New Testingstan

while i am the first to go on about designer branded post-organs mass factory recalls ibrains and planned obsolescences for artificial cyborg kidneys

and i am the first to rail against the messed up order humanity has constructed

when you look at it, for all the wrongs and shit, humanity today is still more prosperous than it was eons ago and the average person today is better off than dark age peasants and the progress of science and technology has - on average - made life better

and also the advent of technologies and shits has made human society and stuff change, for better or worse, but gradually you can see it inching forward

just like how the printing press, increasing literacy and edjumacation helped make people smarter and allowed them to, you know, be able to vote for the leaders they want based on issues that they are aware of rather than blindly following some noble while working in their pigsty and how this brought so much change in the world

the changing technologies today, not necessarily bloop bloop roboto tobor cyborgnetics, but imo more on communications tech allowing for instantaneous informations and really fast exchanges of ideas and infos over distances impossible just a century ago, will bring about all sorts of changes - for the better - eventually for us all

we're gonna see, and are seeing, a whole lot of change and i guess things seem so bleak because its at these moments of history when paradigms shift that things get really confusing and seemingly hopeless with no direction and resolution in sight - because we are still in the process of making that direction for all of us to head towards

etc.

long live the new flesh

same as the old flesh

tbh what grinds me most about the transhumanist discussions is three points

1) it is inevitable

2) it will completely eclipse everyone else

3) it will make things unrecognizable


now not even "may" but "will"


so u start a thread called "viagra in science fiction" and start talking about ppl and shit

but before long someone will come in and say NO U IDIOT DAT NOT REALISTIC WHERE'S THE SINGULARITY?????

of course it doesn't even have to go that far

why are you talking about the crew? obviously all space ships will be autonomous robots haven't you heard drones are already taking over today!

ugh

(actually doing drones might be interesting to explore the people side; in my anti-war propaganda i've heard that real life drone pilots have a whole lot of their own stresses to deal with and it isn't pretty)

starku wrote:ADR, from these cases what do you think are the 'acceptable' ways of advertising their stuff ms has

anything that doesn't leverage windows should be ok since they don't have monopoly concerns elsewhere

they could do tv commercials (i've actually seen a lot of them for IE9 and Google Chrome recently) or anything else on the independent market though i wouldn't mention windows' name in the ad except saying "for windows" like everyone else can

they could perhaps even put it in windows update to push if they also made that available to other third parties, so it isn't an unfair advantage. but sweet jesus third-party adware hooks built in? ugh

the singularity is basically the rapture for fat nerds

they just don't want to admit it

I find the biggest lol is that a lot of them seem to be under the impression that transhumanism will uplift them (and specifically them) to some higher level of existence.

And not, you know, make them more efficient cogs in the machine.

Civil War Man wrote:I find the biggest lol is that a lot of them seem to be under the impression that transhumanism will uplift them (and specifically them) to some higher level of existence.

And not, you know, make them more efficient cogs in the machine.

like i said, rapture for fat nerds

like all the pat robertsons that think they're the chosen ones to be in heaven

F.J. Prefect, Esq wrote:It's pretty interesting when people make up false dilemmas in order to be 'right'.

it wasn't directed at you specifically but it was an observation regarding the general transhumanist argument that transhumanism is "necessary" because technological development is going too fast, or some variation thereof

ignoring whether that's actually likely to make it necessary

the only reason it could happen is because humanity has relegated all control over what gets invented and what gets produced to the mindless and arbitrary market, ie. because of the economic system

but the transhumanist argument says that, instead of taking control and making sure technological development is tuned to meet the needs of humanity, the economic system must remain intact, and humanity itself must change to accommodate it. i am always reminded of that awesome german site with a list of things SCIENCE! could fix about humanity, that listed "dreams" because they "decrease productivity"

but this adversarial relationship between humanity and technological development has existed since the luddites and it would continue to exist beyond transhumanism, because it is a direct consequence of that system

as such transhumanism cannot solve the problem but only make it worse by actively embracing the contradictions that make technology dangerous


now if we got a sane system instead, there would still be a place for "transhumanist technology", but it would be used on purely voluntary or medical bases, not because it's demanded to get a paying job, or function in some hyperactive society, and definitely it would be developed at a pace determined by society, rather the perverse reverse

wait transhumanismoids also embrace some kind of psycho super-capitalism?

cause i thought there were transhumanoids who were all for post-scarcity and the end of the weirdo market blah demand blah invisible hand blah thing where we'd all be free to make the liberty we've won for ourselves outerhaven etc.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:cause i thought there were transhumanoids who were all for post-scarcity and the end of the weirdo market blah demand blah invisible hand blah thing where we'd all be free to make the liberty we've won for ourselves outerhaven etc.

Some of them are all about uploading their brain into a computer and becoming one with god the AI.

Others are about installing an iPhone in their brain so they don't need to use their inefficient fingers to play Angry Birds.

perhaps they are not consciously embracing super-capitalism (well sterglider sure does of course), but the only way to get post-scarcity is by first eliminating the market

no one would invest in technology that would obsolete the market itself

Well, you have different flavours.


In one corner you have those like Stas Bush who would want to build a post-scarcity Anarchist utopia, in the purest sense of the term : everyone is equal, no one is above the others, everyone free to live as they want as long as they don't do harm to the others ;

On the another corner you have those like Starglider who would want to play the Invisible Hand of the Free Market on the casino table of the world markets with their Gods-In-A-Can - basically just introducing a new element to today's world, and letting the invisible hand proceed from there.


Most of the time though, it's all about empowering the Individual - the variations being about how you then have these Empowered Individuals interact with the Collective, and how easy you make for other individuals to become Empowered themselves.




Though you still have those who I would call the "AI Mystics" whose motivation, basically, is to build a literal Deus Ex Machina which would render Mankind obsolete, without any real care given over the destiny of our species in their Brave New World...

yes, of course i hope i don't need to point out that not all transhumanists adhere to the idea that transhumanism is a necessity for the survival of mankind

nor are they all singularians

Why does anyone take the singularity dude seriously? I could have sworn he was discredited.

kurzweil?

Because at this point the movement has practically become a Sect, I guess ?

the joke is that nobody on teo really seems to question the whole singularity thing the way they do christianity

Dooey Jo wrote:kurzweil?

Yeah.

well they don't question the Prequels either

Civil War Man wrote:
The more I work with computers, the more I start to view humans as analogous to the microorganisms that live in our body writ large. Some humans perform a specific task to keep the body running, like the bacteria that helps us digest food and the motes that live in our scalp and eat dead skin. Some (like the Gordon Gecko-style capitalists) are the parasites, who at best feed off the organism while contributing nothing, or at worst actively harm the system.

People can't cope with the scale of the world they live in the same way an intestinal bacteria can't really understand the scale of the body it lives in.

That's a nice analogy.

weemadando wrote: That's a nice analogy.

Yeah, and interestingly enough it makes comparing people to intestinal bacteria not nearly as misanthropic as you'd expect.

As to how working on computers brought me to this line of thinking, it's mostly due to the realization that in building the internet, we have basically constructed a massive brain. Right down to it using electrical pulses to transmit information from one location to another. It is a mass of servers and routers and computers so intricate and complex that it is represented in network schematics as a cloud because there is literally no physical way we can map it out in a way that we can comprehend. The only parts we can legibly map out are the miniscule sections that we control.

Though this is starting to get into one of those "what if our entire universe is a molecule in a giant's toenail?" stoner things.

Dooey Jo wrote:the only reason it could happen is because humanity has relegated all control over what gets invented and what gets produced to the mindless and arbitrary market, ie. because of the economic system

You can't chalk up literally every problem in the world to the spectre of capitalism, nor will 'fixing' capitalism solve the issues which I raised in admittedly extremely truncated form. People don't want to give up their quad core smartphones or twenty four hours a day seven days a week social networking or increasingly speedy internet and they don't really want to give a shit about the suffering of other people. Yeah, they probably started wanting that shit because of consumerism, but unless you've got a time machine you're not stopping that train.

You say 'we should change society to better benefit people' and I say 'dude that IS transhumanism'. That's what it's about. How many places wouldn't be better off if Dunbar's number was two hundred thousand instead of just two hundred?

man i just like transhumanism because i want to be able to download porn directly into my brain

Honestly, I find the idea of being able to beam my sight picture into my brain kinda nifty.