16 KiB
[Q][DST] What are your good role-models for transhumanity & posthumanity from fiction, why?
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Author: u/Empiricist_or_not Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2v6zv8/qdst_what_are_your_good_rolemodels_for/
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Score: 20
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Created: 2015-02-08T14:44:04
Post:
What are your good role-models for transhumanity & posthumanity from fiction, why are they good models?
I'm asking this because I'm getting more and more parsniketty about the books and stories I play during my morning commute, and because discussions in The tragedy of general Zod reminded me some of my ideas for good trans- and post-humans need to be reminded to pay their rent or move out. Anywho I just picked up The line of the Polity and wish I didn't as it's essentially James Bond with space opera stapled on.
Trans-Human Examples:
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Accelerando's Whole Cast a scary book with how simply plausible evolution to extinction is.
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Blindsight's whole cast, ditto to Accelerando
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Jean le Flambeur: the protagonist of the Quantum thief series who seems to have made the transition from individual, to, to copy-clan, to individual and back. The idea of the meta-self, and the implementation of CEV (Coherent Extrapolated Volition) in a way that makes it make sense makes the entire trilogy worth reading.
Post-Human Examples:
I'm leaving this blank for now- CelestAI as a cautionary tale.
- Acellerando spoiler As plausible self improving benign-ish post-humans
- The Cerbernost, specifically who plays a n+1 game but still gets tripped up by a more radically optimizing intellect. This may be more of a strong transhuman or plot based post-human than a useful example.
- The Excession from Bank's Excession, for it's presentation of a post-human inscrutability to trans-humans and plot level post-humans i.e. culture Minds and it's final reveal.
Edit 1: Formatting, clarity. Edit 2: Added my initial post-humans
Comments:
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+6] Godric Gryffindor (8 hours later)
Relevant: https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153083953399228
In general, I tend to be unimpressed with the 'transhumanism' of any author who strikes me as lacking the sense and love of life, carried into a brighter future, that would be necessary to cast a Patronus 2.0. Also with those who seem to be disrespecting the power of cognitive intelligence. Vernor Vinge tends toward the excellent, obviously, and Peter Hamilton also does very well on this dimension.
Even among transhumanist authors, good posthuman role models are obviously going to be exceedingly rare for Vinge's Law reasons. Tunc Blumenthal from Across Realtime, Old One and the Blight in A Fire Upon the Deep, the Minds in Iain Banks's Player of Games (the book that is the most lifeist of Banks's writings), and... I'm actually having trouble thinking of anything else. Well, CelestAI. Actually, CelestAI is about the most reasonably depicted superintelligence in fiction that I can recall, i.e., she is always ultimately depicted as getting what she wants for reasons of cognitive and technological advantage, which is really saying something about the difficulty of having one of those and still setting stories around them.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+4] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (13 hours later)
I'd love to agree with you and am heartened by the various moonshots I see driving humanity closer to growing up and cooperating, but deprecating the values of Stross and Watts work because they are not idealistic enough seems like a violation of the litany of Tarski
n. Both authors are pessimistic, but plausible for separate societal, and biological arguments that drive each author's thesis.
Watts values intelligence but blatantly disregards consciousness, and depressingly he has a thick academic bibliography to his fictional work I need to get around to reading. I'd like to encourage you as a leader in the community to put some time into rebut or criticism of his work, after the completion of HPMOR ****because it is a trifecta of: plausibility, deathism by the ending of conscious thought, and academic reputability.
Stross's future, a-la Accelerando, is similar but less threatening, in it's red queen's race, evolution to extinction bleakness that is his the expected life-cycle of intelligent life evolved in any system, but for society based reasons. His argument seems based on the fact that CEV will be very hard, while more perilous paths to improved intelligence will be tractable with direct profit reward, and in the long run resource optimizing expert systems for whatever is scarce, will inevitably out perform those systems with goals other than optimization and reproduction. I.E. transhumanity will get intelligence optimization wrong, and will have to run away from their children who will be the bandwith, processing, or whatever is scarce, equivalent of dollar chasers.
Thank you for the suggestion of Brin, somehow he has slipped my reading list.
u/None [+2] (20 hours later)
deprecating the values of Stross and Watts work because they are not idealistic enough seems like a violation of the litany of Tarkin.
You mean Tarski?
His argument seems based on the fact that CEV will be very hard, while more perilous paths to improved intelligence will be tractable with direct profit reward, and in the long run resource optimizing expert systems for whatever is scarce, will inevitably out perform those systems with goals other than optimization and reproduction. I.E. transhumanity will get intelligence optimization wrong, and will have to run away from their children who will be the bandwith, processing, or whatever is scarce, equivalent of dollar chasers.
I think we have to ask: does this take into account that many of the people making decisions will have read and understood Stross's "arguments"?
(Scare-quotes because Stross actually thinks there will be no technological singularity as such, and one of his reasons is that we will head off the dangers of UFAI by building only "the intelligence of the serving hand." This is entirely plausible and even sensible!)
I mean, Stross's predicted singularities are based on the Silicon Valley brand of libertarianish-neoliberal-capitalism being built into the first AIs and uploads and thus taking over the whole Solar System. Here in real life, not only has the California Ideology failed to take over the world, as time goes on, more and more people are questioning it, criticizing it, and even turning against it. So predicting a Strossian future seems to fail to take into account that real people just don't want one all that much, and are willing to take steps to head it off.
Doesn't the real future always take our counterfactual speculations and our responses to them into account ;-)?
Watts values intelligence but blatantly disregards consciousness
Is it that he doesn't value consciousness, or just thinks evolution won't value consciousness?
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
deprecating the values of Stross and Watts work because they are not idealistic enough seems like a violation of the litany of Tarkin. You mean Tarski?
Thank you. Fixed
u/None [+1] (21 hours later)
Relevant: https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153083953399228
Now there's an interesting question to go asking.
u/lsparrish [+3] (5 hours later)
Petey from Schlock Mercenary comes to mind.
u/autowikiabot [+2] (5 hours later)
#####
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#### Fleetmind:
The Fleetmind, known to its friends as Petey, is a colossal compound AI currently engaged in a war with the Pa'anuri in Andromeda. The concept of a Fleetmind was first used shortly after the Battle of the Buuthandi in order to coordinate rescue of the gate-clone prisoners. This consisted of Admiral Breya's coalition fleet, and was essentially a hivemind of every AI in the fleet, centered around Petey of the Post-Dated Check Loan. This Fleetmind dissolved shortly after the fleet's escape from the system, although the ex-Fleetmind units kept in touch. In an attempt to correct some bugs in his psychology, Petey had been building an HV-1 version of himself. When the Post-Dated Check Loan was destroyed by the Ob'enn, the mini-Petey survived in a minitank and was recovered by the Scepter of Unrelenting Pain. Using stolen Project Laz'R'Us technology, Petey grew himself a physical Ob'enn body (making himself technically a cyborg) and used it to take over the Scepter. He then dismantled the ship for its fabber, used it to create unfettered AI vessels of his Devastator and Penetrator designs, incorporated them into a new fleetmind, and declared war on the Ob'enn. He grew more bodies, used them to take over and incorporate more Thunderheads, and began systematically squashing the Ob'enn military and de-indoctrinating the survivors, hoping to eventually take the "psycho" out of "psycho-bear". Image ^Interesting: [^Plaited ^Daisies](https://schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/plaited daisies) ^| [^Parrot's ^Dead](https://schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/parrot's dead) ^| ^Extortionator ^| ^Devastator
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u/PeridexisErrant [+3] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (9 hours later)
This is part of why I love the Young Wizards series - it's full of these, in part because that universe is fundamentally different to our own. (Eg: benevolent Powers and a good afterlife are provably known to exist)
Most wizards are transhuman - unaided interstellar FTL qualifies, without considering other and more impressive tricks - and the Powers that Be are either posthuman or nonhuman, and with a notable exception good (but not safe).
u/None [+3] (21 hours later)
I had a huge wall-o-text post on this last night before X Windows crashed. But now I just have to ask: what do you mean by "role model"?
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
Good point, that was ambiguous: I should have said, plausible predictive models.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (13 hours later)
As an author/creator I can just say these kinds of things are hard to involve in the narrative.
The best way I find is using them as world building "truisms" that just behave in some imuttable manner.
A true post human AI I've at beat been making them work like simple facts of the universe. Like gravity.
The drama comes from what people do about that and working within whatever room the actions of the post humans allow.
u/Someone-Else-Else [+1] Anti-Spiral (15 hours later)
Worm's Dragon is a nice posthuman.
Capes might count as transhumans, but not necessarily good ones.
u/chaosmosis [+3] and with strange aeons, even death may die (2 days later)
I found Dragon slightly flawed. She was so bizarrely nice and well-trusted. She was essentially a completely normal human being who happened to also be a computer program. She was more like an uploaded human than anything else, which contradicted her origin story. Saint was the irrational bad guy in the story's eyes, when I think his views should have been given more credibility even if they did ultimately turn out to be flawed. He was a weak straw man of a valid position.
u/Someone-Else-Else [+2] Anti-Spiral (2 days later)
Of course, because spoiler
u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (16 hours later)
- All (or nearly all) parahumans are transhuman, in that their capabilities are beyond human limits.
- Some, particularly Thinkers, are more "traditional" transhumans in that their basic state of being is incomprehensible to humans
- Khepri, and maybe a few others, are literally post-human: both enormously powerful in subtle ways, and no longer human in important ways.
u/Someone-Else-Else [+1] Anti-Spiral (16 hours later)
Isn't a posthuman /spoiler
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (17 hours later)
I think we might need a clarifying term of "equivelant to" post-human and trans-human... But these terms are already really fuzzy.
u/None [+1] (20 hours later)
I always thought a trans-human was one that started out as human, while a post-human was the broader category.
u/IomKg [+1] (a day later)
I kind of liked the approach taken by the non "christian" group of people in Dan Simmons's 'Hyperion Cantos' series.
Though I do think the specific way it was shown was a little too "hippy", and naive. But the general direction of adjusting themselves to best fit the universe as it was, instead of trying to change the universe to fit human limitations..
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
I'd agree. The series was painful to finish. The idea of adapting to where you are going to live is a pretty practical one.
After all why not make your own "Evolution Fairy?"
u/IomKg [+1] (a day later)
I found the series painful to start rather then to finish. That first book sure took its time getting to the interesting parts.
Though its kind of funny, i got the 3rd book when i was 13 or something, and didn't even know there were other books so i read the series in the 3-4-1-2 order. Might cause my impression of it to be non-standard :P
u/khafra [+1] (2 days later)
The protagonists of Panacea Quest do a really good job of grappling with transhumanist issues, and for the most part, making the least bad (but still sometimes horrifying) choice.