CS855 - Week 6 - The Machine Gods

In the Sept/Oct 2012 issue of the Futurist, a long time author of IT and future shock predictions, Marc Blasband, published an article extending a future prediction about an age old worry we have had since the first notion of automation was posited-future machine worlds and the demise of humankind. In this same issue, Julio Arbesu writes on a future delineation of humans and of transhumanity, a concept I have been mentioning in and out of various discussions in this course. I would like to combine these two visions for the far future. Both predictions were made for the next century (post 2100). This time however, Blasband paints a picture of a cyclical type of co-development between our future machine brethren and humans. Arbesu predicts classes of humans that are further divided into classifications based on what percentage they are comprised of machine parts. Arbesu's taxonomy of future humanoids consists of (1) pure machines, (2) humans with direct connectivity to brain machines, (3) humans with no direct connectivity with brains but with automata in various parts of their body, and (4) just plain old pure humans. Blasband points to the impending wars between rebellious machines (machine-generated guerrilla warfare tactics) from multiple nations, (i.e., every nation's robots and machines will organize to form a machine coalition nation and wage war on humanity to prevent machines from further sacrifice as guinea pigs for human experiments and dangerous adventures and projects). Knowledge will be the new supreme power of control, not governmental force. In this vein, machines will be superior.

Transhumanity and machines (chilloutpoint.com, 2010)

Transhuman divides are manifested quite similarly to the divides between gender, race, and ethnic origin of today. Machines gain knowledge (and hence power) at super exponential rates, not unlike the progress AI has made for the past two decades (especially after the logjam that was artificially created by Minsky in the 1960s about the logic gate limitations of perceptrons, i.e., XORs). Intermediate parts of both these long term prognostications (century) have already been approached, if not in technological manifestations, in theoretically successful thought experiments. What has made these proto-predictions become convincing are the forces of technological curiosity and of the social malaise and fetish with slavery. Societies clamor for the new slave (machines) in the guise of a tool that will facilitate a new, easier life for us all (or at least those that think they are to be the aristocratic few left).

The curious scientific mind, akin to the feeling tentacles of the octopus trying to find nourishment or a superior position, is really trying to find the technological nutrients to keep one step ahead of the restless brain extension of itself. We are all but the skin that provides our only feedback (I use skin here as a metaphor for all sense organs) to our scrap full of neuronally entangled brain hell, clamoring to escape, to be extended past our existential limitations. For this to happen, we invent, create, and destroy via those same devises both good and evil (different sides of the same coin).

The two prognostications noted above are also entangled in our progenic yearnings to extend past our death. So, immortality has a newly defined face - technological curiosity (inventions to escape our bodies) and slave surrogates (places to put our new sequence of bodies into). What if we do not engage in this neo-social Darwinist game of flipping physical existences. Instead, what if we redefine our immortality by our perceptual space-times, abandoning physicality all together. What if instead, we deconstruct our information barriers, create artificial information makers, and hence, create anything of any sort, including physical manifestations of alternate universes (generalize many-worlds universes from the same-named interpretation of quantum mechanics to perceptual information universes). Instead, we define death as the never reaching Zeno distance (computed from Zeno machines) Potgieter (2006), between what we are thinking now (which is continuously connected to the next thing we are thinking of anyway - there is no such thing as living in the present-our neuronal structure does not permit that-sorry transcendentalists) and a made up end point of thinking- Western religious definitions of death, (re)incarnations, and transformation. I have just defined a software program for the inscription of digital information immortality. We then embed this as part of the von Neumann self-replicating machine progeny and further mutate it with Godelian self-writing logic to expand itself automatically-defining a superior type of self-reflective and progressive trans-consciousness (von Neumann, 1966; Schmidhuber, 2006). Will machines accomplish this before humans will for them and us? That is the more relevant and fundamental prognostication for human-machine transmogrification.

References

Arbesu, J. (2012). Transport and transhumans. Futurist, 46, 5.

Blasband, M. (2012). When the machines take over. Futurist, 46,5.

chilloutput.com (2010). Retrieved from http://www.chilloutpoint.com/featured/human-and-robots-visions-of-the-future.html.

Potgieter, P. H. (2006). Zeno machines and hypercomputation.arXiv:cs/0412022v3 [cs.CC].

Schmidhuber, J. (2006). Godel machines: Self-referential universal problem solvers making provably optimal self-improvements. arXiv:cs/0309048v5 [cs.LO].

von Neumann, J. (1966). Burks, A. W. (ed.). Theory of self-reproducing automata. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.