Merely Human? That's So Yesterday

[flow]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html?pagewanted=1&ref=homepage&src=me

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

So do the transhumanists among us love this guy or what?

 

[Anthile]

He's a charlatan if you ask me. This sums up my thoughts pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Criticism

 

[Kuu]

"Love"? hmm I appreciate his sustained and optimistic efforts in raising awareness of transhumanist concerns. Optimism is such a rare thing to see in this banal and defeatist age.

His claims might be questionable but I wouldn't go so far as to call him a charlatan.



Is this thread supposed to go somewhere?

 

[Anthile]

"Love"? hmm I appreciate his sustained and optimistic efforts in raising awareness of transhumanist concerns. Optimism is such a rare thing to see in this banal and defeatist age.

His claims might be questionable but I wouldn't go so far as to call him a charlatan.

He obviously misleads people for his own benefit. He makes outrageous claims to make people buy his books. Remember what I wrote about hyperbole and utopian fiction in the other thread? It's exactly like that all over again. His message is basically 'Transhumanism will change your life in never-seen-before ways within a very short amount of time', buy my book to find out about it' - capitalized and with bold letters. It doesn't even matter how improbable the claims are, it doesn't even matter how much of it is pure fiction; in the moment you buy his books, he achieved his goal - because that's all he ever wanted from you.
If you don't want to call it charlatanery, alright, but is has nothing to do with actual science.

Is this thread supposed to go somewhere?

Well, I'm not going anywhere this evening.

 

[Agent Intellect]

As much as I consider myself an advocate of transhumanism, I share in the skepticism. When one reads the actual literature about what we know of the brain (a lot of recent discoveries in the last decade tells us: not as much as we thought; ie adult neurogenesis, neuroplasticity (1) (2), astrocyte function in cognition and so forth), along with how many of the discoveries in medicine and so forth that are always hailed as the next big thing to make life better for everyone, a lot of the claims seem dubious - at least as far as how soon some of these people believe these things will happen.

I've read Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near" and a good portion of it is pointing at the increasing processing power/speed of computers and making ambiguous claims about how much we know about how the brain works and so forth, and then saying that if the trend continues, such and such will happen by a certain year etc. Charlatanism seems accurate to me, because it's playing on peoples hopes to make money, and wrapping it up in important, scientific sounding jargon.

That being said, I'd say the most promising 'futurisms' right now are project blue brain (Video) and the creation of synthetic life.

 

[Cognisant]

Running off on a tangent here but, I reckon Apple will be the first to successfully manufacture prosthetics commercially, sure Microsoft will probably buy out whatever mad entrepreneur is the first to try making a business of it, but nobody wants Microsoft products when they're first released, there's a reputation for them being unfinished.

Of course Apple will leave the market wide open to Microsoft for people who want to be able to modify/maintain their augmentations themselves, because Apple will intentionally make their products incompatible with everything/anything else, thus trying to insidiously force people into service provider agreements.
The great “You own it, but…” scam.

 

[flow]

Is this thread supposed to go somewhere?

Yes, mission accomplished.

 

[Black Rose]

Human augmentation will change everything.

YouTube- Deus Ex: Human Revolution NEW "They Can't Stop The Future" E3 2010 Trailer

 

[Agent Intellect]

Human augmentation will change everything.

YouTube- Deus Ex: Human Revolution NEW "They Can't Stop The Future" E3 2010 Trailer

I'm not that big of a gamer, but that certainly has me intrigued.

 

[Cognisant]

Technological advancement = Kiss my shiny metal ass -> Kiss my sexy bionic ass.

Anyway, judging by the cinematic detail and the fact that Eidos is managing it, I figure this is going to play like a FPS version of Splinter cell, if not an entirely 3rd person stealth/shooter, with perhaps the odd boss battle against another cyborg.
http://www.intpforum.com/album.php?albumid=74

The arm-blade seems to be his signature weapon, definitely suggesting melee combat will be a integral part of game play, it certainly seems to be an effective mook disposal tool. Anyway I figure the story will revolve around searching for his family/girlfriend, who are probably the bargaining chips being used by his employers to control him, that is after he finds out they're amoral bastards and considers betraying them, a classic Deus Ex trope.

Although I wonder if self modification will still be a major part of the game, because I really enjoyed that in the first game, particularly how character development changed how I played the game, turning me from a wits & stealth gunman, into a lighting bruiser.

 

[Vrecknidj]

Well, at least Daft Punk will make music about it. So, we have something to look forward to.

 

[Geminii]

While integrated human augmentation will become more and more available, it's not going to be anything more than a niche for at least the next century. People like just being people too much.

External augments, however, are already pretty ubiquitous.

 

[Cognisant]

People like just being people too much.

True.

<- Dude's metal arms likely can't feel anything, which would take the fun out of a lot of things; jumping from rooftop-to-rooftop wouldn't be as much fun if you can't feel the kinetic build-up-and-release process in your legs, like jumping from A-to-B in a videogame where performing superhuman feats of acrobatics becomes second-nature, hence boring.

I can just imagine:
"Holy crap dude, did you just back-flip off a wall and kick that grenade back at the enemy?"
"Meh, third time today, or fourth, no definitely third, I think…"

 

[Black Rose]

True.

<- Dude's metal arms likely can't feel anything, which would take the fun out of a lot of things; jumping from rooftop-to-rooftop wouldn't be as much fun if you can't feel the kinetic build-up-and-release process in your legs, like jumping from A-to-B in a videogame where performing superhuman feats of acrobatics becomes second-nature, hence boring.

I can just imagine:
"Holy crap dude, did you just back-flip off a wall and kick that grenade back at the enemy?"
"Meh, third time today, or fourth, no definitely third, I think…"

We are closer than most people think actualy. Feelings can always be simulated by nerve pulses. Remember that truth is stranger than fiction.

YouTube- Dean Kamen's Robotic "Luke" Arm

 

[Kuu]

Well, at least Daft Punk will make music about it. So, we have something to look forward to.

Indeed d(-_-)b

YouTube- Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

True.

<- Dude's metal arms likely can't feel anything, which would take the fun out of a lot of things; jumping from rooftop-to-rooftop wouldn't be as much fun if you can't feel the kinetic build-up-and-release process in your legs, like jumping from A-to-B in a videogame where performing superhuman feats of acrobatics becomes second-nature, hence boring."

Why wouldn't you feel? Aside from what animekitty posted, one could incorporate a switch or modulation mechanism between the sensors and the 'brain'... you could feel as little or as much as you wanted...

 

[Adamastor]

Did you guys read Isaac Asimov's The last question?
There are some things that are just fascinating in this text, though I got the impression that he was way too optimistic for my liking...

The thing is the concept of being human will get blurrier as far as I understand it, I am still rather skeptical if human could build a machine that is human, which as feelings, think like a human, etc, because we simply have not enough info about ourselves. Anyway, IMHO, if god did us this way, why can't we do the same? Or better?

Seeing things this way, we can't but speculated about the near future... Although, it may be fascinating to wonder if it is possible to approach machines and humans, that is not our main goal at all, I have always got the impression that things will not following this path soon, because of the simple fact that machines are way too powerful to waste with our simple human means... It is something like this that we are closer to:
Why cyborgs are

I think that is reflected on Asimov's history, I won't spoil the history, but it is interesting to see how humanity progress across it's history and especially the ignorant factor, which grows bigger, fatter and uglier always, is strongly present nowadays - It is something like software development: things are so complex and bigger that it is inevitable that many things are "lost" and need to be recovered latter if needed. This makes me wonder what would happen if I pressed the humanity's reset button, destroy everything man has built and created, so I could see how helpless they would struggle to start from scratch....

______

Well, I am pretty sure that no one is going to bother to read all of the above, so what I was trying to say was that I believe that humanity is going to inevitably lose its condition as mortals, thus as human beings, this is not going to happen in the near future (as it did not in Asimov's history).

Winds are changing to the point where many of us (if not all of us)will not be able to keep track about these changes and so our identity as humans is going to be lost inevitably, if we are going to compare with the past (Personally, humans from the past, from the beginning, are so different from us nowadays, that it is pretty strange to classify the both as the same, as humans).