I’ve argued there’s no imminent singularity, and I’ve thrown water on the idea that the web will become smart or self-aware. But am I just a wet blanket, or do I have a positive vision of our human future?
I have just written up a short “manifesto” of sorts about where we humans are headed, and it appeared in Seed Magazine. It serves not only as guidepost to our long-term future, but also one for how to create better technologies for our brains (part of the aim of the research institute, 2ai, I co-direct with colleague Tim Barber).
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Mark Changizi is Director of Human Cognition at 2AI, and the author of The Vision Revolution (Benbella Books, 2009) and the upcoming book Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella Books, 2011).
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Glendon Mellow, ScienceSeeker Feed. ScienceSeeker Feed said: What’s Next, After Humans?: My new “manifesto” on our future. http://dlvr.it/HNpQC [...]
Someone, perhaps John McCarthy, once remarked that if geneticists had worked with fruit flies the way AI researchers have worked with chess, we’d have a lot of very fast fruit flies, but not much knowledge of genetics.
Bill B
Nice.
Mark, it seems you are envisioning a future in which conscious (or should I say creative) change in culture plays a major part. But is it not in itself a revolutionary transition? For being collectively aware of the ways cultural constructs affect experience basically implies a civilization of a different kind.
Igor
I suppose I do, indeed, think that this would amount to a revolutionary transition. Thanks much, -Mark
[...] Human Transformation, in Seed [...]
[...] Human Transformation, in Seed [...]
[...] What’s Next, After Humans?: My new “manifesto” on our future. [...]
Dear Mark,
Please, consider a (human) being/object without the sense of Self, “I”, Ego – a social evolutionary mechanism that will become absolete. This radically transforms the entire mental structure (neural recycling – ?) and results in essentially different, truly collective, species. And this is not a fiction. You can get in touch with this “alien”, which might change some views on the future of human society…