Full-time web dev; JS lover since 2002; CSS fanatic. #CSSIsAwesome
I try to stay up with new web platform features. Web feature you don't understand? Tell me! I'll write an article!
He/him
From a high level, long term perspective, I think this is both exciting and inevitable. I'm personally all about transhumanism (at least under certain interpretations), and this is a pretty cool step.
However from a short term perspective, I'm nervous about this happening under a capitalist system, especially guided by hyper capitalist tech bro Elon Musk, because it basically guarantees that this sort of tech will go first and foremost to the wealthy and already powerful. Let's go full sci-fi for a minute and extrapolate what could happen. Imagining a couple more steps down the capitalist transhumanist path, and sort of thinking big, we could end up with an upper class of near-immortal transhumans and a lower class bound to a mere century of life. You think class mobility is hard now?
While it's true that the ultimate goal of the company is for people like Elon Musk to upgrade their brains it's also meant to lower the barrier of entry to producing these sorts of products so they'll eventually become affordable to the masses. Tesla started by making super high end luxury cars to establish a supply chain that could produce electric cars with the idea that eventually it would be optimized to a consumer vehicle, which is what we're seeing with the Model 3.
Tim Urban has a great illustration of this strategy
Also all of the initial R&D for Neuralink has focused on medical use cases like neuroprosthetics. Obviously since it's ridiculously expensive it's probably still going to go to rich people who have a medical use case. But Elon has been very upfront about the long term goals of the project and the steps he thinks are necessary to get there, and Elon has a long history of being very upfront about these sorts of things.
Full-time web dev; JS lover since 2002; CSS fanatic. #CSSIsAwesome
I try to stay up with new web platform features. Web feature you don't understand? Tell me! I'll write an article!
He/him
Yeah that's all fine for him to talk about, but it's nothing special to Tesla or Musk, it's basically just an illustration of how new technology works in general: it starts expensive and only-for-the-rich and eventually becomes more affordable. I think this model has major problems: it contributes to the continuous upward consolidation of wealth by constantly giving the already-wealthy a head start with new tech, and it typically takes a really long time for tech to become truly universally affordable, i.e. cheap enough for developing markets to take advantage. These problems become exacerbated with a revolutionary technology that starts off very resource intensive and therefore especially expensive, like a lot of the hypothesized transhumanist ideas likely would be, and when they can have such currently unimaginable effects, e.g. kinda-immortality.
Full-time web dev; JS lover since 2002; CSS fanatic. #CSSIsAwesome
I try to stay up with new web platform features. Web feature you don't understand? Tell me! I'll write an article!
He/him
Probably; I haven't seen Altered Carbon, but this is a very old talking point for futurists and transhumanists. In my experience, these sorts of issues tend to lead many people who think about them toward Socialism in the long term.
A closely related topic is post-scarcity economics, a line of thought that wonders how Capitalism, an economic system based fundamentally based on demand and competition for scarce resources, would sustain itself in a future world where ubiquitous automation and ever-increasing efficiency have made scarcity (and probably a huge chunk of jobs) largely a thing of the past.
Essentially the whole book/show asks: what if you had the ability to transfer human consciousness? One of the big knock on effects it suggests is the creation of an ultra-wealthy caste of decadent, hedonistic, morally bankrupt immortals ruling at the top of a capitalist, cyberpunk dystopia. They're called Meths, short for Methusela, the oldest person in the Bible. Really good work that is definitely informed by transhumanism and the points you bring up.
Full-time web dev; JS lover since 2002; CSS fanatic. #CSSIsAwesome
I try to stay up with new web platform features. Web feature you don't understand? Tell me! I'll write an article!
He/him
That sounds like an interesting watch(/read). I've definitely heard good things about it, and it's on my list to get to eventually.
This is a tangent, and like, whatever, it's sci-fi, it doesn't have to be super realistic, but IMO there's a problem with the premise of transferring human consciousness. My best guess based on the research I've done on the philosophy and science of mind and consciousness (amateur here, so grains of salt all round, but it's been an area of personal interest for like a decade) is that the "transferring" of consciousness to another body would probably be an illusion, and we'd more likely end up duplicating a consciousness into a new body and destroying the old one. The difference being that the stream of consciousness would not connect; the source person would die from their perspective, and a new person would be created with their memories and such. Same thing that people argue about with Star Trek's transporters.
On post-scarcity: Basically what we do now - we manufacture "work" in the form of tax and insurance corporations, among many many other industries that could be sorted by automation.
Full-time web dev; JS lover since 2002; CSS fanatic. #CSSIsAwesome
I try to stay up with new web platform features. Web feature you don't understand? Tell me! I'll write an article!
He/him
From a high level, long term perspective, I think this is both exciting and inevitable. I'm personally all about transhumanism (at least under certain interpretations), and this is a pretty cool step.
However from a short term perspective, I'm nervous about this happening under a capitalist system, especially guided by hyper capitalist tech bro Elon Musk, because it basically guarantees that this sort of tech will go first and foremost to the wealthy and already powerful. Let's go full sci-fi for a minute and extrapolate what could happen. Imagining a couple more steps down the capitalist transhumanist path, and sort of thinking big, we could end up with an upper class of near-immortal transhumans and a lower class bound to a mere century of life. You think class mobility is hard now?
While it's true that the ultimate goal of the company is for people like Elon Musk to upgrade their brains it's also meant to lower the barrier of entry to producing these sorts of products so they'll eventually become affordable to the masses. Tesla started by making super high end luxury cars to establish a supply chain that could produce electric cars with the idea that eventually it would be optimized to a consumer vehicle, which is what we're seeing with the Model 3.
Tim Urban has a great illustration of this strategy
Also all of the initial R&D for Neuralink has focused on medical use cases like neuroprosthetics. Obviously since it's ridiculously expensive it's probably still going to go to rich people who have a medical use case. But Elon has been very upfront about the long term goals of the project and the steps he thinks are necessary to get there, and Elon has a long history of being very upfront about these sorts of things.
Yeah that's all fine for him to talk about, but it's nothing special to Tesla or Musk, it's basically just an illustration of how new technology works in general: it starts expensive and only-for-the-rich and eventually becomes more affordable. I think this model has major problems: it contributes to the continuous upward consolidation of wealth by constantly giving the already-wealthy a head start with new tech, and it typically takes a really long time for tech to become truly universally affordable, i.e. cheap enough for developing markets to take advantage. These problems become exacerbated with a revolutionary technology that starts off very resource intensive and therefore especially expensive, like a lot of the hypothesized transhumanist ideas likely would be, and when they can have such currently unimaginable effects, e.g. kinda-immortality.
Basically Meths from Altered Carbon.
Probably; I haven't seen Altered Carbon, but this is a very old talking point for futurists and transhumanists. In my experience, these sorts of issues tend to lead many people who think about them toward Socialism in the long term.
A closely related topic is post-scarcity economics, a line of thought that wonders how Capitalism, an economic system based fundamentally based on demand and competition for scarce resources, would sustain itself in a future world where ubiquitous automation and ever-increasing efficiency have made scarcity (and probably a huge chunk of jobs) largely a thing of the past.
Essentially the whole book/show asks: what if you had the ability to transfer human consciousness? One of the big knock on effects it suggests is the creation of an ultra-wealthy caste of decadent, hedonistic, morally bankrupt immortals ruling at the top of a capitalist, cyberpunk dystopia. They're called Meths, short for Methusela, the oldest person in the Bible. Really good work that is definitely informed by transhumanism and the points you bring up.
That sounds like an interesting watch(/read). I've definitely heard good things about it, and it's on my list to get to eventually.
This is a tangent, and like, whatever, it's sci-fi, it doesn't have to be super realistic, but IMO there's a problem with the premise of transferring human consciousness. My best guess based on the research I've done on the philosophy and science of mind and consciousness (amateur here, so grains of salt all round, but it's been an area of personal interest for like a decade) is that the "transferring" of consciousness to another body would probably be an illusion, and we'd more likely end up duplicating a consciousness into a new body and destroying the old one. The difference being that the stream of consciousness would not connect; the source person would die from their perspective, and a new person would be created with their memories and such. Same thing that people argue about with Star Trek's transporters.
On post-scarcity: Basically what we do now - we manufacture "work" in the form of tax and insurance corporations, among many many other industries that could be sorted by automation.
Maybe. I'd hope that the answer would be "Capitalism won't survive."