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On Being a Skeptical Transhumanist
Mike Treder
Ethical Technology
Posted: Sep 21, 2009
How critical are you of transhumanist assumptions? Are you convinced that uploading human personalities to computers is possible? Do you believe that some people currently preserved cryonically will be successfully revived? Is a technological singularity inevitable?
Not everyone reading this will self-identify as a transhumanist. Not all technoprogressives are transhumanists. In fact, some IEET Fellows do not regard themselves as transhumanists. But most of us here are at least sympathetic to transhumanist positions and aspirations.
Still, there is a big difference between being sympathetic to ideas in general and accepting them wholeheartedly. So, if you are a transhumanist (or even if you’re not), how skeptical or critical are you of its major futurist themes?
We have just posted a new reader poll (see sidebar) asking whether you agree with the following statements:
- By 2100, robots will do nearly all physical work.
- Uploading of human personalities to computer substrates is bound to happen.
- At some point, healthy human lifespans will be extended indefinitely.
- Emerging technologies will produce a post-scarcity economy within 50 years.
- Some people currently preserved cryonically will be revived successfully.
- We or our descendants will colonize the galaxy within a few hundred years.
- AI will be smarter than humans like humans are smarter than goats.
- Human/machine ‘cyborgs’ will be common by the end of this century.
- The first person to live a thousand years has already been born.
- A technological singularity is certain to occur before the middle of this century.
Some of these things may happen and some may not. Which do you think are most likely?
Mike Treder is a former Managing Director of the IEET.
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COMMENTS
Wow… this is a difficult poll
you may be a little over optimistic with most all of these?
do you play poker?
;0]
Ok, there is one here I would bank on.
Some of those items are phrased absurdly: “bound to happen,” “certain to occur.” That sounds like assigning probability 1.
“We or our descendants will colonize the galaxy within a few hundred years.”
This is physically impossible (according to current physical theories) - the galaxy cannot be colonized in less than 30,000 years because of the lightspeed limit.
If our descendants got to the other side of the galaxy in a few hundred years, we would already be able to see them there, because when radiation from their colonization travelled back here at the speed of light, it would arrive before they had left. It is a counter-intuitive principle of Special Relativity that faster than light travel is equivalent to time travel.
Good job, guys, in catching the over-the-topness of some of these statements. You’re using critical reasoning!
@ Roko
Well the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, so even at light speed it would still takehmm, 100,000 years, (so much for ST’s bold 5-year missions). Best begin colonisation a little closer to home, or jump to hyper light speeds. I love your paradox however!! Perhaps we should tell SETI to look for folks waving back at us? (oh look but wait.that’s me!)
Off course Zeno would say that you would never actually get there anyhoo, as you will never be more than half the rest of the distance.
Given, that someone with a bionic ear could be justly classified as human-machine cyborg, I think that particular prediction is a gimme.
I think the other realistic prediction is that human lifespans will eventually be extended indefinitely.
I think if it was physically possible to colonise the galaxy in a few hundred years it would have been done millions of years ago.
I don’t think uploading a human personality into a computer will ever be possible, but I do think it might be possible to slowly replace parts of a human brain over an extended period of time, with the persons consciousness eventually residing in a computer.
I answered “yes” to most questions, but I would have chosen a different wording. It is not about “belief”. As a scientist by training I think all statements are compatible with scientific law, and as an engineer I think there is a good probability most will be actually achieved.
I agree that skepticism is generally a good thing, and that there is a big difference between being sympathetic to ideas in general and accepting them wholeheartedly. The same should apply to skepticism. Some skepticism is good, too much becomes useless fundamentalism.
@Wayne: “I don’t think uploading a human personality into a computer will ever be possible, but I do think it might be possible to slowly replace parts of a human brain over an extended period of time, with the persons consciousness eventually residing in a computer. “
But “the persons consciousness eventually residing in a computer” is the definition of uploading, and what you suggest is one possible way to achieve it.
Grim • New Jersey, USA • Sep 23, 2009
@ Roko:
I think your paradox is a fallacy. I may be mistaken, but I don’t believe that light can travel backwards in time, to a point before it was emitted. When you look into the sky with your fancy telescope, you see the past, not the future.
If someone reached a planet that is 200 light years away 200 years ago, we would see them today. If they reached the planet 200 years from now, the light would reach Earth 400 years from now, not today. I may be misinterpreting what you’re saying, but if the physical laws of our universe worked the way you seem to imply that they do, any sort of travel, at any speed, would be time travel. Not to mention the fact that you would see any and everything in this whacked-out universe as a blur of it’s future positions and physical states. That’s a good reason why light (or anything else, as far as I’m concerned) cannot (or perhaps I should say, “should not”) travel backwards in time.
Modern physics tells us that superluminal speed is unattainable, nevertheless scientists haven’t rejected the idea of the Alcubierre drive. Personally, I think warp drives are far, perhaps centuries or even millennia, beyond our current level of technology and scientific understanding.
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