Transtopia????

[Eli]

Originally posted by BeBro


Seriously, it seems to me that high quality medical treatment becomes rather more expensive than cheaper like for example consumer electronics (and even there top class stuff isn't exactly cheap).

The question is not how much today's high quality treatment costs, but how much yesterday's one costs today.

[BeBMan]

Sure, but I want something like equal chances in education for example. With tech-improvements (let's say stuff that improves your learning abilities) there will be rather more inequality, those who can afford the best stuff will get it, the rest will get second class cheap stuff. It is already happening in the case of medical treatment today at least in certain cases. I don't care if someone has a faster car or a bigger house or a better tv set, but if it's about "improving" humans as such I don't like the idea that it becomes a question of money as well and therefore a source for greater inequality.

[Az]

Seriously, it seems to me that high quality medical treatment becomes rather more expensive than cheaper like for example consumer electronics (and even there top class stuff isn't exactly cheap).

Because the field is that worst of all sins: government money, private contracting.

[Eli]

Originally posted by BeBro
Sure, but I want something like equal chances in education for example. With tech-improvements (let's say stuff that improves your learning abilities) there will be rather more inequality, those who can afford the best stuff will get it, the rest will get second class cheap stuff. It is already happening in the case of medical treatment today at least in certain cases. I don't care if someone has a faster car or a bigger house or a better tv set, but if it's about "improving" humans as such I don't like the idea that it becomes a question of money as well and therefore a source for greater inequality.

It's unavoidable.

Look on education. If the state has to provide a service to everyone equally, it has to be of low cost and therefore of low quality, since high cost(quality) services are too expensive to provide for everyone.
The really rich will be able to circumvent this problem, since for the prices they are willing to pay a market is always available.
So you both dont solve the inequality "problem", and condemn most people to a mediocre(at best) service.

[Sandman]

These people are like the Sith from KOTOR. 'Let's work together to kill everyone else and then turn on each other!'

Is there a collectivist version of this stuff? A goodle search for 'hive mind now' and 'Borg manifesto' yields nothing conclusive.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Sandman
These people are like the Sith from KOTOR. 'Let's work together to kill everyone else and then turn on each other!'

Is there a collectivist version of this stuff? A goodle search for 'hive mind now' and 'Borg manifesto' yields nothing conclusive.

Actually, if you go to their "singularity club," they do seriously discuss merging into a hive mind of some sort.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Odin
Black-cat:

Are you saying that you are some kind of ID freak that claims genetic changes are the result of some master plan instead of random ?

[Elok]

Originally posted by BlackCat


Are you saying that you are some kind of ID freak that claims genetic changes are the result of some master plan instead of random ?

Oooohboy. I wouldn't say that if I were you. You might as well call Sava a Republican. It's asking for trouble.

Seriously though, evolution, while unguided, is hardly random. The one does not imply the other.

[Geronimo]

Re: Transtopia????

Originally posted by Elok

https://www.transtopia.org

With that said, does anybody here know enough about technology to determine whether there's even the slightest chance of any of this crap coming to pass? I don't mean the technopocalypse or whatever (this whole site may have been cribbed from an early episode of "Sealab: 2021"), but the general transhumanist pipe dreams. Uploading one's brain to a computer, for example. That seems, intuitively, impossible, just because I know the brain apparently works by emergence. Our thoughts are the product of millions upon millions of interactions between simple neurons. Our thinking is a function of our brains' architecture, or so I understand it.

An artificial brain would therefore have to mimic all those connections, which would then presumptively have to be selectively strengthened to simulate the workings of an individual brain, or something like that. That's a staggering amount of work, and in order for the replication to work all the connections would have to be made perfectly, plus you'd want them double-checked. You have to wonder who'd be doing all that...and that's just for starters. Getting a non-biological apparatus with several million small parts that didn't break down or overheat (the ostensible advantage over flesh-brains being durability)?

Also on the list of possibilities: using advanced biological techniques of one kind or another to enhance our intelligence. This would seem to assume that human science can, within a hundred years, outdo millions of years of natural progress. It's also less favorable to their ideology, as they regard flesh as an inferior medium prone to wearing out.

Er, am I wrong?

EDIT: Okay, I looked at their page on "uploading" (briefly). They seem to advocate not actual uploading into a computer but a "fossilization" of the brain by replacing neurons with functionally-identical electronic equivalents. How these would be less prone to breakdown than cells, given their number, is unclear.

"uploading" might be possible as described in your edit, but I think you assume "functionally equivalent" to be "functionally identical" which shouldn't be necessary. The functional properties of the neurons in our brains are extremely mutable. For starters, there is definately a lot of "slop" in the system due to the metabolic turnover routinely completely rebuilding every functional non-genomic component in a neuron from scratch. And of course the very function of the neuron is easily shifted more or less permanently in response to various drugs or pathological conditions. These things obviously alter the persons behavior but at no point do they stop being the same individual.

I admit I didn't look at their site just because my patience for psuedoscience is very fickle, but I don't see why in general you assume that evolution would have been an insurpassably efficient (in terms of time) means of designing intelligence. Consider that even though millions of years of evolution were apparently required to develop cheetahs that were the fastest land animals ever humans nonetheless developed drastically faster machines starting basically from scratch in a matter of decades. So why would intelligence not likewise be possible to artifically duplicate in a manner that surpasses natures existing limits?

Evolution is very good at keeping species adapted to changes in the enviroment, but it should be no surprise that it does so very slowly. Also evolution had to design human intelligence constrained by all sorts of compromises necessary to keep humans viable as a species that wouldn't be any sort of cconsideration in designing an artificial intelligence. Human brains had to be built from biological materials which themselves had long since been selected for their suitability in self-reproduction from readily available materials and with no consideration to suitability for things like speedy signal propagation. When natural selection demanded speedy signal propagation it quickly approached the theoretical limits of those materials and has not appreciably improved on them in hundreds of millions of years. Faster signal propagation could no more evolve in the established lines of organisms than could wheeled locomotion in vertibrates. The resulting brains are relatively slow and small and capable of only very low bandwidth networking.


In some ways I'm surprised it's taken even this long to develop an AI that surpasses human intelligence. If cost was no object I'm sure it could be done with existing technologies after an apollo-sized investment of capital.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Elok


Oooohboy. I wouldn't say that if I were you. You might as well call Sava a Republican. It's asking for trouble.

Seriously though, evolution, while unguided, is hardly random. The one does not imply the other.

At least he hasn't the mighty Mjølner witch Child of Thor may have (hope they aren't buddies and share wapons )

Seriously, please read what I write - genetic changes is random. They may result in nothing, weakness or an improvement. The evolution test of the change is wether it survives or not.

[Odin]

Originally posted by BlackCat


Are you saying that you are some kind of ID freak that claims genetic changes are the result of some master plan instead of random ?

MUTATIONS are random, natural selectrion definitely is not.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Elok
Uh-oh, you called evolution "random." You're not a fundie, but you'd better edit that quick or Odin might go into berserk mode anyway...

Evolution works based on principles of fierce competition (in the sense of competing methods of survival, not that those methods are always purely competitive). The innovations themselves were fairly random, but the theory goes that it's pure Adam Smith acting on the innovations. A rather powerful force. None of our inventions thus far can come even close to running as smoothly as a human (or other animal) body. Computers might be very fast, but their tasks are relatively simple and confined and they still break down after a few years. And they don't have to manage tons of internal organs at the same time, nor do they have pathogens to worry about. They have "computer viruses," but those are relatively crude programs that have to be custom-engineered nonstop by our society's large antisocial-nerd contingent. And the computer has no means of developing its own antibodies either.

The human body ceases to function at all after at most 120 years. In all that time it never ceases to replace every last non genomic part continually while in some tissues it is also replicating the DNA continually. Even a car could be made to run that long if you allowed for replacing everything but the frame continually whether it needed to be repalced or not. Most solid state devices could probably be used continually without needing any parts replaced for 100 years. When you talk about computers breaking down after so many years it's mainly fans and disk drives and other relatively external bits that are wearing out and you also need to consider that none of the computers are built to last because it is understood that they will be obsolete in farily short order.

Originally posted by Elok
There are also considerable restrictions on what can be accomplished by biology itself; the brain is an incredible hog of energy, and it's the main reason human beings take twenty years to grow to maturity. You can't form a genius overnight. Some amount of what we call "intelligence" is probably learned from experience rather than innate, and there's certainly no reason to assume that intelligence is a plain quantity that can be increased ad infinitum like a helping of food on a plate. Different abilities seem to be linked to different deficiencies; e.g., aspies like me are socially stunted, but we tend to make superb engineers, because our minds often adapt better to mechanistic thinking.

That's just because there is a more or less fixed amount of brain 'hardware' so the more you specialize at one thing the less resources are available for another. Increase the amount or capabilities of the 'hardware' and the resulting 'brain' could excel at all of these things rather than compromising some to dedicate more resources toward another.

[Elok]

BlackCat: Er, arguing about evolution with Odin is generally a bad idea. As his sig used to indicate, he spends about 75% of his waking life thinking about it, and he takes it rather seriously. We're already a bit off topic here.

Geronimo: As I understand it, it's not just the amount of material available in the brain. Organization definitely does matter. Again using my own Asperger's as an example, the frontal sections of my brain are unusually divided...something about myelination. The different portions of the frontal lobe don't communicate as frequently and smoothly as they do in normal humans. As a result, the little isolated "clusters" develop an efficient internal routine which makes certain things far easier (my memory for facts is unusually long-lasting and precise, making classes a breeze), and other things far harder (understanding social "code" is rather difficult). I can't have one without the other. At least, that's the theory as I understand it. I don't pretend to know neuroscience perfectly.

WRT durability, I think the durability of solid state devices is tied in to their form (and the limitations which come with that form) more than their materials. As you said, when computers break down, it's usually small fans, or power sources, etc. There are very few moving parts in there, just massive numbers of branching electrical pathways which don't wear out. Raw electrical signals along metallic pathways are naturally very, very fast. However, the sheer amount of electricity moving through them generates enough waste heat that the fans and such are essential. The fans are something like the computer's replacement for enzymes. And the more resources you stack in there, the more waste heat it will generate. It's a miracle of modern technology that our processors don't melt. Also, the more resources you stack in there, the more pathways you need connecting them all together, right? Lots of space, lots of delicate wiring.

Just try to hook one of those up like a human brain. With all the coolants necessary, all the wiring, all the millions of connections, it'd take up a warehouse ten times the size of ENIAC, waste colossal amounts of power, and break down continuously just from the sheer size of the thing. Something has to break sometime, and one breakdown in the cooling system could really screw things up. If you tried to insert brain cells' self-repair and replacement functions, then you have to worry about those breaking down and the waste heat they generate, plus supplying them with whatever they need to operate.

I don't know electronics or machinery at all well, but I do know there's generally no such thing as a free lunch. The reason we so quickly surpassed the cheetah is that cars and trains, unlike cheetahs, do not need digestive, nervous, immune, or reproductive systems. They don't need to hunt for food, protect their young, see, touch, taste, hear, or smell. They run on fossil fuels accumulated over millions and millions of years, which like all their other parts is readily supplied to them, and the demands placed on them are pretty simple. When and if those fossil fuels run out, the machine is useless, and it doesn't know how to fetch any for itself. The combination of fossil fuels (basically infinite "food") and a dedicated set of human servants to handle all details other than actually moving allowed machinery to grow at a huge rate, but that's nothing special. Give unlimited food to a bacterium and it will cover the earth in one massive colony within a year.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Elok

Geronimo: As I understand it, it's not just the amount of material available in the brain. Organization definitely does matter. Again using my own Asperger's as an example, the frontal sections of my brain are unusually divided...something about myelination. The different portions of the frontal lobe don't communicate as frequently and smoothly as they do in normal humans. As a result, the little isolated "clusters" develop an efficient internal routine which makes certain things far easier (my memory for facts is unusually long-lasting and precise, making classes a breeze), and other things far harder (understanding social "code" is rather difficult). I can't have one without the other. At least, that's the theory as I understand it. I don't pretend to know neuroscience perfectly.

Organization matters certainly but for brains the wiring appears to be largely self organizing in response to environmental input. Just look at how clueless humans are when we are born. The genetic blueprint for intelligence in humans appears to be mostly dedicated to setting up systems to process raw sensory data into workable abstractions while the rest ensures canalizing of human behavior to include a handful of important skills like language acquisition. Evolution doesn't seem to use a brute force "programming" style to provide for intelligence involving layer upon layer of carefully crafted coding, rather it builds just enough ability into the thing to allow self organization to work properly. It's not necessary to artificially program an equivalent to every neural pathway in a brain to get intelligence you just need to match the capabilities of this initial crude processing state, and then provide it enough hardware resources to self organise in a timely fashion. Better yet for an AI much of the need to process raw sensory data could be effectively bypassed by providing sensory input in a somewhat predigested form. If the goal is just to provide a machine that can, for instance design a better microprocessor, it wouldn't be necessary for it to be able to translate raw visual field information into useable abstractions. Furthermore you already raised the point that intelligence can be subject to specialization. So if the AI is specialized exclusively towards designing better AI hardware it's not hard to see how that could become an effective feed-back loop. The so-called "singularity" phenomena.

Originally posted by Elok
WRT durability, I think the durability of solid state devices is tied in to their form (and the limitations which come with that form) more than their materials. As you said, when computers break down, it's usually small fans, or power sources, etc. There are very few moving parts in there, just massive numbers of branching electrical pathways which don't wear out. Raw electrical signals along metallic pathways are naturally very, very fast. However, the sheer amount of electricity moving through them generates enough waste heat that the fans and such are essential. The fans are something like the computer's replacement for enzymes. And the more resources you stack in there, the more waste heat it will generate. It's a miracle of modern technology that our processors don't melt. Also, the more resources you stack in there, the more pathways you need connecting them all together, right? Lots of space, lots of delicate wiring.

I guess even though I remain convinced that it would be possible to maintain an AI longer than the current limits on the longevity of a human intelligence this doesn't really matter with respect to whether it would be possible to create an AI that would lead to some sort of "singularity" phenomena.

Originally posted by Elok
Just try to hook one of those up like a human brain. With all the coolants necessary, all the wiring, all the millions of connections, it'd take up a warehouse ten times the size of ENIAC, waste colossal amounts of power, and break down continuously just from the sheer size of the thing. Something has to break sometime, and one breakdown in the cooling system could really screw things up. If you tried to insert brain cells' self-repair and replacement functions, then you have to worry about those breaking down and the waste heat they generate, plus supplying them with whatever they need to operate.

Nonsense. A vast complex information machine doesn't have to break down just because parts of it continually fail. Just look at the internet. Anyway, you are assuming it is necessary to build an AI "brain" that matches the brain for number of connections even though signal propagation is immensely faster in electronics than in brains. The brain needs more connections to offset it's slower processing speed. Furthermore you are assuming that number of connections is the critical hardware parameter when other considerations like speed and sophistication of the individual connected units could be at least as important. A neuron quite likely isn't a very sophisticated information processing unit and it is undeniably slow. Who is to say that a few million properly wired microprocessors could not match the abilities of the human brain if properly setup? Of course properly setting them up would be an immense undertaking since projects of that nature have been quite limited, but that is not to say it would be impossible to do.

Originally posted by Elok
I don't know electronics or machinery at all well, but I do know there's generally no such thing as a free lunch. The reason we so quickly surpassed the cheetah is that cars and trains, unlike cheetahs, do not need digestive, nervous, immune, or reproductive systems. They don't need to hunt for food, protect their young, see, touch, taste, hear, or smell. They run on fossil fuels accumulated over millions and millions of years, which like all their other parts is readily supplied to them, and the demands placed on them are pretty simple. When and if those fossil fuels run out, the machine is useless, and it doesn't know how to fetch any for itself. The combination of fossil fuels (basically infinite "food") and a dedicated set of human servants to handle all details other than actually moving allowed machinery to grow at a huge rate, but that's nothing special. Give unlimited food to a bacterium and it will cover the earth in one massive colony within a year.

You've actually described an important reason to expect it may be possible to build machines that surpass human intelligence. The machines can "cheat" in exactly the manner you describe.

[Dis]

I really thought the website would be about transvestites .