Showing posts with label singularity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label singularity. Show all posts

Tuesday 28 July 2015

Using people to think will be like using monkeys to test drugs


We are no Lords of Creation, more like grass of the field that caught fire.  When the fuel is gone the fire will disappear.   I see three paths of combustion:  1. The singularity is near  with a hyperbolic transformation of human nature into something other.  2.  We perish from the earth for our sins or some accident from outer space.  3:  The flare-up of consciousness passes from people to AI.   Using people to think will be like using monkeys to test drugs, a cheap work-around until something better composes itself.

Picture billions of humans, sort of the Northern Spotted Owl of tomorrow, not very useful but cheap to leave content in ecological reserves.  Today there’s worry about jobs lost to robots as San Francisco raises the minimum wage to $15 and totally awesome hamburgermachines get invented to compensate.  Tomorrow it will be so cheap to supply basic energy, food and selfies to humans that most people will have no need to work unless they have a spark within.     


Per Ardua Ad Astra will be for the very few.  All progress is self-limiting, coming up with zoning rules, copyrights, review boards and Thou Shalt Nots to keep things just the way they are after I got mine.  With self-driving cars and bicycle helmets,  eco-reserves for minnows and frogs, reflective jackets and dawn-to-dusk parent-patrolled childhood, there will be less challenge and those who survive will be both fit and un-fit.  In other words, evolution is treated like the enemy.   People as we know them are becoming less fit to survive and reproduce though richer and freer than ever before.

What fuel these mortals be.
As a conservative do you protect the fuel or the spark?