Transhumanist hedonism: or, let's party like it's 2099.

What's the point of living longer if you're not having any fun? I wouldn't want to do the same old same old for another 40 years, let alone for the kind of lifespan that de Grey envisions. So, How do we extend the range and depth of the human experience? According to sci-fi canon, futuristic recreation will come along the big three: drugs, sex, and videogames.

But lets go back to the original mythology for a moment: what is heaven like? Not the afterlife that's held out as a reward for the religious faithful; I'm talking about the general concept of an ideal, perfect existence. Transcendental well-being, without bounds.

It seems to me that the traditional Christian version of Heaven is not nearly as well-depicted as the Christian Hell, the fire and brimstone. I can easily imagine an eternity of suffering, but what is the opposite of that? Is it just an eternity of happiness with your family and loved ones?

Don't get me started on the whole 72 virgins thing for Islam; what happens when you run out of virgins?? (Most people don't believe this anyway, like the Christian imagery of clouds and angels and harps.)

A perpetual drug-like high, the kind that's induced by opium or heroin? Everlasting orgasm?

Pure blissful happiness, forever? Wouldn't that get boring? 
 


Here, Picard and Kirk are stuck in the Nexus, which makes real all their dreams and desires. The best starship captain in the galaxy only wants a fancy Christmas dinner with well-dressed children and a carousel? Chopping wood by a mountain cabin? Please. Besides, any place that you wish to leave is inadequate as heaven.

Maybe heaven is conflict? Drama and adventure, battles and challenges, pain and sacrifice, love and loss, defending the galaxy, thrilling in victory, forever striving and achieving?

What do you want in your personal heaven?

Famed transhumanist David Pearce proposes to bring about heaven on Earth using technology, what he calls paradise engineering. First eliminate pain and suffering, then boost our baseline sense of well-being. The possible methods: designer drugs, wireheading, genetic engineering.

It's a noble goal, but like our visions of heaven, it is one-dimensional and incomplete. Transhumanism should aim to expand the scope of human experience, and that does not simply stop at happiness.

So what else is a hedonist to do? Stay tuned!

Green sea slugs and dryads

Here's a fascinating creature: a sea slug that stole the ability of photosynthesis from algae, turning itself into an animal/plant hybrid. Not only does it incorporate chloroplasts (tiny organelles inside plant cells) into its own cells, it has also appropriated the right genes from algae to make the symbiosis work.

Think of the advantages for the slug! A creature that's notorious for being slow and vulnerable now has all the food it can desire, produced right inside its own cells. Free food for life! And all it needs is sunlight.

If you're a transhumanist, you'd be thinking how we can get that ability for ourselves. Imagine: solving world hunger with a vaccine. It's clear to me that world hunger can not be solved by simply giving people food - it's a complex social and economic and political problem. But what if we have the technology to bypass all that mess, and inject the genes into those who are starving, so they and their children would never have to be hungry again?

Of course there would be side effects. Your skin turns green. Wearing clothing will block the sunlight. You'll need more surface area than what your skin can provide to get enough energy - leafy hair should do the trick. So there might be new forms of prejudice. But I think naked green-skinned people with leafy hair would be totally awesome:

Some interesting factoids:

• Most of the population suffering from hunger live near equatorial regions where sunlight is plentiful year-round: India and Africa.
  
• Plants are less efficient than broad spectrum solar panels. In plants, chlorophyll don't absorb green frequency light, instead reflecting it and giving leafs their familiar color. But, whereas solar panels produce electricity, the photosynthesis process in plants produces sugar, which can be used directly by our bodies.
  
• Dryads are creatures in Greek myth, also known as tree nymphs.

Story from:
Leaf-like sea slug feeds on light
PNAS journal article: Horizontal gene transfer of the algal nuclear gene psbO to the photosynthetic sea slug Elysia chlorotica
Picture credit: http://www.presidiacreative.com/23-spectacular-examples-of-digital-art-by-artemis-kolakis/

"Reinventing Humanity"

Neil Tyson mentioned in a recent talk that the main obstacle between academia and the public is a lack of good soundbites: short, quotable phrases that are easy to remember and easy to retell. For example: "Supernova, the biggest explosions in the cosmos!"

The shortest bits are catch-phrases that has great meme potential. People in marketing and propaganda know the power of these catch-phrases: "Yes we can", "Can you hear me now?". I propose "Reinventing humanity" for transhumanism. You can put that on a pin, on a sticker, on a poster. It's unique. When you google it, you'll find this article by Kurzweil. Perfect 10-second soundbite.

Now we need a slightly longer explanation that will help people understand the concept. A sentence or two, no longer than that, leading into a 5 minute conversation. Instead of a description, I would ask a question: "If you had the power to redesign and remake human beings, what would you change? How would you make us better?" This question will empower the imagination of the listener, and it provides a great segue into examples of medical and technical advances. (I hope you have a few of these ready! If not, keep following my blog :) Show them why reinventing humanity is not hypothetical, and why the answer is important to us now.

If you still have their attention, you can bring up the more abstract, yet more important aspects of transhumanism. Why "reinventing humanity" instead of "reinventing human"? Our experiences, our lives, are not limited to the physical body; changes ripple outward and reshape our society and culture. How will technology change the way you live? What would the world be like if we can stop aging, if we can modify our genes, if we can record everything we see and hear, if we can enhance our minds and bodies for a price, if we can transfer our minds into other bodies and other forms, if we can alter our moods at the press of a button? These what-ifs show why transhumanism requires more than science and technology, and points out the great demand it has for humanities research too: sociology, psychology, philosophy, ethics, economics. Hours of discussion can follow.

So next time you speak to someone about transhumanism, just remember:

"It's about reinventing humanity."

Fire

A man is washing his feet by the river. Another man runs up to him, and says between heaving breaths, "Please, sir, help me, my house is on fire! Everything I have is burning down!"

The first looks up and says to the second, "Look to your left and look to your right. The entire city is on fire."

The second man insists, "You have to help me, please, do something!"

Two men are washing their feet by the river.

Usability (A short story)

God damn, how can we even consider releasing something like this? We should just scrap him.

We can't. The dev team will go nuts; they've spent years on this one; all those delays, the resources...

Doesn't mean we can't cut our losses now. Forget about this and reassign the programmers to someone more promising.

Promising? We all thought he was going to be the next big thing! The RL Chiang of the West; heck, he was suppose to crush the Chinese models. Everybody bought the hype. Maybe that was the problem. The devs worked on the hype instead of on what's in front of them. Their managers should have kept their heads down, instead of blabbering about him on all the forums.

Who cares what went wrong? He's still a completely unusable piece of crap.

You have the formula. Give it to me now.

Longevity has been one of the main goals of transhumanism. We all want to live long enough to see the Future. What if someone tells you that you can live longer without waiting for gene mods, nanobots, or symbiotes? Too easy, right? No, we don't need technology to live longer, better lives. It can be as easy as changing your diet, and we can do that right now.

I'm not trying to sell any diets; there's too much controversy on which one works, and which one is pseudoscientific bullshit. I don't even buy the natural, or traditional diet, the one that Michael Pollan pushes: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I know most of the processed foods have all kinds of icky preservatives in them, and I know soda will rot you from the inside. But why worship the traditional diet? Traditionally, the average life-span is shorter than it is today. Show me a culture that lives to 120 and I will eat whatever they are having.

Aside: lobsters show negligible senescence and can live to well over 100. Too bad for them they are so delicious. Too bad for us we don't get that longevity by eating them.

140 yr old lobster about to be interrogated on the secrets of its longevity.

The point remains: whether you are anti-fat, pro-carbs, or pro-starving-yourself, you can live better just by tweaking your lifestyle. A bit of exercise is good. Learn to cook, or dance, or play Guitar Hero. Be happy and free yourself from stress. Hang out with friends. Fall in love. It could work. Even if these things don't work, and they don't make you live any longer, well, at least you had fun living.

Merry Christmas. See you in the Future.

Apocalypse!

As civilization grows toward dizzying heights, we become increasingly aware of how far we have to fall. We dote on collapse, destruction, and survival, because of the uneasiness we feel living in a world too complex to understand. Its machinery has evolved beyond our control, and we are all trapped in lives that we call normal. The sub-genre of science fiction that deals with apocalyptic (and post-apocalyptic) scenarios appeals to this dread, and offers a second chance - to blow away the fluff, to reduce civilization to its imaginary core values, and, maybe, to design and rebuild it better than before.

The futurist is concerned with rebounding from this collapse and rebuilding a technological society. After survival is assured, we'd like to skip past all the grime and pollution that came with the Industrial Revolution and go directly into clean, renewable structures. At the last H+ meeting, there was a great deal of discussion on these two ends of the spectrum: basic survival needs like agriculture, medicine, metal-working, tool-making, and sustainable solutions like solar and wind power.

But how do we connect the two? How do we go from subsistence to prosperity and beyond? Are there any shortcuts? There are, but it has less to do with technology than with the propagation of ideas and social structures (at the meeting, interesting analogies were drawn to the role of technology in developing countries). We'd have to consider what resources are available, and how to take the most advantage of them. Let's talk about the end of the world:

Scenario: Biological catastrophe

This broad category includes scenarios of destruction targeted at the human population: any disaster that kills off most of the people without damaging the things we built.  It includes pandemic (The Stand), reproductive failure (Children of Men), gendercide (Y: The Last Man), zombies (28 Days Later, I am Legend), famine due to climate change, ecological collapse, gamma rays and ozone depletion.

Though most of the infrastructure will deteriorate in a decade or less, our most precious resource can last for much longer: the wealth of knowledge stored in books, hard drives (inactive), and optical media. First priority will be the protect repositories of knowledge - libraries, datacenters, and universities - against looting and environmental damage.

As people begin to repopulate and rebuild, we'll need to distribute knowledge to far away communities. The people with access to life-saving information (for example, how to grow food and maintain greenhouses, how to survive cholera or perform an appendicitis) have a responsibility to share it with everyone. Without people operating the network of communication satellites, the easiest way to send information around the world is shortwave radio (around 10 MHz). These radios can be operated by individuals and many are built independent of the electric grid.

Education should be a prime focus. When people become scarce, each person must be encouraged to develop to his or her fullest potential. The problems that caused the disaster, whether pandemic or famine, may prevent any progress until we can find a fix. And that can't be done until we train enough engineers, researchers, and scientists to replace the ones lost in the catastrophe.

Technology level follows the standard decay curve - crumbling quickly as nobody is around to maintain it, but eventually levels off so all that's left are Twinkies, Spam, and those plastic things that hold six-packs together. Population level, following the initial collapse, will slowly grow to a level that's limited by the technology (agricultural, infrastructure, medical, etc) - a logistic curve. Units in the following graphs are arbitrary.

Here is a model of the worst case scenario: nobody bothers to rebuild or maintain the tech, so people keep exploiting what was left from the catastrophe until everything runs down. Buildings crumble to dust, cities turn into wilderness, forests spread across the land. The survivors band together in small tribes and live a hand-to-mouth existence. Even worse: there is no guarantee that we would ever return to a pre-collapse level of civilization.

The recovery model: we preserve enough knowledge to rebuild and use the existing structures to speed up the process. Note that technological decline is reversed quickly and the population limit rises as a result. There's a feedback process here: the more technology and infrastructure we save, the faster people can recover their former lives and become productive (and reproductive!). Optimistically, we'll restore the electric grid in 10 years and networks in 30. Recovery is a race against time - the longer we wait, the more we lose to decay, and the harder it will be to fix things up.

Resources for survivors:
Download the offline version of Wikipedia

Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

National Library of Medicine at Bethesda, Maryland

Research libraries at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, etc.

Google datacenters