[p2p-research] Thinking about science fiction bias

Thu Oct 1 05:06:13 CEST 2009

there is of course a p2p aspect to transhumanism, as there is to
everything,  but most of it is fantasy ... artificial intelligence is
hundreds of years away of replicating full human intelligence and may never
be able to approach the embodied relational and emotional intelligence of
related humans ... there is zero evidence that robots could expand life and
intelligence at this point, except as connected depositories and
intermediaries of human intelligence ...(we're doing it already with Hubble
etc...)

so much more interesting, given the present state of affairs, is the
interaction between humans and the parts of intelligence that can be
externalized to machines, and how both create a new type of social organism
... Kevin Kelly has been exploring that frontier with seriousness I believe.

but if you like sf fantasy, as a way to clarify thinking and imagine
possibiIities, as I do, the best treatment of robotic consciousness  and
even mysticism, in my opionion, is to be found in the Neverness trilogy of
David Zindell, in the chapter dealing with the robot planet Namahn,

as for the best linkage between technological promise and down to earth
human politics, Dale Carrico of Amor Mundi is the most sophisticated, and
probably the only one to see through faith-based transhuman  promises ...

Michel

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> So far, Einstein's theories have proved remarkably stable.  There is little
> science since his death over 50 years ago that rattles much of what he said.
>
> One interesting argument Einstein made is that the speed of light is
> effectively the speed limit of the universe.  And so far, that seems to
> hold.  I like pseudo or pop physics discussions.  And while I'm not in any
> way knowledgeable about technical details, I once spent some time
> understanding special relativity and some related topics.  It's the sort of
> thing I'm curious about.  I suspect that is true of most sci-fi writers as
> well.  They think about these things.  So it is interesting to speculate
> about their biases.
>
> I was reading a blog on the new Hubble Space Telescope pictures and saw one
> of a beautiful cloudy galaxy.  I liked it so much I put it on my computer as
> a background photo.  It is clear in this photo that there are many (I
> presume millions if not billions) of stars in this galaxy.  Given the great
> distance between our stars in the Milky Way and Einstein's speed limit, it
> seems unlikely one would move around much.
>
> Now I'm not a religious or even a spiritual person.  I don't believe in
> divinities or anything else that isn't experienced and probed by a
> reasonably broad assortment of curious and skeptical types.  So, I have to
> rule out gods for travelling between the thousands of galaxies that show up
> in the background of my lovely little galactic picture, and I have to rule
> out life as we know it moving about.  But why not extend life?  Life lasting
> millions of years could allow for travel.
>
> Of course the sort of circuitry we have with DNA replication is far too
> breakable to last that long in one consciousness, but a single consciousness
> could exist as a more stable and self-repairing machine.
>
> It's not that great of an insight but it occurred to me that science
> fiction is highly biased toward life as we know it playing a continuing and
> central.  A life of cells and electro-chemical processes.  There is no need
> for life to be that way, and it would seem highly unlikely to be so if we
> ever encountered it outside our own world--save for a few nearby germs and
> simple organisms that might hitch a ride on a comet or in the basins of some
> volcanic moon.  If I encountered an alien, I'd expect him to be the
> combination of a personal factory and robot...not a conventional flesh
> creature at all.
>
> Now I don't live with the sci-fi corpus, so I'm sure there are a thousand
> or more counter-examples to my little attempt at insight.  I'm sure Philip
> K. Dick or someone else wrote ten books on bots as a civilization.  But I
> still think there is a P2P point.
>
> I wonder if we are moving toward being our works.  I wonder if the division
> between transhumanism and P2P is really shrinking--the commons of the future
> is our own robotic consciousness.  If that were they case, the resource
> issues tend to fade away.  We don't need food, sex, water or even light.
> Our modes of energy production and storage could be remarkably simple.
> Personally I like being human, but I don't rule out the fact that a robot
> could enjoy being a robot given sufficient capacity to learn,
> self-replicate, repair and to do things we could likely never do...like
> travel amongst the stars.
>  I've been engaged at some level with AI thinking for a long time.  I
> remember the Vejur (Voyager) star trek movie...all good fun.  But what if we
> simply ruled out the carbon-based forms.  What if the future of a stable and
> healthy planet is the self-replicating machine that doesn't need us or any
> other carbon life form?  Maybe carbon is one way to bootstrap a longer term
> existance.  Maybe it's a booster rocket and the payload runs on a different
> fuel.
> --
> Ryan
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
>

-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20091001/7843c6cc/attachment.html>