The End of Man

[K]

We let the least genetically fit breed without restriction while the intelligent and beautiful and strong do not because of social restrictions.

Citation needed.

The most intelligent and/or beautiful and/or healthy people make the most money, on average (for a variety of reasons too numerous to go into).

The more money you make, the fewer children you have (again, for various reasons).

Both are well-accepted facts in social science. Put them together, and you realize that modern society disincentivizes fit people to pass on genes.

[DSMatticus]

@K: Quoting everything you said piece by piece would make my post hideous to read, but there's a lot I want to respond to.

Transhuman revolution does not mean golden utopia. Wealth inequality, war, stupid belief systems? Human nature is what it is, and I doubt we'll ever be able to help that just because life itself tends towards the propagation of dickishness towards your fellow man as long as you don't have to look them in the eye when you're doing it. Obviously, we should mitigate these things, and the U.S. at least sucks at doing that right now. But what the transhuman revolution actually means is that the people being dicks to eachother will be more than they were before. And if you look at the peasants of a thousand years ago... Well, I'm well fed and have a computer. Point to today.

And the breeding thing? That really is pointless; there's just no benefit there. That's not even a problem. I mean, yes; it produces theoretical returns to breed your best, but improving our genetic stock is just not something that produces big returns relative to good social engineering. One of the biggest changes any society experiences is reaching the point where everyone starts being well-fed, instead of a starving subsistence worker. That will change shit up in a few generations, faster than any eugenics program you can imagine. But even without eugenics like that? We are getting smarter and better every generation.

As for western morality (specifically, the prejudice of it), conservative bullshit, and the dozen or so billionaire assholes who dump money into ruining the world for fun and profit? The base they draw on is shrinking. If those movements do not forcibly seize control of the western world (voter disenfranchisement and fraud being perhaps the most likely/scariest possibilities), it is irrelevant in thirty years.

On the topic of cheap energy (and this goes to Tussock!), that's really not going anywhere. There are enough known nuclear fuel reserves to last basically a minimum of a 1000 years with current reactors at current world energy consumption. Potentially as many as 10k-80k years. If we get lucky, and somethings that seem really, really sketchy turn out to be possible, it lasts until the sun explodes. Energy will get more expensive, and we will stop pissing so much of it away, but the energy crisis is less about running out of shit to use and more about how fucking terribly we're handling the transition. Things will get more expensive, but not at all unsupportably so.

But yeah, seriously; the problems we are bitching about right now (Christian fundies are fucking insane, why do we listen to them so much; extremist conservatives are throwing a going away party that might turn into the collapse of our societies; energy crisis) either fuck everything up in the next few decades or they stop looming over humanity and we move on until the next set, which will be further towards 'progress' than we are now.

[K]

In the last thousand years, we've convinced a small percentage of people that Enlightenment ideals were a good idea.

We also got about half of the world's people fed and a few of them got computers.

In a thousand years, we'll probably have the same number fed and no one will have computers since the rare metals will be mined out and recycling will be exorbitantly expensive.

I mean, utopia is being held back by social pressures. I don't see those social pressures ever not existing considering that conservative thought seems to have a genetic basis and people seem incapable of abandoning base tribalism.

Ideally, some technological solutions could come up, but for some reason we let corporations do research and then act surprised when we get boner pills instead of genius pills.

I greatly believe in the transformative power of tech. I just don't think that people want to be transformed.

[tussock]

Genetic manipulation is a joke. We can't even change bacteria as fast as they change themselves, it's all about working with what's already out there. We can select for plants that are resistant to certain toxins, but so can nature, on about the same time scale. We change the environment, small life adapts, big life goes extinct.

What does that have to do with human genetic engineering?

People who think we'll do that to humans are about as smart as the eugenicists were a century ago. It doesn't work that way, for some very world-war serious kinda reasons.

Surgery, telephones, plastic, and the industrial revolution. Welcome to the past.

Thanks for completely obfuscating the vast differences between 21st century and early 20th century surgery, telecommunications, plastic (seriously, what the fuck?), and of course further revolutions in chemical engineering and artificial selection.

You should read up on the 15th century. It transformed the whole world in very dramatic ways. So did the 14th century, and the 13th. You might argue the 12th century was relatively stable, but it wasn't. Not at all. The entire of the worlds societal structures rise and fall with every little technological and environmental change. You know stirrups? Changed the world. Probably more than computers.


Seriously, I've read a lot about life in my valley a century back. They had to wait a week to see a doctor unless it was life and death. So do I. They could get daily supplies delivered to their door, but might have to travel or wait weeks for anything special. Same for me. They could communicate in writing with people across most of the planet. Like I'm doing now. Our winter fruit comes from a giant cold-store rather than their preserve jars, but they both taste like shit compared to fresh.

Yes, we have GPS, which almost everyone uses for tasks that were perfectly easy for everyone to do a century ago with a map. There were more tourists per capita passing from around the world through here than there are now, and they spent far more money in real terms doing it. The land grows the same crops, the same animals, as farming fads come and go. The sea nearby has a lot less fish in it now, but people still fish it.

We got a rail line, and then it got torn up, as business interests changed. Factories were built in booms, and torn down for scrap later on. There's two mines left, and there was people mining both things a century back, even though they both closed for a while as technology limited their use. You used to be able to dig a big hole with a crew of men in a week. Now you fill forms for a month or three as dozens of people consider the potential hole, and then a machine digs it in an few hours.

Parliament functions exactly the same as it did a century ago, only now Women and Natives get to vote for the same basic government doing the same basic stuff. There's a system of social welfare, and the same types of people are routinely excluded from it as when the churches ran it a century ago. I have to travel just as many hours to talk to my local representative as someone would have back then, because they live further away now. A poor man like me wouldn't really get to see them anyway, same as then. The prisons are still full of people who hurt no one.

Every house with a massive library, cool beans. Most people read less though, because of TV. Every house with a miniature theatre, cool, so all the local theatres close and there are less travelling entertainers. Cars instead of coaches and jigs, on the same old roads, to the same old pubs, in the same old towns. There's more old people, but they're mostly more active too.

Some people talk on cell phones all day, like some people used to gossip on the porch all day. You don't have to get to know your neighbours any more, but you still have to get to know someone.

Yeh, as a whole we understand the world better now, except that most people don't understand a fucking thing. Einstein was clever, but people still don't even get Newton and Maxwell, almost no one learns a second language or formal logic any more, so ...

[violence in the media]

I kind of think our doomsday scenario will be remaining as we are.

[tzor]

I don't think human society will be recognizable in a thousand years, but I think we'll still be around in some way or another. I kind of think that Futurama is the closest thing to an accurate prediction of the future that anyone has (we'll all have nicer toys to play with, but everyone will still be broke, and working shitty jobs they hate, and so forth).

Actually I think the technology of Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey might be more reasonable.

He then explores the Earth of 3001, notable features of which are the BrainCap, a brain-computer interface technology which interfaces computers directly with the human brain, genetically engineered dinosaur servants, a space drive, and four huge towers (space elevators) spaced around the Earth's Equator.

Clark's work predates the potential insight into the advancement of nanotechnology. I don't think genetic engineering will be popular in as much as genetic reengineering will become popular, especially the repair of DNA over time and the correction of known DNA sequence errors dynamically through nano correctors.

Remember, once you push the mind interface beyond the physical body, you've effectively networked yourself. YOU don't need to be modified anymore than YOU personally need to reach a speed of 60 MPH when your car can do that for you.

[Parthenon]

Does anyone really think that human genetic engineering is actually going to happen?

Who do they think is going to do it? It is going to take at least 20-30 years of work to be sure it works before they get into the hassle of making it legal and publicly available. Probably at least 30-40 years of solid focused work. And that doesn't include longevity modifications, which would take 80-100 years to be sure that it works. There are three options:

• Governments - these change every 4-8 years, so the chances of consecutive governments supporting it is zero.
• Big drug corporations - this is the most likely since they already are willing to work on drugs for years. Except that human genetic engineering is three or four times longer minimum. CEOs still change, stock owners change, public opinion changes which is likely to cause backlashes against the company... The chances of the head of a drugs corporation being willing to try to plan 30-40 years in advance with such a socially important issue getting in the way is basically zero.
• Batshit insane rich individuals - this is the most feasible in another way since if they stay hugely rich then they are the ones most likely to keep the effort going for the 30-40 years required. However they still die, go broke, get bored, or just not have the knowledge and personnel required to get it done. As well as that, they probably don't have the capability to get it made publicly available which would be needed to change humanity on a regional level, let alone global level.

I mean, look: how many longitudinal experiments anywhere doing anything are more than 40 years long? And of those, how many are not researchers with 40-50 year old data that they try and follow up with new testing, and instead planned out to last the 40+ years?

[erik]

I don't think that eugenics is on the near horizon, but with our advancing technology breeding matters less and less. It won't matter what we are born as so much as what we modify ourselves into especially as lifespans lengthen indefinitely.

If 300 years from now there are 200 year old individuals who have had the ability to modify their bodies significantly then I think that what it means to be human will be a lot more hazy.

[nockermensch]

I'm another cynic relative to our future. I think that in objective terms, life will be absurdly better - lifespans of 200-300 years for the rich, 120 or so for most people. We'll probably be taller than today. I was talking with a friend these days and he mentioned the "elfinization" of humanity. With a longer lifespan, our "adolescency" is being elongated (the much talked thing that today's 30s are yesterday's 20s). It'll be deliciously ironic if humanity ends resembling D&D elves: a race whose "serious life" only starts on the century mark

But I digress. I don't believe seriously in doomsday scenarios based on scarcity, because they fail to account for human creativity and adaptativity. Every malthusian apocalypse predicted so far has failed to materialize because we as a species or adjust our growth rate or some genius comes with a new radical tech that saves us. About the energy crisis, we live in a thin cold crust between two basicaly endless (in the thousand year scale being discussed at least) sources of heat and have a huge moon creating tidal forces. Then you add radioactivity, wind and hidroeletric power just to the forces that we know how to harness TODAY. I think it's very arrogant to assume that these are all the forces that can be seriously explored (this is a side effect to the arrogance of thinking that our knowledge of How Stuff Works is anywhere near the completion).

But I STILL digress: The cynical part is that relatively, the "common man" of 3012 will still have to deal with shit like human stupidity, violence (even if it's violence in a so ethereal and arcane way that we can't even comprehend why he'd feel offended/threatened by it) and people harking that the world is scheduled to end next year because the ancients considered 13 an unlucky number.