My random thoughts

[funkervogt]

As narrow AIs get better, there will be more and more claims that some lab has built an AGI, only for those claims to turn out wrong upon further investigation. The repeated false alarms might lead the general public to start ignoring all claims, until it finally turns out that, "Yes, the one that Lab X announced three months ago was actually it."

Imagine the irony of shrugging off such a momentous event in history.

[funkervogt]

If a passenger plane is going down, I wonder if it would be safer to posthumans to jump out in midair rather than stay in their seats and hope to survive a crash-landing. Every posthuman would have the same skills as a veteran parachutist and wingsuiter, so they would be able to steer themselves during the fall and land their bodies in the best possible positions. There have been many cases of people surviving falls from high altitudes.

[funkervogt]

Machine soldiers would have less need for fancy accessories that humans add to their guns because the machines would have better vision and would be naturally better shots. Scopes, flashlights, and laser sights might totally disappear, or at least be shrunk down. The need for fully automatic fire might also disappear since machines would be so accurate with single shots that every shot would hit the target. Moreover, since machines would be ambidextrous and able to memorize complex operations, their weapons wouldn't need features that made them suited for right- and left-handed shooters, nor would they need to be easy to field strip and reassemble.

As a result, machine soldiers would have guns that were cheaper and simpler than human guns, and humans would find machine solders' guns to be uncomfortable and suboptimal for their own use.

[funkervogt]

In the far future, advanced genetic technology will let us create new species that can reproduce and survive in the wild. Fantastical beings that are now only found in fiction, like the xenomorphs from the Alien movies, or dragons from old stories, could be made real.

[funkervogt]

I just watched Top Gun: Maverick. These fighter pilot movies will seem so weird once machines are flying the best planes. And imagine that whole macho, competitive, cocky fighter pilot culture disappearing. What will those people do with themselves?

[funkervogt]

Machines could send secret messages to each other by varying their pronunciations of spoken words in ways that were imperceptible to listening humans, but perceivable to each other. By very slightly changing the pitch of a word, the speed at which it is spoken, or the emphasis on one syllable vs. another, a spoken sentence could actually contain a secret meaning different from its literal meaning.

[funkervogt]

I just started playing the game Death Stranding. It's a weird game, and one of the weird elements is the existence of "Bridge Babies," which are fetuses floating in artificial wombs the sizes of basketballs. Your player can carry around one of these and, using a port on the outside of the womb, plug it into your cybernetic outfit so that the fetus' mind can interface with your sensors.

https://deathstranding.fandom.com/wiki/Bridge_baby
https://deathstranding.fandom.com/wiki/Bridge_baby_pod

This brings to mind a possible future form adult humans will have. Each person will exist as a brain in a jar. The inside of the jar will have wires connecting to hundreds of thousands of different spots in the brain. The jar will also have an integral life support module with its own battery pack. That module's purpose will be to provide nourishment, temperature regulation, immune protection and other things needed to keep the organ alive. The outside of the jar will have ports that data cables could be plugged into.

A jar could have any variety of devices plugged into it, giving the brain access to different bodies, information, and modes of existence. You could keep your jar in a server room all the time, plugged into the internet so you could remotely control bodies from the other side of the planet if you wanted. Or, you could load your jar into one body of your choice and walk around like that. Switching bodies would be little different from changing clothes outfits today.

[funkervogt]

I just watched Unbreakable for the first time since it was in theaters (gives you a sense of how much I liked it). In it, Bruce Willis plays an ordinary man who discovers he is a superhero. Some of his key attributes are:

1) Super strength (can lift cars off of trapped people)
2) Super durable body (can survive a train wreck without a scratch)
3) Super immune system (never gets ill)

Those are all qualities that some robots and posthumans will have in the future. It would make for a good segment in a sci-fi film for some kind of accident to occur that kills or severely injures most or all of the human passengers, leaving their robot servants and companions to rescue them.

Likewise, if the zombie apocalypse happened far enough in the future, robots would be unaffected. That would put an interesting twist on the genre.

[funkervogt]

I just watched the movie Signs, courtesy of YouTube making it free, and again made some connections to futurism. The aliens' ability to jump from the ground to a roof overhang 10 feet up is proof of their inhuman strength. Also, one of the aliens jumps off the roof, lands on the ground, and without suffering apparent injury or breaking its stride, runs into a cornfield, demonstrating a more durable body than humans. These feats will be common for robots and posthumans.

Think of how things would be different for you if you were strong enough and coordinated enough to jump 10 feet into the air, to scramble up or down the side of a building, tree or cliff with the skill of a human expert, and to survive falls from great heights.


The Signs aliens also had sharp claws on their fingers, and "stingers" that could pop out of their wrists to squirt poison gas into the faces of captured humans. A major downside of human anatomy is our lack of natural weapons, but I believe this will not be a problem in the far future, again thanks to robots and posthumans being able to design and change their own bodies. If Signs were set in 2202 instead of 2002, the invading aliens would have encountered much tougher opponents on Earth (another sci-fi film idea?).

The aliens in the film also had chameleon skin, which we could also incorporate into the bodies of intelligent life forms in the future. However, I don't see how it would be useful for normal life, and instead see it as a feature people will use for artistic expression, crime, or tactical missions.

[funkervogt]

FIVR, AI-generated personal realities, and hallucinogenic drugs will be the cures for boredom on long space missions.

[funkervogt]

One danger of having all or most humans living in Matrix-like FIVR is that it would be possible to trap them inside permanently by simulating "real reality" during the periods when they chose to leave their Matrix pods. For example, let's say you've spent a whole week playing in the Matrix, and you want to spend a few days in the real world for a change of pace. Whoever is running the Matrix could secretly create a "Real World Simulation" and the moment you gave the order to be unplugged from the Matrix, your Matrix simulation would seamlessly switch to the Real World Simulation. To you, it would seem as if you were opening the door of your Matrix pod, pulling the plug out of the back of your head, standing up on your wobbly feet, and walking around your physical home, but in actuality, you'd still be laying in the Matrix pod and only experiencing those things in your mind.

[funkervogt]

I just watched the movie The Edge. It's not bad, and of course it got me thinking about futurism. In it, a small plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness, and the two survivors have to walk back to civilization. On the way, they have to contend with nature and each other.

If the men were posthumans or intelligent machines, things would have been much easier for them. First, they would know the cardinal directions at all times and with high accuracy, thanks to internal compasses or advanced ways to deducing the directions by the sun's movements and star constellations. They would also have memorized maps of the area, either by downloading them before leaving on the plane trip, or by looking out the window during the plane flight to mentally compile maps. The survivors would have quickly realized what the best walking route was back to civilization, and they would have followed it without deviation.

Second, if they needed food for energy, they would have had a much better knowledge of which plants were edible, and they would have been able to easily kill animals by simply throwing rocks at them with superhuman force and accuracy.

Third, posthumans/machines wouldn't have been so deviled by the grizzly bear that stalked the survivors in the film. Due to heightened senses, future people would have detected the bear at much longer distances and been able to avoid it or ambush it. There would not have been instances where the bear sneaked up on them.

[funkervogt]

I'm looking forward to computer algorithms being able to generate new architectural styles, complete buildings, and city plans. Imagine a petro-dictator using his money to build an AI-generated capitol city that was more beautiful than Paris.

[funkervogt]

Imagine how demoralizing it would be if a villain created a mind upload of someone you loved, then they killed the actual person, and the upload was under the villain's control. It would do and say whatever they wanted.

[FloydWhite]

I've long believed that the English language has to be altered to make it more understandable and reasonable. Words should be phonetically spelled, irregular verbs should be made regular, and grammar rules should be made simpler and more consistent. In addition, I believe the alphabet should be modified such that each English phoneme has its own letter. This would need the development of a 44-letter alphabet. It's possible that some of the new letters are simply other letters with similar sounds that have accent marks added to them.

[funkervogt]

My argument against the possibility that I'm just an NPC in a computer simulation is that I know for a fact I have emotions, an inner world, and metacognition. If anything, I am a player in the simulation, and some fraction of the "people" I encounter are the NPCs.

However, I've recently stumbled on a disturbing alternative. Maybe I am an NPC, and my emotions, inner world, and metacognition are, in fact, very dull imitations of the real things. If an actual person could jump in my mind and experience the world as I do, it would be terribly limiting, like going from color vision to black-and-white vision. My "mind programming" is sufficient to generate the appropriate behaviors in response to given stimuli, so I'm an NPC that behaves realistically within the simulation. In the same way, the enemy ghost characters in "Pac-Man" display the same level of skill as the human player within the game.

[funkervogt]

I've long thought that the Americans born in 2000 were the last cohort whose "average intelligence, average work-ethic" members could expect to have the traditional career arc of reasonably short training in early adulthood, working at a small number of institutions thereafter, and then a comfortable retirement at age 65. Competition from foreign workers and machines will steadily reduce the share of each cohort that can have that good outcome or better each year thereafter.

[funkervogt]

It's possible to raise an existing house up and to build stilts underneath it. This could be an excellent way to adapt to rising sea levels in coastal areas.

[funkervogt]

If AI takes all our jobs, then in the long run, there will be no wealth or income inequality between humans.

If humans then revert to living in Matrix simulations catered to their individual tastes, there will be no crime or incivility since they won't interact with each other anymore. Each person will only be dealing with NPCs.

The foundations of racism, sexism, and grievances based on religion, ethnicity, and nationality will disappear. After a few generations, humans won't remember what the problem was.

[funkervogt]

Something you won't see often in VR is vehicles. If people and objects can Iinstantly teleport anywhere in a VR world, who needs cars, delivery trucks, planes, ships, or trains?