Transhuman Space 2110, 2130, 2200

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

They're not ridicuous, as there are creatures of earthly biology that apparently do without human-like sleep (sharks, dolphins), imperfect memory (Marilu Henner), and bordeom (sharks again).

One radical/dubious parahuman design that I can see the likes of the Red Duncanites contemplating would incorporate dolphin-style sleeplessness. As I understand it (warning; not an expert; may be laughed off the thread within three posts by an expert), dolphins seem to accomplish this by having large brains, frankly rather inefficient for their size by most mammalian standards, but capable of running something akin to consciousness on half power while the other half does the housekeeping that most mammals do in sleep.

So, steering back somewhere near the thread topic - in 2040, the Duncanites introduce their MEKON-class parahuman template, which toggles between IQ 150 and IQ 80 instead of sleeping. And the last of their transhumanist fans in the inner system listen to the first interviews with a 14-year-old alpha-release MEKON, look at the portrait holos, and say "okay, that's a bit creepy".

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I'm starting to think about a THS campaign to run, someday. But I have this inability to run a setting "straight", I always want to do it differently in some way. An obvious way for THS is to move a little way into the future, and thinking about that led me to an idea about SF in general.

What you expect to happen is biased by your view of what's wrong now.

So I'm interested to know what people think are the problems in 2100 that may yield to socially acceptable technological developments, and if there would be enough motive/budget to attack those problems.

Technological development is always only half the story of events, and sometimes not that much. The feedback flows both ways.

Some things that may lie in the 22nd century for the THS setting:

1. The Duncanites hit the limits of their social arrangements.

The libertarian-anarchic arrangements of the Dunanites work, even given the in-game boost they receive for playability, because their population is both small and culturally homogenous. As their population grows, and vested interests develop, and more power concentrates in conflicting centers, the libertarian paradigm will give over to some more open form of government.

(The Dunancites already have a government, of course, which happens to call itself Avatar Klusterkorp. But that isn't a stable arrangement.)

What will emerge as the government of the Duncanites? That's the interesting question.

2. The social debate about whether the ghost is the original person is likely to be settled, one way or the other. The question is not whether the ghost is the original in objective reality, but what society perceives to be the truth, the resolution will transform the society and have implications for other debates as well.

3. Increasing technological control over the interlocked global ecosystem, weather, etc, will force the emergence of a world government on Earth de facto, even if not du jure. The conflicting interests of the major states on Earth will be resolved one way or another, but how? And by who? Are we talking about Jefferson and Locke, or Bismarck and Caesar?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

They're not ridicuous, as there are creatures of earthly biology that apparently do without human-like sleep (sharks, dolphins), imperfect memory (Marilu Henner), and bordeom (sharks again).

Dolphins still sleep just in a very odd way, one hemisphere at a time, so they can still swim in circles and come up to breathe. It still takes them out of consciousness, so effectively it's the same as normal sleep.

Holy Moly! I had never heard of perfect autobiographical recall that wasn't accompanied by severe O.C.D. I take back my objection on that subject.
Still, I think forgetting is a healthy defense mechanism.

Boredom is a lack of mental stimulation causing stress. Sharks are simple enough that swimming and looking around is using enough of their brain power to stave off boredom, not that we would know.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

...
So, steering back somewhere near the thread topic - in 2040, the Duncanites introduce their MEKON-class parahuman template, which toggles between IQ 150 and IQ 80 instead of sleeping. And the last of their transhumanist fans in the inner system listen to the first interviews with a 14-year-old alpha-release MEKON, look at the portrait holos, and say "okay, that's a bit creepy".

Horses have two types of sleep. The one they need every day, a kind of light sleep, that they can still eat and stand while under. And the more important one, R.E.M., that they must lie down for, but only a couple of hours per week.

Your idea shouldn't be impossible, as real humans can do amazing things while sleepwalking. I've had entire conversations while asleep, and no one noticed. I even apologized for falling asleep while asleep.

[mindstalk]

I hadn't heard of OCD with perfect memory, but Luria's patient S. was described as being very uncreative, IIRC.

If we're not sure why living orgnanisms need sleep, it might be premature to say that SAI won't need something like sleep, whether human-like or via something like hemispheric partial-functioning.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That's what I thought the singularity meant. That everything human from bio-people to "uploaded" people will be vastly outpaced by pure A.I. program entities. What we create will become like gods to that which descends from us.

Vinge's Singularity is at core just the existence of superhuman intelligence -- too smart for the SF author to write about. Even the exponential rise of technology is derivative of that. And Vinge had four pathways: pure AI, brain-computer linkages, brain-brain linked groupminds, and pure biological enhancement via drugs or genes or development. The last shows up in his novel _Tatja Grimm's World_.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Again that assumes sleep, boredom, and imperfect memory are fixable flaws rather than features inherent in earth type biology.
I don't believe that one can "fix" them without so modifying the digital biology as to be easier to just chuck the whole thing and start from scratch.
(This is my grandfather's axe. I've replaced the head twice, and the shaft five times, but it's still the same axe.) To use a metaphor.

If I'm a ghost, then even if it's easier to start from scratch, so what? I don't want to make some scratch SAI, I want me, my personality and memories, to get the benefits of improvement. So I'd opt for modifying my digital biology, because that improves *me*.

Obvious candidate for Singularity-level social change: xoxing becomes accepted. Probably in only place at first, say EU or US due to a court decision or some shift in public opinion.

There's a couple of approaches to thinking about the Singularity. One is to take the more radical ideas seriously, whether to embrace of dismiss them, ideas about hard takeoff and godlike AI taking over the world. The other is to think about more realistic transformative technologies, maybe relabeling it a Cognitive Revolution, and THS is already getting into that, with uploading and SAI; just go further. The ability to design minds, in both capability and in loyalty; the ability to duplicate them. Skilled labor as free software, mass produced Einsteins, immortality of personality and memory, experimenting with new cognitive architectures (what happens if you link two digital brains at a neural level, a la the corpus callosum? Or even two meat brains, via some wireless transmission between implants?)

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by mindstalk

If we're not sure why living orgnanisms need sleep, it might be premature to say that SAI won't need something like sleep, whether human-like or via something like hemispheric partial-functioning.

I won't claim to know what sleep is for, given that the relevant experts still won't say for sure, but I'll stick my neck out far enough to assume that it's about something akin to what computer people will call "housekeeping".

Now, computer design over the last few decades has spent a lot of time, effort, RAM, and cycles hiding housekeeping functions, from the days when my pre-university job was largely about juggling tapes on the 370s at midnight, though hearing that the new minis didn't store files in contiguous bits of the disk because that was more efficient (wuh?), to today when my PC sometimes slows down because it's automatically running some arcane process in background, and I very occasionally remember to run a defrag that the program says isn't actually needed. However, housekeeping is still needed, it's just a bit more hidden. Whether something the size and complexity of a true AI will be able to keep it entirely hidden... Yeah, you tell me.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Dolphins still sleep just in a very odd way, one hemisphere at a time, so they can still swim in circles and come up to breathe. It still takes them out of consciousness, so effectively it's the same as normal sleep.

The was a character, a villain, in Consider Phlebas who had a brain mod that worked that way. Or something like it.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

What will emerge as the government of the Duncanites? That's the interesting question.

Indeed. I think you've identified an issue that I'm going to steer clear of, because I have real difficulty in suspending disbelief in the Duncanite social system working in settlements as large as the ones they canonically have in 2100. I find this less plausible than uploaded minds, for example, and on a level with the rapid terraforming of Mars. This is probably because I'm an urban dweller in a pretty crowded country; I can see it working fine in the Oort, with ships and settlements weeks of travel apart, but not in anything larger than a village.

The social debate about whether the ghost is the original person is likely to be settled, one way or the other. The question is not whether the ghost is the original in objective reality, but what society perceives to be the truth, the resolution will transform the society and have implications for other debates as well.

That, on the other hand, is comparatively easy. It seems pretty clear that fifth wave societies are evolving towards "yes, the upload is the real person". I suspect that the real social conflict may not be AI vs. biolife, but fifth wave vs. the rest.

Increasing technological control over the interlocked global ecosystem, weather, etc, will force the emergence of a world government on Earth de facto, even if not du jure. The conflicting interests of the major states on Earth will be resolved one way or another, but how? And by who?

And there, too many people will vote preservationist for any radical changes to be adopted. I think the solution will be to simulate the climate of the preceding centuries, with fewer and weaker extreme events, predicted well in advance and thus doing minimal economic damage.

[RogerBW]

It seems to me (using John's most recent post to build on top of mine) that the splits may align: Earthbound / biological life / preservationist vs spacefaring / digital life / transhumanist. In spite of all the nanomods that let human bodies survive in space, you still need to cart around an awful lot of life support system to support them, particularly in the long term.

The Martian settlements will certainly maintain some degree of biolife - the hard work's already been done - but I'm unconvinced about the future of biohumanity even on the Moon. A biolife community needs a closed ecosystem, and the ability to make parts to fix the dry tech bits that support it (pumps and door seals and such like); a cyberlife-only community doesn't need the ecosystem at all (though door seals will still be handy to keep the dust out, and it'll perhaps have to minifacture a wider range of spare parts). Given the same number of productive hours, fewer of the cyberlife community's go into keeping itself alive, so it can outcompete the biohumans.

I don't see this turning into a huge war, however. It'll just be a gradual selection pressure, as more and more spacecraft and habitat owners don't want to bother hauling a life-pod around on the offchance a biohuman wants to use it. Eventually, space travel in a bio body will be a pastime of the very rich.

[johndallman]

That's a fairly plausible scenario. There's a problem with its long-term stability in that the teeming masses of Earth are dependent on He3 supplies for the energy to keep their systems running.

They have a vast population to produce ideas and industrial facilities to build them, but there's no obvious reason why they will retain that advantage. Space civilization can create AIs and build more modern industrial facilities.

If Earth's population can be gradually shrunk towards the unsupplemented carrying capacity of the planet, without any major conflicts (bound to be some minor ones) then civilization can embark on another step.