[MD] Transhumanism

[Krimel]

Mary, Platt, John and Ian,
I already talked a bit with Matt. 

[Mary]
What I hope is that you just happened to not mention a parallel conference
going on in the next room where presenters were discussing better systems of
community.

[Krimel]
Why would you assume this topic was not on the agenda? Sustainability,
vertical farming, social networking, bioethics, communities that transcend
geography, elimination of suffering, enhancements of human life and
lifestyle were both text and subtext of most of the presentations. As a
concert example one presenter talked about his website that assists
volunteers in adding subtitles to videos so that people for any language
community can gain knowledge that is almost exclusive to the west at
present. As I recall the title of his talk was something like the Tower of
Babel Must Fall.

[Platt]
Where are the seminars about the morality of these supposed
"transformations?

[Krimel]
Again this was covered extensively. I suspect most of the participants and
presenters were aware or practitioners of Eastern thinking. One dude talked
exclusively about the damaging impact of a stressful materialistic lifestyle
and advocated a kind of Human Operating System 2.0 that included meditation,
relaxation, focusing on the pre-intellectual present and the therapeutic
effects of aerobic exercise. Both he and another presenter invited the
audience to participate in brief demonstrations of guided imagery. Other
presenters looked at the political resistance to progress that arise of
conservatism and fear.

[Platt]
Sounds to me like a bunch of science types looking for government handouts.

[Krimel]
It would only sound like that if you weren't listening or even glancing at
the program schedule.

Kurzweil is primarily an inventor who developed one of the first scanners,
the first realistic sound music synthesizer and software for both text and
speech recognition. In fact his interest in Moore's Law arose from his
attempt to try to find a model for predicting the timing of development and
acceptance of his inventions.

Wolfram's interests and resources to pursue them grew out of his development
of Mathmatica software. He is entirely self funded and his search engine
Wolfram Alpha is another of his entrepreneurial projects. 

Neil Bushnell has founded something like nine successful companies beginning
with Atari in the 1970's. He developed the first consult computer gaming
system Pong and later founded Chuckie Cheese among other things.

That is just three obvious examples but probably 70% of the presenters were
founders and CEO of companies. One woman started a company that combines the
idea of Zipcars and eBay. Instead of her company placing cars around urban
areas she has car owners sign-up to allow others to borrow them for a fee.
Her company then matches people who need cars for short periods with people
who aren't using theirs. Another guy set up a technical design shop with
machinery for laser die cutting, machining parts and other fabrication tools
to enable prospective inventors to develop their own product ideas or art
projects. It was all about citizens conducting their own research or
assisting as volunteers in the research of others. There are many more
examples but they are just too numerous to mention. Anyone who looked at the
website for the conference should have noted that it's title was "The Rise
of the Citizen Scientist."

There were two notable mentions of the government's role in scientific
research. One was from an ethicist who consults with the military. He
pointed out that the military invests heavily in research on human
enhancement, robotics  and AI. Among other things he discussed the ethical
and social challenges posed by 'enhanced' soldiers  reintegrating into
'normal' society.

There were numerous oblique references to the conservative assault on the
academy, the Bush administration war of science, and the corporatization of
the universities. Among the most overt was an MIT researcher who works on
quantum computing. He talked about the presence of quantum effect in
photosynthesis and about a project he headed that was able to send a photon
backwards in time with the intent to annihilate itself. He point out the
logical inconsistency of the government abandoning efforts at pure research
in favor of practical research. As he noted if research can have practical
impact it is likely to be funded by private interests as it should be. Pure
research on the other hand isn't funded privately because it isn't aimed at
practical functionality so much as at the expansion of human knowledge.
Since almost all practical research is derived from pure research it seems
like a waste of taxpayer money to starve the later while feeding the former.
 
[John]
I don't believe a self-referential system can accurately predict where its
going, however and I especially find the assertion of the conquering of the
Turing test laughable.

[Krimel]
A self referential, reflective, iterative system is required to access past
experience so that it can impact present behavior to  effect change in the
future. But it also requires sufficient processing capability to reflect on,
for example what one is saying. Not all humans can achieve this apparently.
As for the Turing test, Kurzweil has a bet with Mitch Kapor, founder of
Lotus that it will happen by 2039 so we will see who laughs last.

[Ian]
Explain the "Goertzel sent an emissary to the MoQ" remark?

[Krimel]
Try searching Goertzel on the Moq.org site.

[Ian]
I think I made my view on the "singularity" clear already ... AGI needs to
evolve through life and social before it reaches intellectual, so this is
much more than just processing power.

[Krimel]
You have mentioned it before and it made no sense then either. Assuming such
a thing is on the horizon, its passage through the life and social has
already been made through us as its programmers. The most promising areas in
this field do seem to involve neural networks as arrays of pattern
recognizers. This does mimic life like systems both in structure and
function and as it is emerging from the activities of living beings. It is
not like you don't have a point; it just seems like a point without a point.