I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
I was thinking the other day about animals in their natural habitat versus in captivity. Remove a gorilla from its jungle and stick it in a small zoo enclosure and it tends to go insane at worst, at best depression sets in. With orcas their fin flops over and even when released back into the wild it never returns to form, we can only guess what happens to them psychologically. Humans in supermax prisons exhibit the same issues.
I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.
Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.
> We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door.
Yes, but that kind of ignores the more active elements. This story didn't languish with few upvotes and a few shallow comments, it was an instant HN darling so had to be killed, or it would still be on the front page.
> they don't understand it and therefore they fear it
I feel this whenever discussion of consciousness comes up. Even though consciousness is not well understood at all (e.g. no scientific progress whatsoever on the "hard problem"), some people would rather say "it's just molecules and we don't have free will, we don't really exist, it's all an illusion, science will reduce it eventually, etc. etc." It baffles me that some people would rather contradict their very experience and declare that they don't exist! Rather than admit there's something that may be impossible to understand.
Who argues that we don't really exist just because we are made up of molecules? That doesn't make sense at all, EVERYTHING that exists is made up of molecules, that is what existence is.
I know I have consciousness, and I know I am made up of molecules. I don't find that limiting or disappointing at all.
I am very confused by these people you say argue that we don't exist. I have never heard anyone argue that.
There are people who think a machine that can produce the same outputs as or better than humans are just as good or better than humans, that we can be treated just as black boxes.
> EVERYTHING that exists is made up of molecules, that is what existence is
This is a belief system which one does not have to believe in order to accept the findings of physical science.
> I know I have consciousness, and I know I am made up of molecules. I don't find that limiting or disappointing at all.
There's two things this can mean:
(1) You do genuinely believe you exist, but just that you're arising from a temporary arrangement of molecules -- essentially, all the statements that one can make about souls is true of you. In that case, you're not who I'm talking about.
(2) There is no such thing as "you", it is purely an illusion, and no legitimate subjective entities really exist.
Can you explain what is contradictory in the view you oppose? You lump a few of these opinions into one and they're pretty different from one another, but the essence of it seems to be disagreeing that humans can be explained with enough knowledge. You say that this is contradicted through natural human experience so much that you think the other side refuses to admit that there's a huge gash in their view. Basically that they're lying to themselves and everyone knows 'the truth'. What is that contradictory experience?
To me, the contradictory view is the one assuming that everything in the world can be explained, except for humans. So far, people found that, given enough time and core knowledge, they could understand anything about the natural world, and we've been refining that process ever since. Since humans are a part of that world, are created in it and live in it, why would I think we're any different? There's a difference between thinking that humans are unique (in a way that makes us have immensely interesting properties) and thinking that humans are special (not subject to natural laws or constraints).
The troubling view for me is the alternative - the one that always tries to draw a hard line between humans and the 'explainable' rest of nature, like we must be different, alien and special to be worthy of interest and appreciation.
Im not being condescending when I say genuinely thanks for engaging in good faith and without being rude! This topic can make people quite rude, in my experience. I guess because it's talking about people's deepest beliefs of themselves and the world.
I think you've distilled it well: I don't believe that human consciousness can be explained.
Obviously, we find neural mechanisms for aspects of it: of cognition, learning, language, movement, etc. And obviously there are the effects of drugs, e.g. anesthesia, psychedelics, anti-anxiety, etc.
But these are all effects on consciousness, they are not an explanation for the very existence of the observer, so to speak. And I don't believe that can be touched rigorously. The best we'll ever be able to do is gesture at it broadly and say "well, it certainly seems like everything has a physical cause and explanation." Whereas I take a different view: it certainly seems as though there is something special about consciousness.
It is certainly of the universe, and obviously interacts with the physical. But it also seems to go beyond it. The experience itself exists. And I do believe that this is intuitively obvious - we know we exist, we know we have a type of free will (obviously imperfect, affected by various circumstances, but nevertheless we exist).
But because we want to feel that everything has an explanation, and physical science has been so powerful and effective in every other domain, there's a tendency to say - "well, that stuff must be an illusion. Human perception is fallible."
I feel the same too. And I believe there is much more complexity in the question "will this be good for society overall" than technologists can apprehend. For example even though I recognize some benefits to social media, I'd have a hard time arguing that on a societal level it's not a huge net negative. Overall, people are more divided, more angry, depressed, egotistical because of social media and the attention economy. And ultimately, as one of my previous boss would say "it's all about people".
I've felt something similar about the internet for a very long time. Time and again I've seen people talk about how they don't have a lot of friends, or that it's hard to make friends, or social interactions are a struggle, which is why the internet is great. I see those comments a lot on HN too, even in this very thread. Hell, I said similar stuff myself when I was younger.
But the more you lean on the internet or on technology, the more you feed that feedback loop of "in-person interaction = hard". Yes, things are difficult, but you're never going to figure out how to be comfortable in those situations if you're not actively putting yourself in them. Growth takes struggle, and I say that with all the empathy in the world.
I definitely got this sense with Zuckerberg/meta (and probably Musk too) -- it should be ironic disturbing to have people who aren't really social people building our social networks....
Some of the least-mentally-healthy people I know see human dynamics as fundamentally 0-sum competitions, and I feel like some of these platforms are modeled on that, but not all of them (youtube is a mixed bag, reddit used to be pretty harmless).
Just because it's nondeterministic doesn't mean they don't understand it. In fact those people can mold it and love doing so, it's like they can finally direct the humans that they feel forced to interact with as they always wanted to.
To others too. Much of what they say (and some other trends and ideas) remind me of those of the literal demonic baddies in CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength. Especially the loss of the value of human beings and human connections.
> The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me.
Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic? How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible. If your best you is a baseline human, then, great! More power to you! I know that mine sure as fuck isn't.
Will there be lots of trouble on the way towards teching up so that everyone can be the best version of themselves possible? Absolutely. Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
> The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible.
Come on, by that vague of a definition, Aristotle and Confucius were apparently transhumanists.
Transhumanism when put into practice will be about changing our environment to take away everything that allows humans to thrive and be happy and fulfilled.
It's about the destruction of families, communities, and human cultures built up over millennia with no serious thought put into what comes next and why it might or might not be better for human beings.
> How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
This is not Transhumanism, the desire for these things far pre-date Transhumanism as a philosophy.
> Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
So maybe we work on that before diving head long into the post human future?
You mean the same people who want to destroy the fabric of civilization - norms, caring for one another, feeling shame - also care deeply about us? REALLY...
It's the same as Elon Musk "worrying" about saving humans and then it turns out it's all racism after all.
> Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic?
What. These current class of tech oligarch support MAGA, which came to power with this being the major culture war flashpoint. They didn't seem to mind.
I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.
Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.