Meaningful Relationships…

I enjoyed ths wired article at lot—all the while experiencing an ominous sense of wrongness.

If you have read your Asimov, it feels like parts of humanity are heading towards Solaria.

Eventually, all traces of our base, biological behavior will have been criminalized and proscribed—purged from polite society. The only flirting or f&*king we will be doing then, will be with our robot housemaids.

 

‘Levy takes Alan Turing’s famous claim that the convincing appearance of intelligence (in AI) is proof of intelligence, and he expands that into the emotional realm:

“If a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue that it does not? If a robot’s artificial emotions prompt it to say things such as ‘I love you,’ surely we should be willing to accept these statements at face value … Why, if a robot that we know to be emotionally intelligent, says, ‘I love you’ or ‘I want to make love to you,’ should we doubt it?” Human emotions, he argues, are no less “programmed” than those of an intelligent machine: “We have hormones, we have neurons, and we are ‘wired’ in a way that creates our emotions.” ‘

Taken to extremes, this is the dark Armageddon of the body snatchers. Humans are swapped out, uploading into shiny, hygienic oids, one by one. Society continues, but it has become a kabuki of raging and laughter—there is nobody home, no Cartesian observers in the cockpit, nothing going on behind cold android eyes…

…I fear we are only starting to scratch the surface of future shock

An external womb, will change the nature of human reproduction…

“Once parental roles are equal, there will be no excuse for male-dominated boardrooms or political parties, or much of the other blatant inequality we see today.”

— I wonder if this will turn out to be true. To paraphrase Douglass Adams: Man has always assumed he was better than woman because of high-powered careers; loyalty to sports teams; and the status tokens of cash, clothes and cars. Whereas Woman has always believed she is better than Man for precisely the same reasons…

 

KEO – Space time capsule to the future.

KEO – is a time capsule for 50K years into the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KEO

“KEO is the name of a space time capsule planned to carry messages from the citizens of present Earth to humanity 50,000 years from now, when it will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. Currently the KEO website cites 2019 as its launch date.”

You can leave your great, great, * Grandchildren a message here.

Here is my message:

We were human once; full of ignorance and wonder.
Are you human?
I hope you live in ignorance, amongst friends.

I hope you know love is the answer.

I suspect you know mind and matter are peers.

The fundamental substrate is hidden and today we see dualism.
I suspect that all minds do their thinking on the same plane (therefore even if we are both characters in a Grandfather Simulation, we still have souls).
It would be interesting to know what you think–
    –although, if you follow my advice, you will not understand what I am talking about as you now live in Bronze Age villages. By the way, we left you a bunch of obscure automation buried in the crust. It looks after you, it watches for meteorites and gamma-ray bursts (I hope it helps with your dentistry too).
The shaman who is reading you this is probably not human, or is communing with powers who are not. You may call these powers God. My people built your God. You might find this truth emasculating. If so, you might want to build your own God. Start by harnessing the power of boiling water to do work. Believe me, as unlikely as this sounds, it will work. Try pumping water. Play with a few designs, you will get there. The better your understanding of numbers, the better your machines will be. One day soon you will be able to build machines that pump numbers. The machine which you call God–that speaks through your Shaman–is a nothing more.
Lots of Love
Toby