My random thoughts

[funkervogt]

Imagine the terrifying creatures you could encounter in lifelike VR.

[funkervogt]

The snarky argument that human cryonics is futile since "No one would be interested in thawing you out in the future" is flawed for two reasons:

1) Even if none of your immediate relatives or close friends were still alive, strangers who were interested in history and anthropology would be interested in thawing you out to talk to you. Just look at how many people are interested in obscure archaeological subjects today, and at how much effort was spent recovering and analyzing mummies and Otzi the Iceman.

2) The cost of safely thawing out humans from cryostasis will drop as technology improves, until it will be affordable for almost anyone. All it will take to thaw you out is one archaeologist who does a GoFundMe.

[funkervogt]

The Fermi Paradox solution that says aliens always lose interest in exploring space is flawed and irrational, IMO. Even if the aliens themselves preferred to indulge in hedonism, VR, or whatever on their home planet, it would be trivially easy to create autonomous, self-replicating machines to do the exploring for them. All they would need to do is set it up once, let the machines do the rest, and periodically check the radio transmissions that the machines sent back to the home planet about their findings.

This solution to the Paradox also assumes that alien species are full of individuals who are all of one mind and agree to stay on their home planet, forever. From what we've observed of literally every species on Earth (including our own), that's highly unlikely to be the case.

[funkervogt]

I just saw a scene in a scary movie where a man was in a dark cave with a monster, and he had to fumble around striking matches to make enough light to see where it was. The fact that the matches kept quickly blowing out or burning out added to the suspense.

It made me think about how posthumans and intelligent machines would deal with the situation. They'd have much better night vision and hearing, so they'd be able to track monsters in the dark better. I imagine they'd also have better senses of "touch," so they'd feel disturbances in airflow and air temperature that would indicate where the monster was.

Lastly, they'd have active sensing abilities, like turning on LEDs on their bodies (forehead? tip of finger?) to illuminate their surroundings, or making "click" noises to do sonar.

[funkervogt]

This short documentary shows the ingenuity of Cuban mechanics who keep the vehicles running in spite of the lack of spare parts from overseas. It's common for vintage cars to still ply the roads, using components from a variety of other vehicles made in different countries. Some items, like seats, have non-automotive origins.



This makes me wonder if the same kinds of Frankenstein vehicles will become common throughout the world thanks to robot mechanics. Like the Cubans, machines can be expected to have expert-level car repair skills and an encyclopedic knowledge of components, their compatibilities, and how to make them compatible with each other. Moreover, the robots will work for free, which will make it financially feasible to repair old cars that would today count as "totaled" thanks to their repair costs exceeding their resale values. Machines would also not have the same aesthetic tastes and OCD tendencies as humans, so it wouldn't bother them to install a replacement seat in a car that didn't match the others.

I think it would be cool to see 50-year-old cars still on the roads someday, with combinations of different parts.

[funkervogt]

It's typical for me to have different videos, podcasts, and songs playing across different browser tabs and different devices (PC, smartphone, TV) at once. If I get bored with one, I pause it, and then switch to another.

The same phenomenon will doubtless be common in the Metaverse. Wearing your VR goggles, it will be possible to choose between multiple different experiences (e.g. - first-person shooting games, virtual attendance of live sports games, hangouts in virtual lounges) happening at the same time. I predict it will be common for people to rapidly "toggle" between different virtual environments, so your avatar might be talking and moving around one second, and then might go still, be ghosted out, or vanish the next, indicating you've switched to a different virtual environment.

It also kind of reminds me of how young people will commit to going to a certain party on a Friday night, but then switch at the last minute because they suddenly get invited to a different party with more popular people.

[funkervogt]

Someday, AIs will be able to imitate the styles of long-dead artists by studying the works they left behind. Among other things, that means AI architects will be able to build new Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.
https://www.designboom.com/architecture ... 1-30-2022/

Advanced technologies will lead to an unpredictable mash-up of old and new. Imagine people never dying thanks to medical immortality, and having 1,000 year olds around to weigh in on current events, or long-dead celebrities resurrected as androids loaded with their personality profiles.

[funkervogt]

FIVR will let you explore the world at size scales totally different from that of a human. For example, you could play a game where you inhabited Godzilla's body and destroyed Tokyo, or where you were shrunk down to three inches tall and had to navigate the wonders and horrors of an ordinary lawn.

You could do this in the real world as well by using a VR setup to control an actual robot that was very large or (more likely given cost and safety factors) very small.

[funkervogt]

FIVR will let you explore the world at size scales totally different from that of a human. For example, you could play a game where you inhabited Godzilla's body and destroyed Tokyo, or where you were shrunk down to three inches tall and had to navigate the wonders and horrors of an ordinary lawn.

You could do this in the real world as well by using a VR setup to control an actual robot that was very large or (more likely given cost and safety factors) very small. You might have a small robot that you could take over to play with your pets at their scale.

[funkervogt]

Dumb thought: Vampires would become irrelevant with the rise of posthumans.

I don't think vampires exist. However, if they do, then mass surveillance will uncover them in the future. With everyone being watched, anomalous people who didn't have official identification, or who were extremely old according to records but looked young, would be uncovered.

However, the ability to produce blood in labs will also allow vampires to exist without hurting anyone else. (They probably could already, simply by buying blood banks and consuming a small fraction of the product.)

Posthumans will also have superhuman traits, which will make them the equals of vampires in terms of things like strength, speed, and senses.

[funkervogt]

Having a super-tough robot or posthuman body would lead to weird situations. Imagine being impaled through the chest with something, looking down at the object, mentally clicking off your pain receptors, and carrying on. Or how about being shot in the head, being consciously aware of the damage, and taking stock of how some of your motor functions, mental functions, and memories were off-line.

[funkervogt]

If I were a smart politician watching current events unfold in Canada, I'd be thinking: "If all our trucks were autonomous, we'd never have to deal with this problem in my country."

And I'd be inclined to give permission to a big trucking company or a retail company with a truck fleet like Amazon or Wal-Mart to put driverless trucks on public roads.

[funkervogt]

We assume that, once medical immortality and age reversal technology arrive, we'll be able to live successive lives doing different things we wanted to pursue. For example, I'd like to spend 20 years on a merchant ship, then 20 years in the military, then 20 years living in a hectic megacity like Delhi, then 20 years living as a farmer in Italy, etc., to immerse myself in each lifestyle and to understand each experience.

However, it's much likelier that brain cybernetics will let us quickly "download" memories, experiences, and skills directly into our minds, making it unnecessary to spend years attaining them the traditional way. You're likelier to end up as a brain connected to the Matrix, and for your personality to be radically different and more expansive than it is now.

[funkervogt]

One upgrade I want for my posthuman body is the ability to digest any type of food and to drink any water. My digestive tract would be able to neutralize microorganisms and biotoxins that give regular humans food poisoning. Imagine if "food poisoning" became an obsolete concept, and if you could also turn off your taste buds at will to consume things that tasted bad, but were necessary for your survival.

[funkervogt]

Rich celebrities lead the way using cutting-edge biomedical technologies. Consider the ones that use surrogate mothers to bear their children, and those who have cloned their dead pets.

Likewise, they will be the first to use DNA ova transfer to overcome their own infertility, and they will use human cloning.

[TrueAnimationFan]

Speaking of posthuman body modifications, I honestly think there's a decent chance that within 100 years, at least one person will exist who can eat dozens of cookies each day without gaining any weight or getting a stomachache.

[funkervogt]

I used to assume that android sex bots and hi-res VR porn would lead to widespread addiction problems, and that people would become unproductive as they spent hours a day indulging in both. But maybe the opposite would happen: If you could satisfy any sexual desire at will with future technologies, and get extremely good sex, then maybe it would be so gratifying that just one 20-30 minute session per day would meet all your needs, and you'd go on your way.

[funkervogt]

I've said before that posthumans would greatly benefit from the ability to alter their own gene expression at will, simply by thinking about it. Let me add that they'd benefit even more if their genome coded for traits taken from non-human species. For example, if a posthuman found itself living on an island, they could slowly grow gills that would allow them to breathe underwater and exploit whatever underwater resources there were nearby.

Relatedly, one fundamental disadvantage of our species is that we must pair up to conceive children. Posthumans will be able to reproduce asexually, through parthenogenesis. Less advanced posthumans will be able to make clones of themselves, while more advanced posthumans will be able to customize the genomes of their offspring in utero, creating humans that are genetically different from them.

The ultimate development of this will be the ability to generate any type of life form in one's womb. Imagine a posthuman with knowledge of thousands of types of animals. Simply by thinking about it, the posthuman could self-fertilize itself with a synthesized zygote of any human or animal.

[funkervogt]

I think the movie Man of Steel is mediocre, but the beginning chapter on planet Krypton bears some similarities to what I think posthumans and the distant future will be like.

[funkervogt]

If brain implants can be used to simulate any type of experience, then they can simulate the feeling of weightlessness, which would be awesome.