transhumanism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

I love how so much of the wizards’s repertoire in D&D implies something awful.

Like, there’s an 8th level spell where you cut out a chunk of somebody’s living flesh and use it to spend the next several months growing a bottled clone that’s bound to their soul, so if they ever die, the soul will transfer to the clone.

This is a standard, core-book piece of wizardry that literally any player’s wizard can choose to learn when they reach the appropriate level.

This is a game that has very specific built-in assumptions about What Wizards Are Like, is what I mean to say.

Tags:

#what do you mean ”awful” #is there some horrible catch not stated in this post? #because as stated that sounds *great* and I *want* one #*fuck* clinging-to-life-with-a-mere-single-body #D&D #death tw #transhumanism #and I suppose I’ll follow OP’s lead by tagging it #body horror

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

another-normal-anomaly:

I just got my Alcor membership finalized! I have the amulet and everything!

\o/

—

Oddly enough, I was just researching cryonics myself these past two days.

My conclusion was “given my current financial situation, increasing my expenses by ~USD$1k/year is probably more likely to get me killed than not immediately signing up for vitrification is”. (yes I saw the Cryonics Institute, but frankly I would not trust any sort of long-term facility in *Detroit* further than I could throw it) Alcor membership is now #6 on my list of Things to Save Up For Once My Finances Permit Saving Up That Much, below the non-shitty car but above the fire-escape ladder.

—

(I get the impression that the demographics are pretty different, but cryonics nevertheless parses to me as a Neat Prepper Thing. I have a soft spot for things that one will likely never find useful but will be *extremely glad for* if one does.)

Tags:

#not a day goes by that I don’t add at least a few strands to one safety net or another #cryonics #death tw #transhumanism #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

alarajrogers:

moral-autism:

proposal: unaging humans that don’t have an ongoing population crisis – instead, norms approach “spend at least 50 years learning who you are and getting settled” and “a child really needs several parents who all have stable relationships with each other, at least two of whom are willing to do full-time parenting, at least in the early years”, and nobody who would have had children because “well, if I don’t have them now I can’t have them later” or an interest in perpetuating the bloodline or an interest in support in old age has kids

additionally, the lower rate of childbirth fails to prevent children from socializing, because of denser housing and better transit, so even if everyone in the city only has a thousand kids they can all meet up, or people temporarily moving to raise kids, or whatever

“but this would make boring science fiction” just have the kid-friendly cities be oversurveilled suburbia that children are weirded out by and teenagers hate. or, like, some kind of extended metaphor where a “working parent and nonworking parent” household has as much trouble raising kids as a single-working-parent household does today, or something.

anyway, since everyone uses science fiction as an oracle now apparently, we should be a tiny bit concerned about the total unavailability of a concept in sci-fi.

Or, the central conflict actually has nothing to do with the kids and how they’re being raised; rather, the kids’ situation in the world is a background to the existing story.

When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a story that took place in a dystopia where they had rejiggered human sleep/wake cycles to give everyone more waking time, and then forced children to spend half that time in school and half that time working for a war effort, which was kind of a “we have always been at war with Oceania” kind of war effort. Except that wasn’t what the story was about. The story was about three kids who find a treehouse that contains gateways to other dimensions, where they go to escape their miserable lives in the dystopia. 

You could have a story about a future where humans have incredibly lengthened lifespans and there aren’t many kids and the kids that there are tend to live in specific kid-friendly places so the story is about a kid whose parents take them traveling a lot so they’re used to being in places for adults and then they move in with a more stable unit because they think the kid needs stability and the kid is bored shitless by other kids and “kid friendly” stuff. Or the kid is neurodivergent in a world that’s a lot more accepting of adult neurodivergence than child neurodivergence because kids are so much rarer than before. Or the family dynamics when your older brother is 40 and you’re 10. Or something totally unrelated, like the kid’s emotional reactions to one of the parents having a dangerous job. The conflict doesn’t have to be about the existence of the longer lifespans and the relative rarity of children but they are raised in places where children are denser than in other areas; you can follow through extrapolations of that to think, what kind of challenges would they have? Or come up with something barely related. Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom” gives us a post-humanist world where people back themselves up and death isn’t permanent and currency is popularity and reputation, and then writes a murder mystery set in that world where the main character is trying to solve his own murder after being restored from backup. The conflict isn’t about being in a post-humanist society where death is a minor inconvenience, but the story couldn’t exist without that background.

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #death tw #there is probably some other warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what

Of Things Remembered

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tanadrin:

“Wake up.”

The scene around me swam and reformed itself as the young man opened his eyes. The generic room was replaced by a modest stone cell. A little table appeared in the corner, where one dim candle flickered, casting a dim light over a couple of books and some parchment. An evening chill swept in from the narrow window that appeared, and outside I could see the stars, undimmed by any city lights or orbitals. I switched over to the full baseline human sense-simulation, and inhaled slowly. The evening air was fragrant and damp, like a rainstorm had just passed. Through the door I could hear voices far down the hall, rising and falling together, perhaps in prayer.

Keep reading

Tags:

#storytime #transhumanism #death tw #(ftr I approve of people doing this for me if they can’t get more thorough resurrection methods) #(though I strongly suspect that this stance could already be inferred from previous data)

Anonymous asked: Body mod: Unaging preteen girl.

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

moonlit-tulip:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know

On the one hand, unagingness is very good and worth grabbing. On the other hand, I like having an older-than-preteen body, both for personal “I enjoy the results of estrogen-puberty and would rather have a body which lets me have them rather than not” reasons and for social “being seen as a kid by people who don’t know me would lead to assorted interpersonal difficulties” reasons. Ultimately, though, the unagingness consideration is a Very Big Deal and wins out over the downsides, and so while it’s not my favorite choice within the space of possible unaging bodies it’s pretty clearly worth it relative to my current baseline (which is how I’ve been rating these).

*

Loophole hacking, maybe? They didn’t say pre-*adolescent*, they said pre-*teen*.

Me aged 12 years and 364 days is a *little* less physically developed than me aged 25, but close enough to be believable as an adult: most of the difference between 13 and 25 is experience, and I assume you’re keeping the ability to gain experience (unagingness wouldn’t be any fun if it gave you anterograde amnesia). You might not pass for adult *at first glance*, but people routinely mistake me for 17 as it is, and I doubt being physically reverted to 13-less-one-day would make it that much worse.

(And it does occasionally have its advantages: one time–it was the day after my birthday, I think I was either 21 or 22–I was in a grocery store and the attached bank had a guy trying to talk passersby into signing up. He started trying to talk to me, but when I turned around and looked at him, my face pinged to him as “too young to sign legal contracts” and he stopped.)

((While seeing whether I could look up which year it was, I found another relevant quote in my diary (age 21): “She tried to take only the parents’ cards†, reading me as underage. (Most of the museum cashiers did. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)”))

—

†Note from present-me: the cards were a citizenship gift from the Canadian government, granting free museum access for one year. Only adults get cards: children merely accompany their parents.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #aging cw #fun with loopholes #morphological freedom ask meme #amnesia cw #our home and cherished land

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

thyrell:

thyrell:

a necromancer is just a really late healer

“you’re too late, doc, he’s…he’s already dead…”

*cracks knuckles* i didnt get my medical license revoked for nothing

Tags:

#as I have a bit of a special interest in the Red Panda Adventures #that is what this post inspires me to grumble about #for a guy who takes having access to a (limited form of) ego bridge *really* well #he sure does go all death-is-what-makes-life-worth-living when it comes to zombies #like dude think about it #yes being a zombie kind of sucks *right now* #but in a single decade the state of Necronium research went from #”mindless meat-puppets” to ”a bit brainwashed and *somewhat* emotionally dulled but recognisably their former selves” #imagine what Necronium could do in *another* decade #tbh the only thing really wrong with Professor Zombie’s vision of the future is that it has her as unquestioned dictator #please do not throw the baby out with the bathwater #tag rambles #Red Panda Adventures #rants #death tw #transhumanism #(I *do* appreciate how well they handled the ego bridge though) #(you almost never see characters go) #(”while (since souls exist) it is a matter of objective fact that copies of you aren’t really you”) #(”dying and being survived by a copy of yourself sure beats dying and *not* being survived by a copy of yourself”) #(”so let’s do it”)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

infernalfarndamn:

in the style of poetry
to which we are accustomed,
uncapitalized and with line
breaks:

i’m going to stab death in his idiot
skull with an ice pick and leave
him swaying back and forth
pinned to the big-ass tree outside

trying to sound sonorous
despite the whistly sound of wind in
his ventilated spinal cord, which
i forgot to mention,
i ventilated his spinal cord
also with the ice pick

which would paralyze him
were there anything to paralyze,
so the tree thing is my stopgap
for immobilizing him,
as no one expects to be nailed
to a tree

he will say something about needing him
and something about the shadow of
humanity, or the abyss of meaning,
he will squall and sob from his
dense, selfish eye sockets
too good for the flesh he wants us in

and children will be encouraged to
throw baseballs. i will charge admission
to the resting site of that 
crusty tool,

but, like, a buck.

Tags:

#poetry #transhumanism #death tw #joking but also not joking

Slashdot headlines written by neural network

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rangi42:

lewisandquark:

The news site Slashdot (“news for nerds, stuff that matters”) is celebrating its 20 year anniversary this October. What could be geekier than celebrating with the help of an open-source neural network?

Neural networks are a type of machine learning program that learn by example, rather than by a human programmer feeding them rules. Whatever the headlines contain, whatever common words and rhythms, a neural network will do its best to imitate. I’ve trained an open-source neural network called char-rnn to imitate all kinds of human things, like paint colors, guinea pig names, and craft beer names.

Slashdot sent me a list of all the headlines they’ve ever run, over 162,000 in all, and asked me to train a neural network to try to generate more.

I used a neural network called char-rnn, an open-source neural network by Andrej Karpathy, and trained it separately on the first and second decades of Slashdot headlines. Let’s see what it learned!

Decade 1: 1998 – 2007

Alternuting Your Computer
The Internet Spectrum Violated
Microsoft To Develop Programming Law
Star Trek Creates Free Memory
Launching the Linux Group Socially
Microsoft Releases New Months
More Pong Users for Kernel Project
Nintendo Goes Canadian Edition to Customers
New State of Second Life
Sexual Security To Allow Australia
Programming Supercomputer Library In Star Wars
What are The Final Fantasy
Review of the Wireless Monster?
Portable Mail With Spidey Law
New 5400 GPL Formed into An Internet
Dvorak on Mario Games?
Half-Life 2X Speed Released
Ban Manhunt 2 Better than Linux?
Vista Releases Denial of the Mumble
New Company Revises Super-Things For Problems
The Dead of Managing Moneys?
Judge Releases Sony Practices in Death
Doom’s On Worldwire Networks
Sun Releases Enterprise in Smackware
I Wants To Control of the Net
Nintendo Can Start in the Wild Button?
Secondors Talk Open Source For Super-Bork?
AOL On Beam Doubt

Some familiar personalities of the tech industry make an appearance:

Microsoft Releases Bill Gates Service Start
Steve Jobs To Be Good
Shatner Awards Up Towards A Game Car Challenge

Cell phones appear to be have been weird in the early days:

Stem Cell Phone Standards in Space
Why Are Blow Systems Taking Your Phone?
New Unreal Tournament Phone Reviews Doubts
Forget To Support Flat Spam Phone

And you find companies doing rather unexpected things: 

Microsoft Announces Mac OS X Released
Intel Releasing Linux In A Networks
Sun Upgrades Apple Devices
Corel Launches $100 Laptop
Microsoft Announces Firefox Portal
Mozilla’s Audio Caroffice
Apple Finally Launches Microsoft

I produced the above headlines by allowing the neural network a high creativity setting, so it could range over many different headline topics that it’s seen over and over. But it’s also fun to turn the creativity down near zero, so the neural network can try to generate the most quintessential headlines:

All The Company Programming Software Software?
Some Computer Computer Solution of the New Company Computer
More Anti-Spam For Software Computer
Mac OS X Interview with Linux Computer
Mac OS X Accused of the Business
Sony Plans To Start Patent System For All Time
Security Hole For Security Hole
Security Hole in the Star Trek
Computer Computer Computer Computer Software?

Decade 2: 2007 – 2017

The neural network had a tougher time with decade 2 – it seems the headlines became longer and more complex, as Slashdot experimented with new formats and new topics.  The neural network struggled to create grammatical headlines as a result. But it still did its best to reflect the new topics of the last decade. Compared to the late 1990s and early 2000s, some companies and topics disappeared, while the coverage of Apple in particular exploded. Star Trek and Star Wars, however, remain perennial Slashdot favorites.
Here are some neural network-generated headlines for 2007-2017:

Twitter Discovered In the Pirate Bay
Google Bacon Medal To Contract Computational Lab
Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store In the US
Steve Jobs Sues Death of the Future
Apple Seeks To Be Become Windows 10 Has Been Control the Desktops
Stanford Computer Scientists Develop Super Man Sales For Computer Science
Star Wars Hacked In Life On the iPhone
Computer Finds Court Broke Math For Secret Company
How Do You Design To Stay Them Bomb
Ask Slashdot: How Clinton Uses Display For Android Chips On Netflix Court From the Jobs
People ‘Fork” At a Flaw Refused
The Pirate Bay Tracking Storage Security For Windows 10
German Porn Update To Compete At CNSR Healthy Court Says
Supreme Court Can Be Lingeries
Apple Says the Moon Project To Pay $1.7 Billion For Free Software
Steve Jobs Allowed To Deal With Solar Power
Apple Sues Apple To Get Flash Mathematics
Microsoft Slashdot: How To Build a Bad Privacy For Windows 10
Twitter That We Use Facebook To Receive The Life
Linux Kernel 3.1.0 Launches In Late, Facebook To Sue Star Trek
The One-Department For Alleged For Connectivity: 3-D Printed Baby
Black Hole Proposed

My favorite part, though? The Slashdot headlines that appeared to come from an alternate, much more advanced, somewhat terrifying timeline:

Google Returns To the Space Station
Mac OS X Project Announces Space Station
Sony Announces Mars Rover Release
Google Patents Intelligent Space Telescope
Officials Release Android Apps For New Space Telescope
Star Trek Control of the Wild Start Up
Scientists Army Interviewed
Company Computer Releases Cloning Crime
Building A Nano-Tech Back
Full Life On The Linux
Chernobyl Announces Company And Educators
SGI Launches Space Station
FreeBSD Base Scientific Hits the Moon
Red Hat Releases Linux Games And Moon
Apple’s Moon Review
About New Moons of a Company
Looking For Mars Landers to Linux
Mars Rover Set for Alien China
Congress To Buy Mars Mister
Building a Top 100 Company For Mars
Apple Considering Debut in People Processors
Apple vs. Biology Details
An Android Bans Secret Project For Console Devices
Your Own Portals
U.S. Considering Death of the Solar System
Black Holes from Digital Dell
Black Hole Sension of the Linux
Microsoft’s Lab Changes “Space”
IBM Moves to The Matrix
Super Planet Wars Solved

The quintessential headline, though? When I trained the neural network with all 20 years of Slashdot headlines, then turned down the creativity level to near zero, I reveal the following essential Slashdot headlines, distilled from 20 years of technology news:

Sun Sues Open Source Project Content
Sun Sues Anti-Spam Computers
Sun Sues Security Flaw Contest
Sun Sues New Star Trek To Stop The Math
Sun Sues Anti-Spam Standards And The Star Wars To Stop Computers
Star Wars Companies Are Streaming the Star Wars
Star Wars To Support Linux Development
Apple Settles The Future of Star Wars
Apple Releases Secure State of the World
Apple Sues Apple To Start The Solar Power Project
Sony Sues Apple Server For Seconds Off From SpaceX Project
Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?
The Desist of the Planet

Want 4 more pages of Slashdot headlines from the neural network? Sign up here and I’ll email you a pdf.

Also: POLL! I’m collecting names of Halloween costumes for training a future neural network. Enter as many as you like (no email address required).

Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?

Tags:

#long post #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(my favourites are ”Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store in US” and ”Facebook to Sue Star Trek”) #(though I agree that ”Do We Want to Be the Computers?” is pretty great even if it does break Betteridge’s Law) #((mind you I’m not sure uploading *in itself* appeals to me)) #((I’m sure silicon-based substrates have their own problems and I have more experience coping with my current body’s problem set)) #((and given that I am honestly impressed this laptop has made it to nearly its third anniversary of purchase)) #((I have no reason to expect they’d even be more durable overall)) #((so really the nice thing about uploading is being able to evacuate to a new body when your current one gives out)) #((for which a cortical stack and the occasional previously-uninhabited clone body would do just fine)) #(((and some offsite backups in case the stack is unrecoverable might be helpful but do leave you more open to forknapping))) #tag rambles #transhumanism #death tw

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

sigmaleph:

somnilogical:

I’m into furry things and vore things and tentacle things and so on. But I feel like I’m almost cheating because these all flow from having my preference for morphological freedom set really high. It seems rather *unremarkable* given that.

I guess there *must* be some transhumanist people who aren’t into generalized furry and bdsm things. Robin Hanson didn’t know what futa were until a few months ago.

It just seems that given you indicate a preference for full morphological freedom for yourself and given that you don’t want to *stop* having sex… it seems like either you would be into this range of things or you would anticipate your future self being into it.

——

[ Linked from @mitoticcephalopod ’s vore discord. Here: https://discord.gg/JH8jH66 ]

Hm. I also have a really strong preference for morphological freedom, yet vore doesn’t do anything for me? Nor does it seem obvious that my Shiny Morphological Freedom Future self would be into it. She might indulge a partner, but.

I don’t think these things are unlinked, but the link is not as strong as you imply, imo.

Ah, there was a misparsing. It isn’t specifically vore that I would expect but the cluster of sex things which aren’t currently physically feasible for most people. Like being a futa whose hand gets cut off or being eaten alive or being able to restrain your catgirl clone.

If someone imagines being in the Shiny Morphological Freedom Future and changing forms a lot and still planned on having sex, it would surprise me if they weren’t into [current projection of sex that is infeasible now but would be feasible with uploads] and did anticipate their future selves liking it.

I think I can imagine what they may be imagining, but the exercise is a little weird. I can imagine people imagining spending long milliseconds as 11-dimensional squid and spongy manifolds. Softly brushing against an object of their desire a sense of ~pleasure rising. Their body feeling ~warm and ~glowing. Them morphing the system of them and the Object into human forms and having kinky earthling sex.

I mean, I guess??

I think that if the people who plan to [change their form a lot come {simspace, nanomachine swarms, full-body transplants}] and [have sex in the Future] thought about Future sex for five minutes I think they would find some of the scenarios which aren’t currently physically possible quite appealing. I would be surprised to find all of their desires funneled into a narrow region of what sex is reachable by humans of the early 21st century.

I think it depends on how sexually adventurous you are to begin with. Given that as it stands, my desires are funneled into a narrow region even compared to the narrow region of what’s currently possible, I suspect the sex life of Morphological-Freedom-Utopia!me would look like a somewhat-enhanced-but-the-same-basic-idea version of mine.

(Some forms of future-sex might very well be interesting experiences to me, but not necessarily sexual ones.)

Tags:

#and there are definitely erotic acts that would be easier with gills #(or just not needing to breathe at all) #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #transhumanism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

alexanderrm:

serrarawillowfluttershy:

just-shower-thoughts:

If keyboards had braille on them, we all could have subconsciously learned braille by now.

Would that actually work?

Google isn’t any scientific papers studying it, only mismatches or a handful of people assuming it’s doable, but I’m not sure if that’s because all the psychological researchers assume it’s doable or because nobody thought to study it, or if I’m not finding them.
I could easily imagine the human brain being set up such that this didn’t happen; anyone want to get a braille keyboard, try this out, and report the results?

Learning via passive haptic associations works for learning morse code: [ https://m.phys.org/news/2016-10-morse-code.html#jCp ]

Sticker sets to change your normie keyboard into a braille one such as this one* cost 20$ if anyone would like to try this.

*[ https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00014VWP2/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489562744&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=braille+keyboard+stickers&dpPl=1&dpID=411SqfyJvrL&ref=plSrch ] (h/t @bunniesravenclawsupernatural for the link to braille keyboard stickers)

FWIW, the related-articles section of that Morse code link has an article about passively learning Braille (through vibrating gloves).

Tags:

#interesting idea #I’m tempted to get a set of Braille keyboard stickers now #that particular listing doesn’t ship to Canada but there’s probably others #reply via reblog