Anders Sandberg Friday, May 8 2009
images and transhumanism 12:01 pm
Posting an image of Anders Sandberg, because he’s an iconic transhumanist. Be sure to check out his report “Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap”, co-authored with Nick Bostrom for the Future of Humanity Institute. You can also see his excellent photography on Flickr. His blog is Andart.
Back in the old days, the primary transhumanist site on the web was Anders Transhuman Page, and many of us got acquainted with transhumanism via that avenue. It’s mostly a collection of links, definitely worth checking out if you’ve never seen it.
Update: most of the links are dead there, sadly. Still, Anders Transhuman Page lives on in our hearts.
Uh oh, the site suffers from the most severe linkrot I’ve ever seen. 1210 out of 1502 links are dead.
If that was the go-to site then, is there one you recommend today?
This one. Also, the Transhumanist FAQ and Wikipedia.
Are there any “tenets” of transhumanism you disagree with? Any future visions that are too far out or too optimistic to happen during your (unextended) lifetime? Are there more extreme transhumanists than you? More extreme than Kurzweil? He’s a dyed-in-the-wool archetypal transhumanist if I ever saw one. I’d enjoy reading the far outest visions you’ve ever come across, I mean, future shock level maxed out.
Yes, I don’t think Kurzweil will be able to revive his father, just a homunculus of his father. I don’t think that the Singularity should consist of all of humanity being thrust into a radically superintelligent culture without smelling the roses first. I’m not as obsessed with enhancing my own intelligence as fast as possible as I used to be, and now basically want to take it slow and enjoy the process.
I used to have a similar outlook to yours (future shock! wow!) but I think that future shock for its own sake can get a little silly. I am probably more extreme than Kurzweil because I actually think human-equivalent AI would lead to superintelligence quite quickly rather than over the course of 16 years. (I still don’t understand why he thinks that.)
I think that humanity could achieve very great things in the next 50 years, so many things that basically most of what we’re wished for and imagined for the last 200,000 years might be achieved (flight, immortality, traveling to space, creating true virtual worlds, understanding our own minds thoroughly, etc.)
Thanks for mentioning me. And my quite linkrotted site – I’m thinking of it as a kind of overgrown Roman ruin. Frankly, I’m not sure what to do with it – set up a gift shop in front of it, a little plaque “This site inspired many”? :-)
I think that for any self-described transhumanist you can find another transhumanist who has wilder ideas in some direction. Omega points? I once suggested Omega *lines*!
As for myself, I’m very sceptical of the idea of rapidly self-improving AI (I think intelligence is to a large degree knowledge-limited, and knowledge acquisition is harder than most give it credit for). I also think a lot of our “favourite” technologies like germline genetic engineering or reproductive cloning are never going to be used, because other technologies like nanomedicine make them irrelevant.
As I see it the real challenge is figuring out smarter ways of thinking about the future: just going for future shock might be fun or a form of social signalling, but it rarely produces any practical action. Transhumanism might be doing an important job just by convincing people to make the variance of future predictions much larger: what we are arguing is essentially that there are going to be bigger black swan events than commonly expected. Hence we might need policies that are much more robust to surprises than current ones are.