Here’s a nice simple general principle to describe many kinds of systems. When once self-sufficient wholes join together to become parts of a new whole, the parts get simpler and also more different from one another:
Absolutely, the minds that comprise the supermind, whether descended from ems or from AlphaGO, will be diverse (in a completely different meaning than in the current political discourse). Greg Egan has some nice thoughts on that in Permutation City, if I remember correctly.
One crucial facet of being a part of an integrated higher-level entity rather than just a mob of your rough equals is the loss of unrestrained individual self-replication ability. In fact I would posit that what differentiates mobs (societies) from superorganisms is precisely that - the degree to which the replication of parts is controlled by the interests of the parts vs. the interests of the whole. Human societies so far have a notoriously low level of control over the reproduction of their members, both under-reproduction and over-reproduction, which implies we are still at a very primitive level of integration. This may explain the dismissive comments about social specialization, stemming from forager-style aversion to inequality.
Mind evolution in the next one hundred years will be blindingly fast by our current standards. It's very exciting, and a good reason to get uploaded as soon as possible, even if you have to commit suicide to make it happen. This month's advances in light-sheet microscopy imply that whole brain emulations might become possible even sooner that I expected, perhaps even in the next 15 - 20 years. It's instructive to compare the progress in brain imaging speeds to the progress of gene sequencing speeds. As the human genome project funding attracted multiple independent inventors, the progress of technology accelerated enormously and gene sequencing prices dropped by about 7 orders of magnitude in less than 30 years. The size differential between a fruit fly brain and the human brain is about 6 orders of magnitude... yes, if brain scanning progresses as fast as gene sequencing did, we will have human whole brain scans in 20 years or so.
And I am willing to carve, copy and split my mind to fit into whatever functions are required in the borg :)
Yes, one sees this all the time in small companies that grow into larger companies. The small companies are founded by and operated by generalists. As they grow, the employees become more and more specialized in both their activities and skills.
Not likely to happen without ems since there is little selection pressure for better societies at the present (at least in the sense of selecting for a maximally economically efficient/productive society). No modern society at the moment has policies that encourage this sort of specialization of descendants (e.g. Offering incentives for couples of the same profession to marry) nor would such specialization of descendants be a good idea at the moment since professions and industries are changing rapidly relative to the speed of evolution.
May happen if we get another great stagnation though.
It seems that the "simpler"part of this would be less generally true than the "more different" part (since any change mechanism which can simplify can also differentiate, but not vice versa)
H. L. Mencken, in "Vanishing Act" (from "Heathen Days", Knopf, 1943), sort of alludes to this specialization in the evolution of human society, as he imagines what the society of ancient Carthage might have been like.
Of the imagined aristocracy, some of whom, "by 146 BC, had been settled in Carthage for five or six hundred years", he writes: "They were the living symbols of half a millennium of Carthaginian power and glory, pomp and circumstance, and each of them was a living repository of honor, dignity, noblesse oblige. Not a few of them, i daresay, were so finely bred that they had lost the calves of their legs and were more or less hollow in the head...."
(He then goes on to describe their virtues, which are less amusing.)
Absolutely, the minds that comprise the supermind, whether descended from ems or from AlphaGO, will be diverse (in a completely different meaning than in the current political discourse). Greg Egan has some nice thoughts on that in Permutation City, if I remember correctly.
One crucial facet of being a part of an integrated higher-level entity rather than just a mob of your rough equals is the loss of unrestrained individual self-replication ability. In fact I would posit that what differentiates mobs (societies) from superorganisms is precisely that - the degree to which the replication of parts is controlled by the interests of the parts vs. the interests of the whole. Human societies so far have a notoriously low level of control over the reproduction of their members, both under-reproduction and over-reproduction, which implies we are still at a very primitive level of integration. This may explain the dismissive comments about social specialization, stemming from forager-style aversion to inequality.
Mind evolution in the next one hundred years will be blindingly fast by our current standards. It's very exciting, and a good reason to get uploaded as soon as possible, even if you have to commit suicide to make it happen. This month's advances in light-sheet microscopy imply that whole brain emulations might become possible even sooner that I expected, perhaps even in the next 15 - 20 years. It's instructive to compare the progress in brain imaging speeds to the progress of gene sequencing speeds. As the human genome project funding attracted multiple independent inventors, the progress of technology accelerated enormously and gene sequencing prices dropped by about 7 orders of magnitude in less than 30 years. The size differential between a fruit fly brain and the human brain is about 6 orders of magnitude... yes, if brain scanning progresses as fast as gene sequencing did, we will have human whole brain scans in 20 years or so.
And I am willing to carve, copy and split my mind to fit into whatever functions are required in the borg :)
Yes, one sees this all the time in small companies that grow into larger companies. The small companies are founded by and operated by generalists. As they grow, the employees become more and more specialized in both their activities and skills.
Yay inequality and social stratification?
Not likely to happen without ems since there is little selection pressure for better societies at the present (at least in the sense of selecting for a maximally economically efficient/productive society). No modern society at the moment has policies that encourage this sort of specialization of descendants (e.g. Offering incentives for couples of the same profession to marry) nor would such specialization of descendants be a good idea at the moment since professions and industries are changing rapidly relative to the speed of evolution.
May happen if we get another great stagnation though.
It seems that the "simpler"part of this would be less generally true than the "more different" part (since any change mechanism which can simplify can also differentiate, but not vice versa)
H. L. Mencken, in "Vanishing Act" (from "Heathen Days", Knopf, 1943), sort of alludes to this specialization in the evolution of human society, as he imagines what the society of ancient Carthage might have been like.
Of the imagined aristocracy, some of whom, "by 146 BC, had been settled in Carthage for five or six hundred years", he writes: "They were the living symbols of half a millennium of Carthaginian power and glory, pomp and circumstance, and each of them was a living repository of honor, dignity, noblesse oblige. Not a few of them, i daresay, were so finely bred that they had lost the calves of their legs and were more or less hollow in the head...."
(He then goes on to describe their virtues, which are less amusing.)