My random thoughts

[funkervogt]

Androids will be so strong, fast and agile that they won't need guns to disable or kill humans. Under a machine dictatorship, the police might only have batons, stun guns or swords. I'm weirdly reminded of feudal Japan, where the samurai used swords to enforce the law.

[funkervogt]

Full-immersion virtual reality (FIVR) will be a great equalizer of humans since rich and poor people will have access to the same experiences. A poor person could "own" a virtual mansion that was as nice as a rich person's. The more addictive FIVR is and the more time people spend in it, the less the wealth differences in the real world will matter (e.g. - it won't matter if your FIVR pod is located inside a chateau in southern France or in a rented storage shed in middle America). And presumably, the less time you are in the real world, the less time you have for a job and hence money making, which will bring the rich down over time.

Also, if FIVR ever gives way to direct stimulation of the brain to generate pure pleasure sensations, then the experience will truly equalize between rich and poor. I can't imagine something better than pure, blinding pleasure.

[funkervogt]

People say that jobs involving human connection, compassion, and empathy (like being a social worker or therapist) will be humankind's salvation from total technological obsolescence since machines will never be able to have emotions or warmth.

At the same time, those same people say that humans are becoming more narcissistic, shouty, and socially/emotionally obtuse with time, which makes humankind less equipped to do jobs involving human connection, compassion, and empathy.

I think the killer app will be machines that understand human psychology and can convincingly fake their own emotions.

[funkervogt]

Autonomous probes that we send into deep space could scan any alien life forms they find and transmit the genetic and chemical data back to Earth, allowing us to synthesize it here in cloning labs. I admit borrowing part of this idea from the movie Species.

[funkervogt]

Personal assistant AIs in your smart glasses, and/or android servants that follow you around will negate differences in intelligence, strength, and other skills between humans. Put simply, your machines will argue on your behalf, pick up heavy things for you, and beat up people who attack you.

[funkervogt]

They could also level the playing field in terms of personal judgement and morality by giving you real-time advice on all sorts of things.

[caltrek]

^^^I am not that sure the paying field would be all that leveled. What I mean is that a premium would be placed on the ability to act upon the advice given. Those who could best take advantage of said advice would do better than those lacking in that ability. Contributing factors would include personal aptitude and socio-economic position.

After all, look at access to the internet. There are those that prosper form the information at their finger tips, and their are those that are waiting for JFK Junior to resurrect himself at Dealey Plaza.

[funkervogt]

^^^I am not that sure the paying field would be all that leveled. What I mean is that a premium would be placed on the ability to act upon the advice given. Those who could best take advantage of said advice would do better than those lacking in that ability. Contributing factors would include personal aptitude and socio-economic position.

After all, look at access to the internet. There are those that prosper form the information at their finger tips, and their are those that are waiting for JFK Junior to resurrect himself at Dealey Plaza.

An intelligent machine could at least warn people of their own biases and of the presence of misinformation.

[caltrek]

^^^True, but some would be more willing to act upon that warning in an intelligent manner, while some...well...I think you get the picture, even before this post.

Edit: Although, this does remind me of something I noticed as a mid-level government bureaucrat. People tended to follow my direction the less passionate I was about advocating for any particular outcome. The more passionate I visibly became, the greater the chance that they would reject my advice.

[funkervogt]

Walking around my neighborhood, I found a good-condition electric scooter in a dumpster. A quick Google search revealed it costs over $400 new, meaning I can resell it for at least half that, assuming nothing is horribly wrong with the internal components. Also, I went to a scrap metal yard today for the first time and sold some leaky copper water pipes I had cut out of my house several weeks ago, and got a surprisingly amount of money for them.

This opens my eyes to how much quality stuff Americans throw away. Imagine how things would be different if you wore AR glasses that could tell you the resale values of objects within your field of view. Markets would be so much more efficient.

[Jakob]

Androids will be so strong, fast and agile that they won't need guns to disable or kill humans. Under a machine dictatorship, the police might only have batons, stun guns or swords. I'm weirdly reminded of feudal Japan, where the samurai used swords to enforce the law.

No matter how strong or fast law enforcement robots are (not sure why they need to be humanoid) they will still be at a disadvantage compared to humans without some means of projecting force from a distance, i.e. a ranged weapon.

[Jakob]

People say that jobs involving human connection, compassion, and empathy (like being a social worker or therapist) will be humankind's salvation from total technological obsolescence since machines will never be able to have emotions or warmth.

Well that isn't necessarily true but what is true for the forseeable future is that humans will be more comfortable confiding in and trusting someone that looks like them than a faceless machine. Then again, if you don't see a machine as self aware or fully human, it might be easier to open up to it, you could just think of it as talking to yourself, only "you" talk back if that makes any sense.

[funkervogt]

Androids will be so strong, fast and agile that they won't need guns to disable or kill humans. Under a machine dictatorship, the police might only have batons, stun guns or swords. I'm weirdly reminded of feudal Japan, where the samurai used swords to enforce the law.

No matter how strong or fast law enforcement robots are (not sure why they need to be humanoid) they will still be at a disadvantage compared to humans without some means of projecting force from a distance, i.e. a ranged weapon.

I've said previously that robots will be able to throw objects with extreme accuracy and precision, so perhaps that answers your concern. Imagine a small, metal ball slamming directly into your kneecap.

[funkervogt]

People say that jobs involving human connection, compassion, and empathy (like being a social worker or therapist) will be humankind's salvation from total technological obsolescence since machines will never be able to have emotions or warmth.

Well that isn't necessarily true but what is true for the forseeable future is that humans will be more comfortable confiding in and trusting someone that looks like them than a faceless machine. Then again, if you don't see a machine as self aware or fully human, it might be easier to open up to it, you could just think of it as talking to yourself, only "you" talk back if that makes any sense.

What if you could interact with a lifelike machine in The Metaverse?

[funkervogt]

If a fighting move is illegal even in the brutal UFC, then you know it's going to be a go-to for killer robots someday.

Just watch this video and think about how much worse it would be if the attacker's skeleton were made of steel. A finger jammed in your eye is no different from a metal rod jammed into it.

[funkervogt]

Is it so hard to believe that we all might be in an ancestor simulation, and when we die, we "wake up" in our real bodies, in a FIVR pod, in some distant future year?

After all, haven't you ever awakened from a dream, still thinking it was reality and confused as to why the world had suddenly changed? Only after a few seconds do you regain your bearings and realize it was not real.

Maybe we're volunteers who have elected to live in an ancestor simulation to help piece together past events that were lost to the historical record. Maybe various details of our simulated world have been made different from actual history to see what effect it has on us and on world events. For example, in reality, Bruce Lee was a Brazilian, and he popularized a variant of the Capoeira fighting style in film. In the simulation we're now in, this has been changed to make him Chinese, and his fighting style Jeet Kune Do.

[wjfox]

Is it so hard to believe that we all might be in an ancestor simulation, and when we die, we "wake up" in our real bodies, in a FIVR pod, in some distant future year?

All I can say is, it's one helluva coincidence that we live at this point in history.

The Universe is 13.8 billion years old. Anatomically modern humans have been around for 200,000+ years. Recorded history is 5,000+ years. And in the last 100 years we saw gigantic improvements in technology and living standards.

And now, here we are. Only around 50 or so years away from this pivotal moment in our species' history, the make-or-break moment when we either transition to a post-Singularity world, or collapse into a second Dark Ages. When you step back and look at where we are, it's astonishing.

Too much of a coincidence for me – so count me in among the simulation believers.

[funkervogt]

One type of genetic engineering we could do involves optimization of the human genome, which I'll cause "optimization" for short. It would involve eliminating all junk DNA and repetitious DNA, and then finding ways to rearrange the remaining genetic material in ways that make it do its job more efficiently. The end result would be a human the looked identical to any of us, but had a shorter genome with fewer base pairs, some genetic loci moved to new parts of chromosomes, and possibly a different number of chromosomes. Because of these differences, the optimized person would probably not be able to breed with Homo sapiens like us, and would be a new species.

We could use technology to also optimize non-hominid species. Food crops might grow better with optimized genomes.

[funkervogt]

"Nicitating membranes" are an anatomical feature we should add to posthumans. They are translucent eyelids that let animals sleep with their eyes still open. As a result, the animals stay more aware of their surroundings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nictitating_membrane

And using genetic engineering, we could make humans who need only five hours of sleep per night to wake refreshed and alert.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... rt-sleeper

[funkervogt]

Genetic engineering and embryo selection will benefit animal welfare since animal breeders will be able to make pure breeds with desirable traits. Right now, breeding animals the natural way, it's still a crapshoot, and many of the offspring have one or more unwanted traits, meaning several "excess" animals are produced for every one animal of the same species that is considered a prizewinner, or at least an excellent example of its breed.

Technology will let us create arbitrary numbers of pure breed animals.

It will also let us delete genetic defects that have accreted in some pure breeds over successive generations of our forced breeding. Many of those defects cause the animals chronic pain, diminished senses, and shortened lifespans.