@djsumdog @pj@bitcoinhackers.org I actually never read Brave New World. I was thinking more like The Giver which I heard was more like Brave New World for kids. I keep on hearing that we are becoming more like Brave New World than 1984 which makes me more concern.

At least more and more people are waking up to this. They realize that voting is not the answer, but either through grassroots activism like counter-economics or secession. There is hope.

@xianc78 @pj I’ve read both Huxley and Orwell. It’s always a little bit of both. If you’ve played Final Fantasy VII (the original) the President of Shinra’s son said he wasn’t going to rule like his father … his father used money to calm the people, but he intended to just use fear. Fictional stories show us the potential extremes, but reality is somewhere in the center.

secession

The UK left the EU. Poland’s leaders stand strongly in the anti-refugee stance. In the US, blue states have ignored federal laws for years with legalized marijuana. With as weak as Biden is, I think we’ll see red states just openly defy his executive orders. Things will come to a head if and when State legislatures start ignoring federal laws (especially around guns and shutdowns) or State courts rule against SCOTUS.

We have to hope the divorce will be peaceful. Right now a lot of people still believe in 🇺🇸 . There is no real meaningful separatist movement yet. I wouldn’t think there ever would be one, but just look at the current media and federal leadership. There is none of either.

@epic @xianc78 @pj

We’ve got self-driving cars a decade or two before we were supposed to have them

Not. Even. Close. We have adaptive cruise control and lane assist and both make drives more relaxed and can lean to be more carelessness. Actual self driving tech is still 10~15 years away (if it becomes viable at all) and is a huge fucking waste of money. It would literally be cheaper to lay down rail in most minor cities but instead, Elon, Waymo, et. al. will continue to get tax money for their sinking ships of broken technology.

@djsumdog I’m with ya. I was really responding to your artificial womb comments and such talk along with things like exoskeletons, interfacing human minds with computers, biomodifications, etc., all under the umbrella of transhumanism. [1/8] @pj @xianc78

@djsumdog You might probably almost certainly, ok surely, have a shorter term view of the self-driving car estimate. I’m talking about estimates before the extremely and unexpectedly fast advances in processing technology occurred, like from when trying to run Lisp in 64k. We are undoubtedly in a place never imaginable then. How fast was that development until now? Really fast. You’ve still got a young buck like me around who remembers it. Your Not. Even. Close. remark is not even close. No one ever thought technology would be where it is now. [2/8] @pj @xianc78

@djsumdog One problem envisioned with self-driving cars when what we have now was just a pipe dream probably not realizable in our lifetimes was the side of the road. A human can look at that sandy shoulder and determine, if they pull off the road, whether the soil is soft and the car would get stuck or if it was hard and ok to pull off. Can a computer do that yet? Again, not even close. But things never imagined exist now. You can buy a Hummer on which the tires automatically deflate on soft sand and inflate again when back on the road. No one envisioned such things. [3/8] @pj @xianc78

@djsumdog In the same way, transhumanism is not transplanting your brain into a computer like you see in science fiction movies. Changes never imagined have occurred, we have exoskeletons that make feeble or old bodies stronger than humans, people are working on interfacing chips into humans (the opposite of putting humans into chips), advances in surgery and biotechnology not considered by computer geniuses envisioning the future back then. We are definitely further along than we ever thought we’d be. [4/8] @pj @xianc78

@djsumdog When you include rail transit instead of self-driving cars, we’re going off both subjects and up to a higher view. Forget rail transit from that view. Up there, what do you see? You see that farming is not done for the most part by people anymore, manufacturing for the most part is not done by people anymore, things are done by machines now. Know what the KKK used to call black people? Obsolete farm machinery. [5/8] @pj @xianc78

@djsumdog From the 35,000 view, what use do the elites now controlling the world have for you? They don’t need rail transit. They need scant few to operate and repair the machines and a few to do the things not yet automated. They’d rather have the land restored to it’s original glory before the masses built houses and businesses and roads and rail all over it and polluted it. A beautiful world where the whole thing looks like an untouched state park. [6/8] @pj @xianc78

@djsumdog The CCP does horrible things to its people and it kicked off the informational and biological world war we’re in now. Marxism always kills tens of millions. Since the ‘40s (no, I wasn’t around then), they have killed from 80 million to 140 million of their people. They humiliate, control, and abuse their population. The elites have no use for the riff-raff. They put Uyghurs in reeducation camps, work them to death, harvest their organs and sell them on the world market. That’s not fantasy. That’s exactly what they do. When there’s no Free Western Civilization to keep them in check, and people get their cherished Globalism, what do you think will happen to you? Are you one of the very few necessary workers or one of the very few kept for entertainment? [7/8] @pj @xianc78

@djsumdog That’s the 35,000 view. Not rail. Not. Even. Close. Don’t mess with me, man. 😁✌️ [8/8] @pj @xianc78

@epic @pj @xianc78

I generally agree with you points about globalism, the horrors of the CCP and what elites want to implement in order to bring on their new era of control. Powerful people are capable of great atrocities when they see humanity as simply something to be fixed. Good long post. You should start a blog.

I think you’re view on the technology is off though. Yes, we have come a shockingly long way in the past 100 years. From steamship to spaceship; from massive warehouses containing machines with 100M of storage to thousands of times that in a piece of silicon that’s under $200 and available for all to purchase. If trends continue, we should one day hit the accelerando Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about in his science fiction books; where we would go from landing on Mars, to permanent settlements to manned space stations harvesting gas off the atmosphere of Neptune — vast tethers moving ships from one location to another .. all within a 100 year period.

There are of course limits; resource scarcity, population, etc .. we need to get to Mars and survive two generations, before we can start breeding a backup planet for humanity. We need to get at least one asteroid into orbit before we can use space to deal with resource limitations. Will we make it, or somehow hit the great filter that may have collapsed so many civilizations? (We should be inundated with the transmissions of other worlds, long dead, if life in the universe was as prevalent as it is on our planet. We’re not. Is life rare? Are we in a simulation? Who knows.)

When it comes to general purpose A.I, it’s not as simple as a faster computer. Even if we figure out the magic to intelligences and sentience, what if it doesn’t scale. What if you replicate sentient, try to add more compute, and it still can’t multiply 2x2 any faster. I agree more with your cyberpunk vision of the future: machines augmenting our biological selves — what you and others call transhumanism. I see it as a possibility, so long as we don’t hit resource limits, or a great filter.

Back to self driving cars, they’re a hard problem .. an insanely hard problem. Almost all the AI training data that’s been leaked shows company has been fudging the training data itself; attempting to use AI to create it. It’s filled with noise. Most of the algorithms are not as advanced as people think. Most autonomous vehicles are essentially driving on virtual rails. You will almost certainly need general purpose AI, even sentient tech, to be able to deal with driving conditions .. and at that point, Marvin the Robot isn’t going to be happy with all the compute power in the planet, driving fat asses around. In Douglas Adam’s world, it would get depressed. In the James Cameron world, it would get murderous.

Our technology is accelerating, I agree. But biological problems are very difficult. Ierymenko does an amazing job of breaking it down in his paper On the Imminence and Danger of AI.

@djsumdog @pj@bitcoinhackers.org @epic The great filter hypothesis assumes that every habitable world evolves the exact same as we do and follows the exact same or at least similar path as ours. It immediately falls flat when you take in account all the possible biologies and biochemistries such alien life would have.

For example, it's theoretically possible that alien life could breathe methane instead of oxygen (http://arcana.wikidot.com/methane-breathing-life). Given that methane is an organic compound, it's possible that such life wouldn't need to eat food to survive. So, certain societal problems we have here (like scarcity of food) would be non-existent on that world. I bet there would be fewer justifications for war and the increase of power.

@xianc78 @pj @epic I'm not sure if that's a good argument against the great filter.

The great filter; and I guess the Fermi paradox, applies to sentient life. So a better argument against Fermi might be that maybe the majority of sentient comes from insect like species that communicate non-verbally and therefore most sentient life totally skips over the radio era so we wouldn't see their communications.

Also we've barely been in the radio wave era; at least in a way where Earth broadcasts stuff out to space. The majority of our comms go over fiber connections. Even if we don't go extinct for another 100,000, compared to the 13 billions+ years of the universe, that's a small window and the universe is big. Maybe we missed radio waves from other civilizations in the Roman era?

The Fermi Paradox is all about "shouldn't sentient life be as prevalent in the Universe as regular life is here?" You can't take 10 steps here without covering your shoes in thousands of micro organisms. Maybe life is common but sentient life is crazy rare?

The great filter is more about: if sentient life exists and doesn't kill themselves off, shouldn't they eventually be able to colonize space; and over the course of a million years, other solar systems? In the billions of years of this universe, shouldn't there be at least one galactic empire? Once again, life could be rare, or all sentient species die off before they find ways out of their solar system (or it's just way too difficult, even with millions of years to do so, to get to another system).

@djsumdog This One to DJ

Whew! You’ve worn me out, dj! You’re more well-read than I and I don’t know the names you refer to in your post. I went to the two links and read the articles so I could respond.

The articles seemed disjointed and badly formatted and very windy for writing someone’s going to put on a blog as a finished product. I’m sure this is my fault. I’m used to just reading news articles and books by writers, not in-depth studies written by computer experts who aren’t writers. I’m a simple man. Those read more like my Fediverse posts for the last 2-3 days.

I was so pleased when I then clicked on BattlePenguin and discovered interesting concise writing from a writer and without diversions to other articles it would take me a month to understand, along with a pleasant easy-to-read format obviously made by a web designer. I was just too burned out after the other articles to read more than the lead-ins. [1/2]

@djsumdog The Real Response

As far as the world being a simulation, we’re sort of in one. That’s one way to look at what the world is. A little off but a way to describe it in a phrase. The first in the series of The Matrix movies was about religion, not technology.

As far as self-driving cars are concerned, I understand what you’re saying. I think they’re far further along than ever imagined but agree they’re only capable of navigation on specific types of streets and you say they’re barely able to do that. Got it.

This makes the multiple videos I saw of people napping while the car drove them down the road even scarier than when I saw them on birdsite!😀 [2/2] @pj @xianc78