Cybernetic Immortality: Why Our Cyberhuman Future is Closer Than You Think

"We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."  -Norbert Wiener

By definition, posthumanism (I choose to call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind-transfer, or rather “mind migration,” for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.

Evolutionary Cybernetics 101: Gaia 2.0, Web 3.0

“We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.” ―Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

In my recent online interactions, I was asked by Arend van Campen and Jelel Ezzine to define cybernetics in my work. Here I decided to expand on my explanation a little bit and provide you a few useful links. For a basic definition, cybernetics can be defined as a multidisciplinary approach to study evolutionary processes and feedback-driven systems of control between animal and machine. My chosen field, evolutionary cybernetics as well as my chosen philosophical discipline, philosophy of mind, both are aimed to investigate this new human-machine paradigm.

Holo Syntellectus: Are We Evolving into a New Cybernetic Species Interlinked into the Global Mind?

"When we look through the other end of the telescope, however, we can see a different pattern. We can make out what I call the One Mind — not a subdivision of consciousness, but the overarching, inclusive dimension to which all the mental components of all individual minds, past, present, and future belong. I capitalize the One Mind to distinguish it from the single, one mind that each individual appears to possess." -Larry Dossey

Are we evolving into a new species with hybrid thinking, interlinked into the Global Mind? At what point may the Web become self-aware? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, how will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness?

Where Do We Fit in the Cosmic Scheme and Where Are We Headed?

 

"The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” –James Jeans

Today's machine learning already employs combined elements of cognitive architectures, evolutionary computing and neuromorphic engineering. Post-singularity superintelligence could have complete access to their own source code – a level of self-awareness presently beyond human capability. That would allow our future syntelligence to create myriad virtual worlds right out of our own superimagination. This scenario might have already happened elsewhere and we can’t completely rule out a possibility that we’re part of that kind of simulated reality right now. At the same time, we ourselves are moving towards the point of 'Theogenesis' where we can rightly call ourselves cybergods.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence (Part III: Conclusion)

*Image: Shutterstock

"For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and… hackers… pales in comparison to the most basic A.I. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So, imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity, I call it Transcendence." -Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp, Transcendence, The Movie 2014)

... continued from Part II (Interlinking & AGI(NP))


CONCLUSION

Creating a digital mind, “artificial consciousness” so to speak, from scratch, based on simulation of the human brain’s functionality would be much easier than to create the whole brain emulation of a living human. In the book “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of the Human Thought Revealed” (2012) Ray Kurzweil describes his theory of how our neocortex works as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers that well may be our starting basis for machine consciousness algorithms. The human brain and its interaction with the environment may be simulated to approximate the functioning of the human brain of an individual living in the pre-Singularity era. Simulation may be satisfactory if it reflects our history based on enormous amount of digital or digitized data accumulated since the 1950s to the present.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence (Part II: Interlinking & AGI(NP))

     

*Image: "Better Than Us," Netflix Series

 

"Whether somebody is implemented on silicon or biological tissue, if it does not affect functionality or consciousness, is of no moral significance. Carbon chauvinism, in the form of anthropomorphism, speciesism, bioism or even fundamentalist humanism, is objectionable on the same grounds as racism."       -Gregory L. Garrett

... continued from Part I (Introduction)



III. INTERLINKING: This dynamic, horizontal integration approach stipulates real-time optimization of AGIs in the context of globally distributed network. Add one final ingredient – be it computing power, speed, amount of shared/stored data, increased connectivity, the first mind upload or a critical mass of uploads, or another “spark of life” – and the global neural network, the Global Brain, may, one day in the not-so-distant future, “wake up” and become the first self-aware AI-powered system (Singleton?). Or, may the Global Brain be self-aware already, but on a different from us humans timescale? It becomes obvious and logically inevitable that we are in the process of merging with AI and becoming superintelligences ourselves by incrementally converting our biological brains into artificial superbrains and interlinking with AGIs in order to instantly share data, knowledge, and experience.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence

*Image:"Better Than Us," 2018 Netflix Series

"Yet, it's our emotions and imperfections that makes us human."   -Clyde DeSouza, Memories With Maya

IMMORTALITY or OBLIVION? I hope that everyone would agree that there are only two possible outcomes after having created Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for us: immortality or oblivion. The necessity of the beneficial outcome of the upcoming intelligence explosion cannot be overestimated.

Any AGI at or above human-level intelligence can be considered as such, I’d argue, only if she has a wide variety of emotions, ability to achieve complex goals and motivation as an integral part of her programming and personal evolution. I could identify the following three most optimal ways to create friendly AI (benevolent AGI), in order to safely navigate uncharted waters of the forthcoming intelligence explosion: