sufficiently advanced machine will go about creating a more advanced one is not very well rooted either, Moore's law might say its inevitable but at the same time that sufficiently advanced machine better have the ability to make ground breaking discoveries in processors and manufacturing because I can garentee anything we make that is somehow that intelligent will be the bleeding edge limit to our technology, its intellectual existence will be limited purely by the physical computer hardware. Spreading out amongst multiple computers would not work either as it may work for long extensive computations but the latenacy between machines will make it impossibly to ever fully utilize a cloud based approach[/QUOTE] Hey, 1/101 of Mankind is actually pretty damn smart, just look at rats! Or Watson, which arguably beats us at the association game. Anyway, ever heard of how many functions you can perform simoultaniously with just 300 Qbits? Supposedly, enough to simulate a good portion of the universe, now apply that kind of power to an A.I. Quantum computers are around good 10 to 20 years away, not even mentioning the recently developed carbon-nanotube computer solving the overheating shenanigans that silicon has.

[QUOTE=Shirt.;46529465]Hey, 1/101 of Mankind is actually pretty damn smart, just look at rats! Anyway, ever heard of how many functions you can perform simoultaniously with just 300 Qbits? Supposedly, enough to simulate a good portion of the universe, now apply that kind of power to an A.I. Quantum computers are around good 10 to 20 years away, not even mentioning the recently developed carbon-nanotube computer solving the overheating shenanigans that silicon has.[/QUOTE] quantum computers are only good at solving a specific class of equations and differential equations, not really anything else, the reason why they are good at that is because they can do multiple operations simultaniously, but that only applies to a very specific set of problems, also quantum computers need to operate as near to 0K as they can get to obtain the quantum effects and like i said, anything that we make that could create a singularity would be so bleeding edge advanced that our technology could not facilitate the rapid doubling of power needed by it to create a copy more advanced [editline]19th November 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=JustExtreme;46526580]In the current scheme of things, yes. I think that ideas such as a Citizens' Income will gain popularity as a result. A lot of jobs merely exist as an excuse to give someone an income anyway (give this a read [url]http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/[/url]) so why not just give them the money without wasting resources and their time doing useless stuff? They'll have the same or more consumer demand then so even if they don't do much or work they'll still be contributing in that respect.[/QUOTE] for any garenteed income plan to ever work it would require a massive shift in how our ruling class (the yale graduate politicians) perceive poverty, currently the republican argument is that poor people are lazy people,entitlements are handouts, and any sort of social welfare is government-socialism and your businesses are next, to this atlas shrugged has unfortunatly made a large impression in the terrible shitlords we've chosen through the rigged system to rule us. the unfortunate thing is, both sides have argued at one time or another for a garenteed income as well as garenteed healthcare, its just they both have totally different ways to approach it, the republican way (scary as all hell) is that we first gut all consumer protections, all minimum wage laws, and then enact it, while the democrat/socialist way is to enact it straight up and force the economy to react to it (less scary, but the shitlords will shit themselves)

[QUOTE=Solomon;46517509]Transhumanism is fucking awesome. Anyone against it is against forward progress.[/QUOTE] Transhumanism is unnecessary, if we have the technology to put our brains in robots or whatever we'll likely have the technology to just solve aging and become essentially immortal - but still as humans. Who wants to be the machine race in sci-fi anyway? We could be the horrifying squishy aliens that show up and go all independance day on everyone's shit

[QUOTE=Zeke129;46531467]Transhumanism is unnecessary, if we have the technology to put our brains in robots or whatever we'll likely have the technology to just solve aging and become essentially immortal - but still as humans. Who wants to be the machine race in sci-fi anyway? We could be the horrifying squishy aliens that show up and go all independance day on everyone's shit[/QUOTE] Digitizing brains would have many more advantages than simply being immortal. You could essentially clone yourself instantly. Imagine scientists working on such a specific and complex field that only a handful of them are experts in it. Assuming you have the necessary computing power, you could simply have multiple copies of those scientists working on a project they wouldn't be able to pull off alone. The speed of the thinking process would also depend on the power of the processing unit, which means that with a powerful supercalculator, you could manage to solve very difficult problems in an instant given the right setup. In certain instances, the human body is really inconvenient, too. Look at the difference of equipment between manned and unmanned space missions, for example. If we could squeeze a consciousness into a probe, exploring remote worlds would be much simpler. Better yet, once other planets are equipped with suitable equipment, we could basically "travel" between them using electromagnetic signals, at the speed of light and with no perceived latency by the "passenger". That certainly beats using the humongous, extremely fuel-intensive ships that would be required for the transportation of humans between systems.

[QUOTE=Zeke129;46531467]Transhumanism is unnecessary, if we have the technology to put our brains in robots or whatever we'll likely have the technology to just solve aging and become essentially immortal - but still as humans. Who wants to be the machine race in sci-fi anyway? We could be the horrifying squishy aliens that show up and go all independance day on everyone's shit[/QUOTE] Yeah but you recall in Independence Day that the aliens got their shit pummeled by the hairless apes right?

[QUOTE=Zeke129;46531467]Transhumanism is unnecessary, if we have the technology to put our brains in robots or whatever we'll likely have the technology to just solve aging and become essentially immortal - but still as humans. Who wants to be the machine race in sci-fi anyway? We could be the horrifying squishy aliens that show up and go all independance day on everyone's shit[/QUOTE] Since when did transhumanism = sticking your brain in a machine? Stuff like advanced prostetics, brain implants, gene splicing, it's all transhumanism.

[QUOTE=Zeke129;46531467]Transhumanism is unnecessary, if we have the technology to put our brains in robots or whatever we'll likely have the technology to just solve aging and become essentially immortal - but still as humans. Who wants to be the machine race in sci-fi anyway? We could be the horrifying squishy aliens that show up and go all independance day on everyone's shit[/QUOTE] I don't know, it might be cool to have cyber limbs, jump over buildings, throwing cars around and stuff. Although I suppose that could also be obtained with some sort of crysis style nanosuit.