[MD] Transhumanism

[Krimel]

[Ian]
You mean Mark Germine (I interacted with him at the time and blogged) ?

[Krimel]
Right, as I recall he got trashed as being SOM and/or left because he was
looking for people to join something.

[Ian]
PS was Jurgen Schmidhuber at the event you attended ?

[Krimel]
I don't think so but the full list of speakers is available at:
www.hplussummit.com. Everything was video recorded and in fact streamed live
at the time. I believe it wil all be available online but I don't know
exactly when that will happen. In the mean time they appear to be sending
out a "live" stream which you can watch, you just can't choose what to
watch. You can just see whatever happens to be streaming ATM.

[Ian]
My point ...
Are you talking about machine intelligence overtaking humans ? or
Are you talking about machine intelligence plus human intellect
overtaking humans ?

[Krimel]
I take Kurzweils basic point to be that humans will develop AIs that will
help them develop smarter AIs. That has already happened BTW. Eventually AIs
get to be smart enough to develop smarter AIs without help or AI+. Those AIs
can then develop geometrically smarter and smarter AI++s. That is the
"singularity" as I understand it.

[Ian]
I remain sceptical about the former happening until AGI evolves
through replication and social organization.
The latter I just see as natural human evolution.

[Krimel]
Unless you read replication and social organization into the above I don't
see any need and if that is what you mean by replication and social
organization is seems like a pretty useless metaphor. But I do take the
whole idea of Humanity+ and transhumanism to be a kind of extension of
evolution without the slow speed and randomness. Rather than waiting around
for hundreds of thousands of years for something interesting to happen
humans will design their own genetic future. That certainly is evolution but
it is hardly natural selection.

Just a couple of side notes here. I had never heard of transhumanism before
last week and while I find it interesting I have not thought about it long
enough to have any real commitment to it beyond my initial investment of
$150 for a two day event. Still, I forget who did it but, the knee jerk
reaction here of writing it all off as SOM was pretty predictable. If there
was a shared metaphysics in any of this I would say it was the underlying
assumptions of information theory. I recently read and plan to reread a book
by Luciano Floridi call "Information". It is part of the Oxford University
Press Very Short Introduction series. Which means it is very short but not
really for dummies. In it he outlines a philosophy of information which I
think covers a lot of ground that Pirsig touched on and pointed towards but
could not see clearly. A shame really.