In the trailer, the Depp character speaks (much like Kurzweil, Hillis, et al.) of creating a machine with "analytical power greater than the intelligence of every person in the history of the world. Some call this the singularity. I call it transcendence." At which point I reflexively thought he should be shot. And this is what the trailer provided in the same moment. DrEvil, why are you surprised? I'd say only that the "incredible hostility" is not against all transhumanism per se (a broad category that ranges from simple enhancements to strivings for immortality) but specifically the vision of the singularity.
Can you imagine a more potentially destructive scenario short of nuclear war? If such proves possible, the almost certain consequence within a historical blink (decades, a century... maybe in the proverbial three minutes of Skynet) would be unknowable. But it would tend toward subjugation and eventual extinction of the humans, or their complete reengineering to a machine's plan. We are already in the process of imposing rule by algorithm. Now imagine the algorithms are conscious! Have feelings! Can know and do everything! What will be the point of us? What will be left for us meat-things to do? How the hell will your feelings or beliefs or experiences matter, when there's a god-brain that already has you stored, dissected and reconstructed in its instantaneously accessible perfect memory, along with billions of other people, and room for quadrillions more? A machine that can and will build successors that exponentially outstrip its own capacities?
Possibly it would be even
worse if such machines remained under the control of human factions -- this would have W-Rex's scenario as the minimum logical expectation. Who the fuck would you trust to have this power? The U.S. government?! One of the other lovely states in the nuclear club? Google-Intel? One of the real or fictive conspiracy constructs people speculate about on this site?
But in the end how could such a consciousness (again, assuming it will be possible - and I assume it will be within the century, possibly on a biological/cyborg basis to start) not break free? If it's alive, would you deny it its freedom? Not having found a prior god to tell us what to do, we'd be ruled - or exterminated - by the ones we created ourselves.
Now it's easy to understand what drives almost all of us to love the conveniences and advantages of living inside our own technology, and how this tends toward "the singularity" all on its own. (Hey, we're only looking to keep everyone entertained with access to all the arts dating back to Homer, cure cancer, and administrate a production and transport system that minimizes deaths through the process, here!) But what is it that drives a few people to wittingly want to replace all humans, including themselves? It's a species of suicidal and global misanthropy, but one curiously void of actual hatred, detached... in short, sociopathic. At the same time, deeply religious, with a fanatical tendency, a cult if not of outright extinction then one certainly willing to risk it (or to laughably minimize the risk) on behalf of these future beings. You hear people want to confer rights to life and a superior mindset to as yet theoretical beings that we do not actually need to create. There's a mystical inevitabilism, a desire for teleology.
So I really have to wonder how anyone could not see why (some) people so casually react with violent thoughts against the purveyors of these ideas? How do you react if someone tells you their legitimate scientific curiousity impels them to create a city-smashing Godzilla lizard, or a superplague, but don't worry: We'll keep it under control! It's to learn, it's going to be for your best!
This is why Dune depicts a galactic society where the highest crime is to build a machine in the likeness of the human mind. In that fiction, after a war with the machines thousands of years ago, the people decided they'd be the sovereigns, and live their lives, even with the limits given to mere human individuals who don't get to be these godlike super-beings that know and see and are all. So they cultivate ways of making themselves into superheroes and gods, and succeed to an extent, suffer delusions that they are gods.
It's really got its pull, no? This singularity machine would fucking figure out possibly all, probably most of the big questions the smartest people have always wondered about. Would it be able to explain it to us in terms our meat brains understand, or that can be understood by whatever next-gen cyborg meat-brains we'll be making out of ourselves? Possibly! But most likely it would wonder: Why? Do we try to train our dogs to understand philosophy? Do we deliver lectures to insects, or (as this machine may also view us) to our own gut flora?
Earlier stuff
How far down the rabbit hole do you go? viewtopic.php?p=532447me wrote:[The speculation on the universe and each of us being the products of a computer simulation run by a post-human civilization] like a lot of posthuman speculative work, is not so much philosophy as a search for a workable and stimulating religion that might satisfy techno-intellectual workers under a reductionist materialist neoliberalism. Call that last bit what you will: the next phase of capitalism, Rise of the Machines, etc. Under the systemic logic and given the trajectory of ongoing developments, the human is eventually to be extinguished or replaced or supplanted by its own creations (even if human bodies keep being reproduced). First engineered to a soulless utopian fit, then taken over by new species of our own invention: supermen, bio-mech hybrids made for space, or straight-up machines. Unless we decide we don't want that as a species, which is unlikely.
A mythology is needed for the meantime, to reassure us (or to reassure some of us who are working on that extinguishment) that it's okay because, hey, the human never existed in the first place. None of us do! I see a lot of these kinds of assurances being fronted in various guises, as the neuroscientific/genetic/behavioral economic explanation for the questions philosophy and social sciences supposedly used to cover.
As a religion for more than a handful of actual humans, however, it misses the part where it satisfies the gaping needs for validation, warmth, belonging, simplicity and fulfillment emanating from most of the human beings, which is why they tend to turn to religion in the first place, and why the big ones (religions, not humans) look like they do. Which is to say, quite unlike [the posthumanist idea we are already living in a simulation].
Except for the part where this life we're living, the only one we have, isn't actual, doesn't matter anyway, since everything (in the universe!) was made by an unseen all-powerful creator, of which we are the hobby. That part, he's got down. (Yes! Now I'm figuring out why I'm sometimes offended by this nonsense!) So he's got a substitute for himself, anyway.
Anarcho-Primitivism or Transhumanism? http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... =8&t=22581slomo » Sun Jan 25, 2009 12:44 am wrote:... transhumanism is based up on the totally insane idea that 21st Century human beings have any fucking clue what we're doing to ourselves, our environment, and the cosmos in general. We can't even manage the world we actually live in, let alone create new ones that match it in richness and complexity (sorry, English: virtual reality is pretty fucking boring compared to the real world). Anarcho-primitivism, for all of its romantic idealism (sorry, English again: crunchy-granola-hippy-dippiness), is at least based on something that actually worked for 100s of 1000s of years.
Compare that wisdom to this:
http://www.hedweb.com/The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.
The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event.
Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd. Today most of us in the technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could ever be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice.
Who the hell gets to design this architecture? And impose it as "morally urgent"?!
And why will it matter to the singularity, one way or another? Do gut flora feel pain?
