>It can write simple boilerplate based on solutions it's already seen,

It can solve Advent of Code problems...

Would you rather be living now or be sent back to 1923?

> I think people will just hit a point where they have a hard time ignoring the void. I.e. it'll just make it blacker and more obvious, or people will just placate themselves with virtual worlds - quite the opposite of any "ascension."

I ultimately think that the feeling of happiness is a result of bodily physical processes, with no supernatural/spiritual intervention (note: this is different from the feeling of spirituality itself, which is very important for most people to feel imo) An advanced technology can help with that, both in ways we may consider positive or dystopian (see: wire-heading, where people are perpetually on a drug high that never comes down). Whether that tech will come into being and be used in a constructive way is the question. But I believe, at a min, a lot of suffering is unnecessary, unproductive, and arbitrary, and eliminating it would be desirable if we could.

From their worldview of an inevitable singularity it makes perfect sense. If we cannot stop AGI; we need to find a way to align it to our interests. It’s the practical approach. As to why Transhumanists often believe AGI to be inevitable:

-Game Theory: Many countries like the US, China, UK, India, Israel, Japan, etc., are all working on researching Machine Learning. And an AGI is absolutely crucial to national security. Therefore a ban on ML research is entirely unrealistic. And since every country understands that such a ban won’t work, they would all continue to research ML even if there was an international ban on it.

-The inevitability of progress: Transhumanists often believe in AI-eventualism, or the idea that Humanity is on the inevitable path to creating ASI, and we can only slow down or accelerate that path.

-The upward trajectory of progress: Building on the last point; most Transhumanists believe that technological progress only ever increases, and that any attempt to stop a society changing innovation permanently has entirely failed and will always fail. So focusing in adapting to the new reality of progress is better than resisting it, which has a 100% fail rate.

Do subs say that much actually? I almost never subscribe to subreddits. I also felt /r/futurology was better when it was smaller in size. Once it became big I started reading here mostly.

I'm saying it doesn't solve our existential problems.

It just puts bandaids on the wounds. It won't shield you from seeing a meaningless reality and deconstructing everyone you love on a daily basis, or finding yourself unable to ignore the illusory nature of self.

IQ does a lot of funny things when people actually have it at the top level.

I don't see a problem with people living in virtual worlds

I think Wittgenstein had a funny comment about religion, kind of remarking about how enabling life after death doesn't actually solve the problem.

I don't think that's the right framing of the problem.

Transhumanism carries its own innate risks and is not a real solution to the control problem on a practical level, in my view.

Do you mean like living in a simulated world where you get to do what you want? Or living longer?

I just want to be free of my biological limitations :)

both in my physical form (which I will change asap!) and cognitive ability.

I assume by that you’re referencing the idea that we might accidentally create a tool that could destroy civilization. Transhumanists care deeply about preventing that; many of the researchers working on the Control Problem are Transhumanists.

The Control Problem (aka the alignment problem) is the problem of making sure a superintelligent AI is aligned to Human interests.

If AGI is to eventually happen (which most Transhumanists believe it will), then it’s imperative we solve the Control Problem instead of trying to prevent the development of AGI. In this framing, it’s Transhumanists who are engaging in the reality of the danger whereas everyone else is playing with fire by ignoring it.

> There's a lot of the 'void' for people here.

Indeed.... And I've been there.

I'm more pushing at people who are trying to fill the void with this tech. But, if you just increase your IQ to 10,000, I think people will just hit a point where they have a hard time ignoring the void. I.e. it'll just make it blacker and more obvious, or people will just placate themselves with virtual worlds - quite the opposite of any "ascension."

It doesn't solve the problem.

Not necessarily.

I'm more poking at the people who think it's going to transcend life's problems in itself.

I think it'll just make the void they feel now more obvious because they'll be too smart to ignore it.

I have a better question do you have a problem with transhumanism?

It's all natural.

> OP’s username is OldWorldRevival, and he advocates for technological regression and an academic reintroduction of theism. So I assume that the angle here is that Transhumanists are attempting to use Transhumanism as a stand-in for religious fulfillment.

Start out with a strawman, eh? You think you understand my username?

What if you're the technological regressive? What if you'd create the tools haphazardly that enable the destruction that prevents the greatest of tools from ever being made?

Maybe you think we should have just felt the intense heat of progress of thermonuclear weapons?

Stephen Hawking warned about AI - was he a Luddite, in your view?

Is there a better GPT for code?

Hey, scrolled through the thread and appreciate your civility, this a valid question imo.

I won't say this is the 'definitive' answer, but this is what I believe.

>AI won't necessarily function in a way that actually leads anywhere that is ultimately worthwhile, and you could lose yourself in the process.

True, I mean as much I hope for this technology to be used to improve people's lives nothing in the future is 100% certain. I actually think you can 'lose yourself' through transhumanism if you become a completely different being, like if my IQ increased by 10,000 I would have little relation to the person I am now. I'd be something else.
>I actually sort of worry that a lot of people are out of touch with the genuine beauty of life, and that trying to fill that void with transhumanism is a little like people trying to fill that void with money and things

Life does have beauty, but not for everyone in equal order. There are tons of people suffering every day for really no reason or purpose. I mean think about a young child passing away from a painful disease, there's no beauty in that, it's just a sad fact of life that these things happen. I think some degree of suffering and hardship is necessary for growth, but a lot of stuff is just a bad draw, excessive and pointless. This is what I hope technology can help solve.

I want to clarify that although I hope the singularity happens and that it is positive, i don't consider anything a sure bet. I also want to point out that people through out history often had some form of afterlife/compensation that contextualized and enriched their time on earth, personally I sympathize with this feeling. There's a lot of the 'void' for people here.

OP’s username is OldWorldRevival, and he advocates for technological regression and an academic reintroduction of theism. So I assume that the angle here is that Transhumanists are attempting to use Transhumanism as a stand-in for religious fulfillment. Edit: His account was also first made to complain about AI art and he made a sub protesting it. I assume his resistance to AI-art is what attracted him to resist Singulatarianism and Transhumanism.

For some that could possibly be true. But the idea of Transhumanism-as-religion is fundamentally flawed. Transhumanism and religion might share a lot of similar ideas like immortality and creating the best possible existence. But that’s where the similarities end. Religions make metaphysical claims like the existence of gods, creation of the earth, etc. transhumanism makes none of these claims because it is an intellectual school of philosophy; not a religion.

As to why people follow Transhumanism, most Transhumanists are very staunch Humanists, Futurists, and Longtermists. Transhumanists see the vague concept of “technological development” as a way to achieve things like superintelligence, omnipotence, immortality, and supereudaimonia.

As for “the beauty of life”, most Transhumanists tend to be existentialist and cosmist. Many Transhumanists believe in the beauty of the existential nature of Humanity to achieve great heights, and our very specific place in the history of Humanity. As a result, Transhumanists often have a strong fascination with things that most people overlook like everyday scientific progress; while ignoring “distractions” like elected politicians.

> I would believe them

I wouldn't.

> People employ technology that solves many of their grievances very differently in each era, which could be seen as "cheating and avoiding reality" by people who live in earlier times.

So, since drugs are a form of technology, would you then say that spending weeks on end strung out on heroin is living?

That sounds horrific, not like a natural process at all. Rapid changes tend not to be so smooth. Well, natural like an extinction.

That scenario is actually one we must prevent at all costs.

> What joy do you get out of telling people they're wrong about their beliefs?

Feels more like caution, and that these particular beliefs might pose some existential risks to society given the asymmetric nature of distributions of things like power, intelligence and resources, and the consequences of that asymmetry.

But also the general concern that people are trying to fill a void that these systems won't fill, and that many people will do damage that no ASI can change in terms of lost memories with people.

Complex understanding and reasoning of the world is necessary to do so. ChatGPT is still just going to spit out what it feels will be the most probable code and not something insightful. Well, it can actually, but that's an emergent property that is weak at best. With big enough dataset and parameters it could identify relationships and become complex enough to do recursive self improvement but it would take a lot of money to do that.

Somebody posted a while ago how LLMs are animal intelligence like us and not true intelligence. That seems true, we haven't truly cracked intelligence. The thing is we may not need to. We will eventually be able to train bigger, better and more complex models and get to human level intelligence.

Yep, the progress toward life satisfaction, even when all else is resolved, is an internal process of the mind.