
About Tomorrow - acsillag
http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/140676/about-tomorrow/
======
bdushabfjjsh
How about a more descriptive title?

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exratione
Worrying about lack of variability in the human condition, as the author does
here, seems like a strange fear in the face of the future ability to edit,
copy, and amend the function of the mind. Once human minds are emulated, those
capabilities follow, and emulation should happen fairly rapidly after the
computing power to do it emerges, since there are already well established
research establishments working on the predecessor simulations.

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

"The pace of progress today bumps up against the limits imposed by
organization of efforts, in that it takes a few years for humans to digest new
information, talk to one another about it, decide on a course of action,
gather together a group, raise funds, and start working. There is no necessary
reason for any of these parts of the process to take more than a few seconds,
however: consider a world in which human minds run far faster, because they
run on something other than biological neurons, because they run hundreds of
distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously, and because they are
augmented by forms of artificial intelligence that take on some of the
cognitive load for task assignment and decision making.

"It is, frankly, hard to even speculate about the potential forms taken by
society in such an environment. Technology clearly drives human organizational
strategies and struggles, for all that the minds of prehistory, of Ur, and of
our modern times are all the same. In the past, evolution of society was
largely shaped by the ability to communicate over distances and by the size of
the population. In the future it will be shaped to a far greater extent by the
way in which intelligences think and feel, and the way in which their minds
depart from the present standard for human nature. We struggle to model human
action in the broadest sense of economic studies, and I suspect that this will
be true for any society of minds, no matter how capable they are. The
complexity of the group always exceeds the capabilities of any individual or
research effort within that group. We can do little more than point out
incentives and suggest trends that are likely to emerge from those
incentives."

For my money, the greater fears lie in what factions of humanity and its
descendants might choose to do about pleasure and suffering, when handed the
controls over the box.

[https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-
imperative-...](https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-
followed-to-the-ends-of-paradise-engineering/)

"Altering the operation of our brains to induce pleasure without the need to
undertake as much work was a fairly early innovation - see alchohol, etc. The
point of much of technological progress is to achieve better results with less
effort. The logical end of that line is wireheading or a life science
equivalent yet to be designed: an augmentation in the brain, a button that you
push, and the system causes you to feel pleasure whenever you want. There are
numerous other alternatives in the same technological genre that seem
plausible, such as always-on happiness, regardless of circumstances. This sort
of thing makes many people nervous, and, sadly, rarely for useful reasons.
That said, I suspect that even the most self-controlled of individuals has
sufficient self-doubt to be wary of the advent of implementations of
wireheading that might be, say, a hundred times better, cheaper, and safer
than today's most influential mood-altering drugs.

"To my eyes this is actually the less interesting and less consequential of
the two sides of the hedonistic imperative. It is the elimination of
suffering, not the gaining of pleasure, that, when taken to its conclusions,
will lead to a world and a humanity changed so radically as to be near
unrecognizable."

~~~
xaedes
" a world in which human minds run far faster, because they run on something
other than biological neurons, because they run hundreds of distinct streams
of consciousness simultaneously, and because they are augmented by forms of
artificial intelligence that take on some of the cognitive load for task
assignment and decision making."

Isn't that what is happening right now with the internet? "human minds" would
then be social circles or any other groups of entities. Powered by biological
neurons, by regulations, by software, by hardware, by all of them together.
Running "hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously" inside
the human participants' skulls and, lets define it broad, other kinds of
'consciousness' inside of software and hardware. It's just a zoomed out view.

------
dredmorbius
Could we have an ever-so-slightly less clickbaity title?

I realise it's the source article's title, that's not the point.

I'll suggest the author's own book title as a reasonable alternative: "Brain
and Culture; Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change"

@dang?

~~~
dang
I don't think this title is clickbait. It's true that it doesn't spell
everything out, but HN has a tradition of allowing such titles as long as the
submission delivers the goods in terms of substantiveness. I haven't read this
article so am not sure if it's good, but at least it isn't obviously lame,
which is the real clickbait scourge.

We don't want every title to be like that, of course, but it's good for HN's
front page not to be trivially grokkable. It makes readers work a little, and
that's a good thing. It's like dietary fiber.

~~~
dredmorbius
The article itself, the site it's from, and even the wikipedia article which
... fairly successfully fails to provide any relevant information ... are all
a hot mess.

The article is the draft of something which might be vaguely interesting, and
raises a few points (some of which are on topics of interest to me -- the
sudden influx of wealth, transportation, and Westernisation to the Arabian
peninsula, for example).

But muddy as hell.

~~~
landon32
I disagree that it's clickbait Might have some silly opinions toward the end,
but I think the summary and analysis in the first half-2/3s is nice.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm not arguing that the _article_ is clickbait, only that it's largely
incoherent.

The site as a whole reflects the same problem.

