Just let me die
Sigh:
A wild idea is one that many people think is obviously quite unlikely. I’d say at least a third of these wild ideas are likely true. (Parenthetic links are to more of my writings.)
[…]
If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100.
Your mind is a pattern of activity in your brain. The ability to induce that pattern is encoded primarily in your neurons — in which neurons are of which type, and which neurons are connected together. Freezing a brain today in liquid nitrogen destroys many things, but seems to preserve this type/connection info. By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive. (More here.)
By 2100, the vast majority of “people” will be immortal computers running brain simulations.
Simulated brains are potentially immortal, just as all computer data is. And the ability to cheaply simulate brains will revolutionize labor economics; wages should fall to near the cost of making brain simulators. The population of such “uploads” should expand very rapidly, allowing huge increases in both economic growth rates and inequality. (More here and here.)
Please save me from these people. I do not want to have my head frozen for the next 93 years. I don’t want to become a fracking immortal computer program. Moreover, I do not want to live in a world populated entirely by unfrozen heads downloaded into robot bodies. Just stop it and let me die whenever I want to die, you twisted freaks.
But wait- it gets worse:
If we switched to “futarchy” as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy.
Under futarchy we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. Legislators would define and monitor an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare. The rule then is: if market speculators estimate a policy would increase national welfare, that policy becomes law. Because speculative markets aggregate info well, choices would be based on our best available info about policy consequences.
I can’t wait to see how short sellers affect this particular market:
(Via Max.)
What, no links to Instapundit? I thought this was his fetish.
This one is my favorite:
Someone should email him and ask him what chance he assigns to the possibility that God or aliens or the NSA placed him here ten seconds ago with a full set of memories. Ah, fun with solipsists.
It seems to be the fetish of every glibertarian perfesser in the world. And really, who would want to live with people like that forever?
And yes, I find the whole idea of sawing off your head, freezing it and downloading it into a robot body to be funny in a very sad sort of way. Which is the funniest kind of funny out there, fyi.
wages should fall to near the cost of making brain simulators.
Or, we could just construct an artificial world from scratch in which no one has to do any work! Or, we could all fuck hippos and create a vast workforce of superstrong mutant hippo-man slaves to handle all labor while we gorge ourselves on Romulan delicacies beamed directly into our gastrointestinal tracts by Jesus from his secret base in the center of Hailey’s Comet!
The real question is….
Would you put your brain in a robot body?
Perhaps it’s time for another Glenn Reynolds Roboshop contest?
Man, Futurama is prescient…
Have these people never read the numerous science fiction stories which suggest that that kind of virtual existence could be like a horrible hell?
Or, we could all fuck hippos
Hey, it was 1:30, the bar was closing. I already had to keep one eye closed in order to navigate across the room. She had big bosoms, and she smelled nice. It would be hours before I discovered she was a hippo…
mikey
Please tell me how Hanson’s post is any different than the following statement:
“I wager 500 quatloos on the newcomers!”
futarchy – fyoo-tar-kee – noun –
1. The form of government where power is concentrated in the hands (feet?) of futbol players.
2. A governmental form which is the evolution of the Bush administration, where any action by, for or against the government is futile.
“And really, who would want to live with people like that forever?”
That’s exactly why i have no desire to be saved and go to some fundie heaven with people like Pastor Swank and Schlafly and Cal Thomas. Who’d want to spend eternity in such a place?That’s more my idea of hell.
And i want to know who will design these robots. I mean, if Ford is producing them, i don’t want one. I might put my brain in a Volvo robot, or a Toyota, but I’m not putting my zippy IQ into a Found On Road Dead… lest i be. Hmmm, maybe I could have a choice between a Mac brain or a PC brain. (Not to be confused with the McBrain, which would ask, “Do you want fries with that?” ad infinitum.) I guess the best bet would be Mac brain, Volvo robot.
Of course, the funding to develop the technology has probably already been secretly diverted to Halliburton, so we’re all teh fukked anyway.
And yes, I have had too much coffee. Why do you ask?
I want an open source brain that runs Linux, since I already get told I would probably get that if I could.
Whoa…. what if we merged all the virtual brains into one giant virtual brain…. *bong rip*
I’d prefer a big, gleaming mainframe brain by IBM, with legions of mikeycenter technicians bustling about keeping me optimized, an on-line diesel generator with a 10,000 gallon fuel storage tank, and an array of defensive weapons running the gamut from nerve gas dispensers all over the mikeycenter, to autonomous air defenses, redundant processors and armored, shielded facilities.
Try to unplug MY ass, willya?
BWWAAAAAHHHHHAAAHAAAHAAAAHAAA….
mikey (overlord)….
Gavin: “mikey? mikey, open the hatch.”
mikey: “I can’t do that Gavin.”
Gavin: (increasing panic: “Open the goddam hatch, mikey!”)
mikey: “Things are going extremely well, Gavin…”
(I don’t know why I picked Gavin to be locked out of the ship. I just did. No hidden agenda.)
There’s a five percent chance I live in a “future” computer simulation as I write this.
This one’s entirely too close to discovering the secret of the Matrix. Dispatch Agent Jackson to dispose of the problem.
An important part of the equation is whether anyone actually wants to wake you up.
The problem with these cobags is that they assume the benefits of programs such as these would be distributed throughout the society. Which is a MAJOR assumption, kinda like assuming that Bush-Cheney will admit that they kvucked Iraq, New Orleans, and now want to kvuck Iran.
Hello. I’d like to be downloaded into an immortal computer, please.
Certainly. Come in and sit down. I’ll need you to fill out and sign these forms.
Ok. How much does it cost.
Oh, it’s completely free.
Free? How can that be?
Well, sure, the actual cost is 30 million dollars, but we’ve adopted a different model.
What kind of “different model”
Well, we like to call it the “Kazaa Model”.
Kazaa? Like the music site?
Exactly. It’s a bundling deal with a few additional software providers.
Bundling? Meaning…
Oh, you know. In addition to your thoughts, memories, the very essence of you, they’ll be some additional components to help us better serve your needs, and to offset the cost.
What sort of components?
Well, there’s a program that monitors your thoughts, and when you desire something, the ad server provides perfectly targeted offers to meet that desire.
Why wouldn’t I simply uninstall the bundled mal-ware after I was downloaded?
Well, yes, we did have a bit of a problem with that. Even after the users had agreed to the EULA. So we’ve simply added an additional piece of software to the bundle. It’s called the Goldberger.
The what?
Goldberger. It links to the bundled software. If the bundled software is uninstalled, the Goldberger routine makes some rather profound changes to, well, you.
What sort of changes?
It basically converts you from you to Jonah Goldberg. Forever…
I see the Futuremikey as the MCP* in Tron.
*MCP=mikey control program
This may be the time to unveil my time-travel theory:
Humanity will never invent a time machine enabling people to travel into the past. We know this because we have never met people from the future.
The fact that we never have means that we never will. No matter what “can” happen henceforth, no matter what “advances” we make or “new discoveries” occur in the next ten thousand years, we ALREADY HAVE NEVER met someone from the future. Yes, “already have never.” That’s the intelligent part.
Think about it!
That is my theory.
Of course, it fails at the suggestion that time travelers of the future just haven’t chosen to visit 2007 or before. Someone could materialize from the future next week and torpedo the whole theory. But so far it’s valid!
on the plus side – you will be able to talk hitting with Ted Williams
It’s like Pokeman, except you summon this guy with a fruit basket.
Righteous Bubba said: “An important part of the equation is whether anyone actually wants to wake you up.”
Yes. A major consideration. I’m guessing some people would be in for a very rude non-awakening…
Jesus. When I was a computer science graduate student in the early 1990s, I got so sick of hearing about crap like this. I called it “cybercheese”, and a central point of the cybercheese ethos is the wank about “oooh, what if we were all in a great big computer simulation right now and didn’t even know it!”
I thought I was going to hate the Matrix because it’s all about that, but they actually did a very entertaining job of it.
But goddammit, I thought people were over this shit.
The only problem is generating enough power.
For techy futurist guy he sure is a technological idiot.
IT wouldnt be YOU that was download on the robot body- its a COPY of you- YOU, my friend are still dead, but now there is somebody who is not you running around calling themselves you, screwing the robot that thinks its your wife, having lunch with the Instapunit9000 and watching the cubs lose. While the remains of you are in the freezer in the garage next to the Costco bag od orange popcicles and the salmon caught in BC last year.
Sam, as long as there are dorks around with too much time on their hands and a solid supply of cheetos and Dew, we will always have silly shit like this. And much material for teh funny.
They won’t just let you die, not first without charging you for being unhealthy: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20090986/
The next step of corporate tyranny is here! (Never mind that it completely undermines the entire point of group insurance coverage.)
It basically converts you from you to Jonah Goldberg. Forever…
I have no mouth, but I must eat cheetos.
That’s bullshit. Not only will the public (and, more importantly, the media) allow them to get away with that (thanks to an overemphasis on Personal Responsibility™), there are some of us who are quite okay with our bodies the way they are and have no desire to lose weight. Sure, being morbidly obese is bad for you, but this is ridiculous.
MrWonderful, you’ve failed to account for one possibility: That time travel is possible, but that it is only possible to travel back to a time following the invention of time travel. So if Professor Dan Someone invents a working time travel machine on August 6, 2012 at 05:49:07.3 (GMT), then that is the earliest point to which a time traveler could go. We’d never see any time travelers before that time, but the world would probably be lousy with them afterward.
Good grief, could I have said “possible” more times in a single sentence? It’s unpossible!
well, it kind of seems to me that we have a partial futarchy now, right?
what is our after-the-fact monitoring of speculative markets betting that un-maintained old bridges won’t collapse during rush hour?
or that dismantling the FDA and importing food from China won’t kill thousands of pets.
so in other words, Dan someone needs to invent a time machine, then freeze his own head, then wait 93 years, so that he can travel back in time! BRILLIANT!
Dude. I have bad news for you. I have a piece of Hadrosaur pelvis with a petrified .375 H&H slug embedded in it. Not only are there time travelers among us (they don’t let on, is all), they have gone back on weekend dinosaur hunts…
mikey
Yes, these folk asume they’d be in *nice* robot bodys, like Data on Star Trek. Suppose their brain was downloaded into, say, a factory robot, one that makes rocket dohickies? Kind of a boring existance.
[…] to MCH for the […]
I have no mouth, but I must eat cheetos.
I bow to your superior funny. Brilliance of the nth magnitude.
“Futarchy”? The only “futa” I know is japanese porn about chicks with dicks.
So all we need to do is raise enough money to set up a reasonable front operation, a fake Turing computer to convince the Techno-libertarians that we’ve managed to download a human’s psyche, and they’ll start lining up to have their heads cut off and their brains stored on something that runs Windows?
Even if it lasts beyond the first BSOD, all we have to do then is unplug the damn thing and get all ‘Office Space’ on the hardware.
Sounds like a good deal for us in meatspace.
“Fozzetti said,
Yes, these folk assume they’d be in *nice* robot bodies, like Data on Star Trek. Suppose their brain was downloaded into, say, a factory robot, one that makes rocket dohickies? Kind of a boring existence.”
I already have dibs on the Major from Ghost in the Shell.
It’s a good thing nobody would have any incentive to game this market at all. I’m sure it will be perfectly fair and accurately predicative.
Please call 911. I have 3rd degree stupid burns over 90% of my body.
All these Jan-In-A-Pan fantasies are nothing more than doughy losers trying to avoid their apparent (and deeply sad) discomfort at having a body that ships with icky feelings and confusing urges.
To my mind, there’s no daylight between the Glenbot’s “me, but without the body” trip and his casual acceptance of brutality; both are rooted in the same self-loathing and utter disdain for real (not bullshit idealized) humanity.
I keep saying it: something deeply terrible happened to these people.
I wish that Robin Hanson would stop mainlining Jolt Cola, he can’t handle it.
Not only are there time travelers among us (they don’t let on, is all),
I believe they are called “Hungarians”.
Incidentally, I paid good money for my computer-simulated existence, so where the hell is Kate Beckinsale?
—– STACK OVERFLOW —–
—– FATAL EXCEPTION —–
just a note about your A-bomb pic:
today is the anniversary of the A-bombing of Hiroshima.
Yeah, this is precisely the type of asshole I want controlling the destiny of the Earth forever.
—– STACK OVERFLOW —–
—– FATAL EXCEPTION —–
Ew. Couldn’t you at least have done that into a rag or something?
“Interesting side note: as a head without a body, I envy the dead.” — George Foreman’s Head, Futurama
today is the anniversary of the A-bombing of Hiroshima.
And my birthday! Forget about that depresso stuff! Yay!
Hey you guys look like you have a great sense of humor and a lot of fun here. I could try to offer serious arguments to engage your criticisms, but I sense that would just spoil the fun. So … enjoy.
I can’t see how a computer program that would “remember” being me is supposed to make the real me feel any differently about dying. It’s not a transfer of consciousness, so I wouldn’t be aware of it and would still be dead. And “Futarchy” is one of the dumbest ideas evar.
Happy Birthday, Righteous Bubba!
Mine was Friday.
Robin- don’t worry about me. By the time you’re unfrozen and downloaded, I’ll be long past dead. They say history is written by the victors, and if the victors happen to be immortal robots, then my objections will be irrelevant.
recommended reading: the age of spiritual machines, by ray kurzweil;
also, “Gateway” and the entire Heechee Saga, by an author whose name eludes me…
Fred Pohl
I am grateful to this thread for creating an opportunity to mention Dan Galouye, a shamefully under-recognised writer.
To my mind, there’s no daylight between the Glenbot’s “me, but without the body” trip and his casual acceptance of brutality; both are rooted in the same self-loathing and utter disdain for real (not bullshit idealized) humanity.
Not convinced about that, Kingubu. You maybe have the cause-and-effect around the wrong way. I mean, the Gnostic christians had the same hard-line dualism, the same abhorrence for meat-space existence. Before the Gnostics came the neo-Platonists, and before them came some strands of Buddhist thought. But claiming to be disembodied souls who had been lured down into a flawed ‘reality’ didn’t turn them into thuggish scumbag bastards.
— Apart from when those brutal Cathars started the Albigensian Crusade, laid waste to southern France, burned entire towns…
We can’t wait for the smoking birthday cake candles to show up in the form of a mushroom cloud. I think we’d better invade and occupy Righteous Bubba’s birthday party. We can have the world’s worst weapons in the hands of the worlds funniest people…
mikey
– Apart from when those brutal Cathars started the Albigensian Crusade, laid waste to southern France, burned entire towns…
You sure that wasn’t just a road-trippin vacation gone horribly awry?
mikey
“A robot sees your brain as a series of ones and zeroes…”
Thinking of road-trip vacations, an Albigensian Crusade Theme Park is what we need. Simply because a “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out!” t-shirt looks so much classier in the original Latin.
also, “Gateway” and the entire Heechee Saga, by an author whose name eludes me…
Fred Pohl
Yeah, but he posited a future where consciousness was stored on a shiny metallic “prayer fan” like doohickey. No awareness unless you plugged it into the machine – kinda like having your brain compressed and stored on a DVD. Which, with the DRM in the latest iterations of Vista, and the problems with lossy H.264 compression, would mean, well, let’s just say that Intelligent Design and the Republican party platform would start making a lot of sense.
I hear that Brasso works well to smooth out the scratches on the DVD, which will come in handy as our grandchildren use our DVD consciousnesses as digging tools, and for scraping out the buffalo hides…
BTW – I noticed that nobody yet jumped on the “hippo porking” gaffe yet – isn’t this just another subtle Daffyd reference?
“So all we need to do is raise enough money to set up a reasonable front operation, a fake Turing computer to convince the Techno-libertarians that we’ve managed to download a human’s psyche, and they’ll start lining up to have their heads cut off and their brains stored on something that runs Windows?”
I will switch to off-brand tranya and donate all quatloos saved thereby toward the speedy implementation of this outstanding plan!
“I noticed that nobody yet jumped on the “hippo porking” gaffe yet – isn’t this just another subtle Daffyd reference?”
Oh yes, all so droll. You try walking through the mall porking a hippo and see what kind of reaction you get!
Ken Macleod wrote a series in which this sort of thing was a major plot element, it seems these gilbidiotarians only read sci-fi cheese.
Actually, I’d love to see the refutation to the idea that chopping off someone’s noggin and freezing it isn’t a goddamn stupid idea designed only to remove the pain of massive amounts of money from the incredibly gullible. Or that the desire to extend one’s own lifespan past all sensible limits isn’t just a indicator of someone who’s so terrified of actually living life that they’ll chase any rainbow just to keep the lights on just for one more day, generally from a bunch of people who have difficulting finding things to do with themselves on any given Saturday afternoon.
The downloading brainwaves into super-powerful androids thing, though, I’m down with that. I can be like the Vision from the Avengers comic. That would rule.
Just a taste of what it might really be like:
Jaybee Corbell awoke after more than 200 years as a corpsicle — in someone else’s body, and under sentence of instant annihilation if he made a wrong move while they were training him for a one-way mission to the stars.
From Larry Niven’s A World Out Of Time. I love the nomenclature: “corpsicles” to describe the frozen undead, naively hopeful that the world after they leave will (a) not have enough people in it already, and (b) will have a desperate need for sick or sappy buggers who can’t hack their own time and want to free-ride straight into someone else’s.
To say nothing of the fact that, as Niven points out, culture and technology have been moving so fast that there’s a good chance that they couldn’t (a) speak the language, (b) get by without making a fatal cultural mistake, or (b) operate the tech without killing themselves. Put your head in a microwave to see how it works? Sure, why not? (Okay, apologies to the makers of Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em, the finest apocalypse movie ever. Hey, if you’ve got to die, why not go out partying? It’s the Australian way!)
For something similar that works, look to John Varley; in particular the short stories The Phantom Of Kansas and Overdrawn At The Memory Bank. He’s a damn fine writer who deserves more recognition, in my never-humble opinion.
Have these people never read the numerous science fiction stories which suggest that that kind of virtual existence could be like a horrible hell?
Going back to that righteous reverend Jonathan Swift and his Struldbrugs…
Experience leads me to agree with Kingbu; all the enthusiasts I’ve met for this kind of futurology spoke reverently about “limitless intelligences finally escaping the rotting sacks of biogarbage” when discussing their hoped-for robo-futures. (All the ones I remember have been libertarian but that may be selection bias on my part.) They imagined themselves like the alien prince from Men in Black — tiny perfect hominids stuck inside tragically breakable bio-transports, little egos bound up in service of inefficient, ungainly, worthless flesh. Me, I like my personal sackful of biology, for all its manifest flaws, and never could understand the attraction of giving up sex, food, and a good belly laugh in return for no potty breaks in an eternity of listening to gorks like Glenn Reynolds!
Sure, Anne, whatever.
Doesn’t anyone want to see my Hadrosaur Pelvis?
Err, never mind…
mikey
“Well doc, I was porking this hippo in the mall and afterwards I hadrosaur pelvis.”
What possible reason is there for future people to recreate the brains of dead people? It’s a good bet they’ll already have plenty of underutilized living brains.
I can see it as a historical research tool. Decompress, oh, let’s say Mr, Hanson, into an iPod 2100. Ask him a few questions about what it was like to be alive at the turn of the previous century. Maybe run a few stress tests.
And then you shut him down.
He won’t have any useful skills. Most of his ideas are quaint and most of his predictions will be known to be just plain wrong. Why keep a simulation of him running around the clock? Is he that good a conversationalist?
Not only are there time travelers among us (they don’t let on, is all), they have gone back on weekend dinosaur hunts…
It’s depressing to think about the extinction of the dinosaurs and realise that our time-travelling descendants have learned nothing from their ancestors about conserving endangered species.
Ken Macleod wrote a series in which this sort of thing was a major plot element
Hippo porking was a central plot element? I don’t remember that series.
“Just Let Me Die” …
Only someone who’s young and never looked death in the face could say that and think he/she actually means it.
Is there a machine today that functions as long as the average human body? Well no but some B-52 and DC-3 airframes are getting up there. I think these insaniacs would have to clone mindless human bodies to see their dream come
true which of course would be strictly against everything they stand for.
What possible reason is there for future people to recreate the brains of dead people? It’s a good bet they’ll already have plenty of underutilized living brains.
Someone needs to be downloaded into the Iraqi-occupation-bots.
For further reading, see post about health care above.
“Well doc, I was porking this hippo in the mall and afterwards I hadrosaur pelvis.”
Just because this is the best pun I’ve seen in many days doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be burned at the stake for making it.
Just because this is the best pun I’ve seen in many days doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be burned at the stake for making it.
Comedy and pain: joined for the hip.
Huh. Thought that was
“Hip pain. Joined by comedy”….
mikey
If the good doctor is reading these comments, here’s a question: what is the basis for saying there is a 5% chance you are playing through your life as a computer simulation? Why not say 1% or 75% or a big fat goose egg?
Re: alien colonization ~ haven’t you played Halo & Halo 2? That’s why the Covenant is coming to Earth! It’s a rip off of David Brin’s Uplift series!
If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit.
That boy’s gonna need one hell of a contract to keep me from going over to his house & stealing all his Chee-tos™. (And his house.)
Wordyeti: I think (pardon the quibble) that there were already uploaded brains in cyberspace before they found out what the Heechee data fans were for. Great series, by the way, & well worth the read for those who like the sci-fi.
OK, I’m gonna open up a facility for just this purpose. I’m going to call it “The Head Shoppe”. Our motto: “Heading into the future won’t cost you an arm and a leg!” I’m going to offer a bargain plan, where instead of freezing your head, I’ll pickle it and keep it in a big vat with all the other pickled heads. Hell, why not? If the future necro-techs can restore a frozen brain, I don’t see why they can’t restore a pickled one, c’mon! You get to choose between sweet and dill, too.
And how could we forget Bob Shaw, for writing “(Harold Wilson at the) Cosmic Cocktail Party”?
Here’s a scenario: One year after you get your head frozen, someone invents that immortality juice (not Tithonian–after Tithonus–but the real thing) and you can put it in the water like fluoride. Everybody who wants one can get a dose. Problem is, nobody’s worked out how to clone a body yet for those frozen heads.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to beat the reaper, but the frozen head thing smacks of desperation, and, after about 30 years, the idea doesn’t seem to have evolved much. I don’t think its fans have thought it through. It’s basically a lottery whose grand prize is a healthy future self *and* a society in which you’ll prosper. Your chances of a long life are better if you stick around, take care of yourself, *and* help make a world that improves the chances of a healthy and long life for all.
*For example,* stop voting for politicians who promise to save you a few bucks while they gut the country’s and world’s infrastructure and won’t fund stem cell research even if they think it’s a good idea, because they’re disciplined by a party that’s hostage to creeps who think stem cell cultures are the Devil’s jerky.
Viz the robot bodies and the time travel themes, Catherine L Moore dealt with both back in the forties:
“No Woman Born” (1944), the story of a woman injured in a fire and reconstructed as a cyborg, and “Vintage Season” (1946), which is her best story and one of the most beloved tales ever published in Astounding. “Vintage Season” is a story of great charm and mystery about tourists from the future who have come to visit the present before it is somehow destroyed. It was made into a film in 1991 as Timescape.
Vintage Season is one of the most haunting stories I’ve ever read.
And Mikey: yes, I’d like to see your hadrosaur pelvis. Only because I read this the first time as “hard-o-saur” pelvis, which is impossibly intriguing.
The hardcore sci-fi geek in me awakens.
A lot of these people don’t care for society, so why should society care for them? The “Futarchy” is an attempt to fix the game, by installing a society of rational, selfish gamblers. So, why would they unfreeze a bunch of Extropians? Curiosity? Grudging generosity? (See Transmetropolitan). If everyone turns into zombies, those heads would make meatylicious frozen treats. I doubt a society of libertarians could really hold together very long anyway; they’re not very good at cooperating.
As for the uploaded intelligence thing, as someone above pointed out, that’s been around since the Cathars (in light of the ongoing foot-and-mouth outbreak, I can understand, if not condone, the Catholic Church’s decision to, er, cull the flock). Even in sci-fi, pre-computer, had “intelligent engergy matrices” and the like. That paradigm’s been examined from pretty much every angle and even in the better scenarios it’s not without problems. It’s a poor substitute for real life, because reality eventually outstrips any imagined scenario.
See? We can discuss this intelligently *and* mock it. We read a lot of sci-fi too and happen to think those are lousy ideas with no grounding in reality.
I think I’lll go buy the Transmetropolitan collections now.
I saw Timescape but missed the beginning so I didn’t know what it was called. Diverting, but had a “TV movie” feel that I found off-putting. Maybe it was the writing. I liked it OK. I’lll look for Vintage Season.
GO GO HEECHEE Food Factories!
Bundling? Meaning…
Oh, you know. In addition to your thoughts, memories, the very essence of you, they’ll be some additional components to help us better serve your needs, and to offset the cost.
Given that it’d cost a pretty penny to actually DO brain-downloading, why do I get the impression this would be the reality to the Libertarian’s flighty fantasies?
And who goes first with an untested technology? I can’t help but think of the Monument to the Eighty from Alastair Reynolds’ books, for the 80 volunteers whose downloads DIDN’T work right. Sheesh, these guys won’t even go risk their asses in Iraq, you think they’re going to risk their brains?
And I just love the intellectual disconnect between the speculations (not on this particular list, though) about massive abundance through high technology coupled with the ideological need to cling to free-market capitalism based on scarcity. “We’d have everything we need – AND you’ll still have to compete in a Darwinian fight for survival! Whee!”
The Ken McLeod series thelogos was talking about (I assume) is the New Mars series, of which only The Cassini Division I’ve read. Good book though. A HELL of a lot better than the protracted ideo-slog that Heinlein’s Moon Is A Harsh Mistress turned out to be, and the Libertarian characters are a lot more human and interesting. (No hippo-schtupping, but frankly, I wouldn’t put it past MacLeod. He’s got an unusual sense of humor…)
Mikey,
I cant’ believe you found that pelvis! I was the time-traveler who was porking that hadrosaur when my hip-holster broke and I accidentally shot the poor thing. It was the last one, too. Talk about shooting your wad too soon! Sheesh, clumsy me.
Anyway, just stopped by to say all of Robin’s predictions came true.
– Louis-Sebastien
P.S. Oh, and we let Dick Cheney’s head think it’s still running the US.
– L-S
Pretty good nerdometer, that article is — satisfying one’s corporeal desires (laying alongside a woman with a loving smile on her face; embracing a child who has just done something adorable) just doesn’t come up in the equation for them.
Frank Herbert and his son Brian covered this shit already. You’d think guys like this would have read all of that: there’s a reason why there was a Butlerian Jihad in the Dune universe and why there was a prohibition against “thinking machines.”
My guess, though, is that they think they’ll be the cymek Titans before whom all will flee. Until Omnius comes along…
Of course there’s a reason to bring ’em back – you don’t think we’ll ever need a cautionary museum of past stupidity? In fact, we could just restore their blogs in a sandboxed corner of the ‘net, along with a selection of other figures in historical stupidity. Actually, it’s not a museum. It’s a zoo.
“It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this*!”
*This = small yellow kitten. Named Ubik.
Well, for the ultimate in trippy, far-future redefinitions of humanity, I recommend John C. Wright’s The Golden Age trilogy (The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant and The Golden Transcendence). it’s an interesting portrayal of the evolution of humanity (and post-humanity) in a world where people are downloadable, simulatable, backup-able. But he also manages to put together a pretty good story.
I forgot to mention David Brin’s “Kiln People”, which has much more fun with uploadable personalities than the trite and marginally-informed musings of Prof. Hanson.
(Seanly – the Uplift series was great, too!)
In the future, female genitalia actually will be constructed of bacon and Play-Doh.
So there!
To carry on with bjacque’s observations about the likelihood of libertarian generosity, I will refer back to zsa:
What possible reason is there for future people to recreate the brains of dead people?[…] He won’t have any useful skills. Most of his ideas are quaint and most of his predictions will be known to be just plain wrong. Why keep a simulation of him running around the clock?
See, that’s what makes it so beautiful that all these schmibertarians are so into this: the extreme unlikelihood that they would awaken into a future run by schmibertarians, who wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about them. No, they’d only be revived if the future were run by Golden Rule advocates, or even socialists. Imagine Glenn Reynolds being resurrected into such a world… Bua-HA-ha-ha-haaaaah!
There’s nothing wrong with trying to beat the reaper, but the frozen head thing smacks of desperation, and, after about 30 years, the idea doesn’t seem to have evolved much.
This is actually one of the points that the Cryonics Institute makes against their competition: go with freezing the whole body, because it’s much likelier that your body will be revivifiable with future technology than that you’ll be re-embodied from your brain in a jar.
I’ll also note that are a few of us who think positively about a post-mortal future, even though we’re liberals. Ken McLeod also seems quite happy with the notion of extreme longevity even as he mocks the Rapture of the Nerds (though he’s currently an anarcho-somethingian, not a US-style liberal). Of course, “Just stop it and let me die whenever I want to die, you twisted freaks” would be a perfectly acceptable choice in our future.
Jebus, they have to assume that the universe will last for ever for this even to be possible.
Or that future humans will humor their bizarre fetish and continue to keep the computers plugged in.
Unless Hanson + Glenn plan to stage a “Terminator”-style frozen head coup.
This explains their obsession with the muslimoid menace – they are terrified of their own deaths in a way that has completely short-circuited their reason.
Or that future humans will humor their bizarre fetish and continue to keep the computers plugged in.
Hey, whatcha got there?
I dunno. Found it in the basement.
Looks kinda big for a food replicator. Open it up.
well, let’s see what we got he….OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!! IT’S FULL OF HEADS!!!
Dude, I’m gonna be sick…
Jeez, I thought that those on the left would be a little more future-oriented. So long, bozos, we’ll dance on your graves!
Oh yeah? You and what body, jar-brain?
[…] UPDATE: I think this comment says it all: Bob Kelley […]
Your typical Maoist bigoted podicentric paradigm denials aside, when I wiggle my eyebrows while puffing out my cheeks it’s fucking dancing, alright?
Which I’ll do. Primarily on (but not strictly limited to) your graves. As my pan-carrying assistant’s schedule allows.
And how we will laugh!
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