Human Limits?

 “Humanity Won’t Be Augmented, It Will Be Drowned”

By: Hugo de Garis

The Transhumanists, as their label suggests, want to augment humanity, to extend humanity to a superior form, with extra capacities beyond (trans) human limits, e.g. greater intelligence, longer life, healthier life, etc. This is fine so far as it goes, but the problem is that it does not go anywhere near far enough. My main objection to the Transhumanists is that they seem not to see that future technologies will not just be able to “augment humanity”, but veritably to “drown humanity”, dwarfing human capacities by a factor of trillions of trillions. For example, a single cubic millimeter of sand has more computing capacity than the human brain by a factor of a quintillion (a million trillion). This number can be found readily enough. One can estimate the number of atoms in a cubic millimeter. Assume that each atom is manipulating one bit of information, switching in femtoseconds. The estimated bit processing rate of the human brain is about 10exp16 bits a second, which works out to be a quintillion times smaller.

Thus artificial brains will utterly dwarf human brains in their capacities, so the potential of near future technologies (i.e. only a few decades away) will make augmenting humanity seem a drop in the ocean. My main beef against the Transhumanists is that they are not “biting the bullet” in the sense of not taking seriously the prospect that humanity will be drowned by vastly superior artilects who may not like human beings very much, once they become hugely superior to us. The Transhumanists suffer from tunnel vision. They focus on minor extensions of human capacities such as greater intelligence, longer healthier life, bigger memory, faster thinking etc. They tend to ignore the bigger question of “species dominance” i.e. should humanity build artilects that would be god like in their capacities, utterly eclipsing human capacities.

Since a sizable proportion of humanity (according to recent opinion polls that I have undertaken, but need to be scaled up) utterly reject the idea of humans being superseded by artilects, they will go to war,  when  push really comes  to shove,  to ensure that humans remain the dominant  species. This will be a passionate war, because the stake has never been so high, namely the survival of the human species, not just countries, or a people, but ALL people. This species dominance war (the “Artilect War”) will kill billions of people, because it will be waged with 21st century weapons that will be far more deadly than 20th century weapons, probably nano based.

The Transhumanists are too childishly optimistic, and refuse to “bite the bullet.” They do not face up to the big question of whether  humanity should build artilects or not and thus risk a gigadeath Artilect war. The childlike optimism of the Transhumanists is touching, but hardly edifying. They are not facing up to the hard reality. Perhaps deep in their hearts, the Transhumanists feel the force of the above argument, but find the prospect of a gigadeath Artilect War so horrible that they blot it out of their consciousnesses and pretend that all will be sweetness and light, all very happy, but not very adult.

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A Reply the above by Steve Richfield

I used to believe as you do, but my opinion has since morphed a bit after many discussions with singulitarians.

Singularity is a religion, only instead of praying to an existing God, they are seeking to create their own God. The parallels to the Tower of Babel are there for all to see.

I have come to believe that anyone who would buy into a “human friendly AGI” must necessarily be too stupid to ever build one, and hence is no threat. Simply ignore the singulitarians, as you now ignore the many other lunatic cult religions.

What is a threat is the diversion of resources to such folly, and the potential awakening of governmental regulation over competent AI development.

Note that several companies now have prototype cold fusion reactors working, but there has been SO little press after past bogus claims. It will be interesting to watch as this technology moves into the mainstream, because the dangers are very parallel in that lunatics could potentially build hydrogen bombs in their kitchens. While this may not be as dangerous as releasing super-human AGIs, it is nonetheless dangerous enough to observe the social response.

Brain to Brain

Is it just a matter of time before brain-to-brain communication will replace the Internet? If we merge our brains with computers, is there a risk the Internet will become sentient and evolve into a life-form?

These are some futuristic questions discussed by scientists these days. There is no doubt humanity is quickly entering a new technological level, but what does it really mean? Not long ago, scientists from the Berkeley University successfully demonstrated it is possible video of your thoughts.

This is done by mapping brain wave response to 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos. Then, patients view a series of videos, and those brain waves are matched with the correlating visuals from the first test.

The result is this video of the clip watched and the matched brain wave activity. As you can see, it is remarkable how close some of them appear to the original, and it is equally amazing how some images become written words in our thoughts. The procedure may eventually help create visuals of our dreams.

Dr. Michio Kaku

So, if our thoughts can be filmed, does it mean that our brains can be plugged into computers and we can begin communicate without typing on the keyboard?

According to Dr. Michio Kaku, brain-to-brain communication would involve not just the exchange of information, but also the transmission of emotions and feelings, "because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts."

            "There's no doubt that the internet is creating what is called an intelligent planet, that is, the skin of the planet earth is becoming a network by which intelligent creatures communicate with each other. '

But that's just the first step. Some people think that the next step in the coming decades is not going to be the internet.

It's going to be Brain Net because we're at the point now where we can actually connect computers to the living mind.

In fact, I ( Dr. Kaku) was just at Berkeley a few weeks ago where I had a demonstration of this: we can actually create videos of your thoughts.

These videos are not perfectly accurate, but I saw a demonstration in a laboratory at Berkeley where you can actually see in a video screen what people are thinking," Dr. Kaku says.

"So with electrodes, perhaps, or EEG sensors in a helmet connected to our brain, perhaps one day we'll be able to have brain-to-brain communication, and that gives us the possibility of Brain Net. In fact, some of the leading neurologists doing these experiments have seriously proposed a brain net whereby you would exchange not just information like typing, but also emotions, feelings, because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts.

And then what comes beyond that? Well, of course, beyond that is science fiction, and science fiction gives us all sorts of horror stories of things like Sky Net: maybe one day the internet will become sentient; maybe one day the internet will think that humans are in the way and perhaps the internet will take over just like in the Terminator series. Well, I don't think so, "Dr. Kaku continues.

This is an image of an internet map. Will the Internet one day evolve into a life-form?

"The internet is simply a way in which minds can communicate with other minds. We see no self-awareness in the internet. Now some people say, "Well, what about some kind of collective consciousness that arises by an emergent phenomenon?" Well, that's a lot of gobbledygook. That's a lot of nice words. Maybe. Maybe not. But it's pure speculation at the present time. Even in the laboratory with our finest instruments and the latest developments in artificial intelligence, we cannot make a computer become self-aware.

I personally think that we don't have to worry that that internet is going to become sentient," Dr. Kaku says.

There are of course scientists who suggest that peoples' thoughts should be recorded and made public, but that would imply a total lack of privacy and it is unlikely it will happen.

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Science Delusion

The Science Delusion

By Steve Marshall

Millions of people around the world claim personal experience of unexplained phenomena, which can be as simple as ‘knowing’ who is calling them when the telephone rings. Mainstream science can provide no explanation for this, other than dismissing it as mere delusion. Rupert Sheldrake, after many years of investigating telepathy, the unexplained powers of animals and human precognition, believes that he can. Sheldrake claims that his theory of ‘morphic resonance’ not only explains these widespread phenomena, it also shows how simple organic forms can self-organise into more complex ones, as an addition to Darwin’s process of Natural Selection. According to Sheldrake:

 “The formation of habits depends on a process called morphic resonance. Similar patterns of activity resonate across space and time with subsequent patterns. This hypothesis applies to all self-organising systems, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals and animal societies. All draw upon a collective memory and in turn contribute to it. A growing crystal of copper sulphate, for example, is in resonance with countless previous crystals of copper sulphate, and follows the same habits of crystal organisation, the same lattice structure. A growing oak seedling follows the habits of growth and development of previous oaks. When an orb-web spider starts spinning its web, it follows the habits of countless ancestors, resonating across space and time. The more people who learn a new skill, such as snowboarding, the easier will it be for others to learn it because of morphic resonance from previous snowboarders.”

There is far more to morphic resonance than this, but I’m not the one to explain, as I have to admit I don’t understand all of its many aspects. Sheldrake believes that memories are not stored in the brain but somewhere outside of it; the brain recalls them not as a hard drive does, by playing back physically-stored electrical signals, but more like a television that tunes into transmitted signals and decodes them as memories. It does this by morphic resonance. Here, there are strong similarities with Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and archetypes. Jung’s ideas were accepted (if rather half-heartedly) by many scientists of his day; although Sheldrake does get support from some of his peers, it tends to come privately. His explorations into the liminal areas of science are particularly unpopular with dogmatic sceptics, who regard the work as ‘pseudoscience’ and “outside the scope of scientific experiment’.

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