Singularity Transhuman Primer
Daily Telegraph Discusses Mind-Uploading Transhumanism
The Daily Telegraph addressed the mind-uploading issue, futuristic technology. The article (Transhumanists’ are planning to upload your mind to a memory stick) by Jamie Bartlett was published on 3rd April 2014. It is great to see main stream media attention to these issues, but I feel the issue has been improperly grasped. Below is my comment on the article, which is a good primer for understanding the Singularity and Transhumanism from an anti-uploading viewpoint.
I manage Singularity 2045 on G+, where amongst other things the viewpoint is expressed that mind-uploading is nonsense. The point is synbio, tissue engineering, molecular engineering, and DNA computing shows us how we are already machines. Biological cells are machines, we are already uploaded.
Yes “mind-uploading” will be possible (there are plans to upload a bee brain into a bee robot in the near future; a digital copy of a brain could be a good AI template too), but mind-uploading for humans is merely alienation, escapism, neurosis, evident by amongst other things the desire to eliminate so-called “negative” emotions.
The mind-uploaders seem rather autistic, which is not necessarily a bad thing but it does cause them to have skewed view of reality. Machines of the future will become organic despite their cells being made from graphene, qubits, or odd metamaterials. Mind-uploaders misunderstand biology and machines. The future is convergence. The beeping, clunking metallic machines of 2014 are very crude compared to the machines of the future, similarly the human genome machine (the human body) is crude also, but via DNA editing we will rewrite the code of our human machine. The uploading idea is merely an 1980s type of fetishism regarding metallic beeps and crackles, there is a failure to understand both biology and machines, a false divide is created. Mind-uploading seems to be merely a childish desire to distance oneself from the standard human race due to poor socialisation skills. Technology will progress but genetic engineering will progress too. Mind-uploading might be valid if no progress happened via biological sciences.
Ray Kurzweil has stated biology is now an information technology, which we can note via bioinformatics, thus progress in the field of biology should be as quick as in the field of mind-uploading because it is all about data. In the future anything you can do in an uploaded state you will just as easily be able to do in a fleshy but modified human body, thus mind-uploading is merely a grass is greener on the other side fallacy, it would be tantamount to transferring all the data from one fully functioning indestructible USB stick to an identical USB stick, the change serves no purpose. It is an illusory concept.
Immortality via regenerative medicine will happen before uploading a lossless human brain is possible, observe Venter’s HLI and Google’s Calico.
On the issue of being bored I personally would NEVER be bored in my current technological state if I could live for one million years or more. I think being bored is a problem of a shallow mind. Perhaps technology could help you with that but personally I’m already intelligent enough to never be bored.
On the issue of money. Everything will be free in the future due to Post-Scarcity. The path to Post-Scarcity is Basic Income (note the New Statesman article end of March 2014). Similarly with space. We will be exploring and colonising the vastness of Space soon, there will be no scarcity of space, no scarcity of any resource, thus no monetary restrictions of resources. Technology is leading us toward ultra-easy and ultra-efficient usage of resources. Crime is wholly a product of scarcity thus there will be no crime in the future. OK, that’s the background.
2045
The 2045 date from my viewpoint is not an exact date, it is a conservative deadline, a latest date when the Singularity will happen, no later than 2045. Note also how the Singularity event is capitalised to distinguish it from the mathematical singularity concept.
Oh, one final thing. I think the term is Singularitarians not “Singularitons.”
Here is the video Jamie mentioned in his daily Telegraph article:
