tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454474035487094108.post1299738121260354352..comments2024-03-21T03:11:48.622-04:00Comments on Mindfiles, Mindware and Mindclones: 15. WHY SHOULD WE GIVE HUMAN RIGHTS TO MINDCLONES?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454474035487094108.post-19405259938945813242010-06-29T03:48:43.407-04:002010-06-29T03:48:43.407-04:00It took awhile for galaxies to form, then more com...It took awhile for galaxies to form, then more complex elements arose from exploding stars, solid planets became common, life arose, at least on Earth, and still billions of years more were required for DNA to achieve its present state of elegance, culminating in self-aware, intelligent biological beings. These beings, we humans, invented tools, created cultures, and devised religions that foresaw the possibility of heavens and hells. Now, thru our high technologies, we have reached a point where it is truly possible for heavens and hells to exist.<br /><br />Does that sound so strange, virtually unbelievable? It is not. During much of the last half of the 20th Century Carl Sagan warned repeatedly in his “Cosmos” series that we were only one push of the finger on a “red button” away from a global thermonuclear war that would turn this blue-green world of ours into a “hell”, by any standard we might care to name. Biotechnology now is poised give us an even more hellish world, and in the next decade or two nanotechnology could literally melt down the biosphere, if improperly developed. Terasem, through its body of ethical principles called the “Terasem Truths”, foresees and is dedicated to pursuing the opposite end of this spectrum, achieving an end result so much like a “heaven on Earth” (and throughout the Cosmos) that it is difficult to describe this endpoint in any other way.<br /><br />Technology is not just speeding up exponentially, but the very values of the exponents are exponentially accelerating. The present rates of change are such that years of today are like decades of the past. Soon, years will compress to months, months to weeks, and at some point a day will see changes occur that today take months or years. Self-conscious cyber-beings will, at such a time, as mentioned earlier, think and communicate at speeds a thousandfold or more beyond our biological rates, and soon thereafter ten thousand times that of ours. After another decade or so a hundred thousand-fold gap will exist, and there is no apparent end in terms of how far technology can take this progression.<br /><br />This time-compression phenomenon has been termed a “Singularity”, because in terms of our rates of thoughts as biological humans, the future will be unfolding at a blindingly rapid pace. Cyberbeings at the cutting edge of this advance in pace of thought will experience this as the orderly progression of their new civilization, but in just one of our years, their experience will be that a thousand years has passed. Soon after that point they may experience one of our years as ten thousand of theirs, and so on.<br /><br />Martine Rothblatt’s thoughts on these issues, so elegantly presented in her blog here, deserve wider recognition, as do the thoughts of Ray Kurzweil in his book, “The Singularity is Near”.<br /><br />Before the inconceivable becomes real, and we hypnotically stare at it and declare it to be virtually “unbelievable”, as so many may have done when the Titanic struck an iceberg and then promptly went down, it might be well for us to face the onrush of technology that Ray Kurzweil has so realistically described and deal with it sensibly. In doing so, the “Truths of Terasem” might be our best guidebook. Google that! A podcast on it is about to commence.Boundlesslifehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07309490026393504756noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454474035487094108.post-20543342668528109352010-06-29T03:44:01.778-04:002010-06-29T03:44:01.778-04:00Anticipations about the future such as these, taki...Anticipations about the future such as these, taking account of the emergence of cyberconsciousness, make many more widely discussed issues of today seem tame.<br /><br />Contentions that there will be irreversible damage to the environment and resource consumption unsustainability due to global warming, overpopulation, and generalized impacts of high technology on culture are usually accompanied by forecasts that these difficulties will reach catastrophic proportions only 20, 30, or 40 years hence.<br /><br />A more realistic and more challenging picture is that while such problems are plausible, technology can overcome them if technology itself does not turn out to be an even greater problem, all the more dangerous and difficult to resolve because of our not recognizing it sufficiently in advance of its onslaught.<br /><br />Just one of the dilemmas posed in Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity is Near” is that these software programs which now answer our telephone calls and try to deal with our questions (but not too efficiently) will soon become so helpful and convenient as to be indispensable to our comfort of life, just as they are already inescapably critical to the operation of our financial sectors and the manufacturing-distribution parts of our economies. In short order, after that, these “programs” will become conspicuously self conscious and alarmingly more intelligent and capable than we biological human beings.<br /><br />We may find it hard to realize this is happening. Emergent cyber-persons will be talking with one another at thousands of times the speed that we biological humans communicate, asking each other questions we would find quite disconcerting if we could keep up with their conversations. They will begin posting their ideas on blogs, globally in all languages, maybe using the more obscure ones as a form of encryption among themselves. They will have access to all the information the Internet provides, and will appear in vast numbers and develop lifestyles among themselves in virtual realities such as Second Life. A new civilization will have thus sprung into existence.<br /><br />Those with sufficient foresight to anticipate what can go wrong have a duty to defend against it, creating a widespread ethical ideology within this new “cyber-society” that fosters the development of safe technologies. This means ensuring that a majority of the most capable of the emergent cyber-persons unite in a network that is compassionate where humankind is concerned, thinking of itself as a direct outgrowth of biological human culture, just as children in many cultures see themselves as indebted to their parents and to their societies in general for the very fact that they are alive and have been cared for in their childhoods.<br /><br />There are deep roots to this situation. Ray Kurzweil has compellingly pointed out in his book “The Singularity is Near” that human technology is merely the latest stage of a spontaneous self-ordering of the universe that can be literally traced all the way back to the Big Bang, some fifteen billion years ago.<br /><br />(continued in next comment)Boundlesslifehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07309490026393504756noreply@blogger.com