{"id":2362058,"date":"2024-10-31T08:01:01","date_gmt":"2024-10-31T12:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/transhumanism-wont-been-the-paradise-we-think-it-will-be\/"},"modified":"2024-10-31T08:06:13","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T12:06:13","slug":"transhumanism-wont-been-the-paradise-we-think-it-will-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/transhumanism-wont-been-the-paradise-we-think-it-will-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Transhumanism Won&#8217;t Been The Paradise We Think It Will Be"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Ftranshumanism-wont-been-the-paradise-we-think-it-will-be%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2362058&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>This excerpt \u2064from *Light of the Mind, Light of the World:\u2064 Illuminating \u2063Science \u2064Through \u200dFaith* discusses the complex and often troubling relationship between humanity and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI). Following the recent Nobel Prize award\u2062 in physics to machine learning researchers, the\u200d narrative highlights a \u200bsocietal anxiety regarding the potential \u200bfor\u2063 machines \u200bto surpass human\u200c capabilities. <\/p>\n<p>Historically, the \u200dnotion \u2062that \u200dhumans might merely be\u2063 advanced machines \u2062has led to a\u200c desire for enhancement \u200bthrough technology, which is becoming a prominent\u2062 agenda in discussions \u200bof transhumanism.\u2063 Advocates argue that humanity is on the brink of a new era, where technology could enable profound\u200c enhancements \u200bto our\u200c physical and \u200ccognitive capacities.\u200d This is exemplified by governmental initiatives aimed at programming biological systems akin to computer software.<\/p>\n<p>However, the\u200d text also raises \u2062caution about this trajectory. \u200cIt points out\u200b that\u200c despite advancements, human suffering\u2014both physical and psychological\u2014has not \u200cdiminished \u200cbut, in some \u200bcases, \u200dhas worsened. The \u2062narrative warns against a future\u200d where AI does\u200d not\u2063 necessarily\u200b align with human values, posing \u2063risks where machines may view humans as\u2062 expendable resources\u200b rather than co-existing partners.<\/p>\n<p>The author \u2062invites a\u200b reevaluation of long-standing philosophical views on science and humanity\u2019s relationship with technology, suggesting that outdated paradigms may hinder our \u2064understanding \u200dof the importance and legitimacy \u200dof the human\u2064 experience\u2063 in an\u2064 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/its-time-for-young-people-to-take-sweat-equity-literally\/\" title=\"Youngsters should start valuing hard work more\">increasingly mechanized world<\/a>. The cautionary tone reflects a \u2064struggle to strike\u2064 a balance between embracing technological progress\u2062 and\u2063 preserving fundamental\u200d aspects of \u200dhuman\u2062 life.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><em>This is an adapted&nbsp;excerpt&nbsp;from <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Light-Mind-World-Science-Illuminating\/dp\/1684515335\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith<\/em><\/a><em>  (Regnery, October 15).<\/em><\/p>\n<p>With the award of this year&rsquo;s Nobel Prize in physics to a pair of researchers in the field of machine learning, it&rsquo;s coming to look as if the future truly does belong to AI. But what kind of future?<\/p>\n<p>Widespread anxiety that machines will outstrip or replace humanity altogether are a natural outgrowth of a philosophy that has been gaining in currency at least since the days when Alan Turing, forefather of modern computing, suggested that human beings are functionally indistinguishable from highly functioning machines. If it&rsquo;s true that we are merely biological processing units, then humanity is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/breaking-michigan-house-member-files-to-impeach-governor-gretchen-whitmer\/\" title=\"BREAKING: Michigan House Member Files to Impeach Governor Gretchen Whitmer\">long overdue<\/a> for an upgrade.<\/p>\n<p>For the machines, at least, the upgrades have come thick and fast. Computer technology has soared to staggering heights of sophistication and complexity. Ever since the internet linked computer to computer at unheard-of speeds, these imitation minds have come to seem as if they could do almost anything.<\/p>\n<p>As the personal computer caught on, the average household found itself occupied by a wakeful robotic sentinel, a box of unknown mathematical procedures hiding behind a colorful screen. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s an alien life form,&rdquo; said the rock star David Bowie of the internet in 1999. The more indispensable they became, the more inscrutable computers were to their average user, the elaborate architecture of their programming hidden and compressed within the recesses of their sleek bodies.<\/p>\n<p>It seemed they could do everything mankind had dreamed of doing all these years: they could share information across great stretches of space and commune with one another in an instant. The simplest of them could assimilate great troves of data that would dumbfound the human mind, sorting through it with the impartial rigor of mathematical logic. Computers assessed the world without the distorting mediation of passion or desire, just as the heralds of the scientific age had longed to do. Their only imperatives were those of necessity.<\/p>\n<p>In the wake of these epoch-making developments, the old longing for a sublime fusion between man and machine has today taken on a kind of messianic fervor. &ldquo;Our species has been rapidly acquiring superpowers in the form of unprecedented levels of control over our bodies, brains, built environments and ecosystems,&rdquo; writes Elise Bohan of Oxford University&rsquo;s Future of Humanity Institute. Just as Karl Marx predicted, humanity has risen up to reshape its environment in the image of its machines &mdash; and now, say the prophets of the cyborg future, man himself must become the object of his own unsparing optimization. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re loath to admit it, but the world is not set up for ape-brained meatsacks any more,&rdquo; declares Bohan. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve seeded an extra-human layer of thought. . . . The next step is to bring it to life.&rdquo; These are no longer the fever dreams of a few tech enthusiasts or Soviet fanatics.<\/p>\n<p>Transhumanism &mdash; the promise of a new generation with bodies and minds enhanced by machine technology &mdash; has become a millenarian aspiration among the magnates of the world. In 2022, President Joe Biden&rsquo;s White House announced via executive order its intention to invest in technology that will make its wielders &ldquo;able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers&rdquo; so as to &ldquo;unlock the power of biological data.&rdquo; If man is a prototype computer, constructed from the raw materials of an uncaring nature, then his destiny is to update himself into eternity. Stretching out his hands to touch the blessed diodes of his most cherished creations, he will slot himself at last into the coiling network of information and electricity that is already snaking through the air and earth all around him.<\/p>\n<p>As artificial intelligence programs have learned to mimic human language and creative output to an eerie degree of specificity, these kinds of predictions have only become more dramatic and extreme. One acolyte foretold the coming of programs that can store and process infinite knowledge: &ldquo;WE ARE CREATING GOD WHAT DON&rsquo;T YOU UNDERSTAND.&rdquo; Elon Musk, one of the world&rsquo;s best-known advocates of the man-machine merger, replied: &ldquo;Exactly.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>This dream is fast becoming a nightmare. For all the promises of liberation and triumph, our bodies and brains have not responded well to our efforts at treating them like first-generation meat computers. No matter how finely we calibrate our hormone levels with pills and injections, our existential despair and unease only deepen. Swapping out genitals and body parts like plug-ins and accessories has not yielded promising results. Transgender surgeries, which one enthusiast hoped would break a &ldquo;lucky few free from the horrid curse of being human,&rdquo; have instead worsened that curse unspeakably, leaving patients to suffer through infection and daily agony. And as artificial intelligence takes on levels of complexity that even its creators can&rsquo;t predict or control, dire misgivings about its destructive potential have started to take hold. Because if we are simply suboptimal versions of our own machines, why should they meld with us at all? Why shouldn&rsquo;t they enslave us, or scrap us for parts, or simply do away with us?<\/p>\n<p>If the long-awaited advent of the cyborg world is upon us, we will be forced to consider whether this is really what we want &mdash; and what other choice we may have. Struggling like butterflies pinned to a circuit board, the skeptics among us are looking for some way out of a world made cruelly flawless by our own inventions. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a pioneer in the development of artificial intelligence, described his fears for what the technology might become: without the right stop-gaps, he wrote, we will end up with a situation in which &ldquo;the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.&rdquo; But this grim future is far from inevitable. It only feels that way to some of us because of ideas we inherited from men like Pierre-Simon Laplace and Karl Marx, who taught us to think of the world as a machine with a <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\">ghost inside called humanity&#038;mdash<\/a>;a ghost destined to evaporate, leaving behind only the ceaseless grinding of gears.<\/p>\n<p>But these ideas are hopelessly outdated. Our philosophical assumptions&nbsp;<em>about&nbsp;<\/em>science are hundreds of years old. They have not kept pace with scientific knowledge &mdash; indeed, not even many AI visionaries (or dystopians) seem to understand this. We still think in terms of matter in motion, of atoms and energy, tiny chunks of material colliding, attracting, and repelling in an endless cosmic flow. And so of course we cannot see what should separate or protect us from our robot children.<\/p>\n<p>At the beginning of the twentieth century, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that &ldquo;mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.&rdquo; More than a hundred years later, this attitude persists in the back of our minds, like programming we can&rsquo;t control: numbers are the most sublime truth, and matter is the most real thing.<\/p>\n<p>But deep as these convictions have sunk into our bones, they have not proved correct. All these years, the very science that brought us the steam engine and the digital computer has been teaching us more about both matter and mind than has been incorporated into our popular understanding. The world is far more than a machine; the brain is something different altogether from a computer. These facts have been evident in the scientific record itself for decades. A rich white light has been streaming into what we thought was the metal prison of a purely material world &mdash; only we haven&rsquo;t yet raised our eyes to see it.<\/p>\n<p>The way out of our anxiety about humanity&rsquo;s future is not to hearken back to a prescientific age, but to look ahead at what science is actually revealing to us, which is not the well-established mythology of matter. The discoveries of physics point to a more humanizing vision of the world &mdash; if we can take stock of all that they imply. We know more than we have yet realized, and our next enlightenment will be far more profound than the last.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<div>\n<p>      Spencer A. Klavan is features editor of <a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/\">The American Mind<\/a>, associate editor of the <a href=\"http:\/\/claremontreviewofbooks.com\/\">The Claremont Review of Books<\/a>, and host of the <a href=\"https:\/\/youngheretics.com\/\">Young Heretics podcast<\/a> podcast. His book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/How-Save-West-Ancient-Wisdom\/dp\/1684513456?tag=youngheretics-20\">&#8220;How to Save the West&#8221;<\/a>, is available for pre-order on Amazon.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The future seems to belong to AI, especially after this year&#8217;s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for machine learning research<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":2362059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/pexels-cottonbro-6153354.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[3899,11458,25275],"class_list":["post-2362058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","tag-future","tag-technology","tag-transhumanism"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/pexels-cottonbro-6153354.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/312"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2362058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2362059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2362058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2362058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2362058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}