🏵️馬德里不可思議(好吃驚?)

🏵️超視點2021高峰會議跟世界經濟論壇一唱一和，準備把人類轉成變種人

上週末(10/9/2021)，世界上的科技名人經過長途跋涉，全聚集在西班牙馬德里，參加這場超視點高峰會議。當然沒打過疫苗的人無法入境西班牙。

(筆者在線上收聽會議，議程非常廣泛。)

變種人就是未來式宗教，

膜拜的神就是科技。

推動的目的是要將人與機器整合在一起。

很多議程剛開始聽來很荒唐，直到你看到仿生學、機器人技術、神經義肢、虛擬實境、人工智能以及基因改造進步到讓人目眩神迷。就會放棄掙扎，從此就範。ckw

🏵️人類的無助可以透過小工具超越?

倡導變種人的人認為，人類的無知、孤獨、悲傷、疾病、衰老與死亡可以透過一些小工具超越。

也許透過大腦植入就可以做到，精英說了算，真實的人類沒有發言權。

🏵️他們瘋狂的想法無邊無際。

變種人的價值被世界幾個首富暗暗擁抱發展。比方：比爾蓋茲推動全球疫苗，傑夫貝佐斯追求延長壽命、馬斯克追求大腦植入、馬克祖克博對元宇宙的嘗試，以及埃里克施密特的美國技術對戰中國的計劃。

🏵️膜拜電腦神最快2029來到

🏵️純有機人被拋在智能的塵埃中...

如果科技集團是成熟的教堂，變種人主義者就是荒野中的沙漠神父。

他們相信神經義肢能與人造神交流。

他們相信機器人伴侶應該正常化。

他們相信長壽技術能賦予近似的永生。

他們相信虛擬現實提供一個生命的價值。最重要的是，

他們相信科技的奇異點即將來臨。(臨界點)

2045年或2049 年，我們會到達科技的臨界點，當人工超級智能超越人類智力，我們無法理解它輸出的意思。

純有機人要被拋在智能的塵埃中。

想要維持長期的生存，唯一的機會就是放下掙扎，將我們的思想身體與全能的機器結合成為新的後人類物種。

所以生命的意義，就是承認未來的電腦神是良善的，趁我們還有時間的時候。 

隨著電腦朝向超級智能發展時，它們的輸出會向著人類的道德指南針傾斜。最終，這個數位大神可能遙控殖民遠方的星系，把所有可用物質轉成電腦心智，所以，更進一步講，我們今日的思維還會決定整個宇宙的命運。

🏵️仍邀請不同聲音的專家敲警鐘

值得稱讚的是，會議上也邀請少數評論家適時說出不同的心聲。

倫理學家 Sara Lumbreras 提到智慧手機與社群媒體對注意力集中，記憶力，與自律的毀壞效應，「如果全部的東西都可以Google，還有什麼意義？」。 因為記憶度是我們用來批判思考與創意思考的基礎。

🏵️迷戀手機已處於人機一體的早期

變種人主義者和勒德派都把24小時不離手機的模式視為人與機器共生的早期階段。但很多老師擔心小孩轉往數位平台會變得人際失能與功能性文盲。整整一代迷失在自我愉悅中。

🏵️找到老鼠大腦快樂中心的位置，於是...

牛津哲學家安德斯桑德格提到1954年的神經義肢實驗。用電刺激，發現老鼠大腦的快樂中樞。他給很多老鼠連線，讓它們按下槓桿刺激自己，它們除了按槓桿不再做任何事。他們一一死了，臉上帶著微笑。

🏵️電動遊戲與鴉片藥物讓我們陷入類似的困境。

即使維多利亞時期，知識分子也想知道人類是否已成了機器的寄生蟲。 他們聯想到生物上的發現，寄生蟲似乎往往是舊物種的簡化形式。

他們也認為，我們可能在科技發展中慢慢失去我們的大腦。

因此，出現電腦迷神話，文明可能因科技享樂而崩潰的說法。桑德伯說「這樣講不是不可能，而且還不可避免。 」建立真正的幸福是複雜的事，但我們知道我們可以讓它增加。

結論是我們能用變種人的野心說我要更快樂？我要整個社會更快樂？我要我的人工智能走向真實與邪惡的好嗎？

有些專家認真思考過人工智慧之超級智能的危險。#這樣的數位實體對於簡單心智的人類完全不可測_也不可控。

🏵️認真講，#先進的人工智慧形同熱核能的彈頭發展。

一位變種人主義者馬克斯莫爾，主持一個冷凍實驗室，他要大眾放棄「永生」這種詞彙，換成「延長生命」。他的實驗室目前有184 名過世的顧客被凍結在特殊的設施中等待復活。

🏵️好萊塢明星被人工智慧取代，還有我們

我們凡人有更緊迫的擔憂。討論到人被機器人，人工智慧取代，「藝術家、媒體大亨和演藝人員應該讓大眾做好心理准備他們在經濟上的過時。」

🏵️科技的木馬屠城

科技倫理學家 Nell Watson提出最大聲的提醒，她是Apple顧問兼 IEEE 主席。

她說：#全球的醫療最大的危機在於被利用來達到專制的藉口。科技最終可能藏在木馬實施在社會信用的監控系統。

今天是免疫療法(新冠疫苗)

10年15 年後可能是人們拒絕大腦植入_或因應金融改變需要的生物識別的管控壓制。

🏵️未來已經來臨

作為廣泛的意識形態，

變種人主義之於21 世紀，

就像共產主義之於20世紀。

在任何人還未察覺之際，整個社會已經改革過了。

聚集在馬德里的未來主義者，與世界經濟論壇的人，正在為完全數位化的社會秩序打基礎。明日，忠實的信徒說，會是人工超級智能、大腦植入與不可阻擋的殺手無人機。

🏵️貼標籤無所謂。

矽谷、中國科技和各種古怪初創企業的共同目標，把人類與數位設備融合在一起，變種人算是一種領先的意識型態了，滑過這些文字，專注於發光的螢幕，就能看到他們的幻想正在變成現實。

🏵️註：Trans-human超越人種，為表達不喜歡，翻成「變種人」

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/15/transhumanists-gather-in-spain-to-plan-global-transformation/

TransVision 2021 saw technologists push radical visions for our future. Apparently, the clueless public is to be propagandized — not consulted.

By Joe Allen

Transhumanism is a futuristic religion that exalts technology as the highest power. The movement’s goal is to merge man with machine. Their wildest prophecies seem ridiculous at first, until you consider the dizzying advances in bionics, robotics, neuroprosthetics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering.

Prominent figures gathered at the TransVision 2021 conference in Madrid over the weekend. Listening to the proceedings online, I heard a broad range of totalizing schemes. There were no Luddites or Amish onstage, but of course, Spain is a long haul for a horse-and-buggy. Besides, no unvaccinated person can legally cross the Spanish border.

Transhumanists hold that the human condition of ignorance, loneliness, sadness, disease, old age, and death can be transcended through improved gadgetry. Many believe tribalism will also be eliminated — perhaps through brain implants — but this elite clique tends to be so convicted, legacy humans will have no say in the matter.

Their radical ideas are hardly marginal. Transhuman values have been implicitly embraced by the world’s wealthiest technologists. Consider Bill Gates pushing universal jabs, Jeff Bezos’s quest for “life extension,” Elon Musk’s proposed brain implants, Mark Zuckerberg’s forays into the Metaverse, and Eric Schmidt’s plans for an American technocracy racing against China.

If Big Tech is the established church, transhumanists are Desert Fathers in the wilderness.

The Cult of the Singularity

Naturally, the dominant tone at TransVision was set by hardcore transhumanists: Max and Natasha More, José Cordeiro, David Wood, Jerome Glenn, Phillipe van Nedervelde, Ben Goertzel, Aubrey de Grey, Bill Faloon, and even in his absence, Ray Kurzweil, a top R&D director at Google and founder of Singularity University. 

Each proponent has a unique angle, but they converge on a shared mythos.

Allowing for variation, transhumanists confess there is no God but the future Computer God. They believe neuroprosthetics will allow communion with this artificial deity. They believe robot companions should be normalized. They believe longevity tech will confer approximate immortality. They believe virtual reality provides a life worth living. Above all, they believe the Singularity is near.

According to the Cult of the Singularity and its prophet, Ray Kurzweil, we’ll see artificial general intelligence by 2029. Unlike narrow algorithms performing specific tasks, AGI will be robust cognition enacted by neural networks, far faster than any human brain.

By 2045 (or 2049), we will hit the Singularity — when artificial superintelligence surpasses human intellect to the point we cannot comprehend its output. Purely organic humans will be left in the smart dust. Our only chance for long-term survival is to fuse our minds and bodies with the All-Powerful Machine — to become a new posthuman species.

Therefore, our meaning in life is to make sure the future Computer God is benevolent, while we still have time. (In most cases, “benevolent” is synonymous with “lefty globalist.”) Today’s machine learning systems are prompted by programmers, then trained with our language and behavior via mass data extraction.

As computers advance to superintelligence, the story goes, their output will tilt toward humanity’s moral compass. Eventually, this digital deity may colonize distant galaxies — turning all usable matter into computerized mind — so our actions today might determine the fate of the entire universe.

To their credit, TransVision invited a handful of critics to ring alarm bells. The ethicist Sara Lumbreras discussed the devastating impact of smartphones and social media on attention span, memory, and self-control. “If you can just Google the information, why does it matter?” she asked. “Because remembering things is the only way that we can use that information for critical thinking and for creative thinking.”

Both transhumanists and Luddites see 24/7 reliance on smartphones as an early phase of our symbiosis with machines. For all the convenience gained, many schoolteachers worry that the shift to digital platforms is making kids antisocial and functionally illiterate. An entire generation is being lost to self-pleasure.

The Wireheading Myth Oxford philosopher Anders Sandberg discussed a 1954 experiment in neuroprosthetics. Using electro-stimulation, the scientist James Olds discovered the pleasure center in a rat’s brain. He wired up numerous rats, enabling them to stimulate themselves by pressing a lever. These rodent “wireheads” ceased to do anything besides push the lever. One by one, they died with smiles on their faces.

Video games and corporate opioids find us in a similar predicament. Even in the Victorian era, Sandberg explained, intellectuals wondered if humans were already becoming parasites on machines. “They connected that to discoveries in biology that parasites quite often seem to be simplified forms of older species [and they thought] we might become some kind of barnacle sitting on the technological infrastructure, slowly losing our brains.”

Hence, the “Wireheading Myth” — the narrative that civilization could collapse due to techno-hedonism. Sandberg insisted that while this story isn’t completely untrue, it isn’t inevitable either. “Building real happiness is a really complex thing, but we know we can make it increase.”

In conclusion, he wondered, “Can we use the transhuman ambition to say … ‘I want to be way happier, I want entire societies to be happier.  … I want my artificial intelligences to go for the true and daimonic good?’”

From Atari to Alpha Centauri

Sandberg is an optimist, but not without reservations. He has contemplated the dangers of artificial superintelligence rigorously. This digital entity would be entirely unpredictable to mere human minds, and perhaps uncontrollable. In a real sense, advanced AI is comparable to the development of thermonuclear warheads.

A humorous hypothetical is an AI system that makes paperclips. What if it goes haywire and turns everything on Earth into paperclips, including us? More realistically, what if an advanced AI is programmed to solve climate change, then arrives at the straightforward conclusion that humans must be exterminated?

Sandberg takes these existential risks seriously, but in the end, he’s ready to go for it.

A Kinder, Gentler Cyborg

The term “transhumanism” evokes such revulsion, normal people immediately recoil. So the alpha-dog transhumanist Max More — a leading figure at Alcor cryonics lab — urged the audience to abandon loaded words like “immortality” in favor of “life extension.” Meanwhile, 184 deceased customers lay frozen at his facility, some $200,000 in the hole, waiting to be resurrected.

We mortals have more pressing concerns. Discussing the displacement of actual people by robots and artificial intelligence, Jerome Glenn of the Millennium Project was emphatic that “artists, media moguls, and entertainers” should psychologically prepare the public to accept economic obsolescence.

The loudest alarm was sounded by tech ethicist Nell Watson, an Apple consultant and chairwoman at IEEE. “The global health crises are being used as an excuse for greater authoritarianism,” she said, shocking everyone awake. “[T]his could end up as a Trojan Horse for some kind of social credit-style monitoring system.”

“Today, it’s immunity therapies,” Watson warned, “but in 10 or 15 years, it might be people who reject some kind of brain-computer interface … or a financial technology that’s linked to biometrics.” She worried that transhumanists might become scapegoats for oppressive policies they are not responsible for.

In response, Anders Sandberg took to Twitter to defend vaccine mandates in the workplace. The conference proceeded apace.

The Future Has Already Arrived

As a broad ideology, transhumanism is as relevant for the 21st century as communism was for the 20th century. In the mid-1800s, Karl Marx and his crew were mere socialist intellectuals. By 1923, the Bolsheviks had taken over Russia. By 1949, Mao had taken over China. In our age of all-pervasive technology, entire societies are revolutionized before anyone can grasp the change.

The futurists who gathered in Madrid last weekend — along with those preaching technocracy at the World Economic Forum — are laying the intellectual groundwork for a fully digitized social order. Today, it’s the Fourth Industrial Revolution — a global paradigm of total transformation — embraced by Microsoft, Alibaba, Sony, General Motors, Mozilla, and Salesforce, among many others. Tomorrow, the faithful proclaim, it will be artificial superintelligence, brain implants, and unstoppable killer drones.

The labels don’t matter. To the extent that Silicon Valley, the Chinese tech sector, and various quirky start-ups converge on the central goal — to merge human beings with digital devices — you could say transhumanism is already a ruling ideology. One has only to look past this text and focus on the glowing screen to see their fantasies are becoming reality.

Joe Allen is a fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees. For years, he worked as a rigger on various concert tours. Between gigs, he studied religion and science at UTK and Boston University. Find him at www.joebot.xyz or @JOEBOTxyz.