Posted on 03/06/2015 8:24:44 AM PST by C19fan
Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening beyond that.
(Excerpt) Read more at edge.org ...
Never to be rid of the likes of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, ...
Oh, brave new world!
In the US, we’re already close to a 70/30 society, more or less. It doesn’t feel very utopian.
I don’t have any reason God will allow ensoulment of silicon.
It would be cold comfort to be told that I had somehow been duplicated in ROM, and now I can be put to death in the flesh because I live in silicon. I’d say wait a minute, at best you’ve cyber twinned me. You have NOT made me immortal, I am still who I am.
Genesis 3:4
The serpent said to the woman, “Surely you will not die”
More dystopian or cacotopian.
The weirdest thing is people who would buy the idea that silicon can afford this capability. Transmigration of souls into silicon would first be required.
It’s all fun and games until the Blue Screen comes up.
Why is carbon more soulful than silicon?
Because of its very carbonness.
Some time in the future a company starts advertising that for X dollars they will transfer your consciousness into a robot. Would you do it? Would they be transferring you consciousness into a robot or would they instead be just killing you off and creating a conscious-less robot that acted like you ... except for that part of you that might one day rise up against the government?
Even if it could be shown that the conscious “you” follows the transfer of your carbon-based body to silicon, this is still not living forever.
For instance, if man doesn’t explore off this rock, in a few billion years, the earth will be destroyed, along with the silicon “you”. If man does, then the silicon “you” will then face the experience the “heat death” of the universe where no useable energy can be extracted, or the collapse of the universe back on itself, destroying everything.
So all these folks are promising is extending life a few orders of magnitude, but eventually, death will occur.
Pareto rules again.
But the 80% will elect politicians who must decide how much to confiscate from the 20%, whilst not not destroying them.
Until a politician comes along and pushes confiscation over the point of no return.
Who are you kidding?! We have always been in that situation.
No one has ever had any idea what the next 40 or 50 years would bring.
Even when individuals predicted some technological advancement like nuclear power they missed many other major breakthroughs and pretty much missed the impact on society of they the innovation foresaw.
No one knows from where the thunder comes.
Only if the government of the United States continues on the path it is currently on which is to say the path of more government control of the economy and placing more controls on the creative and industrial might of the American people.
There is no way that a communist state that is China can compete with a capitalist behemoth that is the United States even with a population that is 10 times as large.
read later
Hear, hear!
These unique conditions may not repeat themselves in the 21st century, so you should broaden your thinking, and you should take into consideration the possibility that medicine in the 21st century will be elitist, and that you will see growing gaps because of that, biological gaps between rich and poor and between different countries.
And you cannot just trust a process of trickling down to solve this problem.
The reason that medicine in the 20th century was egalitarian was CAPITALISM.
Capitalism makes everything less expensive. Innovative things start out expensive because they are new and rare. As demand grows and manufacturing facilities grow to meet demand that new product becomes less expensive to produce. Competing products become available to cash in on the demand for the new product and the new product’s price is driven down.
It is Socialism, Communism and Crony Capitalism (Fascism) that restricts innovation, product development and widening availability of benefits of progress.
This dithering, drooling fool of a socialist doesn’t learn much from history for a historian.
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