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[Starver]

I miss playing games on my dad's old palm pilot.

Hmmm. I had a palm-pilot.  (Three, actually. One was lost in '99, another was handed back in to work when I quit, the third is somewhere upstairs, unfairly abandoned.)

[Max™]

Fondleslab: a slab of glass and metal or plastic plus silicon and some other metals which people like to fondle to make it show them cat videos.

We had tools 2.3 million years ago, we didn't have tools which integrated with our mental state, our memories, our ability to communicate, and so forth in the way that the computer began to when they went from being a room of machinery to a household feature. Smartphones themselves took another big step because it went from being a thing at a place where you need to be to use it, to being a thing that you always have with you. Comfortable long battery life VR headsets will do the same thing. As will implanted devices and if we can figure out how to hack into a cortex, that'll be yet another step along the "I'm in here, and out there is in here too" path.

What they do as hardware isn't really the amazing part incidentally, though they are getting more clever, but no, the main point is what they do to connectivity. The internet is becoming something like a shared external memory and a weird sort of personality/awareness branch.

Do you have a smartphone? If not have you used one? Assuming you have your own, have you noticed the difference in how you approach problems, conversations, plans, and the like since you gained an everpresent link to the internet? On the other hand if you don't have one, you must have noticed how everyone seems to be walking around staring down at this little bit of glass like it's a magic window to Narnia, right? It's not just rudeness or whatnot, our brains are rather accustomed to being somewhat underfed with gossip and such about the folks who live just a little too far away to see regularly, they've also developed in an environment and culture where information and knowledge was something you had to seek, there were places that collected it and you had to go to them.

Now we've got an absurd number of people linked together in a qualitatively different way than anyone ever has been, people who are more and more familiar with things which their ancestors would literally never have had a chance to encounter. Is our discussion here, with all the other participants, and the instantly available nature of replies, really the same as it would have been say, 30 years ago? Sure, there were a few groups of people on the early networks discussing various things, but we're getting closer and closer to the point where the people who aren't making use of modern communication networks will be down to a few groups in places where it's simply not possible to consistently link up, or people who choose to stay offline.

My argument is that if you can't identify that point, or if you argue Transhumanism happened 16,000 years ago, than Transhumanism is a bankrupt word that means nothing very useful at all, and Transhumanists are just futurists by another name.

I'd hardly say we're Humanity 2.0, but we've certainly increased the version number past 1.0 to some extent, and just since you implied I can't identify that point: I'd say around 1990 the counter started ticking up from like 1.00000001 or so, and over the last half of the 2000's and the 7 years since then it's been speeding up faster and faster. A connected and aware humanity composed of connected and aware humans is not the same as what came before, you can argue it's not as sexy as "we're all space cyborg wizards now, wooo" and that is totally right. What point would you insist on before it would seem like enough? Integrate the display in contacts? Implanted visuals? Cortical interfaces? These are more intimate than a fondleslab, but the important thing is that they all enable constant connectivity.

[helmacon]

The big issue with transhumanism is that it does force a societal divide between those that are augmented and those that aren't. And given that the costs of such augmentation are going to make it impractical for most people in general to actually obtain such augments so there's effectively another layer of societal divide to deal with.

And to further add in, immortality, by it's very nature, is an immoral thing for anyone to have; between the exponential rate of population expansion and the fact that ideas that people hold aren't dying effectively proclaims a stagnation in ideas and knowledge since new ideas aren't able to gain traction, which only compounds the more generations that are born.

The industrial revolution was a terribly chaotic thing that led to class divides and suffering and oppression and the death and birth of a number of new industries. Not to mention the prolonged damage to the environment. Even hundreds of years later we are still sorting out the effects.

Despite all that I am damn glad we went through the industrial revolution, and if sent back in time and given the choice I would have us do it all over again.

Likewise, I am in favor of a transhuman revolution. We are already poised for it with crispr tech and designer babies, to super advanced prosthetics and full body transplants, to advances in neural networks and advanced AI.

I say, bring it on!

[Max™]

Speaking of neural networks and networks of neurons and neurons firing as they watch cat videos on mobile networks, where is the internet going to take us that would leave us unchanged from the baseline stone age human models? Wouldn't we need to pull back and avoid doing things like trying to link it right into our brain stems, chill on the VR development, and start going to libraries to use the internet instead of wading around through it constantly like we're doing now?

I am rather pleased that this ended up being such a contentious topic btw, since it's actually on topic!

I do appreciate frustration at this not being the sexy exciting space cyborg wizard future, instead we got the weird banal drone smartphone memeninja future.

[Reelya]

We had tools 2.3 million years ago,

Actually 2.6 million years ago is the most well-known find

But even further, they've found shaped stone tools from 3.3 million years ago, which is even before the Homo genus is believed to have come into existence (about 2.5 million years ago). Tools shaped us to be human in the first place, so we can't separate the existence of tools from our own existence.

But nobody "chose" to be reshaped by tools, the force of natural selection did that. And that force still exists, so even if we go "no transhumans" and live like that for a million years, our ancenstors probably won't resemble us any more than we do Homo Erectus.

[Max™]

That's what it was, I saw the 3.3 and 2.6 numbers and mixed them together.

[helmacon]

Speaking of neural networks and networks of neurons and neurons firing as they watch cat videos on mobile networks, where is the internet going to take us that would leave us unchanged from the baseline stone age human models? Wouldn't we need to pull back and avoid doing things like trying to link it right into our brain stems, chill on the VR development, and start going to libraries to use the internet instead of wading around through it constantly like we're doing now?

I am rather pleased that this ended up being such a contentious topic btw, since it's actually on topic!

I do appreciate frustration at this not being the sexy exciting space cyborg wizard future, instead we got the weird banal drone smartphone memeninja future.

I do go to the library to use the internet. I don't have internet at my house.

 Actually i'm in the library right now.

[misko27]

I don't think you understand me Max. Or you are talking past me, or me you, or something.

Fondleslab: a slab of glass and metal or plastic plus silicon and some other metals which people like to fondle to make it show them cat videos.

Well it sounds gross and isn't actually shorter or faster than calling them tablets. Stop trying to make "fondleslabs" happen, it's never going to happen.

Speaking of neural networks and networks of neurons and neurons firing as they watch cat videos on mobile networks, where is the internet going to take us that would leave us unchanged from the baseline stone age human models? Wouldn't we need to pull back and avoid doing things like trying to link it right into our brain stems, chill on the VR development, and start going to libraries to use the internet instead of wading around through it constantly like we're doing now?

...

I do appreciate frustration at this not being the sexy exciting space cyborg wizard future, instead we got the weird banal drone smartphone memeninja future.

I'm not at all frustrated about sexy space cyborg whatevers. That spooks the shit out of me. The social implications are terrifying. But you haven't conclusively proven that what exists today (which is what you are calling Transhumanist, not me) is what exists in 20 years. To do that, you need to show that the future will be like how it is now in such a way that the lack of wealth boundaries will continue to exist.

blah blah blah digital revolution

Tell me: is that not just merely a social change? How is that different from the Industrial Revolution? Or the rise of Colonialism and Imperialism? Surely society has changed irrevocably, but it's not irrevocable.

I'd say around 1990 the counter started ticking up from like 1.00000001 or so, and over the last half of the 2000's and the 7 years since then it's been speeding up faster and faster. A connected and aware humanity composed of connected and aware humans is not the same as what came before, you can argue it's not as sexy as "we're all space cyborg wizards now, wooo" and that is totally right. What point would you insist on before it would seem like enough? Integrate the display in contacts? Implanted visuals? Cortical interfaces? These are more intimate than a fondleslab, but the important thing is that they all enable constant connectivity.

All right. 1990. Why 1990? What was different? What was qualitatively different about the year 1990 from 1989? They also had computers you know. And so did the year before that. We had computers in 1965.

My point is that I am trying to nail you down to something I can argue against. What is transhumanism? What is the fundamentals, or essentials, of Transhumanism? What is true about transhumanism that is not true about any other hypothetical word, like "technological progress". I'm trying to draw the transhumanism out of your examples and ask: what is the nature of this thing that they all have in common? What is it about transhumanism that distinguishes it from social change in response to technology in general? Is it a certain technology? If so, what technology, and why is that technology is transhumanist and why the technology that preceded it was not? Is it just "social change in response to technology, but in the digital era"? If so, then the argument essentially becomes about haves-and-have-nots in the digital age, which is just economics. And further, it states absolutely nothing about the future, because the digital age is just today.

Put another way: As I understand your argument, you are saying

• The Internet is transhumanist
• We use the Internet
• Therefore we are transhumanist

And

• We are transhumanist
• We are not divided into technological-haves-and-have-nots.
• Therefore, Transhumanism will not lead to this in the future

Even if I concede every single point except for the last one, you still have a problem right at the end. Today doesn't prove that tomorrow social conditions will be mostly the same as today. And this is precisely why I resisted you expanding the definition: If you don't expand it, then it's easier to prove that all transhumanism is the same and will have the same social effects. But since you did expand the definition, I am forced to ask: Why must it be true that the internet is necessarily like getting neural uplinks? You have no proof of this! The technology doesn't exist yet! It's just speculation! Sure, maybe it'll be basically like the internet. Or maybe society will collapse the very day after. I don't know. I'm not from the future. But you haven't explained why I should believe the former over the latter. Again, that's why I am beating you over the head about what Transhumanism actually is: if it's one specific, concrete and well-defined thing, it's easy to say that all transhumanism is just like a single part of it. But if Transhumanism is this huge umbrella term that stands for a million things, than no it's not necessarily true that getting neural uplinks or CRISPR or being a cyborg is anything at all like owning a touchscreen.

My argument in a nutshell:

• IF it is true that Transhumanism can refer to different things,
• AND different things can potentially have different social effects,
• THEN we cannot meaningfully extrapolate the social effects of one part of transhumanism to another part

And if you can't do that, then we still don't know whether the future will be terrible.

[Taricus]

The industrial revolution was a terribly chaotic thing that led to class divides and suffering and oppression and the death and birth of a number of new industries. Not to mention the prolonged damage to the environment. Even hundreds of years later we are still sorting out the effects.

Despite all that I am damn glad we went through the industrial revolution, and if sent back in time and given the choice I would have us do it all over again.

Likewise, I am in favor of a transhuman revolution. We are already poised for it with crispr tech and designer babies, to super advanced prosthetics and full body transplants, to advances in neural networks and advanced AI.

I say, bring it on!

The industrial revolution is acceptable, because that brought our production capabilities forward and as much as it did further class divides (There were always divides prior to it), it also ended up spawning methods to reduce those class divides. Furthermore, it meant that we, as a collective whole, had to adapt socially and mentally to it.

With a transhuman revolution, we change out bodies to sidestep the necessity to change socially and mentally, and to sidestep those is to lead straight into stagnancy in ideas and philosophy. To embrace the transhuman revolution is to fundamentally forget what it is to be human

[helmacon]

The industrial revolution is acceptable, because that brought our production capabilities forward and as much as it did further class divides (There were always divides prior to it), it also ended up spawning methods to reduce those class divides. Furthermore, it meant that we, as a collective whole, had to adapt socially and mentally to it.

With a transhuman revolution, we change out bodies to sidestep the necessity to change socially and mentally, and to sidestep those is to lead straight into stagnancy in ideas and philosophy. To embrace the transhuman revolution is to fundamentally forget what it is to be human

I don't see where you get the idea that transhumanism is escapism from societal/personal change.  To even accept transhumanism in the first place would be a huge social/mental change. Just because you become harder/faster/better/stronger dosent mean we stop changing or dying. Transhumanism is just the next step, not the final step.

[Reelya]

To even accept transhumanism in the first place would be a huge social/mental change.

I don't think it would. For example, for vision we've gone from spectacles, to contact lenses, to lasering your eyes within a minute amount of time on the cosmic scale. Now we're talking about head mounted displays that beam images directly onto your retina and people just see that as the next step. It won't be long before CRISPR will be able to perhaps improve your eyesight with an injection, and not counting any other technical achievements.

One thing that can't be avoided is that technology substitites for our evolved characteristics. And when that happens, there's no natural selection pressure on tht specific trait, so the species changes. One aspect of transhumanism can be that: becoming symbiotically dependent on technology to the point we lose the evolved ability that would have done that job (although not as well). That happens with physical skills, and there's no reason to think it won't also happen with mental skills. The types of cognition abilities which are selected for will be the ones that make a difference in reproduction. If we offload tasks to computers then those will do things we used to do, and there will be less selection pressure in that direction. In that sense we are in fact in a symbiotic relationship with technology.

[helmacon]

...But with crispr technology we can just pick the desired traits ourselves, and avoid the pitfalls of evolution.

As far as the idea that our technology is removing important selective pressure, well, it's been doing that for a long long time already. Think about it. It's not like stupid or ugly people don't have kids nowadays. We really have very few selective pressures left, and our genetics are becoming more and more varied in the modern age. 

Crispr tech lets us take that into our own hands, and solve a problem we already have.

[Reelya]

We have this notion that we're outside evolution, it comes from the same place as all those old charts with Man at the top of creation. But that comes from the same place as e.g. the aristotlean world view with Earth at the center, then we moved to our sun as the center of the solar system. Then when we realized there was a galaxy, we decided that our sun was the center of the galaxy, and that there was only one galaxy. It was only fairly recently (post hubble) we realized that this pattern of "but surely we're at/near the center?" was itself bullshit on every level.

There are still just as many selection pressures as ever. That is where we get smug, get it wrong. We like to tell ourselves we've transcended evolution, that we're the pinnacle of creation. How could you even imagine something better than us? Clearly evolution plateaued when it thought of us, it found the "ideal form" that will last forever. But really ... this is just a projection of Christianity's "Humans = God's Image" into the science era. It's bullshit, "Emperor's New Clothes" type bullshit.

People in the third world have high infant mortality, they have high selection pressure in childhood. People in the first world have low infant mortality, but very low birth rates, they have high selection pressure for a mate and to procreate. You don't have / don't want to have kids? You're part of the selection pressure. Any genes that you have that correlated at all with your lack of kids are the ones being selected against.

"No selection pressure" would be a world where everyone has a high chance of reaching adulthood and then went on to create large families. No such world exists.

[TheBiggerFish]

Huh.

[Max™]

I don't think you understand me Max. Or you are talking past me, or me you, or something.

We're both talking past each other, the internet is an enabler of human development in a new way, along a path which there is no reason to think won't end up square in transhuman territory, nothing more, nothing less.

Fondleslab: a slab of glass and metal or plastic plus silicon and some other metals which people like to fondle to make it show them cat videos.

Well it sounds gross and isn't actually shorter or faster than calling them tablets. Stop trying to make "fondleslabs" happen, it's never going to happen.

I don't try to make things happen and lack the ability to begin trying to care if they do, just can't do it, but it is what I call them, and you asked for clarification.

One thing that can't be avoided is that technology substitites for our evolved characteristics. And when that happens, there's no natural selection pressure on tht specific trait, so the species changes. One aspect of transhumanism can be that: becoming symbiotically dependent on technology to the point we lose the evolved ability that would have done that job (although not as well). That happens with physical skills, and there's no reason to think it won't also happen with mental skills. The types of cognition abilities which are selected for will be the ones that make a difference in reproduction. If we offload tasks to computers then those will do things we used to do, and there will be less selection pressure in that direction. In that sense we are in fact in a symbiotic relationship with technology.

This is what I'm saying is happening with so much of our cognitive resources and interactions moving out into the internet, which was technically open to the public in 89, with the web starting in 90, hence those dates, while the smartphone thing started to really pick up around 2007.