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kleinbl00  ·  2553 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism

    If I have a religion, this is it.

Fair enough.

    I believe that man will merge with machine, and it is happening in bits and pieces all over the world.

Know thyself.

    It doesn't require belief.

Waitwaitwaitbut

    It doesn't require approval.

...since when have religions required "approval?"

    The people working on AI will continue to work on AI.

"and will create God in their own image" - see, that's a belief.

    The people working on brain/machine interfaces will continue to work on brain-machine interfaces.

"and will permit the perfect translation between organic being and silicon storage." See, that's a belief.

    Automation will continue to be be cheaper than human labor, and will only get cheaper.

"and demand curves will be repealed." See, that's a belief and one not particularly founded on anything.

Fun fact: the printing press was invented in Crete and China and Byzantium before Gutenberg ever got to it but it didn't catch on because scribes were cheaper than movable type. The whole of the Ottoman Empire was an exercise in make-work in order to keep the young and unemployed from rising up and striking down the Caliph. Something they don't teach you in school: Gutenberg created movable type in 1440, a bare five generations or so after the Black Death reduced Europe's population by 30-60%. Scribes, in short, were in high demand so automation took over.

I'm not going to question your beliefs... so long as you understand that they are beliefs, not statistical certainties. I can "believe" that the stock market will rise over the long run because mathematically, it is a positive sum game. I can "believe" that the sun will rise tomorrow because there's a lot of physics between that probability and any other. But I cannot "believe" in the Singularity the same way because

And while you may think that people smarter than you understand Step Two?

They're praying for miracles, too.