Anyway, the question is whether you'd want to live in the past, present or future.
I was looking at some photos from Melbourne in the 1950s - life was so much simpler back then. Less expectations. More affordable. Less crowding. More common sense. Less technology. More time for people.
Today people seem more connected to technology than to other people.
Life seemed a little more "loose" back then, like you could absolutely wing it, and at the end of the day you would still have a chance of being "alright", if you were smart enough. I feel like, at least in most portrayals of a few decades ago, you really had to screw up. Hell, a little earlier and you could totally be a criminal and still run away somewhere.
The future is always appealing to me, but it's kind of a toss up since it hasn't been written. If it's like Futurama it would be pretty amazing; if it were like Elysium I'd be downin' radAway for breakfast everyday when I worked the line.
I think if given the choice, I would say the Future. Just because it's unknown and I wanna see it.
I think humanity has reached the awareness that the Future probably will not contain humans.
At least not as the fleshy bags that we are today..
We are only a little better than the cows that we eat..
Cybernetic organisms or even 1 Unified AI constructed by humans replacing flesh bag progeny is significantly more likely
See, it's all good, to have many multi core processors, but you can only get so big without bandwidth between cores being the bottleneck.
Then eventually, the co-processors required to handle command hierarchy and communications consume all the processing time and resources..
Look at governments, banks and financial institutions, they are such co-processors. they have all the available resources at their finger tip, but they are terribly inefficient at making objective decisions to advance mankind.
That is what human society has been held back on.. The sum of its parts is the next step.. and it can not be done through peace/love/government/capitalism..
We need to upload into a unified machine architecture which is much more compact, less bandwidth locked, has greater and more-durable memory.
I have to disagree. Depending on the scale of time I think the hardiness of biological life in general is significantly more viable than current known and public technology can provide us.
The organisms/biological matter we are comprised of and come from are billions of years old, I mean there's even the idea of panspermia. If you are attached to the idea of life dominated by human bipedals, sure I guess I could buy a more dismal outlook.
We function like a mold now, if conditions are met, we proliferate. However, there are molds/parasites/bacteria that due to their biology can survive extreme biological hostility or universal indifference. Anthrax is one.
On average, I might believe we're worse off than a cow in the wild. However, the right persons might be vastly more prepared to survive long term than a cow as proven by history. After all, they're the ones in the slaughterhouses. Our trappings have to be a little more complex.
The idea of Society is a double-edged sword. It both propels us forward gradually and anchors us to the past. Capitalism/competition is the closest thing to "survival of the fittest" and culling uselessness, however the current reward and desired endgame is short-sighted which stunts progress. Very few people live to advance humanity purposefully through whatever means; culture, technology, quality of life etc. Generally its a hand-held, passive endeavor.
I think an AI or any synthetic organism is doomed without some built in sense of novelty. or human-like conscience/creativity/awareness. Any AI would function like an advanced mold unable to imagine its own advancement. It would consume until there is nothing more, then die or just exist; which in essence is death anyway.
If we DO manage to create an AI that contains that human aspect, or we pass that on to it, I don't see how that's different from evolution in the sense that it's still "human". Sure not your average flesh bag, but more of a "boltsbag". And absolute homogeny among organisms leads to stagnation, then death. Different perspectives are necessary. By having separate AIs you can solve your lack of processing power . And if they were individualized, then again it'd pretty much be humans again.
I think an advanced AI, with all the resources and tools of technology, with the human conscience/creativity aspect would function best in anarchy. There doesn't need to be any command heirarchy on that level, those who proliferate win, those who don't die and are phased out/assimilated.
But then it's just "boltbags" instead of flesh bags again.
Banks and large organizations function well in what they were designed to do. They were designed to be tools, the same will be for AI. It's a tool but until we can replicate the human creativity it will be inferior in terms of survival. In all representations of scifi (as far as I know), in AI vs Humans stories, generally AI/synthlife only has a foot hold because of the tools/resources at their fingertips and the humans struggle because of lack of resources. Should humans and AI stand on equal ground in terms of tools available and resources, the best humans will win.
Look at OpenAI and Dota. The program learned to master the game and challenge the highest top tier players in months I believe. Many people lost to it, however there were winner(s). And playing against this AI, it helped the top tier players learn new techniques which boosted their repertoire of available tools. Advancing the players even further than they could have come up with themselves currently.
At that point and level, humanity's biggest hang up will be believing everyone is necessary.
Depending on your definition of the last sentence, I guess what I'm getting at is that I agree with you haha.
Supposing all that is accomplishable, I think the next war beyond that would be which is superior? Synth life or engineered biological life? Could you imagine that being? Being able to take any traits of any biological lifeform and create an organism out of it.
Then it would be a matter of time before synth life and engi life merged as well, similarly how we would've in that scenario. Ever repeating. solve et coagula
I kind of ranted on, and I keep rereading it to see if it makes sense. I've given up now.
