knotty conversation about transhumanism n' nationalism n' stuff

Salix Babylonika

yo

conversation from the Emotional Problems Pile thread that starts like here-ish continues here.

Miss Miko Mayonegg

Humans still poop. Discuss.

Salix Babylonika

Miko



please don't be overly frivolous in this thread.

Salix Babylonika

in any case

Robots are innocent angels and also there can't be a class divide if
no one has any money because the robot overlords provide for all needs
and issue expendable credit in equal amounts.

this assumes some kind of radical social shift which has not yet happened. In order for there to not be a class divide after the rise of transhuman technology, it would have to be eliminated beforehand. The robots have to be designed by somebody, after all.

Tachyon

i think transhumanism is a fantasy, honestly

i do think that improving things is possible and desirable, but the idea that this should entail ceasing to be human creeps me out

that said i don't think it's helpful to identify an ideology with its anticipated negative consequences, in the interests of polite discussion

Miss Miko Mayonegg

i was being serious :<

Salix Babylonika

Tachyon said:

that said i don't think it's helpful to identify an ideology with its anticipated negative consequences, in the interests of polite discussion

I'm not doing that because I have some bias against transhumanism, I'm doing that because I think it's literally impossible for it to not have negative consequences unless radical social shifts occur first.

I will grant that I am not the most familiar person on earth with transhumanism, but I've seen people argue for it before so I know (or at least, I think I do, I'm open to corrections) its general tenets.

Tachyon

why would we want to seriously discuss poop here?

i was not aware that the ultimate goal of transhumanism was to eliminate defecation

Salix Babylonika

I believe she meant that figuratively.

Salix Babylonika

eg. in the same sense as "your favorite anime is shit"

Tanya

Tachyon said:

i think transhumanism is a fantasy, honestly

i do think that improving things is possible and desirable, but the idea that this should entail ceasing to be human creeps me out

that said i don't think it's helpful to identify an ideology with its anticipated negative consequences, in the interests of polite discussion

To be honest, I see no harm in becoming a form that can no longer be classified as human.

So long as my consciousness remains, that is really the most important of a person.

Miss Miko Mayonegg

Tachyon said:

why would we want to seriously discuss poop here?

i was not aware that the ultimate goal of transhumanism was to eliminate defecation

Defecation means people put things in their bodies that makes waste to poop out, instead of injecting pure nutrients.

Tachyon

for the record, i am not that familiar with transhumanism either

mo, i wasn't accusing you of bias

i shouldn't attempt to play the peace-maker, it never ends well

Princess Alice

part of me likes the basic idea of transhumanism but i don't know enough about it

Tachyon

Counterclock said:

To be honest, I see no harm in becoming a form that can no longer be classified as human.

So long as my consciousness remains, that is really the most important of a person.

i remain highly sceptical of the notion that consciousness can be divorced from body, or for that matter, that the body should be rejected and excluded from the realm of discourse, although the language of the patriarchy is dualist

as to the topic of becoming non-human, the expression 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' comes to mind

Salix Babylonika

Tachyon said:

for the record, i am not that familiar with transhumanism either

mo, i wasn't accusing you of bias

i shouldn't attempt to play the peace-maker, it never ends well

It's alright, but I don't think anyone in here is mad at each other, we're just discussing A Thing.

Anyway my basic gripe with transhumanism as I understand it is that it seems to just not work. Basically, all transhumanist arguments I've seen either simply ignore social rammifications entirely or they operate on the assumption that "technology gets cheaper, therefore, all transhumanist technologies will become affordable in time".

I think this ignores the rather basic fact that technology does not hit a wall. Let's take iPhones as an example. There's always a new model in development that is better (or "better", as the case may be) than the old one, it is generally more expensive to buy a new model than an old one, and Apple (unsurprisingly) prioritizes updates to newer hardware over updates to older hardware.

Now, take that business model and apply it to a traditionally futurist piece of technology like say, brain implants, and you start to see the problem. It's not that big of a deal that you have an iPhone 3 instead of an iPhone 5, but it'd be a much bigger deal if having an iPhone 5 made you an objectively more intelligent person than the person with an iPhone 3 (ftr, I have no idea what model iPhones are currently on. I don't buy Apple stuff usually but this is beside the point).

Miss Miko Mayonegg

A world revolution that eliminates money.

Tachyon

don't see it happening

Salix Babylonika

Miko said:

A world revolution that eliminates money.

Money is so intrinsic to how 99.95% of humans alive today operate that I have a very hard time imagining how a world without it could come about.

It'd require a lot of stuff that we don't have, including an infinite supply of a lot of things.

Tanya

Tachyon said:

Counterclock said:

To be honest, I see no harm in becoming a form that can no longer be classified as human.

So long as my consciousness remains, that is really the most important of a person.

as to the topic of becoming non-human, the expression 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' comes to mind

Could you elaborate further?

Miss Miko Mayonegg

Humans did fine without money until like 5,000 years ago.

Salix Babylonika

Miko said:

Humans did fine without money until like 5,000 years ago.

Yes but that is because 5,000 years ago is roughly the dawn of civilization.

We could totally eliminate money if we were willing to return to a hunter-gatherer society where only the physically strongest survive and what we would consider horrible atrocities are far more commonplace than they are now, but I feel that most people are not okay with such a thing (myself included).

Tachyon

what i'm saying is people do a lot of cool things

when you start saying things like 'society is fucked-up' you're over-emphasizing the bad

to take a trivial example, suppose, as Miko suggested, we simply injected nutrients instead of eating food

imagine how boring that would be, and how much wonderful creativity and human achievement would have to be cast aside

Obā-san

Miko said:

5,000 years ago.

....

....

....

no.

no miko no.

Salix Babylonika

Tachyon said:

what i'm saying is people do a lot of cool things

when you start saying things like 'society is fucked-up' you're over-emphasizing the bad

to take a trivial example, suppose, as Miko suggested, we simply injected nutrients instead of eating food

imagine how boring that would be, and how much wonderful creativity and human achievement would have to be cast aside

I feel like in that specific regard the ideal would actually be to somehow make all food equally nutritious so you could just eat whatever you wanted.

We are a long way off from that, sadly.

Tachyon

@ mo: we're certainly much closer to that than we are to doing away with the entire digestive process, which is what Miko's proposal would entail

Salix Babylonika

Realistically, we're a long way from both.

Obā-san

5000 years ago is like literally the peak of the Old Kingdom when the pyramids were going up (*give or take a century or two*)

honestly i'm not sure i can take you seriously anymore. :/

Salix Babylonika

Yon Assassin said:

5000 years ago is like literally the peak of the Old Kingdom when the pyramids were going up (*give or take a century or two*)

honestly i'm not sure i can take you seriously anymore. :/

at the risk of coming across as a douche, I always sort of assume Miko is at least half-trolling at all times.

Tanya

Tachyon said:

what i'm saying is people do a lot of cool things

when you start saying things like 'society is fucked-up' you're over-emphasizing the bad

to take a trivial example, suppose, as Miko suggested, we simply injected nutrients instead of eating food

imagine how boring that would be, and how much wonderful creativity and human achievement would have to be cast aside

I can't help but feel conflicted about an admiration for creativity and achievement that exists as an effect of human necessities.

It makes me feel much the same way as the development of weapons. when the necessity of that is destruction of human life.

Salix Babylonika

Honestly comparing art and weaponry in a way that implies they're similar tells me that you and I have little in common in terms of modes of thought.

I realize you were talking to Tachyon but yeah.

Tachyon

i'm not talking about creativity with purely functional aims, although i see no reason not to admire ingenuity motivated by the will to survive

cookery at its finest is an art

Hexartes

If you eliminate conflict, you eliminate pretty much all good too. You'd have to get rid of all art, all forms of free expression. It might technically be better but it's significantly less fulfilling. 

Tanya

I take issue with the assertion that we shouldn't try to eliminate as much conflict as possible.

Tachyon

^^ and art has its own value

^ why?

Salix Babylonika

can we define "conflict" before we continue with this line of the discussion?

because I have a feeling people might be meaning different things by it.

Tachyon

well, i'm assuming nobody here is arguing for murder, or that war is to be desired

Tanya

Actually I think we're arriving at the wrong conclusions.

MetaFour

If we eliminate war and armed conflict, that will usher in a golden age for the angsty, "things were so much better when we had war, you guys" art genre.

Previous Calica

mojave music said:

can we define "conflict" before we continue with this line of the discussion?

because I have a feeling people might be meaning different things by it.

can we define "transhumanism" before we continue with this line of the discussion

because I have a feeling people might be meaning different things by it.

but seriously, the word "transhumanism" lumps together a bunch of different ideas, from the already happening (prostheses, especially for the disabled; mobile devices with persistent internet connections*) to the plausible (superhuman prostheses, at least in some aspects) to the impossibly far away if even possible (functional immortality, strong AI)

*I'm not sure if anyone has called this transhumanism but there was some branch of feminist theory or something that called everyone in modern society a cyborg because of this stuff

Mr. Darcy

spinor said:

can we define "transhumanism" before we continue with this line of the discussion

because I have a feeling people might be meaning different things by it.

but seriously, the word "transhumanism" lumps together a bunch of different ideas, from the already happening (prostheses, especially for the disabled; mobile devices with persistent internet connections*) to the plausible (superhuman prostheses, at least in some aspects) to the impossibly far away if even possible (functional immortality, strong AI)

This.

I also find it grimly hilarious that "functional immortality" and "superhuman AI" are associated by transhumanists. If superhuman AI were possible, making it would be suicidal. Our superape intelligence hasn't exactly improved the lives of apes.

(I know Less Wrong's raison d'etre is actually convincing people who work on AI to focus on giving AIs a mental block that forces them to be altruistic, but that's an Enlightenment cult* whose guru is a high school dropout.)

*Is Voltaire's Micromegas a precursor of transhumanism?

Tachyon

^^ that's sorta what i was getting at in Emotional Problems

although in this context, it apparently means rule by robot Jesus

also no pooping

Miss Miko Mayonegg

Civilization existed for like a millennium before money was a big thing, I think. I don't believe that money should dictate people's lives the way that it does and I know that basic needs can be provided without money.

Tachyon

but the civilization back then wasn't at all the transhumanist utopia you're talking about

i know you're not suggesting a return to the way things were back then, but what are you suggesting?

regardless, money is definitely a major part of today's culture, so i don't see the world abandoning it

Miss Miko Mayonegg

I'm suggesting that the needs of each person should be distributed fairly, without money. The robot overlords would control birth rates and societal infrastructure in such a way that everyone can find a job to do in exchange for expendable credit to be spent on hobbies and luxuries.

Tachyon

what if i want to spend my credit on killing robots

ok, but what you're proposing is completely without precedent

if we could find a way to live without money and to distribute things fairly, i agree that would be better

i'm just not sure this is a realistic goal here, given the present state of affairs

Odradek

Lemme quote a blog I follow

Let me amplify the point: not only is it ethically nonsensical to declare "unethical" not using technologies that do not even exist for us to use, I will also say it is flatly unethical to discuss the ethics of imaginary technology at the cost of discussing real technoscience. There are no more urgent ethical dilemmas in the real world than the denial of universal access to basic healthcare in wealthy nations, than the banning of contraception, abortion, and assistive reproductive techniques to women around the world, than the neglect of treatable medical, nutritional, hygienic conditions in the overexploited regions of the world. What Mike Davis said fifteen years ago is as true as ever: access to clean water should be considered the most potent miracle drug on earth. These are the ethical and political discussions we are not having when we are discussing genetic superhuman and digital immortalization -- although, no doubt the latter discussions may best be understood as distorted allegories or symptomatic disavowals of these very real questions and their urgencies.

What I'm saying is no one has to belong to Less Wrong to think elimination of bigotry, advanced health care, and development of beneficial technologies is a good thing.

Mr. Darcy

Miko said:

I'm suggesting that the needs of each person should be distributed fairly, without money. The robot overlords would control birth rates and societal infrastructure in such a way that everyone can find a job to do in exchange for expendable credit to be spent on hobbies and luxuries.

I'm suggesting that the needs of each ape should be distributed fairly, without competition.
The human overlords would control birth rates...

In other words, why would they do that? The cognitive bias here appears to be "I think I'm smart, and I'm a Marxist, so a superhuman AI would be super Marxist."

Tachyon

wait, are you suggesting that machines will have human-like drives and desires?

Mr. Darcy

I'm suggesting that if superhuman machine intelligence were possible, it would have drives and desires as incomprehensible and inimical to us as ours are to apes.

Even human-like or subhuman machine intelligence would be alien to us, since consciousness doesn't seem to be divorcable from a body, being deeply mixed with drives and desires from it, and a machine is very different from an animal.

Tachyon

mmm... correct me if i'm wrong but you seem to be assuming these machines are intelligent in the same way that human beings are intelligent, rather than simply very efficient at performing certain tasks they've been programmed to perform

i'm willing to entertain the idea that a conscious AI is possible, but i'm not sure why we'd want to make it if it's not fit for the intended purpose