[p2p-research] Thinking about science fiction bias

Thu Oct 1 17:55:27 CEST 2009

I'd be willing to bet a great deal that replicating the brain is less than
50 years away.  I strongly suspect it is less than 20 years away...if I had
to put a date on it...I'd guess by 2025 we will have fully functional
automatic brains not only equivalent to humans in all capacities, but
superior in a great number.

Ryan

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 10:06 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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-- 
Ryan Lanham
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