Top Ten Cybernetic Upgrades Everyone Will Want
Science fiction, computer games, anime... cyborgs are everywhere. Transhumanists are philosophers who believe that one day, cybernetic upgrades will be so powerful, elegant, and inexpensive that everyone will want them. This page lists ten major upgrades that I think will be adopted by 2050.
#10. Disease immunity.
Between 20 and 40 years into the future, we will become capable of building artificial antibodies that outperform their natural equivalents. Instead of using chemical signaling that relies on diffusion to reach its target, these antibodies will communicate with rapid acoustic pulses. Instead of proteins, they will be made using much more durable polymers or even diamond. These antibodies will move through the bloodstream more quickly than other cells in the bodies, and will take up less space and resources, meaning that there will be room for many more. Using super-biological methods for identifying and neutralizing foreign viruses and bacteria, these tiny robots will still function in harmony with our own bodies. They will probably be powered either by glucose, ATP (like natural antibodies), or acoustically. There are already bloodborne microbots today which are not rejected by the immune system - these are the precursors of tomorrow's nanorobotics. Through their presence and continued operation, they will eliminate all susceptibility to disease in those who have them running through their veins. This will not make people immortal, but it will allow them to walk into a room contaminated with a flesh-eating virus in nothing but a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. For more on artificial antibodies and other body-integrated nanites, see Nanomedicine.
#9. Telemicroscopic, full-spectrum vision.
There are microscopes that weigh one tenth of an ounce. Some birds of prey have vision so sharp that they can spot a hare a mile away. We have compact devices that can scan the electromagnetic spectrum from x-rays to radio waves, and everything in between. Our eyes in their current form can do none of these things. But in time, they will be upgraded. There are already prosthetic retinas that can provide low-resolution artificial vision for blind people. It's simply a matter of time until better prosthetic eyes are created, and their sharpness, contrast, and resolution is superior to what evolution gave us. The biggest challenge may end up not actually being about building a superior artificial eye, but remodeling the visual cortex so that it can process the info and relay it to the rest of the brain in such a way that it's not overwhelmed.
#8. Telepathy/Brain-Computer Interfacing.
Ever wanted to send someone a message with nothing but your mind, or have a neural implant that gives your brain direct access to Google? Hundreds of corporate and academic labs across the world are working on projects that generate progress in this area. Check out the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface, which lets you move the cursor around on a screen with only your EEG waves and 20 minutes of training. Miniature fMRI will allow us to continue increasing the bandwidth between brain and computer, eventually allowing for a "mental typewriter" that converts thoughts into text. A tiny transmitter could send this to a bone-conduction device on the receiving person, letting them hear the message without sound. NASA is also working on a device to transcribe silent, 'subvocal' speech. Like many transhumanist upgrades, these will probably start as efforts to help people who are handicapped, then evolve into powerful tools that can be used by anyone bold enough to adopt them.
#7. Super-strength.
Early in 2006, scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Dr. Ray H. Baughman, developed artificial muscles 100 times stronger than our own, powered by alcohol and hydrogen. Leonid Taranenko, the former Soviet weightlifter, holds the world record for power lifting a 266 kg (586 lbs) dumbbell. If Leo's natural muscles were replaced with Dr. Baughman's synthetic polymer muscles, he could lift 26,600 kg, or about 30 tons. That's equivalent to the weight of this yacht, the Nova Spirit. Super-strength is an interesting area in that the technology to do it has already been invented - the only step remaining is actually weaving the fiber into a human body - which, today, would be complicated and messy, not to mention probably illegal. However, that doesn't mean that it won't be done, probably within the next couple decades. Further improvements to the process could make it safe for normal people, numerous ethics questions notwithstanding. One benefit of improved muscles is that we'd be far less vulnerable to unfortunate accidents. They could also provide armor against bullets or other forms of attack. One downside is that people could use them to bully others around. Guess the good guys will need even bigger muscles.
#6. Improved appearance.
In general, there is a lot of agreement as to who is attractive and who is less so. Numerous experiments have shown that while there are slight subjective differences in who we want to get with, we are biologically programmed to look for certain facial and physical features that correlate with increased fitness. For the time being, this is unavoidable. The only way to change it would be to reach inside our neural circuitry and start severing connections. Until we choose to do that, we can improve our own lives - and the lives of those who have to look at us - by looking as pretty or handsome as possible. We brush our teeth, keep fit, take showers, and all that other great stuff that helps us score. Some of us even visit the plastic surgeon, with mixed results. Surveys show that certain procedures, like liposuction, have very high patient satisfaction rates. As the safety and precision of our body modification technologies improves, we'll be able to change our faces and bodies with minimal fuss, and maximal benefit. Everyone will be able to be stunningly attractive. And the really great thing? We'll always be able to enjoy it. If everyone becomes attractive, we won't regard the slightly less attractive of the lot as "ugly" - our brain doesn't work that way. An attractive person is attractive, whether or not others are around. A planet full of attractive people could do a lot to improve our quality of life.
#5. Psychokenesis.
In the real world, psychokinesis is a bunch of wishful thinking and psuedoscience. Despite the roughly 30% of people who think that it's possible to affect objects through the mind alone, history and evidence make it clear that this is total nonsense. There are no psychics and there never have been. However, that doesn't mean that we can't create technopsychics artificially. By 2030, we'll be cranking out utility fog - swarms of tiny machines that fly through the air and interlock with robotic arms. By combining Brain-Computer Interfaces, like the type used by Claudia Mitchell to move her prosthetic arm, with utility fog, we will have direct-thought connections with powerful external robotics, allowing non-fictional psychokenesis. Utility fog, once all the necessary software for it is developed, will be capable of cooperating to perform practically any physical task or simulate a wide range of materials. Because utility fog could be distributed at low density and still accomplish a lot, a room filled with utility fog would look empty, and people in it could move and breathe normally. They would only notice once the fog is activated - either by a central computer, or a neural interface. Once a connection is achieved, practically anything could be accomplished with the proper programming. Throwing objects through the air, hovering over the ground, cracking an egg from across the room, materializing orbs of energy - all the antics we've always wanted to perform, but never had the means to.
#4. Autopoiesis/Allopoiesis
Autopoiesis is Greek for self-creation. Allopoiesis is other-creation. Our body engages in both all the time - we start as a fetus that creates itself until it becomes an adult, then, essentially stops. Our body produces things external to itself, but usually involving an extended process of cooperation with thousands of other human beings and the entire economy. In the future, there will be cybernetic upgrades that allow for personal autopoietic and allopoietic manufacturing, probably based on molecular nanotechnology. Using whatever raw material is available, complex construction routines, and internal nanomanufacturing units, we'll be able to literally breathe life into dirt. If our arms or legs get blown off, we'll be able to use manufacturing modules in other parts of our body to regenerate them. Instead of building robots in a factory, we'll build them ourselves. The possibilities are quite expansive, but this would require technology more sophisticated than anything discussed thus far in this list.
#3. Flight.
Human flight, outside of an airplane... this was recently achieved by former military pilot Yves Rossy, who flew 7,750 ft above the Alps in his 10 ft wide, self-designed aerofoil. You can see a video of it here. The airfoil weighs only 110 lbs and cost just under $300,000. Over the next few decades, the weight will come down, the strength and flexibility will go up, and eventually it will be difficult to distinguish between people in aerofoils and people that can just fly whenever they want. Using high strength-to-weight materials like fullerenes, we will fly using wings that weigh only a fraction of our own weight and fold into our clothing or body when not in use. Rossy achieved speeds of 115 mph, but with superior materials and greater tolerance for acceleration and wind, our cybernetic flight speeds are more likely to top 500 mph. To take off from the ground, we'll simply use our super-muscles to jump to the highest object around and begin our flight from there. With personal flight, commercial airliners will become obsolete. The only problem left will be dodging each other.
#2. Superintelligence.
When we think of superintelligence, we tend to think of the ways it is portrayed in fiction - the character able to multiply 6 fifty digit numbers in his head, learn ten languages in a month, repeat the catchphrase 'That's not logical', and other tired cliches. True superintelligence would be something radically different - a person able to see the obvious solution that the entire human race missed, conceive of and implement advanced plans or concepts that the greatest geniuses would never think of, understand and rewrite its own cognitive processes on the most fundamental level, and so on. A cybernetic superintelligence would not just be another genius human, it would be something entirely superhuman - something that could completely change the world overnight. For the same reason that we can't write a book with a character smarter than ourselves, we can't imagine the thoughts or actions of a true superintelligence, because they'd be beyond us. Whether it is developed through uploading, neuroengineering, or artificial intelligence, remains to be seen.
#1. Immortality.
The ultimate upgrade would be physical immortality. Everything else pales by comparison. Today, there are already entire movements based around the idea. Realizing the possibility of immortality requires seeing a human being as a physical system - composed of working parts that cooperate to make up the whole, some of which have the tendency to get old and break down. Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has identified seven causes of aging, which are believed to be comprehensive, because its been decades since a degenerative process has occurred in the body with an unknown cause. Defeating aging, then, would simply require addressing these one by one. They are: cell depletion, supernumerary cells, chromosomal mutations, mitochondrial mutations, cellular junk, extracellular junk, and protein crosslinks. A few pioneering researchers are looking towards solutions, but accepting the possibility requires looking at aging as a disease and not as a necessary component of life.
Well then, that just about wraps up our list. See you in 2050, alright?
January 9th, 2007 - 11:10
Very nice article Michael!
January 9th, 2007 - 11:23
I also really like that ghost in the shell pic.
January 9th, 2007 - 14:13
Variation on item 10: I think some other highly desireable upgrades (not necessarily cybernetic but gene tweaking using RNA intererence, RNA activation and gene therapy) would be radiation resistance and regeneration. Those capabilities have been activated in mice.
We will need the radiation resistance to make the population more hardened against potential WMD situations. #3 and #8 will be needed to help get people out of the way of potentially dangerous situations as quickly as possible. If you do not want your immortality (#1) cut short because you could not avoid that hopefully infrequent bad situation you will need fast response communication to “bug out”.
Variation on item 9: integration of information from other sensors. Terahertz radiation and millimeter radiation and other scanners for viruses (info at technologyreview.com).
January 9th, 2007 - 14:23
Hey, you didn’t include anything hendonism-related! To be realistic, there is currently a much larger market for feel-good stuff than things like immortality, superintelligence, and autopoiesis, and that’s what companies will therefore develop. For example, I suspect that one of the, er, side effects of cheap DNA synthesis will be a black market in synthetic, home-grown drugs, which would be much cheaper than paying billions to import from Columbia or Afghanistan.
January 9th, 2007 - 14:54
Marvelous work Michael! However, I would suggest less chest and more kindness as a powerful attribute to an upgraded entity.
January 9th, 2007 - 15:04
You’re right Natasha… but Ghost in the Shell is very popular and well-known, and therefore appropriate for this post.
January 9th, 2007 - 16:09
Michael, I understand that you are indeed a bit arrogant, but if you sincerely want to write for the “game-playing, TV-watching masses” perhaps referring to them as laymen would be a bit more ingratiating.
I am honestlt trying to be constructive not combative.
January 9th, 2007 - 16:30
“Marvelous work Michael! However, I would suggest less chest and more kindness as a powerful attribute to an upgraded entity. ”
Indeed. Why do we even need sentient entities to act as human sex toys or models? A nanomanufactured human with a basic control system in place of the brain should serve just as well.
January 9th, 2007 - 19:43
Interesting you should post a picture of Hedy Lamarr, female geek:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
I would include as an upgrade the ability to control your state of subjective well being so that you still feel good about life during times of physical hardship. For example, if you get stranded in the wilderness and have to do the Bear Grylls sort of things to survive — squeeze gamy water from fresh elephant dung, carve and eat some raw flesh off a marginally edible zebra carcass, bite into a raw fish like Gollum — you could reprogram your brain to experience these activities as a worthwhile adventure, like going to summer camp.
January 9th, 2007 - 19:49
To whoever said “The hard sf fan’s ultimate wish-list!”, please stop spamming the comments with this “Velcro City” stuff.
January 9th, 2007 - 21:38
Yes, good post, Michael! Thanks, Brian Wang & Tom McCabe for exellent, spot-on addenda! (And, I gotta tell ya, IF [and I hope not...] I ever have to experience “sqeez[ing] gamy water from elephant [or Mammoth] dung…” you can damn well bet I’d want to experience a bit more, shall we say, enjoyably, than a current-model human would!! I see things as more *eudaimonistically*-oriented, however, to the extent (and it is non-negligible) that this is (albeit perhaps subtly) different from *hedonism*.
Thank you all…Ciao for now….
January 9th, 2007 - 21:45
Oh, and hell, I thought at first that was *Viven Leigh*, instead of *Hedy Lamar*—they always did look a lot alike anyway. Are you sure that’s Hedy Lamar…? Hmmm…
And, yeah, there’ll definitely be *virtual porn* (see Marshall Brain’s discussion thereof at his website), as well as, to be sure, sexbots/sex-meatdroids as adumbrated here by Tom (McCabe)… Hopefully, though, there will still be *romance*, within which occurs the best *erotics* (imho, anyway…)
Ciao again…(wink)…
January 10th, 2007 - 02:44
> See you in 2050, alright?
If everything will go well, 2050 is many billion years away, subjective time. What only counts.
January 10th, 2007 - 09:26
Hi Michael,
Interesting list. A few comments:
- Regarding item #9, due to physical limitations full-spectrum vision may not be viable in practice, unless one decides to abandon a humanoid body plan altogether. For instance, in order to see in radio-waves, you would need plate-sized, radiotelescope-like eyes – simply because antennas have to approximately match the wavelength they are designed to tune. However, if we are talking about a merely wide-spectrum vision – say, from infrared to ultraviolet – that seems perfectly feasible without “monster eyes”.
- Superstrength may also be severily limited, unless one adopts a full-replacement cyborg body. The problem here is waste heat: artificial muscles with enormous power-to-weight ratio are also likely to generate a lot of heat, and that may raise the temperature of a human body beyond the protein denaturation limit.
- The issue in item #6 could be characterized in a broader way as “easy appearance modification”. Many people for instance may choose to be transmorphs (aka shape shifters), completely changing their appearances (not necessarily to better appearances) at will, in a rapid and self-contained way.
- Finally, not “everyone” will want those upgrades. Remember that nowadays many people voluntarily choose religions and lifestyles that *restrict* what they do – they could do a lot of things, but prefer not to do a lot of them. I see no reason for that changing in the future.
January 10th, 2007 - 15:03
Funny. I thought everything paled in comparison to superintelligence. Would you really prefer the near immortality that some bacteria already “enjoy” to humanity?
Still, in terms of marketability, yep, immortality wins.
The subject of the first surviving story (Gilgamesh) AND
the subject of the second surviving story (Eden).
Yep. It’s a winner.
January 10th, 2007 - 15:18
A little too idealistic.
Large penis.
Adjustable breasts.
Dynamically adjustable muscle tone.
Hair management on demand: change the length, grow it, remove it, change the color, etc.
Scent management- experienced and produced (or associated with self)
January 10th, 2007 - 18:42
All of those go under #6
Also, those specifics may be devalued when everyone can have them.
January 10th, 2007 - 19:10
Superintelligence alone would be quite sufficient because, as we currently understand it, it would probably lead almost inevitably to all the others. But if you think about it, superintelligence couldn’t be that exciting if it doesn’t last. Anyway, I attempted to write this as a popular article, not something that is completely proper, here are some indicators:
1) it’s so image-heavy.
2) some of them subsume others.
3) if it were proper, the article would only be about superintelligence and how it would give rise to everything else.
Sometimes it’s worth writing something that’s more accessible, because preaching to the choir gets really old after a couple years.
Lúcio, good points. In this I am assuming full cyborg. For #6, transmorph would have been more “correct”, but as I mention, this article is written to be more accessible.
MDarling, you win the prize for the least ambitious proposed upgrades. ;)
January 11th, 2007 - 08:57
Curious – I’ve seen you make, and I’ve seen others make comments stating that nanomanufacture is will be here within 10-20 years or so. I’m working on an essay that touches on these subjects – is there any article or paper giving an estimated arrival date for the technologies that I could study/cite, or what are these estimates based on?
January 11th, 2007 - 10:30
Kaj,
I would read everything that Chris, Mike, Eric, Robert, Brian, Damian Allis, Josh Hall, and the members of the CRN Task Force have to say, then draw your own conclusions. Greg Cochran also recently came out in support of near-term forecasts for exponential manufacturing. You can read about that on the Lifeboat blog.
Note that I’m not saying that MNT will definitely arrive between 2010 and 2020 – no one can predict the future perfectly. It just seems like, given the knowledge we currently have, it’s reasonable to expect. Events that occur between today and then could shorten or extend the window considerably.
The biggest theoretical breakthrough in MNT forecasting occurred when Chris P. showed that building a fully functioning nanofactory is not that much harder than building a single reprogrammable assembler. So a lot of MNT forecasting today revolves around how it is to do an assembler. We have some clues, but of course research is ongoing. This is the kind of thing you look at every few months with a fresh perspective, and update your forecasts.
January 11th, 2007 - 12:36
Alright, fair enough. I was hoping there’d be a couple of reports that’d have actual estimates on the technology arrival dates to spare me some work, but I know how difficult it’d be to make firm forecasts. I’ll see if I can familiarize myself with the relevant material, then.
January 12th, 2007 - 18:39
“developed artificial muscles 100 times stronger than our own, powered by alcohol and hydrogen. Leonid Taranenko, the former Soviet weightlifter, holds the world record for power lifting a 266 kg (586 lbs) dumbbell. If Leo’s natural muscles were replaced with Dr. Baughman’s synthetic polymer muscles, he could lift 26,600 kg, or about 30 tons.”
Nitpick: That’s obviously 100 times the strength of the average muscle, not a champion weightlifter’s. Trying to inflate the capability of the artificial muscles that way is similar to reasoning “Hey, ants can lift fifty times their weight, so if we put a ten-kilogram neutronium brick in an ant’s stomach, it could lift five hundred kilograms!” The muscles have some force capability, and that capability for any given model of muscle is given. We use the lifting power of the muscles to calculate the ratio, not the other way around.
January 15th, 2007 - 08:07
Tom, good point.
January 16th, 2007 - 11:28
Yet another load of rubbish from the mechanical soul of Michael Anissimov.
Most of what Michael Anissimov predicts will not occur, and the portions that do occur will be low-key in comparison to Michael’s naive, “true believer”, prognostications.
Michael assumes too much; way too much.
His thinking has all the hallmarks of a fanatic.
Every decade technological gurus, such as Michael Anissimov, pop up with their outlandish predictions about how wonderful the future will be through technological change.
Well, I have lived for over fifty years, and I have been reading these techno guru predictions since my teens.
Most of the predictions have not occured.
By 2001 we were all suposed to be living a technological utopia, where at the push of a button all our desires would materialize.
Yeah, sure.
The reality is that we are living in a world run by mad men, and mad women, where billions of human beings are living in squalor, where wars are waging like wildfires, where corporations behave like mafia gangs, where pop culture has degenerated into barbarism, and where human pollution and over-population, is destroying what is left of the earth’s ability to sustain us.
And what of the great technological advances?
Ipods, flat screens, home computers, so that we can listen to, and watch trash.
The Internet started out with great promise, but it too is morphing into just another technological mediocrity.
I doubt if the human race will still exist in 2050, in any form. Current events point to a future of horrific dimensions; nuclear war, global warming disasters, massive epidemics, cheap-oil scarcity resulting in famine, etc.
None of you have the guts to face reality, so you escape into your fantasies about a technologocal utopia in the near future.
It is that very same gutless escape cop-out mentality, that all of you are writhing in, that will ensure the demise of the human race, and not into the Singularity, but by incineration from nuclear war, or some other self-inflicted catastrophe.
January 16th, 2007 - 12:30
Tim… I work for the Lifeboat Foundation, which is one of the few organizations entirely devoted to addressing existential risk. On a podcast interview I just gave humanity chances 2:1 in favor of non-survival. I am hardly optimistic.
If you believe the chances of existential disaster are high, as I do, then I recommend you join the Lifeboat Foundation as a contributing member, and actually do something about the risk, instead of just whining.
January 21st, 2007 - 11:37
Tom McCabe: “Why do we even need sentient entities to act as human sex toys or models? A nanomanufactured human with a basic control system in place of the brain should serve just as well.”
No. Wny do we need humans? 1. Power; 2. Pleasure; 3. Ego. A nanomanufactured human won’t do at all.
January 25th, 2007 - 23:08
I don’t have a “mechanical soul”, by the way. How can you say that shit about someone you don’t even know? This blog post is full of nice images that I had to spend a lot of time looking for, and here you are dissing me ad hominem. You are so fucking curmudgeony, damn!
February 11th, 2007 - 00:01
You didn’t ask for ambition, though perhaps it was implied. Your title challenged a reply to more accurately define what people would want.
I may be have been a little more cynical and even sarcastic than I believe is true, but we can extrapolte from our current world.
EG: Hypothetical American has funds and time -do they pursue intelligence and skills or give in to vanity and indulgence? I see plenty of the latter, not so much of the former.
I should have added unnaturally straight, white teeth.
February 12th, 2007 - 05:44
Great piece Michael, very interesting.
“On a podcast interview I just gave humanity chances 2:1 in favor of non-survivalâ€
Sounds interesting, could you possibly post a link to this podcast? Thanks.
It’s amusing to see a typical doom and gloomer posting his thoughts against possible fantastic futures. Apparently Tim believes that because the Apollo-powered predictions of the early 1970′s didn’t in fact lead us to a Kubrick inspired 21st century space odyssey, then current predictions of technology trends won’t play out either. Of course many early predictions were based on unrealistic presumptions (such as the impressive R&D efforts of the Apollo project continuing at sustained levels indefinitely – in which case we’d all be living on Mars by now!), or early breakthroughs in narrow AI leading to predictions of short-term strong AI). The difference is today’s predictions are based on existing capabilities and breakthroughs seen in many fields.
Tim’s illogical outburst is especially amusing in that he considers “Ipods, flat screens, home computers†to be the pinnacle of our technological advances…
And apparently by ignoring technology trends and whining about the sorry state of world is in, Tim hopes to avoid some human-inflicted catastrophe. Fortunately there are some people in the world that predict future technology developments and strive to prepare the world for these developments, and in doing so hopefully avoid some of the destructive effects of new technologies.
Meanwhile our primitivist counterparts adopt a cop-out mentality by believing that technological advancement is optional, or that we can even go backwards to some medieval like world. And they have the nerve to accuse us of escapism.
June 12th, 2007 - 18:25
Most of these things will only come in the form of Military issued prostetics. If there are devices made that can offer some of these features, it is likely they will cost tremendously or will be nearly unimportant due to the fact there will be police forces with superior technology and countermeasures.
December 10th, 2007 - 18:51
What would be the meaning of life if we were born perfect?
December 22nd, 2007 - 00:54
Nice resource, very interesting reading…p
March 20th, 2008 - 14:47
This is a very lame article simply because you don’t believe that we are capable of using psychokinesis. The only thing that is stopping us is people like you who won’t just except it, but dream about it constantly. You should check out sites like psipog.com and try to manifest your own PK abilities. The only limit is your imagination.
June 11th, 2008 - 01:21
Yea hi. The picture with the chick holding the gun, is that off some sorta anime? please give me the namee if it is.
August 16th, 2008 - 14:07
@Kyle
The “chick” is from “ghost in the shell”
the best anime ive ever seen.
August 24th, 2008 - 12:18
Nunnya is an idiot. Stop watching X-men and get a life. You’re precious little “PK” abilities don’t exist. Time and again it’s been tried and failed to be demonstrated under control conditions to prove that “PK” is real. There is even a reward of 1 million dollars to the first person to prove, under scientific control conditions, that psychic powers aren’t a load of bull. THE REWARD IS STILL NOT CLAIMED. Your little psipog site is crap and I am surprised I didn’t get a virus from it.
August 25th, 2008 - 03:22
i need something technical abut it.plz tell frm where i can get this
September 4th, 2008 - 15:18
This article represents a form of ‘thinking’ very important for our potential ‘best-case’ future as a species.
I see that with the improvements of nano-scale computers and the now rapid improvements of cutting-edge brain/neural interface between man/machine many of these issues will become commonplace – and soon.
Enhancements in communication/thinking assisted by computers will surely merge into a neural-computer which helps to modify and manage many of our basic human chores…enhanced factual data-bases linked to archived ‘map’ systems and GPS and direct neural (like a powerful WI-FI connection) communication for remote-machine interface and direct person to person ‘communication’ (as well as ‘military’ hacking and ‘jamming’ techniques) will when combined provide opportunity for enhanced intelligence.
As this happens all other things will become possible.
One Problem – No, Two of Them:
1. Control of the Center…
Who will control the central hub of this thought and communication stream? The decisions that are made here can retard (by enforcement of defective norms toward over-simplification and stability, greed/profit-seeking, and personal limitations of the ‘governor’) everyone caught up in it once it happens. Done well, the amplification of In-Telligence (not just for rote memory based tasks and customary human social-roles/functions – but, real understanding and a real choice toward our potential fate or destiny) is what we want; and this will dictate the outcome of any ‘take-off’ hard or soft. The war will be in the programming. Physical-War (with some AI assembly-line) is simply too little too late for us to come to terms with all this and begin making choices.
2. Tower of Babel Syndrome…
When we combine as one ‘Global’ human culture/society which uses the same programming-languages in our machines, much diversity and creative thought will be lost forever. Even today, with the use of the English-Language and Cable-TV and the Cell-Phone we see it and it is scary to a few people who can really see what is going on. I am not talking about superficial diversity of thought relating to what spices or recipes we use, clothing we wear or anything like that. I am talking about powerful concepts which advanced practitioners of any societal-cultural apex gain access with which cannot be described in any other terms. Several eastern cultures have concepts we in the west simply have no reference for. Advanced technological languages and cultures are great…yet, much is lost.
I think we should really value our ability to be creative and develop our natural intelligence and not leave it all to the machines. Otherwise these enhancements would just be a trap toward another form of redundancy – and therefore a maladaptive use of intelligence – all structured around what the programmers allow us to think, feel, and contribute toward the living experienced human-dialog.
As for Nano-Clouds and Telekinesis…at this point feasible or not – what is the point of getting upset about someone stating that they imagine that the technology may be able to do this one day?
After-All: this is just a basic Wish-List for Humanity.
Something Creative.
Why Deuce it?
Only reason I see for that is: Fear.
The fear of someone more creative or brilliant than the one whose only contribution to our future is to poo-poo the competition.
WOW.
That is one example of the sort of defective human cognition I would hate to see in charge of any AI-Human integrated HUB of Intelligence.
See what I mean…you gotta be careful or you will get nazi-like people and computers (AI’s) putting the kibosh on anything and everything they may deem deuceable simply because they don’t like that someone else came up with a difference in opinion or way in life from what permissible to their personal limitations in programming.
October 27th, 2008 - 18:47
Nice collection of thoughts, ideas and links man, I always wanted to see humanity reinvent itself from the ground up before the next phase of technological wonders become foisted upon us. The real wonder and change to our world would be bringing up a generation of kids that dont get fed fairy tales, old prejudice’s or outdated fears. a population with raised awareness and a shedding of ignorance formed from base urge living would be better prepared to not only accept these new forms of technology, but to utilise them without making ridiculous mistakes that could have been avoided from a better understanding of the human condition, and the limits it has taken us to in the past. Australian schools have started a pretty cool initiative in this direction making world history mandatory from primary school up to year 11. Ok so its not gonna change the world instantly but having a generation more aware of our past mistakes and how to avoid em has got to be good right? Now if only we could get the parents themselves to set aside their ignorance in the hope of a better future we may not end up killing ourselves off. so shall we say #11 formulated upbringings designed to create well rounded individuals capable of safely utilising said technologies hehe.
October 28th, 2008 - 17:42
Great list, appearance isn’t really cybernetic. If anything I would replace that with an arm cannon of some sort. *cuts back to command and conquer tiberium sun flashback*
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