The most interesting thing about “post-humanity”, be it genetically engineered, cybernetic, or full blown AI...

Virtual mind uploading. Multiple, subtly different versions of you across different servers. You could turn inward and become a hedonistic self-imposed lotus eater machine, or work over the eons to become Multivac.

Sometimes I wish it would happen sooner just so that we could force what's left of the greatest generation to experience the dystopia they fought to create.

Me. Even if there isn't a scarcity of physical resources, there are limits on social interaction and time you have to spend on activities.

Then there's a limit on how long they can spend on doing their duties.

>I honestly can't think of any post-humanity concept that doesn't invalidate my entire ethical base, destroying me as a moral individual
That's because you're looking at it from your current perspective, and human perspective and worldview will change with time.

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>Even if there isn't a scarcity of physical resources, there are limits on social interaction and time you have to spend on activities.
Not if you're immortal.

>Then there's a limit on how long they can spend on doing their duties.

You just have to give them enough orders to keep the busy all the time.

I'd make the penis a muscle you can grow.

You have more than your ancestors could ever have imagined and yet still you want more.
Future people will have everything we could ever want but have new desires we could not comprehend.

>How about posthuman society where the slaves are modified to feel intese orgasmic pleasure while serving their masters?
Sup Stirling?
When's the next change book coming out?

Depends on what you mean by immortality. If you can last forever but still get killed, death is still a concern to you, and all the more terrifying because you'll never know from where it may come from.

>How about posthuman society where the slaves are modified to feel intese orgasmic pleasure while serving their masters?
Some fucking asshole is going argue that it's inhuman and unethical. Moral notions were never really derived from subjective perceptions of those involved, but always from a reference to higher, transcendetal value systems. This shit would not work unless human perception of ethics would have not chance COMPLETELY from our contemporary norms.

>Or how about one where everyone’s brain is wired in a way that makes them feel pleasure while performing selfless act
First of all, generally speaking we are already kinda wired that way. Taking it any further than it is now is a FUCKING AWFUL idea. Self-regulation. Individual interests and collective societal interests have to be ballanced out, they are in fact two sides of the same coin.
Skew it too far in one direction and you are pretty much dooming the entire society to just die the very fist second some kind of unpredicted difficulty rises. Humans need flexibility and plurality of behavioral strategies.

...

>If I had to honestly choose one thing for a post-human future, it'd be the destruction of the concept of a post scarcity society.
Yeah, the concept is honestly completely fucking idiotic, on multiple levels. It's just New Jerusalem for naive atheists who want all the ease of utopistic dreams without having to deal with ambiguities of religion or personal responsibility.

West, as glorious as this civilization is, has a terrible, terrible habit of indulging idiotic utopistic visions.

How about solve the issue of sexual harrasment by rewiring female brain so that chicks would like it instead of hating it?

>highschool kid expecting to live for 70 more years
I'm envious of his optimism.

Every time people discuss these kinds of subjects, I'm immediately reminded of these fucking lines:
>All these clever men were prophesying with every variety of ingenuity what would happen soon, and they all did it in the same way, by taking something they saw "going strong," as the saying is, and carrying it as far as ever their imagination could stretch. This, they said, was the true and simple way of anticipating the future. "Just as," said Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage,—"just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant,—just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches to the sky."

Read, niggas. Read. It really comes in handy in moments like these.

IDK, I am fairly sure nobody seriously considered immortality to be invented within their lifetime untill like 1980’s

They already do.

Yes. Even if you're immortal, there's a limit what you can do right now.
You can either eat amazing food, or watch the newest cinema masterpiece, or have ultra sex, or visit your grandmother, or sleep in your comfy bed, or do mega acid. You might be able to do multiple things you like at the same time, but you can't do everything right now.

Think of it like money. If you live forever you have an infinite amount of money from flipping burgers. But you only get it in $200 dollar increments.

Honestly, I don't enjoy the idea of changing what makes us humans. It can bring serious consequences in the future, with "pure" humans claiming the right to rule over the "mutants" and such.

But it could make a cool setting. Ancient humans started colonising the galaxy and used genetic engineering to change themselves(perharps to better fit their new homes). After some catastrophic event mankind lost knowledge about the past and can't contact each other and now the galaxy is filled with humanoid beings that nobody really knows why they're humanoids at all.
Tales of ancient star gods(the ancient humans) should be fairly common among the galaxy.
As a party, your goal is to find clues about what happened in the past.

So your answer is to avoid thinking about the future at all in case you're wrong?

I am 30 and I expect to live for the next 50 - 60 years.

That's brainwashing.
The vast majority of humans will be nothing more than mindless slaves.
Similar to the servitors from 40k

But they would be happy?

Isn’t that what matters?

No, the answer is not actually trusting our own stupid assumptions and in general, not being an idiot talking about shit you barely understand anyway. Or if you must, at least never taking anything you or others like you say actually seriously.

Seriously, how many times do we have to learn this whole "future does not go the way we think it's going to go" lesson?

>Seriously, how many times do we have to learn this whole "future does not go the way we think it's going to go" lesson?
Once would be enough.

No.
I would rather live in unending despair than being a slav

Post-human != post-scarcity

We learned that lesson at least four or five times over the course of last century alone. Yet here we are, treating human trascendence with the same certainity we used to preach space travel being norm in 2000 but never fucking realized a fucking telephone could be carried in your pocket.

Post scarcity usually refers to physical resources, things like information or social resources could still be limited. A post humanity society could theoretically engineer themselves to eliminate most if not all conflicts, given enough time, space, and effort. However I suspect that it is more plausible for human diversity to increase in such a scenario rather than decrease.

Post-scarcity doesn't mean everyone has everything they want. It means everyone has everything they need, and enough for the usual wants.

>It means everyone has everything they need, and enough for the usual wants.

Is gf included?

So if there is an ordinary human looking at a post-singularity mind, there's really no way to understand their morality, and no way to trust if they're benevolent or lying?
Do you think there would be incredibly powerful intelligences, smart enough to do incredible acts, but lacking the introspection to act maturely, but they're so powerful that others might think that they operate on an entirely different level of morality?

Which is clearly idiotic. Do the people coming up with these terms not know the concept of relative poverty? The fuck?

You have the time and resources to support a successful relationship. Making use of them is on you.

>I would rather live in unending despair than being a slav

what's the difference?

Even if we had an enormity of physical materials, some materials would be in disproportinate demand, and even if we could synthesize anything, you'll still run into the most basic problem of nature, which is the efficient capture, storage and transmission of energy. You'll always run into some sort of resource allocation problem or resource bottleneck.

57144842
We'll just invent more things to "need", then.

The concept of relative poverty is a side effect of humans being shit, and is not to be encouraged or accepted as an excuse.

The concept of relative poverty is a side effect of humans being fucking HUMANS. There is nothing to "encourage" or "accept as an excuse". It's not something you can do away, not without altering humanity to a point where it's not humanity anymore. And that is a pretty damn scary prospect.

We do now, and always have, possessed an enormity of physical material. The composition of the Earth has never meaningfully changed in human history. The problem has always been uneven distribution. Solving scarcity means perfecting logistics and resource management, which ipso facto means solving energy supply.

Is immortality even possible?

Even if you could make dude live forever, his old memories would eventually become too corrupted to be recognizable from randomly generated memories and then porbably overwritten because brain isn’t infinite and as a result his personality shift to be very different from the old personality result in entirely new dude, so the old dude would be effectively dead.

I’d gfo as far as to argue our current lifespan is long enough for this to happen.

There are many traits of humanity which we'd be better without, and moreover many of those traits those traits are not even present in every human. You claim removing the tendency to judge one's own standing by comparison to others is dehumanizing, yet there exist, right at this very moment, humans who base their self assessment on their ability to satisfy their desires alone. Are these people inhuman, to you?

Pretty sure the question was what we would *like* to see happen, not what actually *will* happen.

Threadly reminder that the singularity will never happen and the average person born in 2000 will die in about 2104.

Threadly reminder that by 2075 the Mole People will rise up and destroy all we hold dear in the name of their strange, dark Mole Gods.

post-humanity != singularity

>Threadly reminder that the singularity will never happen and the average person born in 2000 will die in about 2104.

that's optimistic, 100 years is a long time to go without a big war, pandemic or something of that effect.

Yeah, but we're living in a pretty exceptional moment of human history. I hate doom mongers, but a civilization where there are historically few poor people and the majority can extract a comfortable living (even with extreme wealth concentration) depends on liberating easy energy from a limited resource pool. We've temporarily cheated entropy, not eliminated it. I don't see how the problem is uneven distribution - most complex systems follow the power law, like distribution of wealth, property, audiences, sales of commodities, scientific citations, contributions to wikipedia, experimental successes, etc.

Depends on what these desires are. And keep in mind that the question of whether something is desirable or not is partly based in need (there are some things like food that nobody can do without) but also in morality - what we think is good or not, and morality is generally learned by example and instruction.

What if singularity is just Jesus coming back?

It happened everytime and we don't really "die".
Most people will not remember most of what they had done as a child, but it doesn't mean we're a different beings than what we were

This thread’s theme song:

>youtube.com/watch?v=LDiDK_yBCw0

There will be no choice for you, or your descendents. The Gene Tyrants will make all the choices for you, and you will not have even the power to quietly ask the question why.

Oh, whew! That’s an immense relief. I was hoping it would be something like that.

>There are many traits of humanity which we'd be better without
Doubtfull.
Many of what some of us consider useless traits could actualy be extremely useful traits that our rational brains are not fully capable of understanding.
Among all of our evolutionary traits reason is the most recent and therefore the most flawed.

No, we don't.
Rare earth, which is vital for high tech industry has always been rare, and it's getting rarer and rarer

Rare earth metals aren't remotely rare. Their relative scarcity is due to the fact that the vast majority of them are found in low concentration deposits that are expensive to make use of. The largest high concentration deposits are in China, which is happy for the opportunity to undercut other nations production in order to establish a monopoly.

OP is female gay or both.
Also most likely French.

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> Their relative scarcity is due to the fact that the vast majority of them are found in low concentration deposits that are expensive to make use of
That's exactly the problem

>Will we be more peaceful or more aggressive, more logical or more mystical, more honest or more cunning?

We have more choice now than we had even a decade ago. Do you see a peaceable kingdom around you?

Diversity + Proximity = Conflict

The more changes we can makes with and within ourselves, the more diverse we'll become and the less we'll have in common with the people around us.

Humans are tribal and the "monkeysphere" is real. If transhumanism can't rewrite that part of our nature, the future will simply be more fractured, more narrow, more suspicious, and more violent.

Imagine what future parents will choose for their children.

Unhealthy? no.
Dumb? no.
Anti-social? Fuck no.

The genetic engineering future is a world of hyper-heterosexual 130IQ Chads and Stacys.

I liked the Peter Watts take on it.

The singularity happened in the background. It just didn't take baseline humans along for the ride. They have VR, and they think they'll be the last generation to risk old age, but uploading and immortality are perpetually X years away. (and will probably stay that way, simply to keep humans from getting uppity).

Unfortunately people in the power are much more likely to support the virgin transhuman that the ubermensch.

>full blown AI
>we'll have more CHOICE
>laughinghyperstructures.apriori

Production of desire.

> Thinking it will be your choice and not the Mega-corp you work for deciding it.

Everyone gets artificial nutrition sources so you don't waste time with lunch breaks.

We already have post-scarcity for reasons to eliminate the "other".

Finally we'll also have the weapons to do so.

I know that the obscurity is meant for story purposes, but I'd really like to know what the hell the AIs are up to in the Blindverse. What the hell is happening on Mars, for example?

>Hi! I'm a retard
We need to find a way to increase both intelligence and empathy. The ear-splitting REEEEEEEEEEEEing from the sociopaths will make it all worth it.

>Empathy
Why?

Empathy should be something that you can turn on and off.

The answer can only be understood once you upgrade out of sociopathy.

The mutual exclusivity of empathy and making hard decisions is a myth emotionally immature people tell themselves. It's why they'll never be rid of psychopaths.

Explain

Again, they aren't rare. They're just hard to use. There's more than enough physically present to support the construction of more electronics than we could ever use, once we gather it up.

How about you kill yourself, as you don't deserve to be happy in a post human society?

okay but rewrite the male brain to despise the pleasure derived from ejaculation as well. that way nobody will be happy and balance will be restored.

>Only rewiring the male brain so nobody will be happy

I'm afraid I don't understand your logic.

>CHOICE
Stop misgendering yourself you fucking moron

>and performing self serving acts causes suffering?
Self-serving acts like eating and breathing?

Dad issues?

kek

People in power turn themselves into uubermenschen no matter the no doubt extreme costs of changing already fully grown human.

Everyone else is turned into transhuman.

I think this image may be the apotheosis of the virgin - chad meme.

If you cannot empathize with someone, you cannot tell how they will react to your decisions and cannot plan fopr the eventualities that might occur because of those decisions. In addition, empathy can help you think ofg alternatives aside from the most cut and dried solutions. A lack of empathy will always cause more harm than is absolutely necessary.

They no longer get cushy pensions and actually have to find a job in the industries they personally ruined.

Show me place on the demand curve where needs end and wants begin.

All "needs" are, are wants that someone else decides you should have. Look at the lists that people try to compile over time. Food? Sure. What kind of food? In what amounts? High bandwidth internet? How much bandwidth is high? If we truly "need" this, then why wasn't on lists of needs until it was invented.

Distinguishing needs from wants is muddy thinking meant to delegitimize individual preferences and choices. Just because some wants are very strongly wanted or justified by biology doesn't make them not wants. And just because you want to have everybody have X doesn't make it magically turn into a sacred human need.

People always will want more than they have. Some things (like industrial products) might become cheap or commodified but then other limited resources will take their place.

By the standards of the nineteenth century political writers, we have a post-scarcity society now. Even today's poor have better standards of living in terms of basic human needs than the richest and most powerful people of that era.

>Rare earth, which is vital for high tech industry has always been rare, and it's getting rarer and rarer

Not in the slightest, fuckwit. One "rare" earth is something like the 20th most abundant element on Earth.

The problem has to do with "rare" earths not forming ore bodies, something which has to do with the chemical properties they have which in turn is due to their electron arrangements. "Rare" earths "prefer" to hang out with other elements and compounds instead of hanging out with themselves.

All this means you need to process tons of materials to produce grams of rare earths, something which is environmentally devastating. The refining process is expensive and also environmentally damaging. China currently produces most rare earths because start up costs were paid by the government and they don't give two fucks about any environmental concerns.

In other words, no.

If we all had Santa Claus machines, then there's your new scarce resource: services from other human beings. Or one new scarce resource, at least.

That cop out answer applies to anything some third party (and it won't be either of you) decides isn't a need and therefore that you shouldn't be given. And why not? Isn't love and support and snuggles a basic human need?

Or the reign of the Thirteenth Caliph.