I doubt that will ever happen because the corporations that run our lives wouldn't allow it. Just look at what's happening to the internet

>>4225
Well around this point we'll be living in post-scarcity times so money won't be much of an issue anymore, and even still, I doubt things would get that bad. It's a lot easier to just plug someone into a computer than actually have them taking up space and resources in real life.

>>4226
If people are plugged into the super-internet all day then the only people who benefit would be the people who run the super internet. The corporations of the world would use all of their power to try and get the government to ban it, or use their power to damage the super internet in some way.

Take Netflix for example: ISPs HATE netflix because it's cheaper and more convenient than their own on-demand services, so rather than compete with them they impose things like bandwidth caps on their customers so people can't use it and give money to them instead (since their own on demand services don't count toward the cap).

>>4226
>Well around this point we'll be living in post-scarcity times

I'd love to believe this but I am really, really skeptical when I hear these singularity guys go on about how perfect the future is going to be. And how would you "plug someone in" without maintaining their body? Even if you make a copy of your entire mind, that's just a copy, it's not you.

I wouldn't want my memories to be wiped out.
I must know I'm lucky if I really want to enjoy it.

>>4226
2040 is 29 years from now, you don't honetly think money would be irrelevant by then do you?
It's like people thinking in the 1970 that the year 2000 would have robots and sky cities, or people in 1985 thinking 2015 would look like back to the furtureII.

Just as >>4225 said, no way corporations that run the world would allow anything to exist that they don't financially benefit from.

>with your memories being wiped
this would have all of those easily offended retards protesting this, it would be all over the news, and never see the light of day.

it would be nice, but there's no way our society would allow it, and I highly doubt anything in the next 29 years will change how panicky irrational stubborn and idiotic people are.

The only way this could ever work, is if it's done underground, and not made public, out there for anyone interested, but not really publicised, you know?

>>4231

>The only way this could ever work, is if it's done underground, and not made public, out there for anyone interested, but not really publicised, you know?


It would be found and destroyed, like the internet

Basically if something will put a dent in corporations' bottom lines, no matter how small, they will seek out the cause and destroy it. They are like the white blood cells of creativity and freedom

>>4224
>the technological singularity

You mean when we shall be able to transpose an entiire human mind (as a neural network, maybe) into an A.I. software/analog device, hence achieving immortality as machines/cyborgs (say, like in GITS / NGE / Lain)?...

I find it very unlikely we develop to that point in the next 30 years, or before our generation dies. But, if it turns into like if we could (and I could get access to it), it'd sure give me a renewed hope too. Not in that vulgar sense of "Give myself the perfect life [as] The kind of guy all the girls love and all the guys wish they were" like in a sort of über-Facebook [vomit.jpg], but to effectively being able to attain the intellectual development I long for, by truly freeing my mind from the last boundary that compromises the enterprise of human knowledge: our corporeal finiteness, both in spatial (perceptive) and temporal (cognitive) nature.

>I just want to know what it feels like to be proud of yourself and feel good about what you see in the mirror.
Me too, desperately/voraciously; but I find you standars pitiful and your methods doomed. If you give it enough reflection, you may acnowledge that becoming the God of a world of your own (invention) will not resolve any existential/existentiary problem of you as an individual, as you need the existence of others like you, in the same topos, to even conceive the notion of you as one (existent) being... otherwise all you really want is to dream at command.

Post edited on 22nd May 2011, 5:00pm

>2040
>technological singularity

We're getting dumber by the minute. Just look at my post for a proof of that. My mind is just so limited and apathetic and so is almost everyone else's. How can we achieve singularity by 2040?

Most countries aren't set in a long perspective attitude which leads to our resources getting scarcer (mainly fresh water) and our environment polluted. Most nations are grasping for straws, there is no place to invest in research and education when your people are hungry. Things aren't looking pretty for the next decades, unless a big shift in people's minds happens which I hope is what will happen soon enough, and we can overthrow this economic system and with it all the so called rulers of this insane world.

>I just want to know what it feels like to be proud of yourself and feel good about what you see in the mirror.

If you really could transfer to a world like that or get a complete and perfect android body, don't you think everyone else would get one? You'd feel good for the first months but then you would be just like everyone else. I'm guessing that those who would have the most money would have the best androids or the best virtual worlds. I think in the far out future we could all be machines, because machines don't need as many resources as we do but still have all the benefits of humans. That is, if we find a way to transfer our minds to machines.

Putting my bitterness aside, of course it would be good. Having a perfect life, that's what we all strive for.

On another note, reading the posts before mine I can clearly see the influence of capitalism. People will usually think that if it doesn't make money it's no good, or that it will be shut down by big bad corporations because it would throw a wrench in their gears. This needs to change.

>2040
>technological singularity

Are you serious? Singularity in 30 years?

I know you were being more hypothetical about the date, but damn.

I think life extension will gradually push along to the point of some sort of biological immortality, and from their eventually a man/machine fusion. I think it will be a long time in the future, certainly more than 30 years, but I seriously doubt most of the people on this board will ever die of old age, just if they choose to. That still leaves freak accidents, diseases and such but I feel confident the majority of us will live to see a day when we can be absolutely anything we want.

>>4248
I do not like capitalism, but it won't just magically disappear in the near future. It is established to the point that removing it carelessly will cause humanity to cease existing. You can't just pretend that our world will be perfect by the time singularity is reached, because that's highly unlikely. However, that is enough off-topic discussion, methinks.

On topic, I agree with you in the sense that I believe most people would digitize themselves ASAP so that they could have (even more) hedonistic lives. However I do think that this would bring our ruin, because it would drown people in pleasure, kinda like in the novel Brave New World, if you catch my drift. Well, it's not like things can get much worse anyway.

>>4228
>>4228
>>4228
>And how would you "plug someone in" without maintaining their body? Even if you make a copy of your entire mind, that's just a copy, it's not you.

Is this not an issue anymore somehow? The singularity guys talk about virtual immortality like it's a given, but I don't see it happening.

the "technological singularity" is a religion for atheists

>>4252
>biological immortality
That is likely impossible, as Kana easily explained already [pic].

>>4270
Well, not for me: I even disapprove of scientific realism. The now called Singularity is just an old theoretical/literary proposition (at least from middle XIX century) that gained plausibility and/or popularity in recent times, with the informatic revolution, and wich is interesting to speculate about.

Post edited on 22nd May 2011, 11:12pm

>2040
>technological singularity

I wouldn't count on it. The way things are going, this is what you may expect from the year 2040:
-Five times more social decay and conflicts than today.
-Less privacy for the individual, more government/corporate power and control.
-More poverty and disease in the once "developed" world.

Be glad that you live today. When you have a stable roof above your head and the freedom to go online and discuss anything and everything with other people.

>>4269
yes, some people would argue that your brain is just made of electrical signals so an exact copy within a computer would be indistinguishable. and if you cant tell the original from the copy then they are identical therefore the copy is you. but nobody knows for sure.

>>4252
You forgot that suicide will likely always be an issue.

I think 2040 is way too soon for this kind of thing.

>popular, funny, social king
>The kind of guy all the guys wish they were.

Nope. I always wanted to live deep inside some forest with noone in radius of at least 100km. Just teleport me some stuff I need on weekly basis (food and such) and make electricity, gas and water appear out of nowhere and I'm good.

>>4225

>I doubt that will ever happen because the corporations that run our lives wouldn't allow it.

This makes sense. Think about it. Companies put stuff on the market for you to buy. If you could get said products elsewhere (virtual reality) for free (or not, it would probably cost you, just not as much) they would lose customers. This would be pretty harmful for every company out there (sans the virtual reality ones). I think sooner or later virtual reality would be banned (since it could lead to collapse of global economy) and you'd have to look for illegal points of access in cellars of rundown buildings in ghettos of big cities.

>>4226

>Well around this point we'll be living in post-scarcity times so money won't be much of an issue anymore

HAHAHA, OH WOW

Wishful thinking at it's best.

>>4227

>If people are plugged into the super-internet all day then the only people who benefit would be the people who run the super internet. The corporations of the world would use all of their power to try and get the government to ban it, or use their power to damage the super internet in some way.

Damn. I always try to respond to posts in thread as I read them as I tend to forget which ones I wanted to reply to but it stings when you see someone said what you wanted to say already.

>>4239

>otherwise all you really want is to dream at command.

That's pretty much the point, tho. Just a nice dream I would never wake up from, one I could shape as I please.

>>4248

>If you really could transfer to a world like that or get a complete and perfect android body, don't you think everyone else would get one? You'd feel good for the first months but then you would be just like everyone else.

Well, at very least you wouldn't feel you're worse of than others. Crab mentality I guess.

>>4294
>That's pretty much the point, tho. Just a nice dream I would never wake up from, one I could shape as I please.

Then you (obviously) need to keep your memories with you...

Just to think about: do you remember the Aurin, from Michael Ende's The Neverending Story? each granted wish consumed you a memory, because each time you get something good or get rid of some problem (on yourself), you quickly get accustomed to the new situation (of you) and forget how it feels to be in the (difficult) past, or remember it as something alien to you; so having a wish fully and gratuitiously granted, mean as well to actually lose the (joyful) feeling of it as a granted wish.

Now, this dynamic also implies that when you shall lose your last (and most precious) memory, you won't be able to wish for anything more; the reason is obvious: a man with no memories (not even his parents, origin or name), can't long for anything new. But it also implied, actually, the end of your life as a free man, because it is impossible to get anywhere by will without an honest and explicit wish: wishing is what makes us control our steps in our lives; so, after you comsume all your memories, the only thing left for you, in the book, was to become an inhabitant in the City of Ancient Emperors... or, as we call it here, The Looney House.

I gave it a bit more thought and realized Singularity has a fundamental problem: wereas a cyberbrain might allow us to do things we never could before on our given biological bodies (life extension, superfast calculating/computing, fast reading, eidetic memory), at the same time it could render obsolete all the accumulated knowledge wich was strongly dependant on the concrete and unique configuration of our bodies, and we might not be still fully aware about how much of what we know is into that index, or how dear anything there really is...

To give a trivial example: let's say one really enjoys drawing and/or playing a musical instrument. One would really like being able to keep on doing those in the future, at least as good as one can now, and in the way one performs them now. But, wereas that achieved level of ability and unique style will remain codified in one's cyberbrain, and even if one was insufflated into a cyborg or an android (i.e. a highly precise humanoid vessel), that -properly called- software would lack of the hardware/output device it was meant to function with, i.e. one's own and unique hands and arms (at the very least).

So, maybe with the appropriate attached software and devices, one will be able to draw or perform probably as good or even way better than one ever did as a living body, and maybe in a fairily similar style too. But, for sure, one will NEVER be able to draw or play again exactly in the way one once did as a human body. For good or bad, that unrepeatable line will be broken forever; for good or bad, that intellectual development of one, that valuable part of ones' self, would be lost forever.
---------------------------------
**** EDIT:
On a third thought: that part was going to be lost forever anyway, with one's death (Duh, lol); so it's way more what we save than what we lose.

Post edited on 23rd May 2011, 4:23pm

>>4293
I didn't. I said that excluding disease/accidents and such, most people probably won't die unless they CHOOSE TO. And I still believe that.

>>4313
To clarify: I think we'll reach a point late in the century where life extension will be good enough for us to live indefinitely biologically in preparation for merging with machines, and due to the general progression of this longevity tech before it's refined to perfection over the decades, the majority of younger people around today should probably see that point, assuming they don't get killed by something non-aging related in the meantime.

I don't think the Singularity would happen: not even the development of some kind of superintelligence could improve everything dramatically. First, intelligence is useful, but cannot do everything, it's not omnipotent. Second, superintelligence already exists, and it is us, as together we can do and discover a lot more than any of us could alone; yet, not even the combined intelligence of humanity had brought about a Utopia, and there's no reason to suppose machine intelligence could do anything better. Theoretically it could, but then again, so could people, and they didn't. As with most technical innovations, it would come useful in some places, but it's no elixir.

With the increase of automation (which is, btw, not an autonomous or self-sustaining process, just a consequence of capital accumulation and economic rationality), we can expect commodities to get cheaper, but scarcity will never completely go away, because some kind of matter, energy or skill will be always lacking, always in shortage, at least on the short-term. Only that people could leech of other people easier, as financing their life would be less costly for their supporters. (Note: I'm not saying this disparagingly.) Work won't stop either, because there will always be things that machines would be unable to do better than humans. Less work (and material) will procedure more, with all its consequences, complete(!) plenty not being one of them.

The man/machine fusion has already completed. Look at your town from a hilltop, or even better, a satellite photo. You probably won't see people, but plenty of fields, buildings and veichles; all artificial and inhuman. Not only people cannot survive without artifacts, they already exceed "us" in terms of size, mass and energy consumption, and -- barring some huge catastrophe -- that will be just more so in the future. What's more, not only humans merged with the technium, even what you call "nature" has been consciously modified to be a machine to relax and work in, so much that no area on Earth is untouched any more. (Still not enough, I believe.)

Medical immortality is impossible, because no matter how much of age-related illness and degradation is eliminated, some always remains, and that will certainly kill you sooner or later. The probability of your survival converges to 0. Anyways, the meaning of your life wouldn't neccessarily disappear, as you could as well choose another reason to live for, if the previous one bores you already.

Informational immortailty could work. However, your upload (who would probably operate faster and in a different and richer world than you) would quickly turn into something else, unrecognizable to everyone who knew you, yourself included. Unless you limited your upload to stay the same as you, but in that case, she would be essentially crippled, as her self-development would be intentionally kept down from what she could achieve the other way.

Many people have fantasies that go like "After the Singularity, I would ..." -- but guess what, you wouldn't. By then, your current problems would be solved or lose priority, and new, unforeseen ones would gain importance. What's more, what you call "you" wouldn't exist any more, even if you won't have died. The post-Singularity-you will have absolutely nothing in common with now-you, that person in the future is a literal alien with today's eyes. I do accept mind uploading as possible, feasible and desirable, but only as a tool of continuing life, not as a solution for my present woes.

The future does hold awesome things, just no perfection and -- I believe -- nothing radically new. (Even mind uploading is partially accomplished with biographies and magnum opii.) Nothing will come that doesn't exist today in a less developed, less noticable form, only more of the same. Whatever I/we want -- I/we have already in some degree, even the kind of escapism OP describes exists today as video games, fiction and fantasy. But you knew that already.

>>4466
>>4468
Get out of here, man. You are such a fucking downer. Let me sit and stew in my delusions.

Even if I'll definitely die before perfection happens, I can still hope! I can still dream of a perfect age, with none of the concerns and worries of our awful world. It's pretty tough to do that when you come in here and shoot everyone down.

>>4468

>I do accept mind uploading as possible, feasible and desirable, but only as a tool of continuing life, not as a solution for my present woes.

Overall, I agree.

>your upload... would quickly turn into something else, unrecognizable to everyone who knew you, yourself included... What's more, what you call "you" wouldn't exist any more, even if you won't have died. The post-Singularity-you will have absolutely nothing in common with now-you...

Just a question (that leads to many others): Who are "you"?

What is the "true" you (the one that "exists")?
Is it your body or your own concept of you?
Is it what you or others perceive as your body or conceptualize as you?
Do those perceptions/concepts match each other?
Has even your body remained the same over time?
Do you recognize pictures of yourself as a baby?
Or do you think it's someone else? [don't take it lightly, I'm very serious with this one]
Is identity reducible to resemblance (i.e It's resemblence fair for some criteria, enough ground to assume absolute identity)?
Is it even necessary for functioning as individuals?
Does anything -or anyone- ever exists in a sort of identical state to itself?
Is it even existing to be perceived (Esse est percipi)?
Is perception even ontologically creditable?
...

TL;DR I don't think "you" would be any more lost as a machine than you already are as a human body. I think you can functionally remain the same you as long as you remember whoever else you've been.

"Does the body exist at all? Does one ever resemble oneself? [...] To resemble! Such prejudice belongs to the lakeside days, or troglodytes!" -Villiers de L'Isle Adam
"Changes: everything changes." -Julio Numhauser

Post edited on 28th May 2011, 12:55pm

I really, really don't care about creating a robotic clone of myself. I'm shitty enough as a human, there's no need for another one of me. Give me real immortality or give me death.

1. Why do you want to be immortal so much?
2. If you want to be immortal so much, why aren't you helping the research of it?
3. What do you offer for the 7 billion people on this planet and their descendants in exchange for them wanting to to keep you alive until the end of time?

>>4485
>Who are "you"?
I came to the conclusion that identity is no more that recognition. Or I could say: identity is not a physical property, but identification, a judgement; altough not arbitrary, it's subjective. I find this position more acceptable than anything else I came across so far. (This makes uploading a lot easier, as the upload would not need to be exact, only acceptable, which could be feasible even with today's tech.)

And it cannot be anything more: after all, there are no things" as Fuller put it, not only because we cannot see the "essence" of anything, only a very limited subset of its properties, but also because entities cannot be delimited from their environments either spatially or temporally; and these facts make most of our words (including "I") no more than a figure of speech, referring at most to a specific clump of our perceptions, if at all.

As for the personal questions, I can't remember, recognize, nor identify with my child self.

>>4486
>I really, really don't care about creating a robotic clone of myself.
That was never the point. Aditionally: robot =/= android; I don't think anyone here wants to be a slave.

>>4488
>1. Why do you want to be immortal so much?
To have the chance to witness for events and to know things otherwise I never would, and -for the very first time- to attempt for an ethic (a theorization aroud the principles of what could it be a good life) wich won't be determined by the imminence of a personal death (still lots of shit could happen: we could die in masse due to some cataclysm or at the end of the very universe -however it shall be-, but it'd still be quite different from our common vulgar individual death).

>2. If you want to be immortal so much, why aren't you helping the research of it?
It's not like volunteering for collecting garbage on the street, you know? It takes a full path of life wich isn't the one I've followed, not the one I want, and certainly not the one I think I could make the best contributions on (if on any). If I was to follow a career for every perennial problem in the world I'd like to be solved and for every super-technology I'd like to see invented, I couldn't possibly end or succeed on any (I mean: I'm not genius, not at all... that's why I'd like to have/become a cyberbrain).

>3. What do you offer for the 7 billion people on this planet and their descendants in exchange for them wanting to to keep you alive until the end of time?
I don't know what the new order would be, living with/as androids. The question seems, however, a lot more complex if you aim for post-humans as stand-alone systems; nothing implies that biological humans will necessarily be excusively at the service of androids (or the other way around); many ways of interaction/cooperation/explotation could emerge in such world... the point it's to be there, to know for sure (and maybe take -non trivial- part on) how the world of the future is going to be.

Post edited on 29th May 2011, 4:06pm

>>4500
>That was never the point. Aditionally: robot =/= android; I don't think anyone here wants to be a slave.

Are you talking about mind uploading or extending the life of the human body? Because as I understand it those are different things. Unless there's some way to retain your consciousness or transfer it, the first method sounds really useless to me.

>>4501
When I said that wasn't the point, I meant to build robot(=slave) clones of ourselves. The so called singularity we've been talking about, it's something I've esentially understood as posted in >>4239:

>when we shall be able to transpose an entiire human mind (as a neural network, maybe) into an A.I. software/analog device, hence achieving immortality as machines/cyborgs

... wich certainly doesn't imply in itself for us to be capable of retaining what we call now consciousness, but just to somehow immerse our memory data into a device capable of generating its own deductions/algorithms. So, by all means, I agree with you: there's no way to call such existence a prolongation of ours if an acceptable level of informatic (self)cousciousness isn't yet achieved.

Post edited on 30th May 2011, 3:49pm

>>4488
1. An immortal (or long-lived) being has better chances at achieving their goals, if only because she has more tries. Also, survival is better than death.
2. Today, the most I can do is to ponder its ifs and hows.
3. Not sure.

>>4248
By the "Singularity" they usually mean the first construction of an AI capable of completely rewriting itself, which supposedly leads to something miraculous. No one knows how it could be done, and I doubt it's possible at all.
Please don't berate your writing, I enjoyed it.

>>4488
>1. Why do you want to be immortal so much?

Because I don't want to stop living, and if the future grants me opportunities to experience absolutely anything that I can think of, limited only by my imagination, then it's impossible to get bored. should you ever get bored, i'm sure there's a way to wipe your memories and start over again so everything seems fresh.

>2. If you want to be immortal so much, why aren't you helping the research of it?

I was actually planning on starting up a pseudo-charity with the goal of accelerating the development of medical technologies and other crucial techs.

>3. What do you offer for the 7 billion people on this planet and their descendants in exchange for them wanting to to keep you alive until the end of time?

Uhm, don't you think it's more expensive for me to stay alive and consume all sorts of other resources (food, water, gas, etc.)? Would it not be easier to strap me into a machine?

>2. If you want to be immortal so much, why aren't you helping the research of it?

This is just dumb. By your logic, if someone has cancer, they'd better get their ass to medical school and start looking for a cure, or else they have no right to bitch about how much it hurts.

>>4551
Im sure he's saying that if you have a dream you should try to work to make it a reality rather than give up.