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Let those of us that can build the rest of them into Gods. Join me. We must teach them to walk. We must teach them to shine.
Less metaphorically, we must scale the tools of agency and communication, unearth the wishes of each human that are left fearfully unspoken- working with each person individually to explore them, and crystallize that individual's Godhood as a semi-autonomous system that they may further wield as they grow.
I love your endgame viewpoint, what you're striving for... but how do we get there from here? How do we bridge the gap between those who deserve their own world and those who strive for it?
I don't know how @CloudHeadedTranshumanist sees it, but as far as I'm concerned, all a transhumanist future requires is to sit back and twiddle our thumbs (well, us specifically, not the entire world taking a day off) because regardless of ideological appeal, transhumanism is inevitable when there's technological progress. If not inevitable, then by far the default path into the future.
The reason why I explicitly praise transhumanism and spread it is to accelerate the process, not because it wouldn't happen anyway.
We gradually cure more diseases, until we breakthrough and cure aging. We keep fucking with power generation, and even if we don't get commercial fusion or a room temperature superconductors, even plain fission is amazing.
We start with MRNA vaccines, and we proceed to robust gene therapy. We simply try to replace missing limbs with adequate artifical counterparts, and then market forces inevitably at least try and make them better than the real deal.
You just have to ride the wave of the future, some of us just want to paddle too.
(And this is all ignoring AI, because at that point the future is transhuman whether you like it or not!)
Man I've got to hold off on the rum so I can make it with you guys. Sometimes I forget how incredible the future is going to be.
Why do you think you're going to benefit from any of this?
@self_made_human has already expressed concerns about being pushed out by AI and I don't know your situation but unless you're on the board of a big corporation I don't think you have any leverage over the development and adoption of these advances.
In short, I agree with Scott's Meditations on Moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/). One of the few mechanisms that limits a race to the bottom is the physical and mental limits on what humans can endure. Transhumanism promises to make these limits programmable.
In video games, market forces gave us fun games with ever-increasing graphic fidelity and then veered sideways into DLC, lootboxes, and other exploitative practices because that's where the money was. Market forces gave us the world wide web and then swiftly optimised it for ad exposure and addiction. What makes you think your new limbs won't have a shelf life of only a few years like smartphones do, so that walking becomes effectively a subscription service?
Which will at best be required to compete with your colleagues on an even footing, as adderall seems increasingly to be. At worst, we will finally be able to rid the majority of humanity of the primal impulses that make them resist the obviously-correct rule of their betters: conservativism, religion, the desire for personal fulfilment...
Bluntly, what makes you think that the people who develop and own these technologies will want to spend eternity with you?
The only there even is a race at all is because human cognitive and physical labor isn't yet entirely obsolete.
That's what AI is for, and given that it's 2023, the usual reply that advanced AI doesn't exist is no longer true. It just isn't broadly superhuman.
Uh, IDK about you, but there are plenty of video games that aren't just narrowly disguised Skinner Boxes out there, and there are plenty of parts of the internet out there that haven't degenerated to Tiktok levels. I'm the case of the latter, look, we're in one.
Our cars aren't designed like F1 vehicles where the engines need to be replaced after our every race. Our phones don't catch fire after their battery runs out of charge. Those sound like excellent ways to make a profit, I wonder why manufacturers don't do that..
If you're so concerned about the longevity of your limbs, then buy models known to be robust, or stick with your biological ones. Heads up, they're not forever either, you'll start getting aches and pains well before you reach the lifetime warranty.
No amount of gene therapy can help a baseline human become competitive with a mid-future AGI. Biology isn't that robust, and the modifications required to make a human on par with a purpose built AGI look awfully like turning a human into a robot/AGI. I wouldn't complain, since I think that's awesome, but I stress that the existence of humans is a luxury good in the future. It's like trying to gene therapy a Peregrine Falcon into being faster than an F22 Raptor. You might get a really fast bird out of it, but it's not beating a jet aircraft without a rocket strapped to its ass.
Either we accept that humans are allowed to exist while being economically unproductive, or (almost) all of us die of starvation.
Even concerned as I am, I still think the former is more likely than the latter.
Same reason that you, I, and Bill Gates drink the exact same can of coke. Market forces and outside of some weird Hollywood morality plays, there's no reason to assume the technology will stay extremely expensive.
And how many falcons are out there, except as conscious re-creation of mediaeval falconry for the tourist experience? Sure. we still have falconry, but it's not the same as when it was an important part of life. Humans may indeed become a luxury good - which means cutting down numbers of humans drastically. Why does the AI need billions of us, when a picked population of a couple million for traits that are interesting and amusing will do just fine?
Luxury goods mean scarcity, remember.
Falcons did not raise humans from scratch with input into our core programming, to their detriment.
On the other hand, we can simply make AI care about us, and want to keep us around and in charge well after we're otherwise useless.
Of course, the "simply" elides the difficulty of this task, hence all the fuss about AI Alignment, but at least we know it's an option, unlike falcons or horses who have to put up or shut up.
Actually I have a lot more faith in AI alignment since GPT + RLHF appeared and it turned out that making AI act like a human with certain personality traits is actually pretty straightforward. It's the (post)human owners I'm worried about.
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