Homo evolutus

Juan Enrinquez works with Craig Venter. In this talk at TED 2009, he starts off by giving a fairly right-wing assessment of the economic crisis, then moves on to describing the current and near future state of the art in engineering microbes, tissues and robots. The word isn't said, but it's verging on soft take-off Singularity stuff. The cool thing comes in the last third when he draws out the implications. Now, other speakers and writers always cover the last part along the lines of everything will be awesome, without specifying awesome for who. Enriquez states the obvious, unapologetically. One slide in his presentation shows how in our recent evolutionary history is was more common than not for different species of hominid to live at the same time, and he looks forward to next one to share the stage with homo sapiens, homo evolutus - the rich becoming superheroes. It's an interesting talk.

According to Ray Kurzweil, the logarithmic graph of 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. Lists prepared by, among others, Carl Sagan, Paul D. Boyer, Encyclopædia Britannica, American Museum of Natural History and University of Arizona; compiled by Kurzweil.

Wikipedia

Related posts on this site:
Venter speaking at the Long Now, 2008

Singular

No time to check this out at present, but set here for later reference, one of the purposes of this blog being to slowly build up stuff that I can look back at later. So, here's a special edition on the Singularity from the IEEE, which claims to be the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology. If the topic interests you, it looks like there's plenty to enjoy.

Pills to forever

1. Ordinary life is sometimes boring. So what?
2. Eternal life will be as boring or as exciting as you make it.
3. Is being dead more exciting?
4. If eternal life becomes boring, you will have the option of ending it at any time.

Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, quoted on p53 of the worth-a-read Transhumanist FAQ

The above are the pills that Ray Kurzweil [aged 60] takes every day to help ensure that he's around for the Singularity and the concomitant eternal life. The picture and the following quote [from the reporter, not RK] are lifted from a recent Wired profile.

...immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won't die.

I had a post on this while back, when I was just getting into this page, and it includes more color on Kurzweil and praise for the very good post-Singularity sci-fi novel Accelerando, available for free and legal in pdf form at the link. I'm very, very skeptical, but I like the idea, and I like ideas to play with. But all my bets are on getting older and dying, on not having eternity to play in.

To be confirmed

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

What is the Singularity? - Verner Vinge, 1993

You can get the sci-fi novel Accelerando by Charles Stross for free online and have it printed and bound somewhere.

It's an interesting take on the Singularity, in that it goes beyond the idea there's an event horizon which prevents us from speculating what life might be like after things change.

I've read most on the Singularity from one of its boosters, Ray Kurzweil. He has a pdf collection and is optimistic about seeing the Singularity within his lifetime [born 1948], views the event, among other things, as a way of reversing the aging process and avoiding death...

if you're a Baby Boomer with the right fitness plan (for Kurzweil that involves over 200 supplement pills a day plus intravenous treatments once a week), you may just live long enough to live forever. [link]

He has a machine that he says gives him a full workout in four minutes [I'm skeptical], as well as graphs to back up the idea of accelerated development, which look a lot like visualizations of Terrence McKenna's Timewave Zero / increasing novelty, bringing us to the millennial thread running through the Singularity.

Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again. Six months - three months - 1.5 months ... Singularity.
Plug in the numbers for current computing speeds, the current doubling time, and an estimate for the raw processing power of the human brain, and the numbers match in: 2021.

Staring into the Singularity - Elizer Yudkowsky.

Lifted from here

I like the 2001 trip, which is recycled through Accelerando, as the key moment in the acceleration of novelty is a message from aliens that acts as an attractor.


In Accelerando the new humans are outfitted with all kinds of enhancements. They rely on technology like a turtle relies on its shell.

But it doesn't matter. If you have good teeth and good health - following diet, luck and exercise - things can be as good now as they ever have been or will be.

The pleasure of a cat is enough to keep it happy, and what's wrong with being a cat?