Comments on: Katalyst vs. Singularity: a radical exploration into a subject of our times

By: divineadvancedhumanbeings.com

divineadvancedhumanbeings.com — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 02:17:07 +0000

Could you believe it if you were told we are already biological machines have been for millions of years, trying to evolve into human beings (divine human beings)???? Probably not and why do you think that is… how is it that mankind keeps thinking they are the first to think of such things….. could it be self-righteous ego???? And do we think we are the first society to think these things???? Think again….

Evolution from biological machines into human beings…

A bit about consciousness…We humans began life as very sophisticated machines but in the beginning, there was very little on our hard drive. It is experiences from which to choose a right path that evolution waits for us to have, in order to make good choices. A mechanical device follows the path of least resistance. A machine designed to evolve into a human being becomes human when it makes an active choice to follow the path of greatest resistance. Our transition from machine to human is a long drawn out process but we have a lot of time in which to do it. Consciousness is an interactive program. As it accumulates data from which to make choices, we the humans- are evolving. [more…]

http://www.divineadvancedhumanbeings.com/evolution-from-biological-machines-into-human-beings/

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:28:07 +0000

The process of technological advancement is, in my opinion, additive and not something that we will have to fear. There seems to often be a fear associated with all advancement in terms of the new technologies being used for the accession of power or control. Yet – we have seen that technology actually becomes distributed very rapidly – if not instantly. Power seems to be economic and based on access to resources – such as food, water and energy. So the “windows of opportunity” for control of the technology seems to me to be either extremely short, or non-existent.

The other comment I often hear when discussing such things is that we will lose site of who we are and fall into some type of non-reality. My opinion on that is that technology always has a driver – us. We choose what channel to watch: Celebrity Apprentice or the Documentary channel. To that end, we will certainly find many people choosing one over the other, but with hundreds of years to grown and develop – I hope that eventually we will grow to our highest potential, not our lowest.

So I don’t worry about the advent of the new technology, the “ownership” of the technology, the access to the technology, the use of the technology, the loss of self.

What I worry about is living long enough to ensure I can participate. So issues of health, environment, political stability are all very important as we move to the point when they become irrelevant.

By: maicol

maicol — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:53:59 +0000

Hi Jim,I completely udnnrstaed your frustration, you are far from being the only one who has problems with how FB takes liberties with people’s identities.We enable you to define who will be allowed to access your Kitely worlds. The complexity in adding just name and password for login authentication is that an email address by itself does not provide us with enough information to let you define who will be able to access your worlds unless we also add functionality to let you create and manage groups inside Kitely.That is why we intend to first add Twitter as a login alternative to FB. Twitter has no issues with avatar identities and it provides us with information to let you define groups without requiring us to create internal group management functionality.Eventually email/password login will be possible as well but as our development resources are currently very limited we need to focus on solutions that we can implement quickly.I hope you will bear with us until we become usable for your needs.

By: @carver462

@carver462 — Thu, 17 May 2012 02:57:14 +0000

at GatorALLin… Thank you for your response! I think the fact that we do not know some of the basic questions about our existence (who we are, where we are going, etc.) inspires me to question what exactly the very nature of “reality” even is– Timothy Leary suggested that “reality is an opinion” and I think I would have to agree. To your example, if we were born unto a world with the lights off, we might not even be able to acknowledge that that picture of the coke can even exists. We could build extraordinary things in a world of darkness unaware of its existence existence and oblivious to the consequences. I feel that with our limited sensory perception restricting our ability to comprehend the true nature of things, when we meddle with the very fabric of life, nature, etc. we may need to maintain a certain amount of humility when doing so as there is a lot that we understand yet so much that we don’t. Regarding “meaning” I believe that we could get to a point where we would essentially be able to perfectly program consciousness with carefully crafted stimuli– but to what end would that serve? If it were purely for monetary gain I think we would be in trouble… therefore we need to be aware and understand how we affect others, our environment and why we do the things we do rather than a manifest destiny type of pursuit of the unknown. “When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast with a scientific and technological abundance. We’ve learned to fly the air as birds, we’ve learned to swim the seas as fish, yet we haven’t learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.” -MLK Jr.

By: Martin

Martin — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:50:17 +0000

WE are about to become gods, limited only by our imaginations.

By: GatorALLin

GatorALLin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:17:41 +0000

….at Memo889……. I agree that it could be bad if some crazy person gets control of the singularity first and then could abuse that power…. or some company gets ahead of everyone, by a lot (insert google, apple, etc here), but there is nothing really you can do to stop that. Maybe that happens already in a way… Bill Gates and Buffet has more money than some small countries, but lucky for us they gave most of it to charities to help save the world (more than most of us gave to charities combined btw). lets hope skynet is one of the nice guys… Lets race..first one to reach the singularity wins… (maybe everyone wins a better lifestyle or quality of life) If we had all medical problems solved…all energy problems solved and we could live forever… ..maybe then we could populate a few other planets or tackle some really hard problems. I think the odds are in our favor for good things to occur…. if not, then I doubt you or I could stop that anyhow… JustMy2cents..

By: GatorALLin

GatorALLin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:09:35 +0000

….reply to @carver462…. I like the idea that maybe there are no Facts anymore… but rather just personal perception to things… Ok, there are still “facts” but what is more important is what that means to someone and that it is likely not the same thing. Example…Picture of a Coke Can, everyone can agree it is a red can… Detail guy says now it is red and silver… guy who is color blind says it is brown…. guy with the lights off says it is black… or no can…. same starting place, but a dozen realities. If you experience a great altered reality (for you) does that make it real enough?

By: John

John — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:38:40 +0000

memo889, exactly. I constantly have such thoughts too. Changes (especially with true AI coming) are going to be so disruptive, there might be no space for gradual changes. The “winner” takes it all, and that might cost others a lot.

I’d like Ray to address this issue.

By: John Doe

John Doe — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:26:47 +0000

People have a bizarre sense of their own worth when it comes to apocalyptic scenarios.

Everybody may fear the power of an omnipotent AI hypernetworked food processor from cyberhell, but you have to ask yourself what possible use would humans have to such an exquisitely powerful entity?

Biological humans would be like petting zoo animals to this thing. To need to destroy us would be pointless.

By: @carver462

@carver462 — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:38:48 +0000

Very interesting point– however I wonder, what exactly is “real reality?” It seems to me that what Dr. Kurzweil suggests in his first response is that the “virtual” and the “real” are both in fact real realities– if we are able to develop technologies to expand beyond our limited sensory perception, that reality might be as jarring as living outside of the matrix and infinite in depth. Will we even be able to maintain a grasp on a grounded “real reality” as we delve further and further into the rabbit hole especially if things like parallel dimensions exist? Or, in fact, is everything we experience some form of reality? Some individuals liken our technological “progress” to a Tower of Babel of sorts: attempting to reach infinity with a finite amount of resources. Perhaps our current pursuit of “progress” through technology is analogous– and we may be oblivious to the consequences. I’m not sure if compromise in the past justifies our overall pursuit, but I think perhaps we may need to find a balance that is right for our needs. I’d love to hear your thoughts–

By: memo889

memo889 — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:34:35 +0000

What I worry about, and think about often, is the window of time approaching where, potentially, a wealthy individual or group will be able to use this emerging technology for political advantage. I’m not arguing against people being able to make themselves more intelligent. What I’m referring to is the initial stages. I believe whole countries have the potential to be hijacked as this starts out.

By: Dan Robinson

Dan Robinson — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:13:19 +0000

In general, people should ask those who fear future advances how they feel about all the benefits of present technology, and how they think those in the past would have viewed the present. Not that it’s all good, but only on the average. Anyone can, and sometimes will, reject any advance, but will usually see other people moving beyond them. I tend to question quite a few myself, for instance Facebook over email, and pictures or icons over words.

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:31:11 +0000

I didn’t like that last answer. It is a real concern to try to fit the ol’canned replies… if you limit yourself to 100% virtual reality you WILL miss the real reality. On the other hand you could, and should, use that same technology to IMPROVE your senses and know even more about reality. There should be NO compromise here.