DISQUS

robot_makes_music · 5 months ago

How funny. Just dusted off my copy of 'The cyberpunk handbook' by R.U. Sirius et al. and stuck it back up on the shelf. Didn't think he was serious enough to hang in there all these years.

kurt9 · 5 months ago

Longer legs? An extra hand? Eyes literally in the back of your head? Feathers? Wings? Gills?

Are you guys serious? I don't care about this stuff right now. I want aging cured first. Once you do that, then come talk to me about stuff like feathers and wings.

nextbigfuture · 5 months ago

That was the "cute" blurb from the Speculist. I will be talking about life span, health and immune system enhancement as being more important.

ie Run faster is a mobility enhancement. I can get in a car or hop on a bike.
ie. more strength. I can get a fork lift or lever or get some people to help me move something

GoatGuy · 5 months ago

Dunno ... I'm getting into the focus-group age. This year, turned 50.

So, I'm having a beer (Mom's birthday lunch ... thanks mom!) kind of just drifting in and off different thought trains. The biggest bag of ideas must by an unwritten theorem, come from self-critique, especially of facilities that are declining, or changing.

The body's basic metabolism (see A.C.Clarke's Rama series), needs to be re-engineered, perhaps inevitably prophylactially, but certainly more than just sustained - totally reengineered at the cellular level to rejuvinate the nuclei, to spiff up the telomeres, to perhaps introduce invisible armies of nanomachines to repair genetic damage, to correct genetic "issues". That would be a good start. It necessarily includes the curing of cancer, for what is cancer 'except run-away codon mutuations? Fix 'em, and lo! What cancer?

Thickening up the tissues, supplanting the host of worn down cell-lines with new 'baby cells', directed stem-cells, if you were, is probably the most likely path to if not eternal, then at least Methusalehan lifespans. Might as well take care of cosmetic issues, and "temporary fixes" - upsizing the brown metabolic 'fat' (which is now being thought of as an organ, just not compact), to cut the middle, to cleanse the arteries, to scrub out plaques in the noggin. Nanomachines all, nano good, nano self-replicating, nano cheap.

So, eutopia (sic) being what we're peering at, then what? With my newly minted Doctor "O" medical plan, ("Guaranteeeeeed, my friend, to all Law abiding Citizens"), meds are free, and we call can have some of the good stuff. I'm physically transformed over a precarious decade (until fully reengineered) into a prime new, 25 year old example of Homo Nanoplex, ready and willing to take on a productive 600 year life, largely free of complications. Except the noggin.

EVEN if I were endowed with a 25 year old's body, the speed-up of things mental, the gradual restoration "of the machine", my brain is now filled with a life's worth of accumulated detritus - some of it useful (nay, some of it critical, if dormant), and a whole lot more of it lending toward general pessimism. In point, if the accumulation trend were to continue to act as a mental depressant, then I don't know that the brain would truck with accumulating 600 years worth of fortune and misfortune combined.

Worse, the idea of a selective mind-wipe ... isn't tenable. I guess there could be a combination of happy drugs, and a microfibrous semi-organic, semi-machine network that could harmlessly grow into the synapses of the brian, which in turn could be tuned to "kick up" the kind of thoughts and patterns that we enjoy, and to slow down (but never quite suppress) the paths that lead a cynic to his end. Moreso, such an interface would necessarily contain no knowledge or "stuff" in itself, but rather would work like a grand aquaduct irrigation system, getting the right signals where they are optimally directed, the regular grey mass notwithstanding.

Perfect (or near perfect) visual, sensorial, auditory recollection. Even if I got nothing else from "the membrane", that would be worth the price of admission. Faster recollection, or the almost abstract enhancement of "connection-making", which is the unspoken, very much higher level cognition that makes us so human ... that would be good too. I'm not given to the utter fantasies of the Neuromancer, Snow Queen crowd (loved the books though!) ... or Effinger's much older, but just as 'with it' super-future visions of computer-brain interfaces. I think we really are very much more abstract individually, and the portability really isn't going to be there. But no matter!!! With really improved "acceptance" and "retention" and especially "pattern recognition" rate enhances, learning a second, third, or fifth language to the point of complete fluency ... should be relatively easy.

I put forth that extraordinary gentleman in England, who has something peculiar 'wrong' (but so right) with his brain ... who learned 25,000 digits of Pi, who learned to speak fluent Icelandic in less than 2 months (and had an unrehearsed interview on Reykyavik's public TV channel!) whose mind is so freaking fast and clear that it shows that there IS the capacity up there somewhere, it just needs a lot of training and enhancement.

AFTER THESE THINGS, I really just want to have a different kind of interface with computers whereby we are "one" - where like the talking I'm doing in my head, presently, in order to propound this very commentary (which requires no vocalization), I too want to be able to address my AI someday the same way. No jiggling of jawbones, no befuddlements of keyboards and the like. Just a running conversation with Jane, and "her" almost magical ability to keep track of schedules, communiques, 'things to do', and independently, as my personal 'go-get', to find stuff that aids some other aspect of my mind's enterprise.

FINALLY, perhaps if you are going to do this next year, you might consider including an old curmudgeon. Just sayin.

GoatGuy