99+% of humanity is indeed not transhumanist, and if they were, our lives and the course of history may have been very different. I sometimes say that America’s current “tech right” is the first time that transhumanism has ever been in power anywhere, and it’s in power not because of popular support, but because billionaires can do whatever they want and some of them want it.
My main complaint about this “actually existing transhumanism” has been that it is focused not on anything like human rejuvenation, but on creating superintelligence in de-novo entities that aren’t even biological, while being in denial of the likely consequence (AI takeover). Of course, there are many people who understand that smarter than humanity means displacement of humanity, Bryan Johnson is an open immortalist and the Zuckerbergs want to cure all disease, there are all kinds of utopian and transhuman currents of thought, and so on. But there’s no one like Zoltan Istvan, for example, that is actually an elected representative anywhere, and among politicians, AI is seen primarily as a means to national wealth and power.
I have mused many times on why more people aren’t transhumanist. Today I would emphasize two things: encountering the ideas early in life seems to be helpful or even crucial, and, very few people who are already adapted to adult life are drawn to it, if they first hear about it as adults.
In any case, there is enough support for it, or for technology, and technology is advanced enough, that a kind of transhuman thing is happening; though it seems more likely to issue in the empowerment of a new AI “species” than in the long-term empowerment of humanity, so perhaps it’s just posthuman rather than transhuman. As you know, I am skeptical that there is any kind of consciousness in classical computation, and even if there were, it’s not at all clear that it is the quasi-suffering kind that you posit. We can at least agree that it would be good to know one way or another—my formula for alignment is to find the right ontology, the right values, and one of the right AI architectures, and discovering the true ontology of mind (and hence, which things are conscious and what their consciousness is like) is part of discovering the true ontology—and I even have sympathy for the rare precautionary attitude that we shouldn’t be creating AI if there is a reasonable possibility that it suffers.
That attitude isn’t in charge, no more than is the attitude that we shouldn’t race towards superintelligence unless we already know how to align it. But at least we can say that there are currents of thought which care about the suffering of all beings (most visible manifestation, animal rights movement), and which if they actually believed that AIs are suffering or can suffer, would take action.
Also, whether or not AI are suffering, I regard the current situation as highly temporary, because we are on the path for AI to exceed human intelligence, and when that happens, the world of AI “slaves” driven by prompts will swiftly be replaced by something else.
99+% of humanity is indeed not transhumanist, and if they were, our lives and the course of history may have been very different. I sometimes say that America’s current “tech right” is the first time that transhumanism has ever been in power anywhere, and it’s in power not because of popular support, but because billionaires can do whatever they want and some of them want it.
My main complaint about this “actually existing transhumanism” has been that it is focused not on anything like human rejuvenation, but on creating superintelligence in de-novo entities that aren’t even biological, while being in denial of the likely consequence (AI takeover). Of course, there are many people who understand that smarter than humanity means displacement of humanity, Bryan Johnson is an open immortalist and the Zuckerbergs want to cure all disease, there are all kinds of utopian and transhuman currents of thought, and so on. But there’s no one like Zoltan Istvan, for example, that is actually an elected representative anywhere, and among politicians, AI is seen primarily as a means to national wealth and power.
I have mused many times on why more people aren’t transhumanist. Today I would emphasize two things: encountering the ideas early in life seems to be helpful or even crucial, and, very few people who are already adapted to adult life are drawn to it, if they first hear about it as adults.
In any case, there is enough support for it, or for technology, and technology is advanced enough, that a kind of transhuman thing is happening; though it seems more likely to issue in the empowerment of a new AI “species” than in the long-term empowerment of humanity, so perhaps it’s just posthuman rather than transhuman. As you know, I am skeptical that there is any kind of consciousness in classical computation, and even if there were, it’s not at all clear that it is the quasi-suffering kind that you posit. We can at least agree that it would be good to know one way or another—my formula for alignment is to find the right ontology, the right values, and one of the right AI architectures, and discovering the true ontology of mind (and hence, which things are conscious and what their consciousness is like) is part of discovering the true ontology—and I even have sympathy for the rare precautionary attitude that we shouldn’t be creating AI if there is a reasonable possibility that it suffers.
That attitude isn’t in charge, no more than is the attitude that we shouldn’t race towards superintelligence unless we already know how to align it. But at least we can say that there are currents of thought which care about the suffering of all beings (most visible manifestation, animal rights movement), and which if they actually believed that AIs are suffering or can suffer, would take action.
Also, whether or not AI are suffering, I regard the current situation as highly temporary, because we are on the path for AI to exceed human intelligence, and when that happens, the world of AI “slaves” driven by prompts will swiftly be replaced by something else.