Brooks Agnew – Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
This statement made headlines around the world, with many media reports suggesting that experts now believe “AI could lead to human extinction,” to quote a CNN article.
Given enough time, artificial intelligence would change our society in ways that we cannot even imagine right now. Continue reading
Michael Rectenwald – The notion that the world can be replicated and replaced by a simulated reality says a great deal about the beliefs of those who promote the metaverse [treated in the previous chapter].
The conception is materialist and mechanistic at base, the hallmarks of social engineering. It represents the world as consisting of nothing but manipulable matter, or rather, of digital media mimicking matter. It suggests that human beings can be reduced to a material substratum and can be induced to accept a technological reproduction in lieu of reality.
In this article, I’m going to reveal how transhumanism is a dangerous, irrational death cult shrouded in the language of geeky cybernetics. In fact, the entire idea that you can “upload your mind to a computer” is complete junk science quackery, as you’ll soon see.
In case you’re new to the term, “transhumanism” means uploading your mind to a machine, discarding your body, then achieving immortality by living forever through machines and robots. Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, has been pushing this cult for many years, and just recently he promised that by 2045, humanity would achieve what he calls the “singularity,” where our minds can be uploaded to computers. (Click here for the source of this claim.) In less than a century, Kurzweil says, we could all discard our “fragile” human bodies and inhabit advanced robotic systems as our new immortal selves.
Kurzweil’s cult is so bizarre and dangerous that following it can only lead to a lunatrocity of mass death and deception. Kurzweil’s sci-fi cybernetic mind-meld theories are so outlandish that they make Scientology’s galactic narratives sound like Christian Sunday school.
Where to even begin the debunking of it all? Let’s start with its claims…
Let’s examine the claims of the transhumanism cult leaders like Kurzweil. They are saying that by 2045, all the following technology will exist:
Technology #1) A way to “scan” your entire brain and record every neuron and holographic patterning that exists in your brain.
Technology #2) A way to build an equally complex computing system that has equivalent computational capabilities as your brain.
Technology #3) A way to COPY your brain scan into the computing system. This is called “uploading” your brain to the machine.
Once these three technologies exist, we are promised, we can all transfer our minds to computer systems and experience “digital immortality!”
But wait a second. Something’s already missing here, do you see it? In this plan there is no mechanism to transfer your consciousness to the machine. So even if all three of these technologies are adequately developed (which is possible, by the way), they still don’t provide a way to merge your mind with a machine.
All you’ve really done, even if all three technologies are developed and working by 2045, is made a copy of your brain. This copy may, indeed, be able to run on the machine, but it’s nothing more than a simulation of your brain. It is not you.
Technology has enabled modern mankind to enjoy a lifestyle that our ancestors could only dream of. Countless numbers of science fiction writers have warned for decades about the negative side to our advancing technology. Every new technology invented has the capacity to be used for the benefit or destruction of mankind. Even technologies originally intended for good can be misused.
Could many of our society’s ills be connected to our over dependency on technology? Is the answer, as transhumanist leader Ray Kurzweil says, to simply merge with it? If we do, will our humanity still be in-tact?
Let’s take a look at some statistics.
According to a 2010 LA Times report, young people spend on average 53 hours a week watching TV, playing video games, and sitting at the computer.
Facebook users spend about 15 hours a month on the social networking site.
People are walking – and driving – blindly while texting, sometimes walking into fountains and even falling off cliffs.
A literal matrix is being built around us. It hasn’t snatched all of us up yet, but there are warning signs everywhere. The food we eat is increasingly synthetic. Much of the news we watch has been shown to be a total fabrication. The virtual world offers endless hours of entertainment, pressing buttons in our brains to make us come back for more even when we don’t want to. It even offers virtual mates that some men end up finding more pleasurable than their real partners.