Paleolithic Emotions, Medieval Institutions Godlike Technology

Montreal_Music

We are not ready for this:

Synthetic Humanity is near.

fornax55

I wrote my response before watching the video, which was apparently the wrong thing to do because I basically addressed it to the title and the few words in your post rather than the actual video. The video is perhaps the funniest thing to have been produced in 2023 but like much of the best humor it's unfortunately funny because it parodies a depressing reality. I'm Canadian and I couldn't even tell if this was fake or not until I looked it up lol.

As for synthetic humanity....
I've been trying to caution people about this for years but it's difficult to do without being dismissed as a lunatic. Add to that the fact that there are so many parallels to Biblical, Hindu, and Native American prophecies all rapidly coming to fruition, for someone who doesn't study such subjects themselves it's quite easy to get written off.

For someone who does, though, the implications are very concerning. Even without any of that sort of prophetic hoo-wah, anyone with unbiased critical thinking ability should be able to project the current direction we're headed a few decades into the future and see cause for concern. Altered Carbon, anyone?

Either way it's clear the transhumanist goal wants to eschew "humanity" or the "soul" and replace it with something material, mechanical. Turn the figurative mindless working into a real one. Human consciousness encased in a reparable, synthetic body? Sure, this could be easy to sell as immortality, just like Big Pharma markets addictions and diseases as cures. People would be saving up their whole lives so that they might be able to download themselves into a synthetic body. Life's basically then reduced to the function of an "on-off" switch that I guarantee you, yourself, would not have access to. Its remaining on would be the decision of the Authorities (and if our judicial system keeps going in this direction, which is a whole different topic, that spells out a whole lot more Black Mirror-esque nightmares).

Sure, you could potentially live forever, but on the other hand, you could be stuck living FOREVER. What if your new body falls off a boat and sinks to the bottom of the ocean and you're just stuck there, awake, until the sun explodes and evaporates the oceans and you melt. What if you're wrongly accused of a crime and imprisoned for millennia while they try to extract a confession for something you didn't do. Etc.

I think immortality could be a nice idea if humanity figured out the basic tenets of how to exist alongisde one another without immediately starting to sharpen spears and squint their eyes as soon as someone from outside the tribe walks past.

ervin

@fornax55 said:
Life's basically then reduced to the function of an "on-off" switch that I guarantee you, yourself, would not have access to

Your "guarantee" of one potential outcome of an imagined future possibility (in other words, something twice removed from current reality) is based on what exactly? Genuine question.

Svetlovska

This dive into Elevenlabs AI explains it well.

This is next gen. The future is coming faster than you think. Scammers, black ops types are going to have a field day with this. Funniest thing, the guy saying it doesn’t sound like him - when it sounds exactly like him!

It offers a chunky free level. I’ll be using it, if they don’t get sued into the Stone Age.

Regarding transhumanism: I’d take an Altered Carbon future in a heartbeat, though in a world where first lives are already cheap and disposable enough, I doubt if the Musk/Zuckerberg class would want to share immortality with groundlings like us.

The novel, btw, is superb. A scene from the excellent first season of the tv version strikes me how transhumanism would work for the poor: the computer preserved soul of a young girl is ‘re-sleeved’ into the only body her family can afford: an old, disabled woman. And they don’t recognise her.

Elevenlabs AI update: the web browser interface more often than not flags attempts to use it via Safari as suspicious (probably because of the anti tracking stuff Apple built in), but when it does work - wow.

I just got one of the preset voices to read Dover Beach by Mathew Arnold, and it did a bang up job. Better than I could manage, probably. Voice actors should be worried.