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Did you know that your phone, pad, and laptop are all “computers” wherein all relevant info is stored in “bits”? And did you further know that you can get tools to let you very easily change almost any of those bits? Since you can change most any bits in these devices, you need never tolerate any imperfections in anything that results from those bits. Thus you should never see any disagreeable screen or menu or feature or outcome in any app in any of those systems for more than a short moment. Same for books, music, and movies. After all, as soon as you notice any imperfection, why you’ll open your tool, change the bad bits, and abra cadabra, the system will be perfect again. Right?
In Mind Uploading Will Replace the Need for Religion, “Award-winning #1 Bestseller Philosophy & Sci-Fi Visionary” and Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan applies the same penetrating insight to future ems:
Being able to upload our entire minds into a computer is probably just 25-35 years off. … As people begin uploading themselves, they’ll also be hacking and writing improved code for their new digital selves. … This influx of better code will eliminate … stupidity and social evil. …
In the future, we may all have avatars—perfectly uploaded versions of ourselves … [who] will help guide us and not allow us to do dumb or terrible things. … Someone trustworthy will always be in our head, advising us of the best path to take. …
This is why the future will be far better than it is now. In the coming digital world, we may be perfect, or very close to it. Expect a much more utopian society for whatever social structures end up existing in virtual reality and cyberspace. But also expect the real world to radically improve. Expect the drug user to have their addictions corrected or overcome. Expect the domestic abuser to have their violence and drive for power diminished. Expect the mentally depressed to become happy. And finally, expect the need for religion to disappear as a real-life god—our near perfect moral selves—symbiotically commune with us. (more)
Well there’s a few complications. Humans don’t always take advice they are given. And since brains were designed by evolution, we expect their code to be harder to read and usefully change than the device app code written by humans. But surely those are only small bumps on our short 35 year road to utopia. Right?
Perfect Bits
Istvan seems to think that religion is just a random affliction that happens to weaker minds (I remember thinking this way when I was 12). However, the ubiquity of religion despite the existence of some atheists favors the notion that under the social evolutionary conditions prevalent over the last 30,000 years or so it had a fitness-enhancing effect - otherwise there would be many more atheists around. It may be that during evolution in the computational substrate populated by designed minds it may no longer be a fitness-enhancer - but this is a complex and hard-to-model issue, not something to be dealt with by silly talking about "a real-life god - our near perfect moral selves".
If stupidity and social evil have a fitness payoff, they *will* have a brilliant future.
I presume that the parent is talking about the standard individual interest vs collective interest dichotomy a la prisoner's dilemma, etc. If we can rewrite our code, we will do so in order to optimize for our individual objectives, and the result may well end up being a hugely negative-sum competitive game.