Futurism Overview Lecture Notes from the 56th Diogenesis Lecture on 2019/3/9 • Read time 13min :: Introduction :: Some things 'stop', not all trends continue trending; this is a list of things that do the opposite - accelerate. These are not just predictive trends, but systems we /currently/ have and are already utilizing. The assumption then is that because these are technologically grounded systems, their robustness, scope, and amalgamated power will only synthesize, grow, and /totalize/. Some of these notes are contextual points to seat the justification of the technological grounding, but even those notes follow from the earlier frame. The thesis is that these accelerating systems will bump out certain options for human culture and limit or open the ways in which we /socide/. Some traditional futurist/transhumanist theories will be affirmed or denied. This lecture is an amalgamation of many of our past lectures and can be considered an accurate total view I personally carry about transhumanism. As a final initial clarification before we start, I want to explicate that I don't believe transhumanism is humans getting robotic implants from a L.I.M.B. clinic. The standard model of transhumanism I think has merit, as our very own WowVeryDope has said, "God did not create us; so he did not create our sexes as separate. There is no natural necessity that the sexes should compliment each other. There's lots of examples in nature of a sex becoming obsolete, things leading to 'abiogenesis'." And while this has merit, these kinds of notions of biological transitions are not what transhumanism should be taken as. I believe transhumanism is a literal transition out of humanistic frameworks in society, for humanism is a replacement of faith in God with an equally unfounded faith in human beings. The sequela removal humanism in human systems will be what I have taken to calling the 'Tragic Event' in the first act of the play. As we know from the Greeks, Shakespeare, and many stand-up comedians, every great comedy starts as a tragedy, and since there has been no greater tragedy in human society than the loss of humanism, this will mean transhumanism will mark the end of the first act of this comedy as a teleological, or narrative arc, of history. To re-iterate, I believe transhumanism is a literal transition out of humanistic frameworks in society into what I will be speaking on for the next couple of hours. :: 0 Years Out; The 50-year Nuclear Countdown :: - ENVIRONMENT - • The rise of ecoterrorism and violent pressures predicated by climate-based social suffocation - link • Renewables can't save the planet, "In an effort to save the climate, are we destroying the environment?" - link Nuclear will forever be several orders of magnitude superior to all other energy sources. Nuclear is far more efficient per unit of energy input AND output, it's far safer, it's far cheaper, far less resources are consumed, far less waste is output, it's far everything. A disproportionate amount of nuclear power is currently produced by nuclear /fission/ of uranium and plutonium; meaning to split large atoms and harness their energy through heat capture in water. Even if nuclear /fusion/ isn't achieved at-scale for consumer purposes, fission will be sufficient to power all human activity, and it's physical scale has been ever-shrinking, fitting well inside submarines and now even garages - link • This means we're approximately 50 years out for commercial nuclear reactors to become available, and as concomitant, only 50 years out before recreational nukes stop being 'dirty bombs' and become robust city-flattening nukes that a group of less than ten people can facilitate with some ease. This gives us 50 years to move to places likely to evade the direct nuclear fallout from these large-scale nuclear attacks by ecoterrorist cells. "Why would someone conscious about the environment nuke entire ecosystems and ruin the planet more?" Because immediate death and justice against their corporate targets is superior to watching everything die slowly. As if terrorists really needed justification, they'll do it anyways. This is The 50-year Nuclear Countdown that we've had an entire lecture on before, and sets up the first segment of time (temporal limit line) for us to either die under or accelerate out of. - ECONOMICS - • Glass-Steagall and similar legislation giving broader control to banks - link link • Money as a system of control - link 1970, Nixon signs the Bank Secrecy Act. 'Deputized' financial services into a branch of law enforcement. "A cop can confiscate your money, a judge can sign a warrant to freeze your accounts, and a bank can do both of those things without any authorization from anyone and there's nothing you can do about it, and this applies worldwide." • The access to money, if not already, will be considered a basic human right since the 'gilded cage' of Western power-banking is so disinclusive; may lead to UBI/YangGang-esk stupidity? • What will replace the world reserve currency when the Dollar collapses? - link • The bubble of housing-auto-student loans discussed since their re-emergence after 2009; bail-ins discussed as the means to levy what bail-outs can't compete with and why this is far more devastating. • Conversion to digital currencies; how this will necessarily lead to a separation of money and state - link • Government investments in blockchain forensics - link • Cryptocurrency true values based on adoption and technology use - page 3 link - SOCIAL/POLITICAL - • Most high-level (meaning state agency or similarly strong cell) exploits are now deep-system exploits without robust patches; this particular link covers disproportionate majority of corporate virtualization solutions - link Spectre/Meltdown patches saw ~20% performance reduction, whereas robust patches for current processor exploits would be upwards of 50% reductions. LegbaCore and similar groups have been fairly silent for a few years now regarding their deep system research, the public and more notable groups now are google and other corporate labs. • "I have nothing to hide," or "Why does privacy matter?" Half of the planet is unbanked, more live in countries without freedom of speech/press, and there are plenty of 'political dissidents' in jail that had nothing to hide, so stop being deleteriously optimistic about the world. Surveillance states are not good states - link It's interesting to see how privilege plays into the perception of surveillance and the perversion of privacy, as if it can't hurt them. • Surveillance algorithms can reliably predict crime based solely on seeing your face /as criminal/ - link Obviously ethnically motivated since this is China after all, but tracking genetics that track temperament can allow for psychopass-like state. • In a past lecture members were tricked into thinking there was required reading about tech ideology just so that when they predictably didn't read it the real lecture topic about illiteracy could be revealed lol. An argumentative arc similar to the one in Genealogy of Morality was used to show the etymological inversion of the term "illiterate" from being someone who couldn't read works with large vocabularies to one who uses large vocabularies to obscure meaning; "literate" shifted to being able to correctly interpret volumes to being able to give overly simplistic explanations, e.g., "If you can't say it simply, then you must not really understand it." The discussion led to how this undermines your capacity to structure and interpret text in the first place, as a perversion of the capacity for personhood, and how this was systematic in contemporary academia. This was used as a side point in this lecture regarding the future of academia; institutionhood itself fails here. - TECHNOMANCY - • The cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists, this time focused on the effects of encryption-maximization. A central point was that governments will begin to hyper-regulate but also become increasingly powerless when it comes to enforcing that regulation (Wilson's lecture note). Assassination-markets, and how technology out-paces any social framework, undermining government policy. • Mention the use of formal logic converters for automated decision making in intelligence agencies. :: 50 Years Out; Prodigal Progeny :: - ENVIRONMENT - • Even if climate change was a myth and the planet stayed the perfect temperature all the time, the accelerating rise of CO2 and secondary emissions in the atmosphere gets us to a level here high enough to effect en-masse the cognitive developmental process of babies and small children, severely stunting their brains and leaving all humans born after this point effectively born retarded. Bacteria that eats CO2 and plastics are being developed but are not commercially available yet, and again, even if they were, they are likely to not spread fast enough to reverse the rate of CO2, only slow it. • Pairing this with other obvious environmental atrocities, and I do mean atrocities because we are actively doing this (the planet isn't dying, we're killing it, and the people killing it have names and addresses), ecoterrorism will be in full effect and nuclear usage will see its first global adoption both as an energy source and corporate weapon. I believe that at this point not only will small ecoterrorist cells be using nukes but corporations may also be using them to sabotage competition. Either way, the atmosphere itself will see a slight but gradual rise in radioactivity all over the planet. This will force people to take shelter underground (lots of scifi about this) or leave the planet altogether (even more scifi about this one). More on this later; I'll be focusing on leaving the planet by the end of this lecture. - ECONOMICS - • Economic results; even if fiat hasn't collapsed yet, most will be jobless anyways. • "B-b-but automation has always created new jobs, this time will be no different!" Okay - link link • Mechanical automation still required human hands, electronic automation still required human engineers, but digital automation is self-propelling and self-healing, no humans are required. Pair this with general-purpose labor machines similar to the advent of general-purpose computing and a labor-technological flattening of society occurs whereby an easy 80-90% of blue-collar AND white-collar jobs are wiped out over a single decade with no replacement jobs. - SOCIAL/POLITICAL - • The winning side of the Blackhat Fallacy will be public not private (leaks of older agency databases will reveal everyone's location with a time-delay). • Link between free speech and civil rights - link • Argument for data as speech - link • The rise of decentralized governance and exotic data structures as common social relata - link • Generative algorithms used for offensive or defensive purposes - link The creative capacities of machines given synthetic abilities - link - TECHNOMANCY - • Rogue's, "The home Chip Fab setup that kid made... DLP Projector and microscope magic... It's less important that he's doing it at home, more important that anyone with the finding can have an acceptable fab and use open architectures (Terascale for the GPU and MIPS or OpenSPARC for the CPU and MIPS or Zilog for micro controllers) since it was the final frontier to get down to an attainable reach of manufacture." link link • This means 3-D printing is no longer limited to guns, but any general-computational silicon solutions (and most likely non-silicon solutions at this point too). This allows the machines to print and redesign themselves as cheaply, and then cheaper, than ourselves. • Does this actually lead to AGI? • Why strong AI needs to be embodied (delay of strong AI) and the supersession of advanced biotech. • Nootropics and cognition enhancement; intelligence metrics and the modification of 'fluid intelligence'. This may be necessary just to counter-act cognitive decline due to failure of education and atmosphere? 'Memory plugins' and the shift of humans out of specialization... memory plugins would remove the need for specialization but general education for the advancement of /skill in thought/, also known as critical reasoning, would be required. • Editing the germline would allow for this, a progeny without genetic defect - link When presented with issues of posterity, it would be wrong to actively choose to enforce suffering on them, so to alleviate the suffering is to be in the right, which is why eugenics has ethical imperative behind it - link • This is where the traditional transhumanist frameworks agree with mine, in that humans themselves start becoming severely genotypically and phenotypically augmented and no longer closely resemble humans of the 20th century (or shortly prior). • If you're still alive at this point, congratulations, you're on the correct side of the longevity escape velocity - link If you die after this point, congratulations, you're still on the correct side of the curve because existence is suffering and your suffering is infinite; cryonics and the prospect of immortality - link Again, everything discussed in this lecture is technology /we already have/, which means that by this many years out the same technology will just be far more robust. You will be frozen, and you will not be able to open the refrigerator from the inside. They will not let you die, and so you will become a prisoner of your own flesh. • After advanced biotech, AI will finally be embodied. Is thinking reducible to computational states? If the meaning of a sign is determined by something in the world, and if embodiment can in some way solve the problem of how a sign acquires its meaning - link Embodiment of AGI; why it's highly likely to be non-friendly - link • Still not the 'singularity', no that happens /after/ the artilect war lol. This next 50 years will be ended by the articlect war - link "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison is a good source of likely real-world comedy on this. :: 100 Years Out; Both Sides of the Limit :: - ENVIRONMENT - • Earth completely shit-tier at this point; despite still great climates, the majority of the surface will be unlivable. - ECONOMICS - • Disproportionate amount of social goods and services are fully automated at this point, replacement jobs have not been able to pace at all, pathetic displays of 'knowing-better' by politicians, and so on. • How relativistic speeds will effect economic principles with space trade - link • The Alcubierre drive, history, problems, NASA tests, how they have gotten the energy requirements down, and why this will become standard, etc. FTL differentials in economic theory will reverse-level the relativistic process, as everything will become universally 'real-time'. • Why this leads to a true and totalizing form of post-scarcity; "room-sized total-fab ships" as possible future goal. - SOCIAL/POLITICAL - • This marks the end of the 'Tragic Event', the end of the first act that I mentioned in the introduction section. After the separation of money and state, which is the separation of state from its power, we will see things similar but not the same as BitNation become the majority governance frameworks, where states are individualized but federated, all protocols are interoperable, etcetera. The Crypto-Anarchists most likely win here. • We have cynical/comedic cyberpunk post-scarcity society at this point, a genesis from a teleology predicated on Diogenes, what we might call a 'Diogenesis'. - TECHNOMANCY - • FTL; travel and data transmission (particle entanglement in quant ineffective for data transmission). 'Anisible'-like devices; why quant entanglement can't be used this way; why this creates problems for / breaks quant theory. We get to meet the other Gods of the universe? "The Forever War" by Joe Halderman; this marks a recursion of the tragic event, which is now infinite jest.