/sci/ - Science & Math

Nerdwank

>>2222411

What's there to discuss?

I'm not OP, but I'd like to see a transhumanism thread without shit like >>2222415 in it. A serious discussion.

It goes against Christ

>>2222431

I just spoke to Christ, he doesn't mind.

>>2222436
I fact, I'm pretty sure he was just a time traveller from a post-singularity earth having a laugh at the sake of the primitives.

why would they put such an effort into making the torso area human like, but leave the hands robotic? surely you'd want to most visible parts of your body to be human. that is why I assume they gave it a face, instead of locating it's vital components in it's center of mass for protection.

>>2222451
having a cpu in the head benefits cooling, same reason you're brain is there.

Also I'm interested in trans-humanism, and although some progress has been made. It's still a fantasy at the moment.

>>2222451
that character from Dresden Codak, the comic that's from, doesn't ahve any particular attachment to the human body. She considers the machinery her best feature.

>Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities.

Sounds good to me.

Emotions?

Transhumanism? They are more deluded and optimistic than any religious fanatic you might come across.

>>2222499
Keep them, lose them, whatever. It would be nice to have more control over them, at least.

>>2222505
Why do you believe this?

CCM here, hey guys. Im posting this from my kindle now, such is my devotion to this board.

Nah just testing whether I can post on 4chan with this :>

>>2222517
Most I have come accross say the overly naive speech that technology will solve all of the world's problems. I retort that no such thing will happen, even if we discover everything there is to know about the universe. Then they go about being able to control those things with SCIENCE. I say that affecting the mind of humans like that would make them no more than drones. "Being drones is fine".

I run away from those lunatics.

>>2222534
Heh. Those people don't know what they're talking about.

>>2222534
Sounds to me like you've been talking to strange nerds that think of themselves as transhumanists, not real transhumanists.

Then again, the "movement" has no cohesion anyway so who cares

>>2222534
>technology will solve all of the world's problems

-All of the world's problems are considered problems because of humans
-If there were no humans there would be no one to observe those problems

Clearly, the answer is to use technology to kill humanity.

>>2222534
Those are just the overly hopeful nutjobs. Wait until you .eet Kurzweilian and Strossian Singularitarians.

Personally, I like the idea, but I don't plan on it. I'd love to be able to augment myself, but I don't count on it. I don't like having debates about it because nobody will know who's right until it's blatantly obvious. Either we'll see everything match the pace of moore's law, or it will plateau and we won't. It's be nice to live for an idnefinite amount of time, and I think we'll achiece that in my lifetime, but I'm okay if we don't.

>>2222558
Something tells me that Kurzweil will be a very famous man in about 20 years.

>>2222561
Neutral positions are not acceptable on 4chan. You must pick a side and pour all of your hate and rage into it if you want to stay.

The Kurzweil/Stross vision of the Singularity implies that computers will make us both obsolete and immortal. Because that` not a paradox at all. Goddamn you Kindle constrained grammar.

>>2222588
They imply that unmodified humans will be obsolete. But that doesn't mean we can't keep them around if we want. A kurzweilian future can support a bunch of unaugmented freeloaders. But everyone can be immprtal in that future, yes. What's the problem here?

>>2222588
Something tells me such a change will be very, very violent. And possibly regress us to the stone ages after the dust sets in.

>>2222601
The Luddite War. Not an unlikely event. but this isn't a disney movie. The people willing to embrace technology will crush those that don't if it comes down to it.

>>2222588
It makes humans as we know them obsolete; a consciousness that maintains continuity that was once a human which becomes some unthinkable machine-being is what ends up being immortal.

That said, Ray Kurzweil is a false prophet riding on his flimsy credibility and nerdwank. If commercially available immortality becomes available by the time he says it will, it will be a coincidence.

>the caticide

>>2222617
Of course it would be a coincidence, it would be a self fulfilling prophecy otherwise.

Why do people always assume Transhuman means having a Singularity? I'm a Singularitaraian too. But we'll have augmented Transhumans before the Singularity.

Also inb4 argument over whether or not the Singularity is possible. We need to research parallel computing first.

>>2222605
Well fuck me sideways now hhow do I make my novel not sound like a kurzweilian ripoff.

>>2222631
Throwing enough power at the problem, a human equivalent mind can be done serially. But parallel processing si already coming into its own. silicon processors aren't getting much faster or denser, we're just adding more cores. That will keep going until the next thing comes around which can be done in a single core.

>>2222638
He didn't explicitly mention a luddite war, you can do it. In fact, I'd be interested in reading that.

>>2222646
Since I didnt want to exaggerate its moe of a whoops we threw all tech out the window and now everything falls aprt thing. With little actual cofnclit.

>>2222658
A transhumanist fable. interesting idea.

"HEY DUDE! WE CAN TOTALLY MAKE YOU SMARTER! JUST LET US DRILL THIS HOLE INTO YOUR HEAD AND PUT THIS PIECE OF EXPERIMENTAL METAL AND YOU WILL BE GOOD AS NEW."

"Uh, no thanks."

"DO IT OR NOBODY WILL HIRE YOU"

"What the fuck."

>>2222665
With luddites, realistic tech and realistic [limited lol] expansion into space, interstellar travel, transhumanism and golden posthu.am leopard furries.

>>2222684
Did I just get trolled here?

Remember when we thought we'd have Mars colonies by the eighties. Yeah... transhumanism is like that.

>>2222689
not exactly, CCM really is a transhumanism, space exploration, genetic singularity, furry.

That occasionally posts awesome sci-fi stories

or something close to that

>>2222704
hehe, okay. just making sure.

>>2222674
More like:

"Ah, comrade. You want be smarter than human-normal? We put this in head, make thoughts go fast like computer, yes?"

"Uh, no thanks."

"You will come around, comrade. One day you walk past this square and I am not here. Then you wish for head-set and no one come, yes? Be like Amish, forgotten in park, yes? Enjoy day, comrade."

"What the fuck."

>>2222674
Your post reminds me. Relevant to any Transhumanist thread.
>>2220162
Pic not related, pictur I wanted to post was a duplicate post.

The Luddite War,

just EMP the sons of bitches, I'm sick of seeing great technology used by morons for mind numbing purposes.

In any case, the number of consumers of technology is much greater than those who are involved in its production and possess points of control.

No.2222605 I disagree. Go Luddites!

>>2222751
i dun think u know wut luddite means son

>>2222751
grey fucking goo. Go get eaten.

>>2222768
grey goo is impossible. energy from the nanobots has to come from somewhere and the waste heat hhas to go somewhere. the whole periodic table is a fucking bomb but it feels good to know certain things cant be weaponized.

>>2222628
You hairsplitting nig, I mean that he didn't arrive at his singularity conclusion by harnessing all his powers of prediction, he instead made a prediction that would sell books and whip up excitement, then backwards-justified it with a few superficially-fitting statistics.

The press he's given the idea directly and indirectly may end up making it somewhat self-fulfilling though.

>>2222784
grey goo is basically artificial, prolific, all-consuming bacteria. They manage to have a power source. And waste heat isn't an issue, grey goo doesn't need to stay intact very long.

We'll get graphene processors @ 1000ghz in 5-10 years for a few hundred bucks and a few years after the first graphene-super-computer goes online, we will reach singularity.

>>2222807
but bbacteria doesnt consume worlds regardless of how efficient it is

could a user of a genetically engineered organisms be considered a Luddite?

>>2222823
I believe you mean "it hasn't yet," because we're still here.

>>2222819
The biggest supercomputers in the world could simulate a human brain if we had the software for it. That's the big problem. Either we need some incredible software or a nondestructive to-the-synapse brain scan technique.

Dresden Codak is boring shit. Transhumanism is an eventuality.

>>2222827
You can be considered a Luddite if you're against technological progress, even a certain kind of technological progress rather than in general.

So yes.

>>2222819
We need software not hardware for the singularity.

I'm sold on transhumanism. Let's see what the future has to offer.

IT'S BIODIGITAL JAZZ MAN

>>2222848
More war, probably.

does anybody know of that episode in Aeon Flux when the guy gave the chick an orgasm by messing around with her spinal cord?

>>2222878
I watched a documentary on that... I was a horny little bastard and I saw the thing's title and recorded it, but it exists.

>>2222878
It's been done.

>>2222878
scientists managed that in real life fairly recently

wasn't this in /tg/ just the other day?

>>2222894

Do you know what the title of their paper was?

I'd hate too see the failed experiment subjects. pretty cool research, but who would admit to doing it with a lab rat?

>>2222908
Frequently pops up there, it's just misguided fools thinking the future will save them from their pathetic lives instead of making something of it now themselves.

>>2222930
he got the story wrong. See http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=127280

It wasn't research but more off a serendipitous discovery by a practicing doctor.

>>2222936
Ah, yes, dreams are such silly shit. I don't know why we bother.

>>2222945
Dreams are something you strive to make real, these are just wish-fulfillment fantasies.

>>2222952
Oh? So - everyone who dreams of orbital colonies, intersystem vessels, useful quantum computing hardware, hell, a better toaster - If they're not actively assisting in the development of those dreams, it's all petty wish-fulfillment? Or do I have you wrong.

it already happened. it all already happened. you are me is everyone, playing a game with and against itself just to pass the time. it is ending and starting constantly. it is everything that ever was or will be, repeated infinitely in every direction forever.

this is what you are. the lower representations are variations on a theme. they are to be embraced, of course, but the reality is always to be remembered? or should the ignorance also be reveled in? is that not after all, "the point"? do we really want to rush back up?

but... what if i'm wrong, and the void all around really is all there is? if everything is exactly as it appears to be? if this is, "the first"? then (of course) it stops being a game and becomes vital.

it's a dilemma. but i think you know the answer already, no?

Transhumanism... it's an appealing idea, but people tend to underestimate the hurdles.

So far human engineering usually does not surpass the efficiency of natural systems. Any organism is able to
a) run on fairly unclean fuel (food)
b) reproduce without external means (apart from a mate in sexual reproduction)
c) repair itself
d) exist in an equilibrium with its environment

Any technology we developed requires highly refined sources of energy and raw material, a huge external support infrastructure to produce and to repair it and has negative long-term impacts on the environment.

So all our invetions excel at only a few aspects and are very very bad at everything else. Now imagine replacing parts of the bodies of every human with technology that has these properties.
The resource requirements and displacement of ecosystems for the support infrastructure would be fairly large. The components may underperform in certain categories... for example they could make the human body less flexible or decrease endurance due to the need for refueling/cooling/maintenance.


And for those who think all these developments will happen at insane speed (*cough*singularity*cough*). No, they won't. The singularity (assuming it will happen) may increase the speed at which new technology of a certain complexity can be developed. But to get closer to the efficiency of naturally evolved systems (which had millions of years to be optimized) the complexity of new inventions will skyrocket too. So the newly gained speed development speed of self-improving AIs or augmented humans will be consumed by ever-increasing complexity. It will still take decades to develop a new product.

You don't even know what it is to be human yet...

>>2222985
>(cont)

Imagine we finally manage to create an AI based on artifical neural networks. We have no idea how to program those things, the only way to use them is train them. Like a child.
So you train a supercomputer like a child for 15 years. Teach it how it works. Let's assume it has the potential to be smarter than a normal human... it still has to understand all things to make use of its raw processing speed. This will take time.
Now, let's say after 25 years (optimistically) it can finally start improving itself. But it's only a single smarter-than-human entity. It's not godlike, it's just very smart. So it'll have to work for years, together with the assistance of humans.

So, let's say after 30 years it finally has made a breakthrough. Ok... but this breakthrough is incompatible with its own system. We have to implement it on a new supercomputer and begin teaching a new AI, from scratch.

The singularity may come, but it will consume itself by making things better at the cost of increased complexity

>>2222981
Whether it's real or not doesn't matter as long as it feels real. Life has no win condition. Enjoy yourself.

Transhumans would be easier to enslave. It would be a great platform for a government compliance program. When are RFID tags going to become mandatory? Or is live face recognition sufficient?

>>2222996

Transhuman rebellion and flight to mars. Sign me up.

>>2222991
a tick to the ignorance side. like i said, you already know. it is in-built, i think. and the vast majority will always trend to the side of ignorance (i think).

whoo hooo lets all go get WASTED and REPRODUCE.

i want to murder you with a claw hammer.

>>2222985
Here's what you do.

Create a simulated environment in which enhancements to the human body can be tested. The more detailed, the better. Set target conditions that the enhancements need to meet, and allow the control program to make changes to the enhancements following an evolutionary pattern. Basically, let each enhancement evolve over a vastly accelerated timescale, obtain massively increased efficiency.

It's not a new idea. It's just a bit more complicated, applying it to things like this rather than radio antennas.

>>2222990
>(cont)

And what i said about technological inefficiency also applies to developing AIs/augmenting humans. We have a rough idea how the brain works, we can simulate aspects of it. But we're horribly inefficient at it. We don't grasp the emergent processes yet. We don't know how the cellular development of an embryo to an adult brain shapes its learning process.
Not to mention that we don't even know all the details which degrees the individual vertices in the graph of synapses have, which weights and how those factors are deterimned.

So we will have to to overprovision a supercomputer simulating an approximation of a brain to make up for these gaps and inaccuracies in our knowledge.

>>2222986

Amen, brother.
Our society is becoming more and more shaped by people with asperger's.

>>2223002
>whoo hooo lets all go get WASTED and REPRODUCE.

Follow instincts toward pleasure-seeking and increasing population numbers? Yes, go ahead.

>i want to murder you with a claw hammer.

Follow instincts toward violence against that which opposes your own views? Sure, why not.

Just don't harsh my mellow, bro. There's enough matrix for everyone.

Also, your inability to use proper capitalization causes my intestines to clench with unholy might.

>>2222964
If they're hoping for something uncertain to come to pass to make their lives better sometime in the future, yes, that's just fantasy.

>>2223011
you need an evaluator function for evolutionary algorithms. For sufficiently complex systems the evaluator is so complex that it basically has to be sentient to make a decision if one system is "better" than another.

Or you have to write very very very complex rulesets to check against... and then after millions of generations of optimizations you'll get a prosthetic arm that performs really well... but runs on liquified kittens because you forgot to specify that kittens should not be harmed. You get the idea i hope.

These things are not trivial.

>>2223030
There are issues with that approach? You don't say.

Would you care to estimate the earliest moment where the required simulations would become practical?

>>2223001

The exclusion of transhumanist's from the 100m Olympic events is evidence of discrimination against us.
The day will come when we will take control of our own destiny!

>>2223043
Well, as i implied earlier: I consider whole-system optimization (of a sufficiently complex system) through genetic algorithms to be en par with creating strong AIs.

So... some time next century.

>>2223059
You could just make your own Olympics. You could have a whole bunch of competitions not in the "normal" Olympics, like a contest deciding who can burn through a stack of iron plates first with their groin lasers.

>>2223079
Transhumanist olympics... being about brute strength? Really? Maybe you do not understand what it means to transcend the human condition.

>>2223096
What were you expecting? Multi-dimensional chess? The construction of a mathematical system based from physical laws foreign to this universe? Pancake tossing?

Please, describe what it means to transcend the human condition.

>>2223118
competetive problem-solving?

>>2223125
Problem: These iron plates do not have holes in them.

Condition: The solution to the problem must involve groin lasers.

>transhumanism

Maybe, but not now..

And not likely to be any time soon.

>>2223139
that problem statement predetermines the solution. and you know what i meant.

>>2223153
Correct on both counts.

>>2223096
Transhuman Olympics? Isn't that what Starcraft 4's called?

>>2222411
I'm not into transhumanism when it's sticking lots of things inside of my body, but that's just my own personal opinion.

Transhumanism is inevitable, while I want to stay human and die as one. I understand the draw of not wanting to live as a human and be mortal.

>>2223291
>>2223285
very nice, i didn't have those two yet. *alt+clicks*

those pics give the wrong impression... but fuck it, i'll dump the rest anyway.

EVOLUSHUN

done.

>>2223400
What happened to Nemo Ramjet, guy? I haven't seen his work in a while, and Snaiad is down.

I remember asking /sci/ about AI once. The thread went fine until one retard decided to shit all over it.

I expect the same to happen to this thread. Things that are possible in the near future scare people. So they blindly write off OP as a dreamer.

Sorry, man.

>>2223414
I have no idea where he disappeared too.
Here's the source on that pic for anyone who wants something awesome to read.
http://www.mediafire.com/?7ticslwp1n7bbi2

bump to counter raid

bump

Is that fucking raptor? Damn.

>>2223697
this is fairly arousing

IS THIS JUST LIKE SOME ADVANCED PROSTHETICS?

>>2223429
>hurr the proles don't understand, they ruin my glorious vision of robot utopia

If you bothered reading the thread, I think you'll find a great deal of reasoned, logical opposition to the transhumanist fantasy, drawing meaningful questions about its feasability...and a lot of robot girl porn. I think that in and of itself is an interesting phenomenon.

Transhumanism/singularity is the "scientific" reflection of fundamentalist christianity.

>>2223697
MORE of that, dear god

>>2223697
seriously, what do I have to google for to get more pics of her?

if we can agree that what makes us human as how we experience the world around us, then transhumanism is just making our bodies stronger/better/faster, but you would get a bit of ghost in the shell, i mean the movie, not the trope, in that people would lose what they thought made them humans.

on another note, if evolution is survival of the fittest, and by practice we would be using our intelligence to engineer said transhuman parts, would that not be a logical albeit forced form of evolution...

>>2225043
She's Kimiko Ross from the rarely-updated webcomic Dresden Codak

I really want to be a cyborg and live forever.

>>2225088
"But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young."

>>2222986

Be more specific or GTFO and take your empty rhetoric with you.