20.7.2010
Terrible future of post-humans: I just read today that the OMS is happy that we are now treating 5 million people with AIDS. Indeed, these are great news... but the AIDS is not really cured, in fact these drugs make people able to survive the disease, able to live with it; but this means, from the perspective of the virus, that its host does not die, and so that it gains time and opportunities to spread. So, let's indulge ourselves on a dystopian dream, an epoch when all humanity will live with AIDS, but well and going - as long as you have your daily cocktail of complex drugs... Basic needs existed beforehand (water, food, etc), so this medication would be just a new "essential" nutriment after all. That would be okay perhaps, until we remember that these drugs are not found in nature, nor can them be prepared on your kitchen. We will depend on bio-technologies in a manner that will make us very fragile. It is quite different to have an electricity shortage (and miss your favorite TV program) than to have shortage on say, oxygen...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

12.9.2008 - Being an afterthought

From time to time, we are all (philosophical?) zombies! In fact, we are most of the time consciousless: most of what we do, we just do without really being aware of. Why then it looks like to ourselves as if we "are" there all the time? well, perhaps for the same reason that, at any time, it looks like to us that we are "seeing a perfectly detailed and total" image of the world with our eyes: because the potentiality of eliciting consciousness is there at any time: we can "switch" at any time a routine of "self awareness" so as to describe (to ourselves and to others) our current experience - but this does not mean that this routine is always on - nor that it need to be for us to "function" efficiently. We are not continuously scanning our actions, or at least not all the time with the same level of self-attention. Internal or external stimuli can switch this process on and off (cf. attentional self-less concept proposed in my boxedEg
Read more

Reinforcement Learning and the Ergodic Principle across the Multiverses

How we improve a chatbot today? instead of creating a model of the mind, just use the universe to test the answers: the reaction of one person, a thousand, a million.. that’s how a reinforcement learning chatbot would learn today. Now, let’s apply the ergodic principle. Suppose that instead of learning over time , you learn over zillions of simultaneous trials. Now suppose on top of that, that you can try an answer not over a million, not over a googolplex of people, but on an infinity of individuals. All the individuals that compose the multiverse.  Suppose that the chatbot don’t even CARE about the “meaning” of the conversation, but instead of making the person smile, and be happy, and think the chatbot is intelligent - and not only right after its answer, but on all the multiverses that emerge from that interaction (perhaps also towards the past.. but I digress).  The point is: meaning may emerge by a blind measure of a single quantity , the purpose of the conversatio
Read more

Real or Virtual Matter - or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Matrix

Image
On the way to the Space Elevator, an improbable view pop ups through the hyperloop oval window. It is the fleeting mirage of a floating ocean - or a gargantuan aquarium - stealing an entire city block. For a fraction of a second I can hear it, smell it, taste it... that is, I feel the seashore with all my senses. It was late afternoon, and a kaleidoscopic (virtually out-of-this-world) sunset had transfixed me, so it takes me a moment to realize that such experience was anything but real. These were not whales, dolphins and fish - just holographic projections rendered in a carefully crafted simulation (kids these days probably don’t mind the distinction; I guess I am too old not to feel cheated).  Dancing voxels of light: not a single flying fish. A short multimedia choreography took my senses by surprise, prompting that primitive part of my brain always eager to believe. These were fish - these were somehow fish - claims an inner voice rapidly gaining ground in my mind [1]. The
Read more