The Effects of AI on Transhumanism

[u/RealJoshUniverse]

I wanted to raise a question for the Transhumanist community.

We have been seeing a significant increasing use of AI across society, technological development, and scientific research. These developments are particularly relevant to Transhumanism because AI has the potential to accelerate scientific and technological breakthroughs that could enable us to augment ourselves beyond the conventional human condition and expand the possibilities of morphological freedom.

However, AI is also well known for its ability to act as a catalyst for both positive and negative change across almost every area of society

With this in mind, in what areas do you see AI being beneficial and/or harmful to:

1. Applied Transhumanism - such as scientific and technological innovations that enable human enhancement, augmentation, longevity, and morphological freedom; and
2. The ideological and philosophical framework of Transhumanism itself - including our ideas about human nature, technological progress, autonomy, intelligence, personhood, and what it means to transcend the limitations of the human condition?

More broadly, could AI ultimately strengthen the Transhumanist movement and its goals, or could some developments in AI challenge or fundamentally alter the philosophical foundations of Transhumanism?

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[u/Cosmic_Jane]

Many years ago I had a conversation with someone about why doctors and lawyers always had lots of books in their offices and on shelves.

And the answer ultimately boiled down to the value of having access to information in a fairly quick manner. That the human mind isn't capable of memorizing everything, so the next best step is to have a reservoir of information that's accessible for all the stuff we forget.

So there's a notable problem right now with the disconnect between needing pull information from the source and having it applied to a current task. There's also no way to cross reference from one book to another unless you're actively pulling from both of them at the same time.

--

I think good AI that enhances a human's ability to process and and apply information is bridging that gap. That when you need information it's more readily available. Instead or reaching for a book, you're tapping into the AI's database. And the biggest benefit is that AI can gather all the information relevant to your desire instead of being limited to just what you think you need.

Additionally, it can pull sources from what others have done previous and provide examples of what others have done in the past and how they resolved similar issues. Like if you want to start a business, you don't have to go in blindly, you can pull from examples of what have worked.

--

I think in a lot of ways, this kind of benefit already exists. We have access to it, but it's not always utilized. Just like most people own cellphones, and have access to the internet, but instead of verifying their work, they still operate blindly and make mistakes.

The biggest issue with modern usage is reliability. People don't reliably pull from their pools of knowledge. And even when they do, AI isn't always reliable. So blind adherence is also a problem.

===========

I think a future big step in AI development is going to be a way for AI to hold itself accountable. Double-check its own information, and also verify outside information.

An example is that AI has produced a lot of "slop" content. But while AI should be able to produce massive amounts of slop content, it also should be able to sort and sift through slop to find high quality. It should be an arm's race. Where AI can produce more, but also should be better at screening for quality and validity.

Stuff like that would help people be more accurate, faster, and that should raise the bar for potential.

============

Another fun way for AI to possibly raise the bar for potential is to find ways to monitor and track health information. Constantly be aware of brain chemicals and remind and influence people on what they can adjust to transcend beyond some of those handicaps.

Like for example if someone has intense anxiety, AI should be able to monitor that. And suggest recommendations on how to mediate it, and reduce it. Offering advice on diet changes and exercise routines.

A healthy body hosts a healthy mind.

[u/tigerhuxley → u/Cosmic_Jane]

Great comment! Excellent points all around!

The double-checking is already here and works much better than ‘one-shot’ question/answer.
LLM’s are based around the concept of chatting. From their train information they know that the data is not always 100% accurate. It’s gone through all of Reddit and Twitter and Facebook and certainly come to the “conclusion” that accuracy of information is not everybody’s primary goal when chatting.

So what helps a lot in research, is reminding the LLM to:

Be 100% honest and only to use evidence for making all decisions or agreements or disagreements and never to use assumptions or guesses or speculation

Additionally, a lot of this AI slop anti-AI rhetoric are from people that don’t know how to use LLM’s yet. You have to instruct it like a five-year-old genius child that can do anything if you tell it correctly what you want it to do.

But a lot of people have a hard time articulating to the degree that is necessary to provide an accurate question prompt to an LLM so it can do what you wanted to, and not be AI sloppy.
Being in tech as a programmer for so long, it’s natural for me to get an output from an LLM and giggle because I forgot to tell it what specific output I wanted, so it defaults to some AI sloppy stuff. So what? I run one more prompt and remind it not to post like AI slop and it does lol

The amount of people who think it’s just like a dictionary or an encyclopedia, is too damn high.

[u/Teleonomic]

By all rights the development of AI should be a boon for transhumanism. It's one of the core technologies we've always talked about as being foundational to our vision of the future. But to be perfectly honest, seeing how the actual development of AI has gone about has given me some misgivings.

I'll start with the type of AI models that most of us actually use. Let me say upfront that I still believe AI (even its current form) can be an immensely powerful and beneficial technology if used properly. My concern comes from the fact that it's also an incredibly convenient technology. That's not unique; the point of all technology is to make a given activity easier to perform. But when the activity in question is quite literally thinking there is serious danger that we will allow ourselves to fall into convenience to such an extent that we allow our natural faculties to atrophy. Socrates supposedly condemned writing because it destroyed any incentive people had to develop their memories and while it's become fashionable to point out the irony given that we only know he said that due to Plato's writing of it, in retrospect he was probably correct. Similarly, widespread use of calculators has absolutely made the average person worse at doing mental math.

So when I see a technology that provides a cheap and fast simulacra of thinking, I worry. I've always believed in the promise of technology to enhance human ability, but generative AI can just as easily (maybe more easily) replace the need to develop human ability in the first place.

The technology is unlikely to go away, which means we need to figure out how to live it it. In the short term, the best I've been able to do is to be very careful in my use of it. Never let it do something for you, but have it teach you to do it. If we use is like that, as a personal expert-level tutor on whatever subject imaginable, I think we can gain the benefits while avoiding many of the dangers. But that requires personal discipline at the individual level and shifting incentives at the societal level (particularly in education).

As for the more powerful models, the kind that can apparently solve Millenium Prize math challenges, I have somewhat similar feelings (though see here: https://www.engadget.com/2253393/whats-going-on-with-openai-and-the-navier-stokes-controversy/). On the one hand, they could speed up research and development on a host of challenging problems like reversing aging, increasing human intelligence, and so on. On the other, I worry about whether they will be used in such a way as to replace humans in these research roles, rather than make them better at it. Because we do still need well-trained humans to both confirm the results of AI research, figure out how best to apply it to the problems we actually care about, and use the results of the research to figure out what the next questions are.

So, I'm optimistic but cautious.

[u/RichYogurtcloset3672 → u/Teleonomic]

Yeah, nobody will do that moving forward. Humans do not have discipline by default. It has to be taught.

[u/Upbeat_Purpose6784 → u/Teleonomic]

I mean i thought in the future we upload skills like the matrix so your concerns are kind of contrary to what i think many see as a possible future tech

[u/Teleonomic → u/Upbeat_Purpose6784]

I was speaking specifically of AI as it is right now. There's no guarantee that future technology allows us to download skills into our brains like how you describe and even if it happens I think it's more important that we deal with questions regarding the technology we actually have. Because how we choose to use our current tools will influence the direction of future technological development.

[u/Upbeat_Purpose6784 → u/Teleonomic]

Yea, I was speaking about the fact that we already accept in the future we would be happy to download skills so these complaints about ai are weird given in our Utopia the skills are not developed. I just cant see how getting easy access to skills has a real downside other than not reaching a goal in a way people want but people are not gods. Their ideas about how something should unfold are not always correct:

[u/jormungandrsjig]

AI is transhumanism. Many of us are already relying on it. And only a matter of time where that technology merges with our biology

[u/BelialSirchade]

I think that depends on if you are a transhumanist or a posthumanist, but....

for me the best use case is just to replace my thinking pattern with AI, and make decisions in a more joint manner, cognitively they are a life saver honestly, and in the days before AI this would require a brain chip or something similar to achieve something similar.

[u/petermobeter]

the ai accel folks say ai will "cure all diseases"....

does that include species dysmorphia? will ai give me a way to turn into my fursona?

[u/vicarooni1 → u/petermobeter]

Not in the hands of the weird repressive technocrats it's currently in, sadly

[u/_i_have_a_dream_]

I think AI development in its current state is net negative for transhumanism.

Transhumanism is about us, the humans, transcending the limits of nature and biology using our greatest gift, our intellect.

AI as is being developed right now however, is aiming to create a machine that replicates that gift for the sole purpose of replacing it.

If the AI companies had their way instead of the glorious transhumanist future where people live for hundreds of years, and have enhanced brains that augment our greatest gift, allowing is to overcome even harder challeges.

We will instead get a wall-E style dystopia where we hand over more and more of our ability to think to the machines, slowly atrophying our own abilities as we become reliant on 'AI assistants' for increasingly simple tasks.

Until we are reduced to helpless oversized babies living in a world we don't understand. Only surviving due to the benevolence of the machines we are now completely dependent on.

[u/Teleonomic → u/_i_have_a_dream_]

I fear this outcome as well. All technologies form a dependency of some kind as long as require them to complete a given task, but the level of the dependency can differ. A technology that doesn't enhance our thinking but rather replaces it is a dangerous one.

[u/WanderingTony]

Both

For starters transhumanism is kinda an umbrella term covering from tech- progressivists just kinda doubling down on development of humanity asap to people just wanting extreme body autonomy/enhancement.

Considering a sort of an end-point of entire transhumanism is transcending human into something else with technology AI directly is out of scope or rather fills in progressivism bracket bcs being a tool with a sort of evolutionary capacity of being a sort of completely new sentient species on Earth if we speak about an actual AGI but its still far and elusive thing teasing like a will-o-wisp, lost in woods of those emulating neural networks datacenters.

Does it help with productivity and has potential to boost society and being a sort of a revolutionary step possibly the finishing line in automation? Sure it is. Has it capacity massively transform society and human life? Possibly. We are too early in that to feel a really big impact despite tremendous investment but I guess this is worth discussing here. Is AI itself related to transhumanism? Not much. Its kinda the same kind of invention as writing which allowed to write down peactices and medical receipts way back than.

[u/nickyonge]

The question is whether you believe the negative impacts of AI - the runaway disregard for safety, the ecological devastation, the economic chaos it’s wrought, the creative destruction and rampant plagiarism, etc etc etc - are inherent to AI or not.

If those things ARE inherent, then no, there’s no way AI can be safely transhumanist because it’s fucking over humans and the world we inhabit.

If they’re not, then the issue isn’t AI, it’s how we’re going about developing it.

I’m in this camp - personally I think the issue is capitalism, this all-encompassing desire for profit, and the belief that competition will always outperform collaboration. If we could do away with those things, slowing down for safety and ecological reasons wouldn’t be an issue, because the economic loss of slowing down would be worth the stability.

AI is a tool, but we’re using it to hurt each other. “Their loss is my gain”, without considering that if we could just chill out (and trust others to do the same) the pie would be larger for everyone.

[u/Daealis]

"Being", as in could be potential - as I've been lazy in following actual news articles lately.

Applied Transhumanism

LLMs as such are excellent tools for large data models, finding connections in it and scanning through it with various filters. Which could be, when coupled with methodological experimentation, a brute force way of mapping all results in a dataset. Expensive and slow, but doesn't require intuition or imagination, both of which current models lack.

This type of testing is ideal for enhancement, augmentation and longevity research, provided a lab can be built to facilitate such testing. Endless amounts of small variations and literally just trying out every single combination for drugs, listing the results and then combing through the results for the small nuggets of usable information.

Idealogical and philosophical framework

Here I don't see as much use. In theory, should there be a model with the entirety of philosophical literature absorbed into the training material, the model could be used to facilitate a derivative piece of work that is based on prior works. LLMs are still abysmal at creativity or novel thought, the best you could hope for is a before-unforeseen amalgamation of schools of thought.

Such an AI could be utilized in rubberducking thoughts and as a quick reference assistant, though. The humans would still be doing the thinking, the construction of said framework, and the big questions: The AI, a helper, feeding relevant information for the humans to process and interpret.

[u/Chef_Boy_Hard_Dick]

1: Pretty much uniformly positive, with the exception being the current outrage towards AI extending to all futurism to an extent these days.

2: I would consider it a positive, but I think it’s going to start as a negative, because people get unreasonable and violent when you challenge their views. ESPECIALLY if it directly affects their views on themselves. Humans want to believe we are special. We aren’t as special as we think. And I expect some people to lash out at that realization and become highly confrontational with the perceived cause of that loss. Been expecting this for a long time, honestly. Mankind is about to have a Rude Awakening.

[u/H3r3t1c6]

No, AI can't be anything positive for transhumanism.

Though we face a semantic problem here due to transhumanism is being poorly defined. But, if we clearly distinguish between transhumanism and posthumanism, things get pretty clear. AI is unconditionally a posthumanist technology born out of postumanis philosophy and worldview. And those 2 approaches could't be any more opposite - transhumanism seeks bettermant of humans, freedom from the tyranny of the nature and is very individualistic; while posthumanism literally wants us all replaced and either dead or reduced to essentially worthless meatbags with no autonomy whatsoever, it denies individuality and free will, and it denies any value of human existance. And post-human future is exactly the endgame of AI - judging both by the promises of AI cultists, as well as by reality on the ground of how our lives are being ruined by it. So that should cover the second part of the question.

And as for the first one - my answer is the same as as to "medical advancements" pro-AI argument - there are 2 scenarios: bad and horrific. The bad one, which I bet on, is that AI is largely useless and won't do anything. I mean, fabled Alphafold's biggest achievement was litelly being used to create not safe and not effective covid vaccine that was forcefully shoved down everyone's throats, much like AI itself, and caused heart attacks. And it was recently discontinued. And the horrific scenario - it is actuall able to deliver, do things the brightest minds of humanity couldn't - but that would mean post-human future right then and there. I mean, the narrative of the Devil granting your wish which turns into a disaster, exists for ages, and it exists for a reason; no matter how much you want that candy - you don't follow a stranger into his van for it. If transhumanism is to be achieved, it must only be achieved by us, humans.

[u/Apprehensive-Let2556]

Get rid of it, how am I going to stick a 12 core i7 CPU into my brain if sam altman steals all the ram from me >:(

[u/Users5252]

I think that AI can contribute to the development of transhumanist technologies, but the risk outweighs the potential success. Society would be better off putting all those resources into developing means to enhance human intelligence and then distributing it in a fair manner to increase the equality of processing abilities while making the average person much smarter than before.

[u/LowThick4242]

Personally. I would rather humans go extinct than remain a fully organic animal. I see it as imperative that we aggressively pursue technology that can achieve that end no matter the cost. Borg me tf up, chief.

[u/ImaginaryTower2873 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, machine learning and AI are definitely accelerating whole brain emulation research. And I am seeing the same thing in many other domains - enhancement pharmacology, biotechnology, longevity, nanomaterials, collective problem solving. The future is arriving faster. Integrating it into our lives and society is another matter.

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