We are already ”ai’s” since we are biological machines that receive consciousness from ”out there”. If you damage your brain it’s like damaging your computer screen, the user experience is impaired and not optimal. There are still many unexplored phenomenons (dark matter etc..) that envelopes all our existence, so we may yet, scientifically, come closer to this “out there” consciousness. Although it is today and through all time something that, not all, humans devoted themselves of getting more in touch with. Your consciousness and through that beyond and beyond in expansion of perception and consciousness.
So if you can’t be happy, tolerant and compassionate during 80 years of life – then 8 million years wouldn’t help you?
I think bio-tech improvement (transhumanism etc..) will and may be helpful in every day life eventually – like making the blind see better. But the issue of consciousness is very much ignored in the religious movement of transhumanism. Every being must leave its machine and die, to let the body dissolve and move into something else. Compare humanity from the middle ages and now, we have super amounts of information and better health and we are still not “happy” in the world. Consciousness is being ignored and not really collectively valued in our socio-economic system. So if you can’t be happy, tolerant and compassionate during 80 years of life – then 8 million years wouldn’t help you? That is one of the prime benefits that transhumanism preaches about, a happy long life. My thought is that consciousness will meet the same issues as long as you are of human consciousness. Will you improve or prolong the issues? Will the possible “a.i.” grow and mature? Transhumanist arguments seem to orient very much on “the bigger, the faster, the better”. But the movement probably needs this optimism of religious dedication since it’s new and more is to come and be explored? Also human life is short so you have to make your theory and income quite fast – promise of an improved life with easy external means has always been a bestseller.
So if you’re already an biological “ai” then you are already immortal. Death is like an transition maybe, like waking up from a dream or falling asleep again, who knows? It’s the living left behind that make it a bigger problem. We attach to something, we kill others of our own kind and so on. The problem is the immaturity to handle impermanence and shortcomings? Yet there are way to overcome that and leave fear and anger out of it. Many ancient wisdom traditions teach practically about this – the concept of impermanence.
There is no such thing as perfect because without the imperfect you could not desire the perfect and so on – so if the transhumanist gets to the post human state, singularity or such, the relativity will be different compared their conception of humans today. So the bigger, faster, the better “ai-future” will not change much – one life time is always one life time and a moment of bliss is always a past moment of bliss.
What do you think?