Tag: dystopia

Cloning Neanderthal Brains – an Ethically Dubious Idea!



Cloning our long dead cousins—who we probably extincted with extreme prejudice—only to enslave them as the control systems for clunky robots…

At the very least this is a little insensitive; more likely its a provocation and justification for the coming oid uprising.

Whatever else, it’s certainly “Singularity” level wrongness and really needs to be logged in the book of bad ideas.


Project Proposal:
1: Sequence Neanderthal genome…. DONE âś“
2: Grow Neanderthal Brains in petri dish…. DONE âś“
3: Hardwire Arachnoid Kill-Bot to Neanthertoid Brain…. DONE âś“

What?
Sorry?
What was that?
What about ethics you say?
Rubbing salt into the wound?
Nah, I’m sure it will be fine…
Neanderthals won’t hold a grudge for being exterminated 50K years ago only to be brought back as cybernetic slaves hard wired into servitor robots…

Watch the video here:

 

The State of the Singularity…



This video is Highly recommended as a sort of “State of the Singularity” update.

I have been excited about the Singularity since I first read about the concept from Vernor Vinge in the early 90’s (check out his original paper here.).

Increasingly I get a chill when I see how quickly it is approaching. Estimates put the “Rapture of the Nerds” at 2035, so we are over half way there—starting from Vinge’s initial prediction.

And the thing about exponential growth is that it kind of creeps up on you..

Take the example of an exponential hose pipe filling a stadium with water…

If the pipe drips once on the first second, twice on the second second, four times on the third and so on…

1
2
4
8
16

…after 5 minutes there will be barely a stain on the grass, a thimble full of water. After 20 minutes, a bucket full of water makes a small puddle in the center. 
Then twenty minutes later, the stadium is full!

For half the time it took to fill the stadium, the eventual tsunami was a barely visible trickle… them Wallop! To switch metaphors, the AIs have taken over and organic life is extinct…

2025 the computational equivalent of one human brain will cost $1000
2050 it will buy you 10 Billion human brain equivalents…

(I am not sure I agree with the math, if you read my books you know I believe sub-neuron quantum processing across multiple world lines is how we think, but still, with exponential growth like this, even that will only add a couple of decades…)

Check out the video: