I agree, though I think it is more likely that stem cells can be used to make small biological neural blobs that connect to a silicon chip, such as is being done with rat neurons at Georgia Institute of Technology. Probable applications are, of course, curing Parkinson’s disease. Possible applications are…well, you’ve all seen Matrix, right?Here. I don’t like Kurzweil, but I agree that the potential is profound. I’m just not going to build my life around the expectation that flying cars or intelligent computers will exist by January 1, 2030. I’m not going to join the cult and wear robes while chanting “2030, 2030”
Policing and safety is going to be a problem assuming any sort of high technology. The hypothetical dedicated policing entities would need to be designed by the most competent posthuman entities available. These defences are sometimes called Blue Goo but need to be frighteningly powerful. So I agree with you.
This is certainly one option, another similar option being memetic engineering, using posthuman persuasive techniques to achieve the required consensus.
Some may believe that this will be necessarily bad, or evil, but the most efficient strategy would be surely to maximise benefit for the society and the individual without despotism.
This group mind scenario is one possibility, as is the possibility of single gigantic monolithic intelligent entities. Each may occupy a gigantic Dyson sphere or Matrioshka Brain but there is also much potential for diverse societies and worlds beyond our imaginings including societies we might recognise and appreciate – and believe me, I have been trying to imagine this stuff.
Oh joy, wouldn’t this all be so much fun. I’ll take my eternal reward, aisle 3, pelase.
For dramatic and fictional purposes I assume that bad things will still happen.
heh heh
Some dedicated Transhumanists may disagree, and expect every thing to be happy ever after, however that doesn’t make for dramatic tension.
Have you read Greg Egan’s Learning to be me?
Yes, Egan is very smart.
Things to do if you sucessfully upload by this neuron replacement method…
copy your entire database, once, twice, a million times, and send copies off in spaceships around the galaxy (when you meet up again you can have a ‘far edge party’).
or inhabit a virtual world of your own design, meeting other virtual people and having apparently real interactions with them (‘the tailor-made Matrix’).
Increase the processing power and memory available to yourself and become a superhuman computer entity.
Adjust, augment, remove any portion of your personality, add portions of other peoples identity and become a composite entity.
Build a biological robot, or a mechanical one, and live among the unsuspecting meatheads.
And perhaps- transmit your entire database via interstellar commlaser to a nearby star system and do all these things over again.
I don’t bother myself too much with continuity of identity in these rabid imaginings because every night we go to sleep, and wake up to a new day…
after a discontinuity that is more disorienting than being a virtual person coming back on line after a few days in powersave mode.
Come on, Bosda, you’ve been around long enough to know better.
Your post would have been much better directed to IMHO or even MPSIMS with a link to the old thread.
This zombie is closed.
Moderator’s Note: Since this thread is over three years old, I’m going to go ahead and close it; if anyone wants to discuss issues relating to the future of human evolution, feel free to start a new thread (and link to this or other old threads as desired).