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to recent opinion polls that I have undertaken, but need to be scaled up) utterly reject the idea of humans being superseded by artilects, they will go to war,  when  push really comes  to shove,  to ensure that humans remain the dominant  species.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.

hplusmagazine

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.

Zeigeist

    

 What if someone from the future popped up in our timeline and started answering questions from people on internet message boards? That’s exactly what John Titor did in the late 1990s. Claiming he was sent from the future on a mission to retrieve an antique computer, he talked with thousands of people online and told stories of futuristic life in 2036. Many of his tales warned of imminent disaster for the world, but he said he couldn’t help.

    As abruptly as he appeared, Titor vanished in 2001. Did he finish his mission? Who – or what – is behind the legend of John Titor? …

    Posted by John Titor on 01-27-2001 12:45 PM.

 Greetings. I am a time traveler from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975. My “time” machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two, top-spin, dual-positive singularities that produce a standard, off-set Tipler sinusoid. I will be happy to post pictures of the unit. …

    Life in 2036

Titor talks about his life as well, including living in Florida as a child, his service in the second American Civil War as a member of the Fighting Diamondbacks in 2013, and the communal/agricultural nature of life in 2036.

 Titor admits he lives in a parallel timeline, one that varies 1-2% from ours. Enough to be slightly different, but not diverge from the major societal events. Titor is on a mission to obtain an IBM 5100 in order to debug computers in 2036 due predicted problems with Unix in 2038. The IBM 5100 emulates APL and BASIC programming languages, an interesting feature. John also posts pictures of his time travel machine along with schematics and the logo used by his military unit.

    Titor’s story eventually falls apart, with answers inconsistent and terse, and the user quits posting in April of 2001. The Titor story contines to grow as the conversations are re-posted onto other sites and through e-mail lists, with Titor fever reaching a peak in 2003, culminating with the release of a book about Titor, John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale in late 2003 by the John Titor Foundation, Inc.

mindscape

Gnostics and Annunaki

Gnostics, Annunaki/ Archons 
& The Reptilian Agenda

    by John Lash

In response to Dan Brown’s reference to the Nag Hammadi texts as scrolls, “They are codices – books with individual pages. They are actually the oldest example we have of leather-bound books.”

Amazingly, whatever the significance of their content (and we have just barely begun to comprehend what that might be), the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC) are rare original artifacts, the earliest surviving examples of bound books.

A close reading of these arcane materials shows that Gnostics were deeply concerned with alien intrusion into human affairs. The entities they called Archons appear to be identical to the ET’s of modern Ufology. Both Grey and Reptilian types are explicitly described in the codices. I would estimate that up to one-fifth of the core material in the NHC concerns the Archons, their origin, methods and motives.

'The Sophia Mythos,' the Gnostic creation story, explains that the Archons arise due to an anomaly in the cosmic order. “The world system we inhabit came about by a mistake.” (The Gospel of Philip)

This startling line alludes to the Gnostic theory that the solar system was produced by the impact of the goddess Sophia upon lifeless atomic matter, but the Earth was formed from Sophia’s divine, alive, self-aware power.

Odd as it sounds, this view is totally compatible with modern astronomy. We know that the solar system at large is dominated by inorganic chemistry and does not support life as it occurs in the biosphere, where organic chemistry is the norm. Gnostics would argue that this is so because the Earth is the embodiment of Sophia, while the solar system is the product and habitat of the Archons. The observation of this difference between the inorganic and organic aspects of our solar system led James Lovelock to formulate the Gaia Hypothesis.

So, the earliest surviving books contain a description of Alien intrusion, but what about the earliest known writings? Archeologists tell us that cuneiform writing was invented in Mesopotamia around 3200.

The cuneiform record gives us the most extensive repertoire of stories about human prehistory. Cuneiform texts such as Atrahasis, Enuma Elish, and Enki and World Order, present stories of a non-human race called the Annunaki, “those who from heaven to earth came,” as Zecharia Sitchin translates that term.

Sitchin is known for densely researched books on the Annunaki, whom he identifies with the Biblical Nefhilim, “the Watchers” of the Book of Enoch. These are alien entities who “came into the daughters of men,” as Genesis says.

The story of the Annunaki describes how an alien race intervenes deeply in human evolution. Sitchin and others accept this plot as if it were an actual record of events in prehistory.

Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses

Cuneiform tablets describe how two Annunaki leaders, Enki and his half-sister Ninhursag, produced a hybrid, slave race from the indigenous ape-like peoples of the planet.

Hence, an alien “interbreeding program” is central to the Annunaki narrative. It is an indisputable fact that this story is written down in the oldest surviving records, but is the story itself a fact?

Virtual Space

Henry David Thoreau once remarked that “He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all”, and those words have become true in a way that not even he could have predicted. While we sit motionless, interacting with the world on the screen we enter into a sort of quasi-movement through a virtual world. And this is something that puzzles me immensely. I consider myself to have a firm understanding of exactly where I am until the moment I open my web browser, and then it all goes a bit fuzzy. Where am I when my experience has shifted from my physical surroundings into a virtual space? How do we define virtual space, and is it possible and preferable to create an accepted virtual topography?

The term telepresence has often been used to describe one of the largest benefits of instant media. In the earlier parts of the 20th century, long distance communication was remarkable enough, but the multi-medial character of the internet has brought about the ability to project ourselves instantly into other people’s lives in an even more remarkable way. We can broadcast our ideas with comparatively small amount of effort and cost, share in experiences of music, literature of video and even the most mundane online games enable us to commune with people all over the globe as we entertain ourselves, all while holding instantaneous access to immense archives of knowledge at our fingertips. And yet, there’s something strangely detached about our current experiences of virtual reality. The prefix “cyber”, one that so many of us overuse to explain complex socio-technological phenomena, takes its roots from the old Greek word describing the act of steering a ship. And while we can certainly agree that the analogy of holding a ships rudder may make sense in relation to a control device such as a keyboard, it takes much more imagination to picture ourselves in the middle of a vast ocean, navigating the internet as if it were a body of water. There has always been a tendency to predict future technological development as moving toward a system of full-body immersion, a system that will enable us to completely enter into a virtual environment and become fully mobile within the machine in a naturally intuitive way. However, although such technology may not be fully realized and available yet, it does not mean that we have not entered into an era of “virtual movement”.

Source: humanityplus