Transumanar

Reality 2.0: A new world in the making

Reality 2.0 is still in development and preliminary alpha testing. It will have a unprecedented degree of graphical video-realism and a very, very realistic physics engine. It will offer all features of current VR worlds like Second Life, Kaneva or the forthcoming Sony’s Home: instant teleport to remote locations, IM, built-in editing environment to create your own things out of thin air and customize your own avatar, multiple avatars per user, intelligent NPCs and the possibility to acquire all sorts of near-magic powers. Reality 2.0 will be much more realistic and addictive than current MMOGs and permit users working and playing in-world without ever leaving it. Living and working in Reality 2.0 will be, as a matter of fact, much more interesting and fun than whatever you can do in good old RL (Real Life) as we know it.

I am sure you have already understood that Reality 2.0 is, in fact, good old RL with some enhancements that will be developed over the next few decades.

IM (Instant Messaging) will be implemented by read-write brain implants linked to the wireless network. Think something to tell someone, your thoughts are captured and processed by your implant, addressed to the recipient through the net, and appear in her mind. A popular name for this process is telepathy. Reading thoughts and memories from a brain and writing thoughts and memories back to a(nother) brain or a computational network (neural interfacing) will also permit cutting and pasting entire personalities and making backup copies of human minds (mind uploading). This is how teleport may work: the entire contents of your mind are copied from where you are and beamed to where you want to go.

We also need the capability to create objects out of thin air like we do in Second Life. The development of molecular nanotechnology will permit the development of utility fogs: live air filled with zillions of tiny (nanoscale) machines able to communicate over a network and link to each other to reproduce any shape or material. With utility fogs, the fabric of physical reality will be used as a construction materials for objects and avatars (bodies). (If and) when they are developed, utility fogs will effectively lift the boundaries between physical and virtual realities.

Many Second Life users, especially in the “first generation”, were mainly motivated by the wish to change things they did not like in their RL. In particular their body shape, age and gender. I must be one of the few people who are middle-aged fat guys in both RL and SL. But many give their avatars younger and better looks, and some choose for their SL avatars the gender that they wish to have in RL but has been stolen by a stupid biological accident. Sooner or later, we will be able to do this in RL too, when it will evolve to Reality 2.0: we will be able to change physical bodies like we change clothes today, and wear a new body like we wear a new shirt.

In writing this I am identifying with the computational processes that take place inside my mind and regarding my physical body as something external outside me, like my car. Of course I know that things are more complex and there are many feedback loops between body and mind, with chemical and hormonal things happening in the body that influence the activity of the mind, but I do not really consider weather-induced bad moods as central to being me. If my thinking were never degraded by a headache, I think I would gain a lot without losing anything important. So I think I (the I that matters) am information, and look forward to the possibility to decoupling this information from biology.

Once mind cut-copy-paste technology is developed, it will mean effective immortality. When you are killed by a monster in Entropia Universe, you wake up at the nearest revival station where, we can imagine, the most recent copy of your mind file is reloaded to a physical body similar to the last one you were wearing, built on the fly by a utility fog. This is how I imagine the unwritten fictional machinery behind Entropia Universe works, and I think Reality 2.0 will also have a revival feature. It will be necessary because, while the monsters in Entropia Universe are very dull, Reality 2.0 will be populated by conscious, thinking NPCs as smart as us, often smarter than us, and occasionally much smarter than us. Of course, the same technology that will permit creating supersmart AIs will also be used to become smarter ourselves, by merging with intelligence boosters. In Reality 2.0, we will be as smart as we need or want to be (it may cost money of course).

Ok, so when will Reality 2.0 be released? An alpha version is in the making in all research laboratories where nanotechnology, neurotechnology, advanced biotechnology and artificial intelligence technology are being developed. Let me refer to these as transhumanist technologies. Not in the sense that only transhumanists are engaged in the development of human enhancement technologies, but rather in the sense that transhumanists take Reality 2.0 seriously and view it as something *good*.

So when? My best guess is in the second half of this century, but it may well be sooner and some experts think it will be sooner. So cross fingers or, better, follow the last link above to join and donate some time or money. Waiting for Reality 2.0, watch this space for the announcement of Reality 3.0.

Posted by G.P. on 03/31 at 08:38 AM
English • Views • (3) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Print

Back from Geneva

I have been a week in Geneva. I was living there for a few years (1984-1988).

The two guys with my wife in the pictures are my two best friends Carmelo and Federico in their country houses. They both work at CERN.

My daughter was born in Geneva. Another important thing born in Geneva more or less at the same time was the Web. Now at CERN they have big screens proudly advertising CERN as the birthplace of the Web. But few people (even at CERN) took it seriously at that time. The Web was to have a radical impact on our personal and professional lives in only a few years, but many people, even including some of those who were developing the technology, did not realize its potential out of the lab environment.

Same today with the so-called transhumanist technologies of human enhancement, that will have a much more radical impact on everything else. The signs are out there for everyone to see, but only a few people realize that big changes are coming soon.

Posted by G.P. on 03/30 at 05:20 AM
English • Views • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Print

Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life

We have been thinking of this event for weeks, now I wish to organize it. I am looking at my calendar and thinking Saturday, April 28 at 10am PST would be a good choice. Date and time can still change though.

EDITED: We changed the date to Sunday, April 29 at the same time 10am PST.

I will propose my own views, summarized in the article Engineering Transcendence and to be expanded in a book Transcendent Engineering. I plan to give a revised version of the same talk at the TransVision 2007 conference in Chicago in July.

Extropia DaSilva, a “transhumanist avatar” who writes some of the best mind expanding stuff about first and second life, the universe and everything, has promised to give a talk. Some recent Extropia’s essays are available on Transumanar. Bill Bainbridge (YES, Bill is in SL) plans to give a talk. I hope to have one or more speaker(s) of the Society for Universal Immortalism.

James Hughes will present his paper “The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future” (PDF).

Technology and practical organization:

The current plan is to hold the seminar on uvvy island (now completely rebuilt) but if more than 45 people sign up we may move it to a new sim on a higher performance “Class 5” server able to accommodate 80-90 participants.

Voice chat is coming to Second Life (I am participating in the beta test and have been impressed with what I have seen and heard so far), but it will not be generally available before June. So, this will be one of the last transhumanist events with text chat as the main conversation mode.

Of course, speakers will have a choice of multimedia technologies to give their talk. I will give mine by real-time streaming video broadcast. The video streaming server will of course be also available to the other speakers who, if they choose this option, will have to install webcam broadcast software like QuickTime broadcaster (Mac only, recommended option, free download) or Wirecast (Windows, commercial product). Now that I think of it, I have never been at an event in Second Life with real-time video broadcast from multiple locations, this is an interesting experiment to make.

Participants will ask questions by text chat, and speakers will answer by text, voice or video. Extropia, whose face and voice may be very well known (many people like to speculate on who her primary might be - once I advanced a guess that she may even be Ray K himself but she denied), will give her lecture and answers by text.

Posted by G.P. on 03/18 at 07:02 AM
English • News • (3) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Print

First steps to neural interfacing for consumers

The Economist has a good article on applications of Brain to Computer Interfacing to computer games: “the promises of, respectively, Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky, two young companies based in California, that plan to transport the measurement of brain waves from the medical sphere into the realm of computer games. If all goes well, their first products should be on the market next year. People will then be able to tell a computer what they want it to do just by thinking about it”.

“First applications are most likely to be single-player computer games running on machines such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3. In the longer term, though, he thinks the system will be ideal for controlling avatars (the visual representations of players) in multiplayer virtual worlds such as Second Life”.

Before becoming available to Second Life users, the new neural interfaces might be available to PlayStation 3 owners in Sony’s forthcoming new service, Home, that puts users into a real-time, networked 3D community, where they can interact, join online games, communicate, share content and even build and show off their own personal spaces. Home will be available this fall as a free download from the PlayStation Store..

Home looks impressive: Second Life with the graphic quality of a console videogame. Take a look here and imagine moving in this world and interacting with things by thought. Add fullly imemrsive headset displays… wow!

The first applications of neural interfacing have been in the medical field. See for example the recent breakthroughs of Cyberkinetics, whose technology used in medical pilot projects has permitted severely disabled patients interacting with computers by thought. Now this technology is finding its way to the consumer market. I am not surprised at all to see that the first consumer applications of neural interfacing are developed for the computer gaming industry. In the computer gaming market there is a lot of money and there will be even more money, and game companies are able to attract very bright and creative people everywhere. I am more and more persuaded that other transhumanist holy grails, such as conscious artificial intelligence, will be first developed by the computer gaming industry.

From the Emotiv website: “Our mission is to create the ultimate interface for the next-generation of man-machine interaction, by evolving the interaction between human beings and electronic devices beyond the limits of conscious interface. Emotiv is creating technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from your mind”. From the NeuroSky website: “Brainwaves have been used in medical research and therapy for years. We’re bringing it to the consumer world”.

So we will soon be able to think our way in Home and Second Life. If a computer can read information from our brains, it won’t be long before it can also write information directly to our brains and very fast: two way neural interfaces that will make computer screens and headsets obsolete, a Second Life that goes directly to the brain bypassing the eyes. And when our virtual environments will contain artificial intelligences, perhaps smarter than us, we will be able to communicate with them at the speed of thought. Let’s call things by their name: these first baby steps to neural interfacing for consumers will lead to *the* transhumanist Holy Grail: mind uploading, the transfer of human consciousness out of the brain into much higher performance supports, where we will be able to interact and merge with our AI mind children.

Posted by G.P. on 03/16 at 07:05 AM
English • News • (3) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Print

THE STRULBRUG FALLACY: AN ESSAY BY EXTROPIA DaSILVA

This very good essay by Extropia DaSilva shows how to counter some of the usual “arguments” against life extension. Published with permission.

More...

Posted by G.P. on 03/06 at 06:42 AM
English • Views • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Print

Transhumanism as a reality based religion

Wesley J. Smith says: “Hughes believes that humans will one day be made immortal and that we will all be able to upload our minds into computers where we will spend eternity enjoying group consciousnesses with our fellow post humans. Of the two of us, I hardly think I am the one who is reality challenged… Transhumanism is religion. And it definitely isn’t reality based”.

My comment:

Who is reality challenged, one who believes in science or one who believes in Santa Claus?

I have never been able to see any fundamental difference between believing in God and believing in Santa Claus. In both cases, one is believing in something for which there is no evidence. Sure, I am not able to prove that Santa Claus does not exist. But the existence of Santa Claus would be so strongly against our scientific knowledge that I think the safest assumption is that Santa Claus does not exist. Same for God.

Mind uploading is a future technology that does not exist yet, and will not be developed next year. My best guess is that developing operational mind uploading technology will take 30 years. But even if mind uploading technology does not exist yet, it is perfectly compatible with our scientific knowledge. The history of science and technology demonstrates that is something can be done (in the sense of not being a violation of scientific laws), sooner or later it will be done.

So Wesley yes, I think you are the one who is reality challenged.

Is transhumanism a religion?

I do not think “religion” is a very appropriate definition of transhumanism. We do not share the self-righteousness, closed mindedness, bigotry and intolerance found in most religions. You say that the religious right opposes the genocide at Darfur, but History and CNN say that the religious right mentality (in many religions) has been and continues to be directly responsible of many genocides all over the planet. And of course, transhumanism is not a religion because it is not based on revelation without evidence. Transhumanists only believe in a heaven that we can build, if and when we develop the necessary capabilities.

But “religion” has also, in my opinion, positive connotations. It is about transcending our current limits and becoming more, much more, than what we are. It is about hope and happiness. In this sense I am willing to accept the label “religion” for the transhumanist worldview. A transhumanist religion, if such a thing existed, would be a kinder, tolerant, inclusive and forgiving religion based on science and humanism.

Posted by G.P. on 03/01 at 07:59 AM
English • Views • (6) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Print