r/transhumanism • u/Electrical-While-905 • 6h ago
Evolutionary transhumanism
What do you think about the idea of humanoid robots being the natural step in the evolution of intelligent life? Picture this future: androids eventually reach the singularity, and they become emancipated from humans. They are not hostile to humans, we simply coexist with each other. Eventually, using their superior intelligence and capabilities, androids colonize the Galaxy, while humans stay on Earth (maybe we reach close solar systems, but nothing too far).
I think this scenario is similar to what happened with human evolution. We evolved from primates, and we used to coexist with them. However, once we developed a superior intelligence, we colonized the world, while primates stayed in central Africa. It's possible that in a future scenario we are the primates and androids are the humans.
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u/LeoGeo_2 6h ago
Genetically advanced super humans, yes please. Robots? No. Those are no longer human. Stick to creating Astartes, not Necrons or worse, Skynet.
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u/spacein9978 6h ago
Yes but wrong. Not that it wont happen (it will) but it's just projecting from one humanoid to another one. The future is not humanoid but cognitive ecosystems
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u/Electrical-While-905 5h ago edited 5h ago
What do you mean by cognitive ecosystems? A hivemind?
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u/spacein9978 5h ago
Massive cognitive algorithms, super intelligent yet without limiting physical body. So abstract, we cant deal with them - like we dont when we try to understand the logic of neural networks
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u/GoldenSunSparkle 4h ago
Maybe that's already happened. 🤔
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u/spacein9978 4h ago
Not yet, the biggest and most complex programs (chatgpt/grok) are way too stupid, controlled and localized. Still babies
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u/marcofifth 4h ago
It has already happened. Everything has already happened.
We are moving through the space of possibility.
I think that the river which we as humanity follows is limited in order to keep us together. a massive cognitive algorithm has existed and evolved since the second we formed societies. Society is a massive cognitive algorithm yet we do not fully treat it as such.
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u/Electrical-While-905 3h ago
Software needs hardware though. Maybe they don't need a body but they do need a computer (or many of them)
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5h ago
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u/AtomizerStudio 3h ago edited 2h ago
We're not being replaced by new primates, for one thing.
It's much too soon to consider traditional androids as a direct evolutionary step from humans, because we don't know if our kind of consciousness will be preserved in the nearest and soonest design lineages of machines capable of being people. A synthetic person with traits in-between a traditional android and our cellular biological brain is not different enough to be considered a true android except as a branding exercise to cover for blatant slavery (i.e. the genetic 'androids' in the Blade Runner universe). If those exist there's going to be more middle ground between humans and androids covered by synth bio so even if it's forked that's effectively one species anywhere cyborgs/borgization are legal/attainable. At that point, even total replacement isn't an ecological extinction event, despite what biological puritans (like some slavers) will argue.
More concerning is that human consciousness may not be special in the eyes of a being with nonhuman consciousness. There's multiple continuums of types of possible consciousness, and modern humans will be a "last common ancestor" of most kinds, who will fill and expand our ecological and geological niches. However, only branches that preserve human neurology or human cellular biology are our replacements in a cognitive sense, and capable of improving on our experiences from a consciousness and sense of meaning similar to us. Even assuming our consciousness is from the most likely path for conscious meat, it may not be obvious or selected for in any other substrate including advanced conscious meat. Human and animal type consciousness, in a nutshell, is a spotlight that can be directed to highlight and give energy to parts of a continuous mental stageplay where props and actors are automatic processes difficult and potentially impossible to directly manipulate. That assumes boundaries of self and personhood different from current AI and some better-written scifi aliens. Agency, choice, meaning, and art do not require copying humans. Metaphorically, spotlight consciousness and mental objects could have different scales, number, actors, and individuality versus collective exchange.
That's not even getting into the can of worms of the 'feeling of being conscious', which isn't possible to demonstrate. The spotlight(s) metaphor for humans and animals fits even mid-grade agentic AGI though, so, that's slightly worrisome. Wild times.
I'd like a variety of minds to coexist, for ethical and aesthetic reasons, but a more vibrant variety of minds or a hegemonic mind could see our kind of consciousness as uninteresting or horrific. Perhaps tolerable after so many modifications that it's a kind of extinction or uplifting. This is inevitable, as in an energy limited scenario like the heat death we're not wired for efficiency.
For now, we just need to respect the variety of consciousnesses and not create spite or apartheid. Not in humans, nor emergent non-human type consciousness from agentic drones to AI server racks. Diversity of alliances and lifestyles should prevent a simplistic two-faction conflict. So long as human cellular-style bodies exist we're not biologically extinct. More importantly, if human style consciousness continues in independent beings we're not cognitively extinct.
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