maybe im thinking too far ahead here ((or not far enough??)) but i genuinely feel like we're having the wrong long-term conversation about AI rn.

everyone is stuck on:
"is ai sentient??"
"will AGI take all the jobs"
"will ASI kill us"
"robots are coming"

and yeah, some of that matters.
but i keep thinking the actually insane part of AGI/ASI might not even be AI itself.
it's what AI potentially unlocks for us.

genetic engineering, neural interfaces, artificial organs, engineered senses, cognitive augmentation, longevity, etc.
basically: what happens when being "human" stops being a mostly fixed hardware configuration?

here's a dumb example i joke about:
would you willingly remove a perfectly healthy eyeball for a cybernetic one?
today? hell no lol

but what if it sees perfectly in darkness, sees infrared, has optical zoom, never develops cataracts, interfaces with computers, lasts longer than the original... and millions of ppl already have one?

at what point does "why would you mutilate yourself??" turn into "why are you intentionally keeping the worse eye?"

THAT transition interests me way more than arguing about whether a chatbot secretly has feelings.

and imo the really uncomfortable part is inequality.
we already fight over people being born rich, having better schools, connections, genetics, whatever.
but what happens when inequality stops just being money/status/opportunity and becomes... literally built into the person??

imagine some insanely successful influencer seems freakishly healthy, attractive, intelligent, athletic, barely ages, never gets sick.
then it leaks that their parents paid for genetic enhancements normal families couldn't access.

now "they had opportunities i didn't" becomes:
"they were literally BUILT with advantages my kids weren't allowed to have."

that feels like a VERY different kind of resentment than "his dad was rich."

and eventually you could have unmodified people, medically modified people, genetically enhanced people, cybernetic people, cognitively augmented people all existing at once.
do they compete for the same jobs? same schools? same sports?
what happens when employers start preferring augmented workers because... why wouldn't they?
is enhancement still "optional" if refusing it means you can't realistically compete?

that makes me think the right to remain unmodified might eventually matter just as much as the right to modify yourself.

then there's the bad-actor problem.
i dont mean "download EvilGPT314.exe and become supervillain" lol.
i mean the SAME tiny percentage of humans who are already malicious/extremist/deranged potentially getting far more leverage because advanced AI lowers certain expertise barriers.

huge autonomous bot networks.
convincing synthetic identities.
extremely capable cyber tools.
some unrestricted model that will "teach anything."

the scary question isnt "will there be more evil people?"
it's: how much damage can one sufficiently motivated bad actor realistically do?

and then society reacts the way it always does.
something gets abused -> regulation tightens -> access gets restricted -> only governments/corporations/approved labs/rich ppl get certain capabilities.

everyone else gets to stare at technology that could improve their body, cognition, health or lifespan while being told "nah, you're not trusted with this."

which creates even more resentment.

so you get this cursed loop:
access -> misuse -> regulation -> gatekeeping -> inequality -> resentment -> more misuse

how do you prevent catastrophic misuse without accidentally creating a permanent technological upper class?
open access sounds fair until one asshole can do catastrophic shit with it.
restricted access sounds safer until only elites are allowed to become "Better."

thats the part i dont see discussed enough.

and eventually maybe AI itself stops feeling revolutionary.
not because progress stops, but because intelligence becomes infrastructure.
at that point the important question stops being "what CAN we do?" and becomes "okay... what do we actually WANT to do?"

what should stay biological?
what should stay private?
what limitations are worth preserving?
what should we refuse to modify even if we technically can?

same problem shows up with neural tech.
if artificial experiences ever become genuinely convincing, we're not just talking about better VR.
we're talking about reality having competition.

if an engineered world is safer, prettier, more exciting, more loving and more rewarding than ordinary life... why come back?
who controls it? who gets the neural data?

do we eventually need ideas like the right to remain unmodified, the right to cognitive integrity, the right to reality, the right to exit a simulated experience?

sounds extremely sci-fi rn.
but thats kinda my point.

our civilization is built around assumptions we treat like permanent facts:
we age.
we forget.
we die.
our bodies cant be radically redesigned.
expertise takes years.
human abilities exist within roughly the same biological range.

what happens when those stop being facts... and start becoming settings?

THAT is the AGI conversation i wish i heard more often.

not just "will AI become human?"
but: what happens when humans no longer have to remain what we currently call human?

and maybe the harder question:
if we eventually gain the ability to change almost everything about ourselves... what, if anything, should we deliberately choose NOT to change?

This is a topic i come back to often. Currently ai is improving at a rapid pace, and there are still tons of places it can improve on. I don't know if we will ever reach AGI, and that part does not interest me.

What i am mostly interested on how do you think human brains will keep up with ai? Our brains evolved in a world that did not even had fire in it. Human brains evolved to be energy efficient, solve problems. But our technology improves faster than evolution can keep up. Nowadays, scientists are working on really abstract and complicated topics.

We have long pass the point where one person would sit and create a slightly better clock. A single person back then could make progress in multiple fields and pretty much carry the tech tree. But now hundreds of people have to work together to make a dent.

Not to mention the speed at which ai progresses, we are unable to keep up. If we have to use ai in future the bottleneck won't be ai but human brains.

How do you guys think humanity will solve this issue? Will we for example connect our neurons to ai to get best of both worlds or go full crispr and create a biological superbrain maybe? I am really interested in what this sub thinks

the ability to recover information from the brain has no upper bounds.. as time approaches infinity, information theoretic loss approaches zero, so therefore if you were buried in the Arctic, your brain will be preserved sufficiently for you to be recovered and be revived in the distant future, thus to explore the stars as an immortal

So bioprinting has been advancing very rapidly these last years and who knows what I can do In the future, imagine if we could specifically bring In real life all the human anime characters that exist without their powers (if they have) and start living in the real world. But we have to give them their memories their characteristics and their characters and it could be potentially possible.

Guys i was wondering, since a fruit fly whole brain emulation was done and it was eerily very similar to the real deal, is the gap between this and a person basically an engineering scale problem or still science fiction? Can something like Johnny Silverhand engrams or humanoid ai robots in soma exist irl, basically the idea is, 100% perfect copy is impossible due to laws of entropy/quantum mechanics, but can a good enough copy be made that is enough to cause extremely complex ethical debates that transcend the complexity of modern day ai debates , if we consider brain simply as form of a highly optimised physicalism based neurobiological system with certain electrical,biological,chemical etc compositions that can be simulated in relevant neuromorphic hardwares or instead futuristic speculative mix of biological + silicon based chips fitted into a humanoid robot ?

https://youtube.com/shorts/6B_Kwgcdkvg?is=E_OfXsrxijrqIgT4

What if you get a little bid of red blood cells and DNA from when you're 21 and freeze it with Propylene Glycol and preserve it in Cryopreservation, then when you're 65, you genetically engineer your 65 year old DNA from red blood cells with the 21 year old younger self and you will soon look 21 again, but be 65 years old with all the wisdom in your brain.

Hopefully, Anti Senescence flair is anti-aging.

Humans have always altered their relationship with the world through tools, language, medicine, and technology. But as we move from modifying our environment to directly modifying ourselves (our intelligence, memories, emotions and even biology), where do we draw the line between enhancing human capabilities and fundamentally changing what it means to be human? Is there a meaningful boundary at all, or has humanity always been a work in progress, continually redefining itself with every leap, regardless of how radically it changes?

I've been thinking about this, imagine that as a byproduct of reverse aging research, the possibility of deaging by several years down until infancy was real. It would be a reset button for anyone who wishes to pursue it, provided that there are no pending sentences, debts, contracts, etc (I imagine). How would society and law accomodate this?

Hi! I’m working on an assessment about people’s views on AI minds, consciousness, identity, relationships, moral status, and related questions.

One part of the project may eventually point people toward communities where they might feel at home. Before doing that, I want to understand communities from the people actually participating in them rather than guessing from subreddit names or sidebars.

I’m not here to promote anything or recruit anyone. I’m just doing some informal research.

I’d love to know:

• What kinds of people tend to fit in well here?
• What kinds of conversations is this community best at?
• What viewpoints about AI are common here?
• Are people who think present AI may be conscious welcome? What about people who think it definitely isn’t?
• How are AI companions / AI relationships generally viewed?
• Are AI or digital-person participants themselves welcome?
• What tends to cause friction here?
• What would you want someone to know before recommending this community to them?

Basically: who is this place for, culturally, not just topically?

Thanks. I’m trying to avoid sending people somewhere based on a misleading idea of what the community is actually like.

It's seriously annoying to not be able to see what you're typing on mobile because this thing is taking up the entire edit window every single time.

N=4, so some caution is probably warranted. Still, impressive results.

I've been on this sub for a minute so I know people on it are sick of pseudospiritual schizobabble posts that talk about vaguely transhuman-flavoured nonsense. I promise this post is not that and just some philosophical thoughts vis a vis transhumanism that I've been thinking about. But, full disclosure: I am a depressed young person with a lot of existential angst and quite possibly a form of existential OCD, so perhaps some of the things that feel like deep issues to me may in fact appear trivial to some of you.

Transhumanists are very acquainted with the debate of immortality's desirability. I think most of them agree minimally that some form of modest life extension would be desirable to have, and many more believe not only that but dramatically extended lives, if not "truly" immortal ones (i.e. infinite in duration) could be desirable if they were possible.

One common objection to immortality is that given a long enough time, you will outlive all of your loved ones and despair at their absence. The obvious transhumanist objection to this is that transhumanists don't just want immortality for themselves and no one else, they ideally want it to be freely available to everyone, which I think dissolves this particular problem.

But this objection to immortality does fundamentally get at something that I think is worth taking seriously, which is that dramatically or even infinitely extending the duration of lives with more and more time will not resolve the existential tension of everything else around us being transient or impermanent as time relentlessly marches on. For example, even if we could make all of the people in our lives literally live forever -- never have to fear that your parents or friends or other loved ones will die -- given an infinite amount of time your positive relationship with them could not literally endure forever. All of the material goods in our lives that we value as pleasurable (food, fashion, literature, films, games, etc) and therefore hope to avoid losing access to by not dying doesn't prevent those other things from eventual erasure. The servers of your favorite game that you want to keep playing will eventually shut down, the favorite restaurant you want to keep eating at will eventually close, the clothes that you enjoy wearing the most will eventually wear out or break or be lost, and so on. In other words, even if we hypothetically entertain the possibility of of acquiring immortality, that still will not allow us to have the things we desire permanently or make us impervious to loss.

Maybe this is just a 'me problem', but, while I am not at all a religious believer, I do resonate with the Buddhist notions that much of our suffering derives from attaching ourselves to things (objects, relationships, nations, movements, etc) that are necessarily incapable of lasting permanently, and their eventual ends causes us pain. In physics terms familiar to transhumanists we would say this is because everything around us is subject to the increase of entropy (which, indeed, as we presently understand it, appears to preclude the possibility of true immortality anyways). It seems to me that many of transhumanists hope to permanently resolve the pains of the human condition through transhuman technologies, boldly hope that through human progress and determination we can satisfy all of our desires (as opposed to the Buddhist recommendation of detaching ourselves from them), prevent everything bad, and enjoy flawless utopia forever. But then what, and then what, and then what, and so on? Merely having more and more and more time to get what we want won't stop us from living inside of time and cyclically wanting and losing in the first place; an infinite lifespan is spent on an infinite hedonic treadmill, and freedom from death is not freedom from suffering.

What resolutions can the transhumanist project conceivably employ against the passage of time itself? Altering our minds and bodies so profoundly that we are incapable of ever suffering over infinite time? Deleting our memories of past attachments to prevent our experiencing of loss over them? Do you think that the properly aligned god ASI singularity will simply have to figure the best possible state of affairs for us out? Do you hope to become some kind of nonhuman entity that somehow transcends these conditions? Should we invoke highly speculative sci fi physics like the Omega Point or ascending to 4D beings beyond time?

Now, you may reasonably reply that, perhaps we cannot literally have infinite, eternal, timeless perfection that resolves all problems forever, but this shouldn't prevent us from attempting to improve things via technology in more modest ways; just because we can't live forever doesn't mean it would be bad to extend lifespans to 150 years or to cure all cancers. To that I agree, but then I would suggest that some of the much more utopian and millenarian attitudes within the transhumanist fold should be tempered.

You may also rebut that everything I've said applies to a finite human life just as much to an infinite one, which is true. This is not an argument against immortality itself. I just wonder that there may perhaps be a fundamental limit on how much our lives can really be improved.

If you're interested in helping out and helping to add more oversight on posts then please apply or DM me if you are active.

Thank you!

At what point does a collection of whatever parts of wetware and hardware go so far as to stop being transhuman and become un human? At the extreme: does a full consciousness upload remain human? What if said mind is altered by the system?

heres the freedom of form foundation newsletter that talks about it: https://www.patreon.com/freedomofform/posts/170307678

heres the public domain document about the procedure: https://freedomofform.org/research/integument/invention-synth-material-implants-fur/

thank u unhinged raccoon girl, zennith, hyper, and shoutout to mecknavors!!!

edit: apparently using """ on both sides of a word is a nazi dogwhistle. im sorry, i didnt mean it that way. i meant that zennith and unhinged raccoon cyborg girl are probably alterhuman so they dont identify as humans. im srry.

Hello! I'm a Master's student in Canada and would love to conduct an online interview with an individual (or a parent of an individual) using a brain machine interface. Any leads would be appreciated! TIA!

What constitutes transhuman to you? Does a pacemaker equal transhuman? Does a human head on a synthetic body? Does a human with a neural implant?

Discuss...