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[pilgrim-seeker_tom]

@Gamer

To address astute comments from pilgrim, surreptitious and fuse:

In my opinion I think merging with tech is going to be key if humans are to persist past the next few centuries in any dignified way.

Whether we should do this is up to how badly we want it. Such a choice won’t come down to how intelligently we approach the problem. It will come down to an aesthetic impulse. It will come down to what we decide we want. The greatest challenge will be to survive not artificial intelligence, but our own intelligence.

It’s not uncommon for philosophers and artists to outsmart themselves out of a job, but not the job of creating and philosophizing; the job of living. As the intellect and self awareness increases, there’s, I suspect, a direct proportionality with the increase of reasons to cease living, and an inverse relation to the reasons to persist in living.

The point I’m after here is that while we need technologies to make us smarter to survive and Marshall our AI progeny without having them overwhelm us, we also need technology to keep us dumb in certain ways, or eventually we’ll break that fragile thing within us that generates meaning.

If meaning is so fragile and fleeting, why protect it? Surely something so delicate is built in sand anyway, so why fight to preserve it?

In the end those among us not plagued by existential crisis will likely persist, not because they are smarter, but because they are that perfect blend of simpleton or amygdala, and quantum circuitry and crispr. Our pre-frontals will fall away like heavy rocket booster, and the capsule will have been our reptilian brains all along. So yes, I worry we may survive, but that we will evolve into a scourge.

For a benevolent society to thrive, we’d need to program ourselves to want to survive at all costs, when nature stops programming that impulse within us naturally and by default. There’s something a bit gross about that, about “prosthetic will to live.” But it’s the final turning point: do we program ourselves to want to survive?

I predict yes, because in the end, our success at maintaining our human altruistic traits through the singularity transition will be the only thing protecting the universe from the treachery and pain caused by the alternate things we could become. Our goodness and our disdain for causing pain to others will trump any existential crisis and force us to dumb ourselves enough to want to live.

Thus, as religion predicts, in the end times, it will be our morality that saves us. Except it will be saving us from ourselves, not from the wrath of an omniscient and omnipotent God, although at this point I scarcely see a difference.

An insightful prognosis Gamer … I hope you are right.

Once again … the inward journey must supersede the outward journey(the conquest) …

The Second Great Transformation

[Jakob]

I’m left to wonder where the people bringing about all these new technologies fit in.
In your scheme, Gamer, it seems like tools fall out of the sky, and like having tools never leads to new requirements, for which even more people have to be employed. That’s what seems to be happening in life on the planet.
People are exceedingly busy these days coming up with new useful or not so useful tools with many applications.

A tool invariably creates a desire for more tools, identical ones as use expands, as well as different ones for new purposes the last tool revealed. And a tool is seldom sufficient for its own reproduction.
“Man is a tool to make tools to make tools…”

[Jakob]

For example, say we dont need anymore Uber drivers, due to self-steering vehicles.
Did this just happen out of nowhere, aren’t there people involved in developing that technology?
Of course, there are. And because accountability will never be the same again, all laws pertaining to it are being rewritten and amended, as well as car insurance strategies. That’s new specialties in which people have to be educated, and for which curricula will be put together with specially equipped experts, etcetera.
It never ends.
Labor is the eternal migrant, from square to square to square.

The underlying reality here is that humans that have more stuff will tend to have more demands as well.

[Jakob]

A local supermarket in Amsterdam had all its staff but one replaced by barscanning pinmachines.
Soon enough, there was a line two isles long as a few elderly folks were struggling with the machines and took their time. Then, it turned out the machines had turned to malfunctioning and an expert had to be called. The facility ended up closing its doors for the day, as a team of what looked to be ten men were busy resolving technological problems.

Making life easier isn’t easy. Making it automatic is impossible.

The envisioned selfdriving paradigm will be so logistically complex, there will be so many errors along the way, so much technology and consumer confidence to develop, it will end up employing millions and millions of people - just to result in more time for humans to explore, create and consume even more.

As for what it is that is created; it doesnt matter. Existence is expansive, creative, excessive, it trumped the far more lax option of a zero-sum universe. Anything can be born, as long as it is excessive and makes great demands on its environment. Id est: as long as it values.

[Gamer]

In your scheme, Gamer, it seems like tools fall out of the sky, and like having tools never leads to new requirements, for which even more people have to be employed.

Well, yes. When you consider the tiny fraction of people necessary for the development of tools that benefit billions of people, the tools can be said to essentially fall out of the sky as far as most of us are concerned.

But what’s more worrisome is the second half of what you’re saying; that tools always lead to new requirements. I agree with this assertion, but only to a point. We can’t count on this to be an endless zero sum game, where every new tech demands an equal-sized new crop of employed people to take care of it, maintain it, supply it, distribute it, albeit in different ways. I’m afraid to say that that sense of equilibrium you’re banking on has an expiration date, and we’re approaching it at breakneck speed.

As the products and their functions begin to resemble nature, consider, say the sun rising and setting, or the condensation and evaporation of water, human labor will be taken out of the equation. Stuff will quite literally run itself. This will happen due to a combination of harnessing energy to near 100% efficiency; programmable biology; materials printing; creative AI several magnitudes smarter than humans; nanotech that self-replicates using natural resources as fuel; VR/AR reducing the need for physical resources and living space, and any systems that support travel, place, setting, proximity, material objects, or shared experience, and energy; and I’m sure there are more examples. Think of it as the Wittgenstein’s Ladder of production.

The earth and sun are perpetual motion machines, thus so are the flowers and trees, and so it will be that our machines, too, will soon pick up on these rhythms and begin tapping their feet and dancing along, and when they do, we can sit back and take a breather for a while, for man will no longer earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow.

There will be a time of wonder and awe, poetry and renaissance, but soon, all the world’s conscious masters will arrive at the pickled and jaundiced place that only the richest and smartest go to become anhedonic and eventually flame out. At that point, they will take comfort in love, the last hope of humanity. After all, was Lennon not spot on when he said LOVE is all you need? Of course, he was. But what is love when the vanilla sky smothers your eyeballs and every word or deed you aim toward another human, no matter how well intentioned or refined, no matter how pure – even this beauty I write to you from my heart at this moment – hangs a foul and heavy burden, in comparison to the songs and kisses of the Gods we made?