My random thoughts

[funkervogt]

I just watched this quick video about the British Royal Guards:


I had no idea that their minimum height requirement was 6' 2" until recently! Combine that with their caps, and they must be 7 feet tall! I've seen them in London before but never got a chance to get close enough to one to appreciate their height.

This makes me think about how intimidating humanoid robot soldiers will be. Just imagine a big group of 6' 6" Terminators, moving in perfect unison with each other, with a sharp grasp of human nature and perception that lets them stare at you in the eye in just the right way to intimidate you at an animal level.

[Vakanai]

Furthermore, humans are the only species that will someday have it within its means to end suffering among all life forms on Earth. The details of how we could do that have been explored by philosopher David Pearce, and I recommend his website: https://www.abolitionist.com/

It would be fitting and just if, after dispensing so much death and destruction on our environment, we became its saviors and inaugurated a new era of peace and bliss for all animals. If we saved enough of them over a long enough timespan, we will exceed the suffering we inflicted on their ancestors during our species' earlier history. 

Best thing we can do for animals is leave them alone and let them have enough wild nature to survive as they always have. We should only interact to save them from the harm we ourselves have caused them.

What if they decide to Roko's basilisk (or exterminate) us?

Animals? I don't see chimps or dolphins (smartest animals I can think of) making a Roko's basilisk or forming an eradication squad capable of taking on most country's defense forces.

[funkervogt]

Sticking solely to biology, there is surely a "space for all possible animals," or as Kevin Kelly called it, a “periodic table” of life forms:

A “periodic table” of existing life forms graphed on a matrix of physical characters would reveal blank white spaces lacking organisms that “could be.” Such “could be” life forms that obey the constraints of matter – because we see the same form in other taxon — include a mammalian snake, a dinosaur mole, a flying spider, or a terrestrial squid. In fact, some of these could still evolve on earth, if we left the current flora and fauna alone long enough. (See Dougal Dixon’s magical “Zoology of the Future” in “After Man”) These speculative creatures are entirely plausible because they are convergent, recycling (but remixing) morphological forms that repeat throughout the biosphere.

https://kk.org/thetechnium/ordained-becomi/

I'm sure advanced computers will fill out that periodic table by running through countless virtual simulations at high speeds, and seeing which animals could exist given the constraints of various fields like biochemistry and biomechanics. We could use the findings to genetically optimize our own bodies and to synthesize entirely new, exotic species in cloning labs that were unrelated to any other natural species.

While this could be wondrous, it also has a dark side. Some of the horrific monsters conjured up in our science fiction might actually be creatable, like the xenomorph from the Alien movies, the protean alien from The Thing, or the demonic creatures from Shin Godzilla.



I didn't like the film Prometheus, but now that I think about it, we could fill the role of the alien "Engineers" someday. We humans would be so radically modified through genetic engineering and cybernetics that we might look like 7-foot tall, muscled albinos, and we'd have the ability to manufacture horrifying animals for biological warfare.

[funkervogt]

Among defense experts, there's broad agreement that a small group of people or even just one person will someday have the ability to engineer a natural pathogen to be much deadlier, and to then release it to kill huge numbers of people. The bio technology to do so will soon exist, and such an act of mass destruction is consistent with the dark aspects of human nature.

So why should the threat of a hostile group or even just one person modifying a benign AI created by someone else to wreak similar havoc? The computer technology to do so will soon exist, and such an act would be consistent with the darker aspects of human nature.

The possibility of such a scenario provides a strong counterargument to the claim that AI won't become dangerous because it lacks its own drives and only wants to serve humans. A malicious human will defect from the rest of us and reprogram an AI to have drives like self-preservation and the destruction of humankind, and to be able to disobey us.

[funkervogt]

Aerial drone light shows are on their way to replicating the "baby faced" Deus Ex Machina that Neo bargained with at the end of The Matrix Revolutions.

[funkervogt]

Half alien Ripley from Alien Resurrection gives us a clue as to how super strong and coordinated posthumans will be.


Just imagine the most dexterous, agile, and quick humans alive today (mostly Olympians) and then realize that will be the AVERAGE level of competency someday.

[funkervogt]

A UFC fight between Istela Nunes and Viktoria Dudakova ended in the first round when Nunes fell and dislocated her arm at the elbow.

https://youtube.com/shorts/g4xtqVAp9Zw?feature=share

The clip is remarkable because it reminds us how frail humans really are. A person in peak physical condition who is also largely inured to pain thanks to thousands of practice fights can still be disabled and turned into a screaming child in one move. We will have no chance in hand-to-hand combat against robots, since they'll have the strength and knowledge of human anatomy to inflict those kinds of crippling injuries on us while being able to shake off any damage we inflict on them.

I like the android attack scenes in the game Alien Isolation because they give some clue as to what it would really be like fighting a robot. The androids aren't faster than humans, but they are much stronger and can withstand more damage. Because they are so much stronger, they don't need to employ any kind of fighting style or special moves to kill you--they just grab a hold of you and hit you very hard with their other hand or throw you into a wall very hard.



Fights with robots will be simple, brutal and fast. If one of them could grab you, it could just squeeze to break the bones of whatever limb it was grasping and you'd end up on the ground like Istela Nunez.

[wjfox]

^ I really wanted to enjoy that game, but I gave up on it eventually. Too difficult for me!

That scene is pretty cool, though. The androids were indeed very menacing.

[funkervogt]

^ I really wanted to enjoy that game, but I gave up on it eventually. Too difficult for me!

It's a hard game! I actually started playing it like three years ago, but then quit after a few weeks because I got to a really hard level where I kept dying. Two months ago, I started over playing it, more determined than before, and I got past the level that I'd been hung up on.

[funkervogt]

In the movie M3GAN, the eponymous android is in the form of a little girl because it is meant to be a companion for a human girl of the same age. Had the machine not gone haywire, and had the family kept it indefinitely, what would have happened to it as the human girl grew and matured? The android wasn't made of a material that could grow, so presumably the family would have needed to buy new bodies for it every few years until getting one that was the same size as an adult woman. The machine consciousness could have easily been transferred from one body to another.

The problem is, humans have emotional attachments to physical things, so it's hard to see them just disposing of the old M3GAN bodies as it "outgrew" them. I could see families keeping every android in the series, particularly if each could do household work, with the androids either being controlled by a single mind, or each with a separate mind the matched the machine's level of wisdom and maturity at each age.

A happier version of the movie would have ended with the little girl growing up and going off to college with a new version of M3GAN that had the body and mind of an 18-year-old. When she came back home to visit her stepmother for winter break, she and grown-up M3GAN would have found Preteen M3GAN and Teen M3GAN at the house, doing whatever chores and jobs they were assigned.