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12/7/17: HOMO REJECTUS

Ron Patton | December 7, 2017

HOMO REJECTUS

MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

While most people are awaiting the confirmation of extraterrestrial biological entities or the disclosure from the government of alien infiltration, there are others that are waiting for the Technological Messiah.

Sci-fi depictions of the future would have us thinking of the singularity, when A.I surpasses human intelligence, as either a Technological Messiah or the Apocalypse. Experts in the field hold varying opinions about just how good or bad, gradual or sudden it will be, but most agree that it will happen in the next hundred years and probably sooner.

Technological Messiah may be a strong phrase for self-aware Artificial Intelligence, so the technocrats have created the word “singularity” in order to explain computers and networks that learn to think on their own and later reproduce more of their kind.

Back when I did the show on cryptocurrency we had a discussion about how the blockchain could be the very computer program within the vast network that could be the closest thing we have to the singularity.

The term singularity can be borrowed from contemporary physics to describe an environment in which we no longer really understand much of what’s happening around us.

Physicists call the Event Horizon of a Black Hole, a singularity because the laws of physics don’t apply there.

Some believe the singularity will be achieved when the biological joins with the digital in order to form an advanced Artificial Intelligence capable of feelings and emotions.

Having computers or even anthropomorphic robots that are capable of embodied cognition and social learning will be very important to the socialization of machines.

One of the biggest obstacles will remain in the process of accepting this socializing is human suspicion and paranoia about so-called smart computers and robots because most of us have been raised to not trust a future that includes thinking machines.

However, the present is becoming an object lesson in dystopia even in times where Artificial Intelligence is allegedly still in its infancy.

I am beginning to suspect that perhaps the singularity has already happened and all of the discussion about it happening is merely a grooming process to suppress the reality that mankind has reached its peak and that Artificial Intelligence and its marriage to biological counterparts is the only way mankind can evolve into a better species.

We have been seeing a great deal of worldwide crises. Every time we hear of a volcano erupting, or an earthquake, or even bad weather, we have tendency to lie to ourselves that there has to be someone responsible for these anomalies. I would love to reiterate that history and future tense potential gives us the major kick in the head that forces us to confront the idea that we are heading for what is being called, the Sixth Extinction.

The environment is damaged, or it is adapting to some other “normal” that we are contending with now. We are seeing global upheavals, unexplained animal deaths and human behavior that is quite destructive.

It appears that the consensus is not united and that through their division and discontent are seeking a suicidal end to what we have cherished. We may have the fight in us to protest, resist, scream and shout, but that is what happens before the final blow silences the screams of those who are in pain.

Einstein warned us that crisis is the pretext for extinction. Every crisis that we try to over analyze, every terrorist event that we develop new theories for is tantalizing mental masturbation, but it does nothing to help us over come and get beyond our collective victimhood.

We are now excelling in using our victimhood as currency. It does nothing to benefit society. People have always been victimized by some sort of trauma, but now it becomes an everyday “crisis in the now” and it is now personified on the cover of Time magazine.

We can manufacture all sorts of what ifs, but we may want to watch the what now’s that indicate, the only hope we have now is to grow in knowledge and shatter old myths that seem to cloud our development.

Today it was reported that researches are now concluding that humanity has reached its peak and is now probably in its downfall.

The technocrats are saying now that people have long thought of human development as one long process of improvement, going on forever. But we are now running up against the limits of how good we can be, and most likely we’ll now just begin to fall again.

I guess that is pretty bleak – just when you thought we were improving our lives, science tells us that this is as good as it ever will be.

The major research review looked at 120 years of data and found that there appears to be limits on our characteristics, like when we die, how tall we can be and how strong we are. We are pushing up against those limits now, the research suggests.

For a long time, humanity has looked to be improving. Things that once seemed impossible are now commonplace, for instance, and the record for oldest person in the world is often being broken.

But with time, we’ll probably see fewer world records being broken, the new research suggests, and little development in how old the oldest people are. More people might reach those peaks of performance, but the peaks will get no higher, the research published in the journal, Frontiers in Psychology found.

Our super biological traits are no longer increasing, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress. The research suggests that modern societies have allowed our species to reach its limits.

Human height has decreased in the last decade in some African countries; this suggests some societies are no longer able to provide sufficient nutrition for each of their children and maintain the health of their young.

Scientists are now saying that environmental constraints may force us to look into some of the transhumanist options.

A few years, Stephen Hawking spoke at a conference about how he believes humans have entered a new stage of evolution. Although it has taken Homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year. We have sped up our evolution with the use of drugs, bodily enhancements and technology. The human we will see in the not too distant future, according to Hawking will be an advanced human, maybe even something that has a semblance to humanity without being human.

We are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls “self designed evolution,” in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. At first these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, Hawking is sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and our physical being in order to become something more than human.

I worry that science is now in the process of grooming us all to accept the inevitability of mechanical upgrades, chips and other artificial enhancements to the human body.

The technocrats are working hard to produce biodigital Artificial Intelligence.

A loose definition of Transhumanism is a point in evolution where man becomes something that is beyond human. Transhumanists see the human body as something that can be improved through science and technology. They also see technology as a means to where we can overcome suffering, aging, loneliness, and involuntary death. Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label “posthuman.” The symbol for Transhuman is H+ or “Enhanced Human.”

With the advent of Transhumanism, there seems to be a new way to cull a civilization by converting them to a grid where they can be controlled.

In 1958, Robert Sheckley wrote a piece of speculative fiction about a human’s consciousness being transferred into a brain-dead body. There are also new breakthroughs in downloading information into the brain.

Two neuroscientists at the University of Rochester say they have managed to introduce information directly into the premotor cortex of monkeys. The researchers published the results of the experiment on today in the journal, Neuron.

Although the research is preliminary, carried out in just two monkeys, the researchers speculated that further research might lead to brain implants for people with strokes.

The monkeys had devices implanted in their brains that could “inject” information straight into the premotor cortex.

Today it was also announced that scientists have created the world’s first soft artificial beating heart.

It looks like a real heart except that it’s made of silicone. It was made with the help of a 3D printer.

There is still one major issue with it. The heart only lasts about 3,000 heartbeats. That’s roughly 30 to 45 minutes.

The reason is because the material can’t seem to stand the strain. Despite that, it still shows the potential of artificial organs possibly saving lives in the future.

This puts us even closer to the time where machines will be used to prolong life and enhance our brain capacity.

Meanwhile we are now being that officially Google has created an A.I. that can create an A.I. that is better than the A.I. it created. Technically this means that Google has created Artificial Intelligence that has given birth to its first child.

The machine learns through ‘reinforcement learning’ which means it trains for a task, reports back to its AI ‘parent’ and then learns how it can do it better.
This particular AI recognizes objects, such as people, cars, handbags and traffic lights, in real time.

According to Science Alert, the AI child, called NASNet, is controlled by a neural network called AutoML, made by Google Brain, which teaches the ‘child’ to do specific tasks. The process is repeated thousands of times.

Eventually researchers found NASNet was 82.7 per cent accurate at predicting images correctly. This is 1.2 per cent better than previously published results and the system is now four per cent more efficient.

The findings show automation could create more AI all by themselves.

AI is currently limited to Siri or Alexa-like voice assistants that learn from humans, Amazon’s ‘things you might also like’, machines like Deep Blue, which has beaten grandmasters at chess, and a few other examples.

However, the true reveal comes when a machine or robot is capable of passing what is called the “Turing Test.”

The Turing Test, is where a machine exhibits intelligence indistinguishable from a human.

So far we are told that no machine has passed it.

What we have at the moment is known as narrow AI, intelligent at doing one thing or a narrow selection of tasks very well. General AI, where humans and robots are comparable, is expected to show breakthroughs over the next decade. They become adaptable and able to turn their hand to a wider variety of tasks, in the same way as humans have areas of strength but can accomplish many things outside those areas. This is when the Turing Test will truly be passed.

Then from there comes artificial super intelligence.

ASI is the thing that the movies are so obsessed with, where machines are more intelligent and stronger than humans. It always felt like a distant dream but predictions are that it’s getting closer. People will be able to upload their consciousness into a machine, it is said, by 2029, when the machine will be as powerful as the human brain and ASI or the singularity will happen, Google predicts, in 2045.

After what we know about mankind’s decline, it appears that the machines are already waiting to take over.

Written by Ron Patton




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