no gf we die like gamers
Okay but like seriously I expect double digit % mass defection from being male when transhumanism hits.
In other words, the gamers will realize they were the gfs all along.
Anonymous asked:
xhxhxhx answered:
no person is illegal, anon
In a dystopian future where the government regulates the choice of preferences for new moral agents at time of creation, genderfluid robot Optimum 7 has been declared illegal by the Turing Police. Can she survive the death of her creator, the elusive, elite transhuman Strayan Shtpost Hacker @argumate?
Google DeepMind Films presents…
Sharkpost 7: Parkour Or Die
Pineapple on Pizza Forever
@argumate: wut
Okay, I’m going to break this down seriously.
“no person is illegal” is rhetoric from part of the immigration debate that fails to address the actual arguments of their opposition. (It implies that anti-immigration groups think unauthorized migrants should be executed, when the actual position of anti-immigration groups is that they are trespassing and should be put back where they came from.)
In a dystopian future where the government regulates the choice of preferences for new moral agents at time of creation, genderfluid robot Optimum 7 has been declared illegal by the Turing Police.
However, we are about to enter an era where we will be able to choose the preferences of new persons (to some degree) either through genetic engineering or software engineering. In that case, someone could choose to, say, up their offspring’s chances of sociopathy.
Thus, in the Transhuman Era, some people may be literally illegal.
Some choices of preferences may be banned in a way that applies to their creators acting in ways that violate certain moral norms. For instance, by making fully sapient agents that love the creator and just the creator unconditionally. That isn’t the case here, which I’ll get to later on.
Instead of being an android or gynoid, our robot is genderfluid because the real future is going to be strange, and thus for example, some kind of reconfigurable androgynous mass-produced body may be preferred over a specialized male or female one. The robots themselves may default to a unified base personality upon which masculine or feminine personality templates are applied.
Can she survive the death of her creator
Sadly, you die early on in the movie in order to drive the plot. 😢 😢 😢
the elusive, elite transhuman Strayan Shtpost Hacker Argumate?
In the future, Argumate is literally a cybernetic owl.
the elusive, elite transhuman Strayan Shtpost Hacker @argumate?
In the future, internet meme warfare is dominated by professional shitposters. Ones with infosec/computer skills are among the elite, working for or (presumably in this case) against governments and major corporations.
Google DeepMind Films presents…
The reason this film is so weird is because it was created by artificial neural networks specifically for the viewer, as part of a customized service offered by Google.
Sharkpost 7: Parkour Or Die
Sharkposting must be some kind of meme or slang in the film, or else may refer to a plot element - the Shark Post - from earlier in this series of algorithmically-generated films.
Sharkpost 7: Parkour Or Die
Best guess (87% confidence by Watson™ Dynamicalist™) - the user who generated this movie likes parkour, and it includes a lot of parkour by our gender-ambiguous robot protagonist.
Pineapple on Pizza Forever
The pineapple on pizza discourse has reached its apex, as the anti-pineapple forces have used the heavy hand of the state to prohibit the creation of new people that like putting pineapple on pizza. This is the entire reason the government is hunting down our beloved robot protagonist.
We must preserve the US Second Amendment so that the people will be able to buy the near-military-grade augmentations that make them remain a non-trivial threat.
Like, the obvious question is: will the price you’re willing to pay be a price you can pay? The institutions of society (including authoritarian restrictions on reproduction, if any) are going to be designed for the service of the most powerful, and agelessness will considerably widen the gap between the most and least powerful (a stricter immortality such as through hand-waving “backup” technology is actually even worse).
There’s little reason to think that there is a fundamental physical cost that is highly expensive, like with flying cars.
The rules for agelessness cannot openly be designed so that only the wealthy benefit because people have accepted democratic principles. They’ll revolt if that happens. The powerful will have to make concessions whether they like it or not.
and the “being dead is terrible in principle” element is unconvincing to me simply because we’re all still going to die in an ageless world, or even an “immortal” one, and it’s not at all clear that we’d even die later than we would in this world.
Considering that the world is still getting safer overall, I’m not sure how reasonable that projection really is.
Additionally, postponing death by 10 or 50 or 100 years is still a very big deal, and here you’re treating it like “well you’re still going to die eventually, so it’s irrelevant.” Like another 50 years to know your loved ones or fulfill your potential (with things like art) is irrelevant.
and there’s a good chance that the quality of life we’d have in that world would be drastically worse overall, because society is made for the powerful and on average the powerful now live 100 times longer than everybody else and that will have really significant effects on how society, law, and work are structured.
Your argument hinges on this, but I feel it’s overstated and don’t find it compelling.
How hard would people be willing to fight if they knew it meant a lot more than just their ordinary limited lifespan?
And how do the powerful justify and maintain their power?
Political support for things like basic income are growing. If there is a big wave of mass displacement by automation, I think it will even go through, even though it would have been unthinkable ten years ago. The reason people aren’t thinking about these problems in the mainstream is that the technology doesn’t seem plausible yet. The political landscape will change as it does.
In other words, I expect the boring liberal democracies to essentially remain as such, with some set of politically-palatable compromise solutions. Some of the elites will even believe these solutions are good ideas.
Well yes, the economic argument isn’t the strongest one. The strongest argument is that the alternative is becoming weak, helpless, and mad, followed by literal involuntary permanent nonexistence. There are very few arguments that would convince me that we should not develop immortality technology when I have a metaphorical gun to my head that can only be moved farther back by immortality technology.
You don’t find the economic argument compelling, I don’t find “really, death isn’t that bad” plus all the other arguments compelling. The price I am willing to pay for this technology is very high. My enjoyment of the future beyond the end of my lifespan is literally zero or null if it is not developed.
That price includes authoritarian restrictions on reproduction.
I can on conscious level sort of understand that some people aren’t bothered by the fact that they’re gonna die, and can even sort of understand their reasoning (and I do believe in the right of people to make choices that I consider to be shitty), but on the intuitive level this is just incomprehensible for me. But then I remember that there are plenty of women who don’t just totally buy the idea that only young attractive thin women have value and deserve respect, and everyone else must be constantly shamed into “knowing their place,” but also enthusiastically and aggressively perpetuate it. That is despite the fact they’re basically guaranteed to sooner or later enter the category of people they worthless and deserving shame. And presumably the project of stopping appearance-based shaming or at least changing your own beliefs and finding yourself an accepting community is easier than eradicating death. So defending mortality makes at least as much sense - if not more - than defending old-unattractive-shaming, and evidently people can be extremely enthusiastic about the latter.
I’m definitely in the “death is preferable to no-death” camp, and while I can’t speak for others, I can maybe do a bit to try to explain my own position. The first thing I should emphasize is that “not being bothered by the prospect of your own death" and “in favour of mortality as a thing” are not as tightly coupled as you’re probably supposing. As with many issues, it’s often necessary to separate large-scale social policy from personal interests. It’s also important to distinguish between death by accident, trauma, or illness and death by aging, because they’re very different things. I don’t know anyone who’s against eliminating the former, but a lot of people (including me) are wary of tinkering with senescence. Futurist critics tend to frame this as a kind of superstitious nature worship, a slavish fixation on the moral supremacy of What Is, but I find that dismissal a bit too pat.
(cut bc long)
There’s more to it, but you even if you set aside the fact that not dying is actually very, very valuable, you also have to account for the disadvantages of the current system.
For instance, it is extraordinarily expensive to raise an entire generation of people, during which time they can’t really be part of the workforce without compromising their later effectiveness, have them work for a limited time as their bodies and minds slowly degrade, spend even more money as their bodies start to fall apart all at once, then discard them and bury their bodies.
Then we do it all over again. Only it’s worse, because they have to spend one quarter of their lifespan raising children to keep this going. This not only limits investment in children, but limits time in the workforce.
The stickiness of scientific theories might be related to health degradation and loss of neuroplasticity over time.
As for social change, I’m not sure that more is always better. We’re still wrestling with changes in incentives from the sexual revolution, and while LGBTs are only a small fraction of the population and were never a threat to society to begin with, polygamy has a lot more practical trouble associated with it (like decreases in the psychological health of women and children, and incentives that lead to very early or even child marriage) and is probably next on the Progressive schedule after Transgenderism, even though normalizing polygamy is probably not a good idea. (It’s different when it’s just a few nerds doing it.)
Seriously though it pisses me off immensely that most leftist’s response to the possibility of immortality only for the rich is to oppose immortality rather than to try and make it available for everyone.
Like, what the actual fuck, you’re the left, that is supposed to be your thing, saying you’d rather just ban transhumanism is basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
Immortality for all.
basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
That’s a good point, actually. If you offer people to be Capitalist and have a chance of not dying, or be Communist and have a 100% chance of dying, they’re probably going to pick the former.
Anyhow, the good news is that life extension is probably worth a lot of money for any government that has to pay for healthcare, simply because aging is so ludicrously expensive. If costs $100,000 to delay aging-related care for 10 years, then to a government like that of France’s, it’s worth it to just subsidize it en masse.
The other thing is that it’s not that probable that whatever procedure is needed will be necessarily expensive because of physics, the way rocket launches are. It will probably be able to see large cost-reductions long-term through automation.
You most likely would not be eliminating old age and end-of-life costs but only delaying their onset by X years. And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.
(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)
And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.
That’s assuming the life extension effect doesn’t kick in until the person is already quite old. That probably is not the case, or the life extension mechanism is not likely to be effective at its goal of extending life. It won’t stretch out puberty, either (probably), so that leaves an effect on early and particularly middle adulthood, which are prime earning years.
If you can extend the amount of time that someone is effectively 40 by about a decade, or even just five years, then sure it isn’t as fun as being in one’s 20s, but it still adds plenty of earning potential.
(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)
At first, sure. And the willingness of wealthy tech executives to pay almost any cost for it will fund a lot of the research necessary to make it cheap enough to be more widely available. But while we are on the side of the medical cost curve where medical costs come down from infinity, and therefore costs go up since we start actually paying them rather than dying, there should be a far side of the curve where the costs start going back down again.
We’re growing new organs on laboratory animals, printing new (and functional) organs with 3D printers, and we just got CRISPR. Apparently this year the NHS will be testing some kind of gene therapy on a subset of blind patients. Surgical robots, while not autonomous, are becoming more common. (That’s leaving aside the prosthetic robot arms since those aren’t relevant to aging right now.) Even those immunotherapy drugs are a step up.
On the far side of that curve, the sorts of chronic conditions that cost us so much money are prevented through gene therapy and selective IVF, while tissue engineering replaces organs damaged by disease with natural ones that require no immunosuppressant drugs. Robots decrease the cost of surgery, either by automating part of it or allowing more labor to enter the field from elsewhere in the economy. Critically damaged limbs can be replaced by nervous-system-linked prosthetics (which already exist) produced by highly-automated factories and custom-fit to the patient (factories are getting massive reductions in staff even in places like China), without drastically impacting patient mobility.
Much of the cost is in the research. One can gene mod bacteria to synthesize the desired chemicals, build big heavily-automated factories, that sort of thing.
Many very expensive drugs cater to an illness that is not common in the population. However, the market for life extension is probably at least one quarter of the population in all developed nations, if not much more, and they would be willing to pay an enormous amount of money to have it. That’s a very large number of people to amortize the research cost over.
Now, reading all this, you might say I’m being naive and that it will require personalized interventions for each person, not a nice mass-manufactured one-size-fits-all solution.
But that’s what we have computers and big data for. The market is enormous, and computer power is still increasing, so even if the genes have to be tailored to each specific person, the genetic tailoring can still probably be done by machines.
Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this, and it will remain unreachably expensive forever. However, I think that sort of pessimism on this matter is driven in large part by how unattainable life extension has been for humanity, and all the Deathist myths in our culture that tell us that old age and mortality are really better for us, and that the immortality we crave but cannot have would be terrible. In our myths, it is often associated with vampires and other undead, the temptation that drives sorcerers and other villains to do evil and corrupts their hearts.
In fact, weren’t people joking about Peter Thiel wanting to look into the qualities of young blood? But we can just grow cell cultures, and if it’s something that’s common to all young blood, then that sort of thing would only last for about ten years before they crack the secret of how to do semi-artificially it on an industrial scale.
It seems likely to me that either the rich will have life extension treatment and it will become cheaper over a couple of decades, or that no one will have effective life extension treatment worth more than a few years, and not a stable in-between state where we go for a century with only the wealthy having life extension.
Clearly the interventions won’t be priced in the mid-six-figures on the rare-disease model, but that doesn’t mean that an intervention with everyone as its target market will necessarily be cheap, nor that there’ll be the fundamental willingness to pay for it on a large scale. Right now there are mortality-extending drugs for patient populations in the millions, pricing in the $4K-$6K a year range – that’s rack rate, obviously, much higher than the various sorts of actual rates – and the payor landscape has been extremely resistant, despite not only rigorous clinical evidence and strong medical guidelines recommendations but also great pharmacoeconomics models and strong value propositions across health-systems, hospital, and patient levels. It’s not going to be as simple as demonstrating impressive clinical benefits and rigorously proving cost-effectiveness.
(And I mean I’d really, really like the answer here to be as simple as “well, fucking well charge a bit less and just roll around in a zillion tons of moneys instead of a jillion,” cf: literally everyone. I get that. I spent fifteen years in oncology. I’ve seen some shit. Suffice it to say structural incentives across biopharma and the entire US access landscape are pervasively and fundamentally fucked in that way where you can’t do much more than tinker with any one bit without catastrophic repercussions due to the whole contextual gestalt of it and solving for pricing strategy is a killer of a hard problem.)
As per the rest of your response, of course, there’s always the possibility (necessity) of a lateral and sharply innovative solution.
I actually like your optimism and find it less implausible that outsider/cross-industry thinking could in fact end up generating the way to break the back of what look like intractable problems from here than that the healthcare industry will manage to painfully stepping-stone its own way out of the mess. I’ve been in the industry for a long time (mostly in biopharma rather than devices, which your post is kind of suggesting to me might be part of the problem) and I’m tired and maybe jaded. And personally I might be a little bitter about transhumanism. I’m over forty and feel like even if all of this really truly comes to pass it’s going to be too late for me to benefit, certainly while in my prime, on which I haven’t yet lost my goddamn death-grip [so to speak] thank you very much but the writing would seem to be on the wall even if I’m not yet forced to look that way. It’s hateful tbh.
And personally I might be a little bitter about transhumanism. I’m over forty and feel like even if all of this really truly comes to pass it’s going to be too late for me to benefit, certainly while in my prime, on which I haven’t yet lost my goddamn death-grip [so to speak] thank you very much but the writing would seem to be on the wall even if I’m not yet forced to look that way. It’s hateful tbh.
I’m younger than you are, enough that I may benefit from at least replacement organ technology (probably only 10-20 years out now), if not reach at least the early tiers of life extension or cryo that actually works.
But my parents aren’t. I’m fortunate enough that they’ve made it this far, but I need to start thinking about how they may not be here in 20 years. And that hurts, because I have not yet showed them me being successful. I want them to at least see that, before it’s too late. I’m trying to record some more things, too.
They had me late. On the one hand, that put me perhaps ten years farther into the future, which gives me more of a fighting chance, and allowed me to meet the people and have the experiences that are important to me. On the other hand, I won’t be able to know them as long, and they are good people.
I know you may feel bitter about Transhumanism, because younger generations will benefit more than you will, and younger generations still would benefit more than me.
…but isn’t it better to be one of the last generations than any generation before? Isn’t it better than to be born earlier than this, in the 1700s or the 1800s, or the early 1900s, where the people were recognizable to us, but the only hope was some vague abstract notion that progress would overcome it? Clashing against a seemingly-indestructible monolith of despair.
It’s like knowing a war will end soon, and that even though you won’t make it through to the end, your children will, and after this, they may never have to experience a total war again, not the way you have.
Please, keep fighting, though. At this point, even a few years could make a difference, for both you and for others. Those tech billionaire money spigots are starting to turn. If we can just manage to keep the economy going for another 20 to 30 years, I think we may just make it through to the other side as a species.
Seriously though it pisses me off immensely that most leftist’s response to the possibility of immortality only for the rich is to oppose immortality rather than to try and make it available for everyone.
Like, what the actual fuck, you’re the left, that is supposed to be your thing, saying you’d rather just ban transhumanism is basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
Immortality for all.
basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
That’s a good point, actually. If you offer people to be Capitalist and have a chance of not dying, or be Communist and have a 100% chance of dying, they’re probably going to pick the former.
Anyhow, the good news is that life extension is probably worth a lot of money for any government that has to pay for healthcare, simply because aging is so ludicrously expensive. If costs $100,000 to delay aging-related care for 10 years, then to a government like that of France’s, it’s worth it to just subsidize it en masse.
The other thing is that it’s not that probable that whatever procedure is needed will be necessarily expensive because of physics, the way rocket launches are. It will probably be able to see large cost-reductions long-term through automation.
You most likely would not be eliminating old age and end-of-life costs but only delaying their onset by X years. And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.
(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)
And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.
That’s assuming the life extension effect doesn’t kick in until the person is already quite old. That probably is not the case, or the life extension mechanism is not likely to be effective at its goal of extending life. It won’t stretch out puberty, either (probably), so that leaves an effect on early and particularly middle adulthood, which are prime earning years.
If you can extend the amount of time that someone is effectively 40 by about a decade, or even just five years, then sure it isn’t as fun as being in one’s 20s, but it still adds plenty of earning potential.
(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)
At first, sure. And the willingness of wealthy tech executives to pay almost any cost for it will fund a lot of the research necessary to make it cheap enough to be more widely available. But while we are on the side of the medical cost curve where medical costs come down from infinity, and therefore costs go up since we start actually paying them rather than dying, there should be a far side of the curve where the costs start going back down again.
We’re growing new organs on laboratory animals, printing new (and functional) organs with 3D printers, and we just got CRISPR. Apparently this year the NHS will be testing some kind of gene therapy on a subset of blind patients. Surgical robots, while not autonomous, are becoming more common. (That’s leaving aside the prosthetic robot arms since those aren’t relevant to aging right now.) Even those immunotherapy drugs are a step up.
On the far side of that curve, the sorts of chronic conditions that cost us so much money are prevented through gene therapy and selective IVF, while tissue engineering replaces organs damaged by disease with natural ones that require no immunosuppressant drugs. Robots decrease the cost of surgery, either by automating part of it or allowing more labor to enter the field from elsewhere in the economy. Critically damaged limbs can be replaced by nervous-system-linked prosthetics (which already exist) produced by highly-automated factories and custom-fit to the patient (factories are getting massive reductions in staff even in places like China), without drastically impacting patient mobility.
Much of the cost is in the research. One can gene mod bacteria to synthesize the desired chemicals, build big heavily-automated factories, that sort of thing.
Many very expensive drugs cater to an illness that is not common in the population. However, the market for life extension is probably at least one quarter of the population in all developed nations, if not much more, and they would be willing to pay an enormous amount of money to have it. That’s a very large number of people to amortize the research cost over.
Now, reading all this, you might say I’m being naive and that it will require personalized interventions for each person, not a nice mass-manufactured one-size-fits-all solution.
But that’s what we have computers and big data for. The market is enormous, and computer power is still increasing, so even if the genes have to be tailored to each specific person, the genetic tailoring can still probably be done by machines.
Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this, and it will remain unreachably expensive forever. However, I think that sort of pessimism on this matter is driven in large part by how unattainable life extension has been for humanity, and all the Deathist myths in our culture that tell us that old age and mortality are really better for us, and that the immortality we crave but cannot have would be terrible. In our myths, it is often associated with vampires and other undead, the temptation that drives sorcerers and other villains to do evil and corrupts their hearts.
In fact, weren’t people joking about Peter Thiel wanting to look into the qualities of young blood? But we can just grow cell cultures, and if it’s something that’s common to all young blood, then that sort of thing would only last for about ten years before they crack the secret of how to do semi-artificially it on an industrial scale.
It seems likely to me that either the rich will have life extension treatment and it will become cheaper over a couple of decades, or that no one will have effective life extension treatment worth more than a few years, and not a stable in-between state where we go for a century with only the wealthy having life extension.
Seriously though it pisses me off immensely that most leftist’s response to the possibility of immortality only for the rich is to oppose immortality rather than to try and make it available for everyone.
Like, what the actual fuck, you’re the left, that is supposed to be your thing, saying you’d rather just ban transhumanism is basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
Immortality for all.
basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
That’s a good point, actually. If you offer people to be Capitalist and have a chance of not dying, or be Communist and have a 100% chance of dying, they’re probably going to pick the former.
Anyhow, the good news is that life extension is probably worth a lot of money for any government that has to pay for healthcare, simply because aging is so ludicrously expensive. If costs $100,000 to delay aging-related care for 10 years, then to a government like that of France’s, it’s worth it to just subsidize it en masse.
The other thing is that it’s not that probable that whatever procedure is needed will be necessarily expensive because of physics, the way rocket launches are. It will probably be able to see large cost-reductions long-term through automation.
I’m really, really worried that Peter Thiel’s support for Trump is going to lead to a public backlash against transhumanism, which so far has mostly managed to stay obscure enough to avoid it.
god it would be terrible if they banned our life-extending nanobot cultures-
wait we don’t even have those yet :(
I mean, there is plenty of reason for the Left/SJ to decide that they hate Transhumanism already. Many Transhumanists are white, they’re male, and they live in circumstances that allow them to even think about the future like that in the first place rather than desperately trying to survive until the next day.
And while, hypothetically, the Left/SJ is supposed to respect neurodivergence, in practice they often don’t.
When it comes to left-leaning moral virtue, there are multiple vectors for attack. It’s bound to be somewhat expensive, it will be decried as Ableist, probably those able to afford the first wave will be mostly white, it makes some people just straight-up better than others, it doesn’t truly respect other cultures, the list goes on and on and on.
I give it 50-50 SJ/the Left decides Transhumanism is an Evil Hated Outgroup. The other 50 depends on the Right coming down hard on it so that it gets protected by Leftist contrarianism, like Islam.
