All I can say is “wow!” This short YouTube video is both an engaging and succinct history of the way the Internet is transforming human communication and a powerful argument that this transformation will ultimately radically alter humanity itself. Amazing.
When I first logged in to Second Life about two months ago it struck me as the best attempt yet to bring to life Neil Stevenson’s metaverse concept. I’m happy to report that the more I explore Second Life the more accurate this observation appears to be. The latest indication? The Transhumanists have officially planted their flag on the shores of Uvvy Island (their very own sim) and are holding a Transhumanism Day Event tomorrow, Wednesday June 7th, to celebrate their arrival. The main speaker and organizer of the event is Giulio Prisco, a Senior Science and Technology Consultant who has worked at CERN, the European Space Agency, and the EU Satellite Centre.
If you’re interested in Transhumanism I highly recommend that you head on over to Second Life and grab a free account. To participate in the conference you’ll also need the Vivox connector client. To get this you’ll need to add your name to the list of participants here.
Being both nosy and curious I wandered over to the staging area to check things out. A quick survey of the area revealed designers putting finishing touches on various environments and even the two main speakers working out plans for their presentation tomorrow. Since I had already configured the necessary Vivox client software to participate in the audio portion of the presentation I was able to listen in to their chat. I was soon noticed, however, and promptly invited to join in to help test out the system and chat about Transhumanism. A good guy that Giulio Perhaps (Giulio Prisco in Real Life) and very willing to engage others on the topic.
I have to say the hosts were very welcoming of this particular outsider which bodes well for their outreach effort.
The conference area is sleek and modern as one might expect and has integrated white boards and display panels capable of rendering what appear to be power point slides and live web-pages. Definitely the collaboration environment of the future. The lack of a moderation feature in the Vivox client however promises to make things interesting…they definitely need to get cracking on that one!
Paul Kimball of Redstar Films wrote an interesting article entitled Borg… or Highlanders in response to another article by Mac Tonnies. To sum things up, Mac was ruminating over whether or not humans might one day transfer their consciousness into computers as per Ray Kurzweil’s vision as expressed in his book The Singularity Is Near. Apparently, one of Mac’s more spiritually-minded friends made the argument that one can come to a subjective realization that consciousness persists beyond death and so such efforts as Kurzweil proposes are pointless.
Putting aside the argument as to whether subjective experience can yield reliable facts about the fate of human consciousness after death, consider Paul’s response that “we have already crossed the proverbial Rubicon when it comes to using technology to enhance and even extend our lives – organ transplants, artificial hearts, drugs, even the dreaded iron lung – all of these things are man-made inventions, many of them mechanical in nature, that keep us living longer than nature, or God, intended. Indeed, if there is a God (and like Mac, I’m a hopeful agnostic on this question), then surely He gave us our superior intellect (well, superior to squirrels at least) in order that we would use it, for a whole bunch of things – including, I would think, living longer, better lives.”
To this I reply thusly: Amen, Paul!
Unless one believes that “soul stuff” resides in some realm other than the material world (see dualism) and so is not subject to investigation using the scientific method it seems to me inevitable that we will one day, possibly soon, reverse engineer the human mind and re-instantiate it in a computational substrate not limited to evolving biologically. In other words, if humans are just complex biological machines then Kurzweil is right and we will some day be able to create Artificial Intelligence that will quickly surpass human levels and will continue to do so exponentially.
Along with Kurzweil, Paul then goes on to imagine that we will one day transfer our minds into this great AI and live virtual lives which will greatly expand our consciousness allowing us to inhabit new bodies and to experience life from many different angles. For example, Paul states: “Really, it’s just a matter of degree, isn’t it? Today an artificial heart… tomorrow, an artificial body (I’ll take the Jessica Alba model, thanks – and if you have to ask why, you don’t know me very well).”
Again, Paul is spot-on. In fact, just for the record, I’ll take the Natalie Portman model. (Sometimes Paul and I think so much alike that it seems we might have been separated at birth!) In fact, if you want to see firsthand the beginnings of this sort of gender-bending virtual world you should check out Secondlife. Secondlife is basically an early attempt to realize Neil Stephenson’s Metaverse concept as described in his seminal cyber-age adventure Snow Crash. Warning: Secondlife can be pretty bizarre (and I do mean sexually) but even this is certainly only a shadow of the things to come.
Like Mac, I’ve recently read Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” and find his arguments about the inevitability of the Singularity quite persuasive. Less certain is whether the so-called “heaven” scenario he paints for the reader is similarly inevitable. Although I’m skeptical, I do think his vision has some hope of panning out. One reason I think Kurzweil is not totally off the mark is the fact that in most cultures people cherish their Golden Age myths. Such myths describe for each culture a perfect world that existed in the distant past that was somehow tragically lost. Although these so-called Golden Ages never really existed, what those who believe in them are really describing, often without realizing it, is the world the way they would like it to be in the future—generally filled with “peace, love, and good happiness stuff” and with scarcity and social barriers eliminated. This almost universal hopeful vision of the future, even though seen as lost and out of humanities’ grasp, might very well ultimately be reflected in the nature of any technological “God” (for what else should one call a super-powerful AI entity in which we live and by which we are sustained?) we might one day create.
For a bit of balance to the rosy Kurzweilian perspective outlined above you might want to read another book on this topic called Radical Evolution. Like Kurzweil’s book, Radical Evolution buys into the idea that the Singularity is inevitable but takes a more cautious approach to dealing with the potential fallout of this momentous event in human history. It does so by considering three possible scenarios which the author refers to as heaven, hell, and prevail. The Heaven scenario you have just read about—everyone lives happily forever after in the arms of a loving and ever more powerful God-like AI entity. In contrast, the Hell scenario is pretty much the opposite of that. Imagine the world consumed by out-of-control self-replicating nanobots that turn the entire planet’s biomass (including you and me) into a giant glop of carbon goo. Ouch! The Prevail scenario, on the other hand, avoids both of these extremes and argues that things will probably continue getting better as we develop new and better technologies but that this process will be considerably slower than predicted by either the heaven or hell camps and will be fraught with some peril and not likely to change who and what we are fundamentally anytime soon. Interesting reading!
It should also be pointed out that Kurzweil’s logic also has implications for Ufology. For one, if Kurzweil is correct and humans are only 50 years away from creating the Singularity it stands to reason that any advanced ET life traveling between stars to visit our planet will have already passed through the “singularity” phase of their evolution. As a result, they will probably NOT be biological organisms (humanoid or otherwise) but technological beings. It’s quite hard to say what beings so transformed might look like; in fact, it’s quite possible that they could instantiate bodies appropriate to the audience with which they are trying to communicate if they were so inclined, appear as a force of nature, or not appear at all. As Arthur C. Clarke famously stated, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Second, interstellar probes built on the nano-scale would be extremely compact, capable, and have very low mass. This means that it should be much easier to accelerate them to near the speed of light. If I had to guess I’d reckon we’d use a series of powerful lasers in sequence to push the little devils out toward target systems in large quantities. Once they’ve landed on (or peppered) some asteroid or other suitable host they would then begin to manufacture (through self-replication) the larger scale structures they would need to complete whatever mission parameters they’ve been given. This could be accomplished by including the necessary “DNA” programming with the probes allowing them to evolve into the necessary components of the larger system (nanotechnology starts to look like biology again in this scenario) or perhaps by transmitting the necessary instructions for self-assembly as a data stream that follows the probe on its journey to its target.
Wheeeeeee! :-) Fun stuff to think about in any case.
Perhaps this is what’s meant by “finding the kingdom of heaven” – maybe we are meant to create it here, on Earth (or, should we travel to the stars, “out there” as well), on our own?
Think of it this way – perhaps God is the ultimate “Posthuman”, just waiting for us to catch up.”
Well, Paul, once again we agree. From a religious standpoint, it’s my opinion that it is irrational for God, if it exists, to expect us poor humans to select the “One True Story” about Him from the many stories we have to choose from, most of which are hundreds if not thousands of years old, lest we be doomed. Casting people into hell for not getting this decision right, or for choosing not to decide at all considering the paucity of evidence (agnosticism), would not only be irrational of God but evil as well. Personally, I tend to think that this is not the kind of God God is if there is a God. J All of which is to say that, like you, I’m not too worried about human attempts to realize the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and that I support this secular humanist goal and the secular humanist philosophy that humans are infinitely perfectible.