Mind uploading: the write answer

A 1st generation Apple iPad showing iBooks, with the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A book, one might say, is a document consisting of text, printed in ink on sheets of paper. A human mind, one might likewise say, is an entity consisting of ideas, thought processes and emotions, configured into neurons, synapses and glial cells in a brain.

But if I ask whether or not the book you're reading is Alice in Wonderland, I don't care what kind of ink or paper it's printed on, or whether or not it's printed at all. As far as the reader is concerned, a book is text, not the configuration of matter used to store that text. Nobody questions whether or not an e-book can be Alice, just because Alice was originally a printed book.

The Healthy Workaholic's Manifesto

Whereas, global food and water shortages, the dwindling supply of non-renewable resources, and the possibility of a nuclear war all imminently threaten to cause the collapse of society, if not human extinction;

And whereas, the only cause for optimism that such threats are humanly surmountable is the phenomenon of technological acceleration, and the revolutions it is expected to trigger in nanorobotics, biotechnology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence;

And whereas, research shows that people who tend to be the most dedicated to their work, to the detriment of our immediate health, also tend to be the most logical, analytical, creative, disciplined, self-confident, optimistic, and future-oriented;

And whereas, such people, if we work in engineering or scientific research, are therefore an indispensable asset in humanity's race against time to solve social, environmental, and economic crises technologically before they destroy us;


And whereas, both scholarly and popular discourse nevertheless derisively call us "workaholics", depict us in fiction only as evil (or at best unsympathetic) Mad Scientists, and label our heroic self-sacrifice -- or, depending on life expectancy, our sensible long-term investment -- as a symptom of a mental illness;

Resolved, therefore, that workaholism is among human nature's few redeeming virtues, and that it is to be encouraged and celebrated in all people who:

• Work as, or are students training to become, scientists, engineers or professional philanthropists to help develop emerging technologies.
• Maximize our actual contribution to our field worldwide -- and not just our time spent at work, our reputation among colleagues or managers, or our value to only one particular company's shareholders or one particular government's taxpayers.
• Are concerned about the scientific and technological achievements of humanity as a whole more than about our own individually, so that we are motivated to cooperate rather than to compete.
• Commit to resisting the corruptive influence of our power.
• Accept that our lifestyle reduces our capacity to fulfill social and family commitments, and limit such commitments accordingly.

Workaholism isn't obsolete after all

A week ago I confessed to being a workaholic, and wrote about how working too hard tends to lead to second-rate output. I quoted FM-2030 as saying that workaholics -- even those of us who love our jobs -- were too uncreative and all-around boring to be ready for the singularity and its precursor period (which he called the Telespheral Age).

On Saturday, however, Sean Henderson from the Abolitionist Society wrote, in reply to an e-mail inquiry of mine, "Present day work implies involuntary suffering - we'll need workaholics to develop the means to transform human design so that activity is blissful. Maybe the motto should be 'towards the abolition of suffering through suffering'."

#Occupy the #Singularity

[A]s death to the mortal man so failure to the immortal[...]. (Imperial Thought of the Day, Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 4th ed., p. 226)

Some Singularitarians have publicly jumped to the conclusion that younger Occupy Wall Street protesters have nothing to worry about in the long run. The argument runs like this:

Premise: Mind uploading will eliminate the need for food, water, shelter and medicine. The only necessities of posthuman existence will be data storage, processor hardware, and electricity.
Premise: Moore's Law, combined with a new abundant energy source (fusion? space-solar?), will make all three of these resources abundant and the cost of existence negligible.
Conclusion: Therefore, at the time of the Singularity, planet Earth will have transitioned to a post-scarcity economy without poverty.

I consider the first premise all but proven and the second highly probable, but I don't agree that the conclusion logically follows from them.

Kurzweil: no prophet, but a name worth dropping

For most of my undergraduate career, I wouldn't have been able to write a blog like this one. Without being thoroughly familiar with such keywords as "technological acceleration", "transhumanism" and "singularitarian", it was hard to articulate my visions and sense of purpose in life, and hard for Google to find me any of the relevant writing on the subject by futurists.

What finally got me going in the right direction was when one of my profs name-dropped Ray Kurzweil this summer, and I started reading his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.