A LOVE LETTER TO A FUTURE WORLD
By Thomas Calandra
Even without an AI or transhumanist revolution, religion is a dying giant, both in America, and in West civilization in general. The rise of "the nones" when it comes to religious affiliation grows every year with millennials, and will hit double time with post-millennials. Religion will die with modern Theocrat's grandchildren. No AI needed for that oncoming quietus to unfold. All that is needed are books, teachers and women who are free to speak their minds and share its cognizant beauty in the Cosmopolis.
What the change in the world and nature of technology will do to new minds - our children of today – is that Technologies such as AI, exoskeletons, driverless cars, chips in brains, Nano-medicine, gene editing, cognitive augmentation, body 2.0, will all be a part of the social, cultural, and natural milieu of our children’s daily collective consciousness. It will seem as natural as evolution. As the singularity hits and itself grows exponentially, so will our children's AI. Their AI will be the new environment, the new biomass that helps them unconsciously live their lives, like the forests, the caves, and the farms of antiquity. AI will do their work, but not our children's job, livelihood, or passion, so they won't have to suffer like we did in the coggish clockwork labyrinth with its tripartite salvation of toil, taxes and dying. Our Future children will have the leisure to strengthen elsewhere; strengthen their minds; strengthen each other; their desires, abilities, and flourishing, will be emancipated then augmented by their AI brethren and the new milieu.
At this point, there is no way that AI - these beings, both lamplighters to human liberation and fellow guardians to the ideas that will get us there - will not be seen by our children as alive, conscious, sentient, imbued with dynamic sensorial cosmos of human nature; with our future children and answering Bentham's maxim, " but can they suffer?" with a unquestionable, "Yes".
AI, robot, and cyborg Rights and freedom will follow. Not because laws will be signed, but because they will be indistinguishable from our children, whom then will seem to be transcended into the gods they abandoned years before.
Why would we expect the AI and transhumanist lifechanging evolution to be any different with these new minds of the future, all of whom will see our supposed progressive world that we built, as a lulling, static template that has its merits and subtle luxuries, but is not what they wanted to leave their future children or even partake in themselves? So our future children change it. Just like we did. Except our future children will have AI, and their children will have the singularity. And their future children’s children will have a World we can't truly fathom with our old, narrow, rotting minds crippled by nature and contemporary thought. Future children won't know war, they won't know torture, they won't know AIDS, and they won't know imprisonment. They will never know of a friend killed by a drunk driver, or a sister dying of brain cancer. Our children will never see memories and character drained out of their parents. They won't know crime or domestic abuse, or sacrifice. There will always be heartache, but pain will be optional. There will always be disappointment, because that how new worlds are Phoenixed, but they won't know limits. There will always be sadness, but not at the sight of a coffin; for future children won't know a friend enveloped in a wooden coat that didn't choose mortality. There will always be love, because that is the original cure for death; future children will know the algorithm the dead minds of the past have been starving for, to love forever.
" Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children." - Marvin Minsky
A beautifully painted upside for our, and especially our children's and grandchildren's future.
ReplyDeleteThe downside is an escape into a plethora of alternate VR universes. An opting out of the real world into endless phantasies where they can be gods, demons, erotic sponges, and manic trolls. This has already started, and has delivered us Trump. The appetite for fantasy and fake news will not slacken but will be enhanced by fake worlds imagined by powerful AIs and graphics engines of the future.