
My strange journey into transhumanism - tim333
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/god-in-the-machine-my-strange-journey-into-transhumanism
======
mavdi
Everyone talks about extending life and eventually becoming immortal, yet no
one asks what happens when we are immortal. What happens when one accumulates
centuries of data and witnesses numerous traumatising events?

I mean I'm 34 and I get ever more paranoid, suspicious and corrupt as I age. I
can't image what 3400 years would do to my head.

~~~
RichardHeart
Summary of pro death arguments re: longevity progress

    
    
      Fairness
        Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)
        Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
    
      Bad for society
        Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
        Run out or resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)
        Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
          Stop having kids
          Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
        Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
    
      Bad for individual
        You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
        You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
        You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
        Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
    

More people make more progress faster. I'm glad my parents didn't decide the
world would be prettier or work better without me in it. Einstein, Bell,
Tesla, Da Vinci etc, still alive and productive would be nice. Many literally
asking for others to die out of their fear. The burden should be higher. Have
courage. If living longer sucks, we'll know 100 years from now, and decide
then. First 220 year old in 2136 unless you know how to make one faster than 1
year per year? And that's if you added 120 years to a 100 year old person
starting TODAY.

Man up, save your family, save yourself.

P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident,
and if the parade of imaginary horribles comes true, even earlier.

~~~
goatlover
You'll likely die of cancer, Alzheimer's or heart disease before 600 anyway.

~~~
jnicholasp
Because a state of medical science which has solved aging will certainly not
have solved cancer, Alzheimers, or heart disease.

~~~
goatlover
You would think so, but it's 2017, and despite all our impressive progress, we
still heavily rely on fossil fuels and have no cure for baldness.

~~~
jnicholasp
> it's 2017, and despite all our impressive progress, we still [haven't solved
> x]

People tend to think that [current year] is super late and advanced in the
history of the world, and seem to infer from that impression that things that
haven't been solved yet are unlikely to be solved. The germ theory of disease
is about 150 years old; practical uses for electricity are just over 100;
powered flight is just over 100; not using horses as primary transportation is
the same; etc. Now is _early_ in the possible history of discovery. There
remain hundreds of thousands of important things we don't understand, or even
know about, yet.

Besides which, we are talking about a hypothetical _future_ in which we _have
solved_ aging; to suppose that future would exist without comparably
revolutionary advances in intimately connected biological problems like cancer
and dementia is odd.

~~~
exergy
I think your line of argument is more odd than his. We've discovered
antibiotics, and promptly created superbugs. We've gotten rid of horses, and
promptly replaced horse poo with PM2.5. We've domesticated plants and animals,
and promptly been rewarded with smaller brains, worse bodies, and mass
extinction of fellow inhabitants of this planet.

If you believe we're doggedly and linearly solving Problems Humanity Faces one
at a time, and that techno-utopia is around the corner, I think that's
mistaken. We continue to remain blind to unforeseen consequences, and it is
unclear to me that we'll figure them all out before we wipe ourselves off of
the face of the earth.

~~~
jnicholasp
My first argument was that, in a hypothetical future world which had solved
aging, it would be likely they would have also solved cancer, dementia, etc.

My second argument was that our current moment in time is not likely to be
near the end of the possible tech tree, that large advances in technical
knowledge and ability are very likely still in front of us, and that therefore
it doesn't make sense to argue that if by now we haven't already solved [x,y]
then we probably never will.

Your argument seems to be that we don't fully understand the unintended
consequences of our inventions, and that there's a distinct possibility that
some of those unintended consequences may cause us to go extinct before we get
smart enough to stop making those kinds of errors.

I agree with that argument. I don't see any conflict between your point and my
point - just between your point and some claim I didn't make about techno-
utopia being just around the corner.

Some kind of "techno-utopia" does seem like a _possible_ future, but not
necessarily a probable one. I don't know if we'll make it there. We're not
reasonable enough, maybe. And one of the ways in which we're unreasonable is
that we tend to read into our opponents' arguments things they didn't say and
impute to them beliefs we don't have evidence that they hold. That isn't
helpful, and on the large scale it's distinctly harmful - it's a major part of
the political polarization and divisiveness that is dragging down our
collective ability to cooperate and come to reasonable compromises.

------
RichardHeart
Transhumanists have a time-frame problem. They're very concerned with the
opportunities and problems of people who are not going to be them. You must
earn the right to be around to face those future challenges. As it stands,
just like nearly all of the futurists of the past, they're dead, they don't
get to see all the robots, flying cars and shiny clothes of 2017.

Build the future you wish to see. Biotech, the life you save may be your own.

If you like nanobots, try your hand at the white blood cell, it's pretty great
at what it does. You'll get farther hacking it, than trying to build your own
nanobot version. Same for trees. Pick up where nature left off. Nature's
already done a pretty great job of it over the very long time it's had.
Imagine the difficulty of building an artificial tree, compared to efficiently
planting more.

~~~
AstralStorm
The problem with the genetic solution of the WBCs is that they are unstable.
There are plenty of cancers and diseases affecting them (including autoimmune)
and the complexity is immense. Immunology is a young science still, and it is
only a small part of the war on aging.

WBCs are grown and raised in a stochastic, vastly imperfect process. It might
be indeed easier to build an equivalent from ground up, similar to how AI
algorithms do not quite copy the neuron. Some are inspired by it, but not a
copy.

If everyone expected results immediately we would be nowhere now. Typically
"normal science" works incrementally with occasional flashes of insight and
paradigm changes.

------
exratione
It is a strange journey that we'll all be going on, just through the
incremental process of desiring and adopting improvements.

[https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-
apot...](https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apotheosis/)

But really, transhumanism is common sense. You see a problem and you fix it.
That inevitably leads to the end of suffering, which requires medical control
of aging, complete control of the biosphere, comprehensive neurotechnology,
and so forth. The only open question is how long it all takes to run through
the development pipeline.

If longevity-assurance technologies existed, everyone would use them as a
matter of course, just like people go to the doctor when they are sick, take
vitamins, and go for flu shots. We're in a strange part of history at the
moment, transitioning from a state of abject technological poverty, unable to
affect our environment, to a state of technological wealth in which all of
these items - aging, intelligence, the human condition - are becoming
malleable. All of the mental and philosophical architecture put in place to
enable people not to go mad in the face of death and limitations will come
crumbling down, but not without a fight.

Humans are nothing if not conservative at root, and all change is fought. Not
an advantage in an age of vastly beneficial change, but it is what it is until
the human mind changes.

------
pmoriarty
This story reminds me of a little-known movie called _The Rapture_.[1] It
lacks the technological spin, but is otherwise also about a lost woman
adopting a strange, cultish faith. Some religious people have taken offense at
its view of Christianity, and it's obviously a low budget movie, so you have
to tolerate some consequences of that, along with a bit of soft-core sex, but
otherwise it's really interesting and definitely a challenging view of
religion.

[1] - [https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-
Rapture/60034962](https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Rapture/60034962)

~~~
scottlegrand2
IMO it's one of those rare movies with an ending that does not let the viewer
down.

------
pmoriarty
_" there has also persisted a tradition of Christians who believed that
humanity could enact the resurrection through science and technology. The
first efforts of this sort were taken up by alchemists."_

There has been some debate about what true goals of the alchemists were, and
whether they were using religious language merely as a veil of indirection and
as protection against the religious intolerance of their time. Some believe
that the alchemists had religious motives, others that they were really after
worldly wealth achieved through chemical means, others that they were after a
psychological transformation.

The entire narrative woven by this story is certainly fascinating, but I am
not persuaded by the thesis that Christians deserve all the credit for the
religious strains in the transhumanist and singulitarian movements. Similar
aspirations are certainly reflected in these movements, but these aspirations
are shared by many religions all over the world.

Even if we limit the focus to just America, where the computer revolution
could be argued to have been born, there are many religious influences outside
of Christianity, such as the attraction to and adoption of Eastern religions
by at least much of the American intelligencia in the 50's, 60's, and 70's
around the dawn of this very computer revolution. Eastern religions have their
own stories of transcendence and of humans essentially becoming gods.

I am also reminded of Eric Voegelin[1], who thought many modern movements,
from Communism to Fascism, were actually gnostic in nature, and sought to
transcend humanity through knowledge. Some have characterized gnostics as a
"Christian sect", but in fact they may have had influences from various
religions and may have predated Christianity.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin)

------
goatlover
This talk of curing aging is curious given that we don't even have a cure for
balding or the common cold yet.

It's nice to dream, but it's in the realm of visiting other star systems at
this point.

~~~
marktangotango
Vernor Vinge had a talk related to what if the singularity doesn't happen, he
said people in that future would call the current era the Age of Failed
Dreams.

------
Mendenhall
I enjoy being mortal, can only suffer the fools for so long.

------
djokkataja
Full-length version: [https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/ghost-in-the-
cloud/](https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/ghost-in-the-cloud/)

------
peterwwillis
This kind of philosophy revolves around a theoretically unlimited supply of
resources, wealth, time, and of course a completely frictionless society.

"Immortality" will eventually be possible in the form of biotech, given enough
time with uninterrupted technological and medical progress. But before that
happens we're going to be torn apart, either by our own humanity (nuclear war,
politics/religion, pollution, overfishing, antibiotic resistance, etc) or
nature (new ice age, giant meteor, etc).

We can't even agree on why _the seas are rising_ , much less decide to do
anything about it. And these people think we're going to evolve? Not if we
drown in ignorance first.

------
meamonb
cool!

