LA SINGULARIDAD DE LA SINGULARIDAD O CUÁNTO HAY DE HUMANISMO EN EL TRANSHUMANISMO

Fernando Broncano

UTOPÍAS HISTÓRICAS

• Retratos en negro de las sociedades contemporáneas

• Hipóstasis a una realidad sin lugar (o tiempo)

• La hipóstasis funciona como fuente de imaginación e impulso de la voluntad

• Toda utopía es un topos localizado histórica y culturalmente.

UTOPÍAS Y DISTOPÍAS DEL HUMANISMO

• El humanismo de “primera ola” estuvo asociado a ciertas utopías de la promesa (La ciudad del sol, La nueva Átlántida, etc.)

• El humanismo de “segunda ola” ha estado asociado a distopías de la promesa (Los viajes de Gulliver, Frankenstein o el nuevo Prometeo, Erehwon, A brave new world…)

LAS NUEVAS HUMANIDADES

• Humanismo bajo condición “cyborg”: la naturaleza artificial de lo humano

• Humanismo reflexivo sobre las posibilidades tecnológicas/sociales

• Utopías y distopías como elaboraciones de las posibilidades

LA SINGULARIDAD

LA SINGULARIDAD

Explosión de inteligencia

Explosión develocidad

SINGULARIDAD• Human history has been characterized by an accelerating rate of

technological progress. It is caused by a positive feedback loop. A new technology, such as agriculture, allows an increase in population. A larger population has more brains at work, so the next technology is developed or discovered more quickly. In more recent times, larger numbers of people are liberated from peasant-level agriculture into professions that entail more education. So not only are there more brains to think, but those brains have more knowledge to work with, and more time to spend on coming up with new ideas. We are still in the transition from mostly peasant-level agriculture (most of the world's population is in un-developed countries), but the fraction of the world considered 'developed' is constantly expanding. So we expect the rate of technological progress to continue to accelerate because there are more and more scientists and engineers at work. Assume that there are fundamental limits to how far technology can progress. These limits are set by physical constants such as the speed of light and Planck's constant. Then we would expect that the rate of progress in technology will slow down as these limits are approached. From this we can deduce that there will be some time (probably in the future) at which technological progress will be at it's most rapid. This is a singular event in the sense that it happens once in human history, hence the name 'Singularity'.

• http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/singul.txt

Nick Bostrom( Future of Humanity Institute)

Hans Moravec

PROMESA TECNOLÓGICA

• Nanotecnología

• Biotecnología

• Colonización del espacio

• Computación avanzada

• Ingeniería a mega-escala

• Manipulación espacio-temporal(http://www.aleph.se/Trans/)

PROMESA INDIVIDUAL

• Transformación individual

• Longevidad

• Control de la muerte y las enfermedades

• Amplificación de la inteligencia

• Extensión del cuerpo

PROMESA GLOBAL

• Singularidad tecnológica (máquinas que crean mejores máquinas)

• Evolución de la humanidad (existencia post-biológica. Seres post-humanos)

• Expansión al universo (punto Omega: universo como ser inteligente)

EL CUERPO EXTENDIDO

EL CUERPO EXTENDIDO: AMPLIACIONES

• Añadidos e interfaces

• Implantes

• Coberturas

• Manipuladores

• Bastones, azadas, lanzas…

• Sensores

• Analizadores externos

• Analizadores internos

• Almacenamiento

• Materiales, energía, información

• Transporte

• Físico, señales, semántica

• Comunicación

• Percepción

• Nivel de la señal

• Espectro

• Traducción de modalidad (“ver” temperaturas)

• Filtros

• Utilidades (posición, previsión de tiempo, ….)

• Conducta

• Agentes proactivos

EL CUERPO EXTENDIDO: FUNCIONES

• Esqueleto

• Piernas

• Torso

• Tracto Gastro-Intestinal Sistema Circulatorio

• Respiración

• Reproducciónn/Sexo

• Metabolismo

• Piel

• Ojos

• Cerebro y sistema nervioso

• Sistema inmune

• Sistema Hormonal

• Edad y Desarrollo

• Genética

CUERPOS EXTENDIDOS

ORGASMATRON DE STUART MELOY• El Orgasmatrón era un gran tubo que podía contener a una o dos personas y

proporcionar orgasmos al instante en la película “El Dormilón”. Stuart Meloy, especialista en tratamientos contra el dolor, consideró que no había mejor nombre para su descubrimiento: un implante de electrodos que maximiza los orgasmos. 

BRAIN ENHANCEMENTSOnce the brain is in an artificial form, it will be much easier to modify it. Assuming a good understanding of our neural circuitry, a number of enhancements and deletions will be possible. These will strain the definition of "human." At a minimum, it is probably best to prohibit modifying other people's brains without their fully informed consent. It may also be worthwhile to restrict certain types of modifications. Some of the changes which have been discussed follow.

Ampliaciones

Extended senses (e.g., seeing ultraviolet light); increased working memory capacity; mental calculator or database; language modules,; and telepathy. Some people may want to go further and more fully integrate their minds with computers, changing their very thought processes.

Borrado

To remove instincts which are no longer "needed“: food, sex, anger/violence, fear, and so on. Some may even try to remove all emotion. Although it may (or may not) be true that these no longer serve a logical purpose in an uploaded person, they are certainly an integral part of what we now understand "humanity" to be.

Alteraciones de memoria

To manipulate our memories almost as easily as we manipulate disk files. This includes procedural memory and episodic memory. Memories could be deleted, added, or swapped between persons.

Sondeos mentales

To search a person's memories for knowledge related to a specific event. This could be use to establish guilt or innocence of a crime, for example

http://www.ibiblio.org/jstrout/uploading/enhancements.html

DESCARGAR

• “Subir la mente a la nube”

• “Subir el cuerpo a la nube”

• http://www.minduploadingproject.org/blog/news/

META-SERES HÍBRIDOS• “The integration of human beings will proceed in another dimension

than that of human culture, a dimension of depth. We conceive of a realization of cybernetic immortality by means of very advanced human-machine systems, where the border between the organic (brain) and the artificially organic or electronic media (computer) becomes irrelevant. Such hybrid organisms would survive not so much through the biological material of their bodies, but through their cybernetic organization, which may be embodied in a combination of organic tissues, electronic networks, or other media. With communication through the direct connection of nervous systems to machines and to each other, the death of any particular biological component of the system would no longer imply the death of the whole system. Such metasystems will be evolutionary selective, in that they will have advantages for survival in an evolving environment. This is a cybernetic way for an individual human person to achieve immortality.” (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUP-META.html)

CUERPO SOCIAL

• Through such techniques, the form or organization with which we identify our "I" could be maintained infinitely, and, which is important, evolve, become even more sophisticated, and explore new, yet unthought of, possibilities. Even if the decay of biological bodies is inevitable, we can study ways of information exchange between bodies and brains which will preserve the essence of self-consciousness, our personal histories, our creative abilities, and, at the same time, make us part of a larger unity embracing, possibly, all of the humanity: the social superorganism. We call this form of immortality cybernetic, because cybernetics is a generic name for the study of control, communication, and organization. It subsumes biological immortality.

MODOS DE REALIZACIÓN

• There may be developed computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)

• Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity. o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.

• Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

“We need to first understand that the human form—including human desire and all its external representations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism”

(Hassan, Ihab. (1977). ‘Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?’, in Michael Benamon and Charles Caramella (eds.), Performance in Postmodern Culture, Milwaukee: Centre for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 201–217.: 212).

• Badmington, Neil (ed.). (2000). Posthumanism, New York: Palgrave

• Fukuyama, Francis. (2002). Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Foster, Thomas. (2005). The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Graham, Elaine L. (2002). Representations of the post/human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

• Halberstam, Judith and Livingstone, Ira, (eds.). (1995). Posthuman Bodies, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

• Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999). How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

• Terranova, Tiziana. (1996). ‘Posthuman Unbounded: Artificial Evolution and High-Tech Subcultures’, in George Robinson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam (eds.), Future Natural: Nature, Science, Culture, London: Routledge, 165–180.

Alien: Resurrection,Jean Pierre Jeunet, 1997

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Simon West 2001

The Dark Knight Rises, Ch. Nolan, 2012

Inception, Ch. Nolan, 2010

Cosmopolis (DeLillo, 2003), (Cronenberg, 2012)

• “The posthuman doesn’t supersede the human subject or offer a ‘better’ or more advanced model of the human. It doesn’t necessarily want to leave the body behind. Instead, interpreting the posthuman as a process of reformulating established categories of being creates the possibility of transforming identity politics based on dialectical relations.” (Toffoletti, 2003, pg. 14)

• “the posthuman operates as a site of ambiguity,as a transitional space where old ways of thinking about the self and the Other, the body and technology, reality and illusion, can’t be sustained.”

• How We Became Posthuman examines the question of posthuman existence in contemporary society by addressing three key areas—the dislocation of information from the body, the creation of the cyborg as a technological artefact and cultural icon, and how a historically specific construction called ‘the human’ is giving way to a different construction called ‘the posthuman’ (Hayles 1999: 2).

KATHERINE HAYLES: THE SEMIOTICS OF VIRTUALITY (HOW WE BECOME POSTHUMAN)

Posthumanismo vs pensamientos binarios

¿EN QUÉ SE EQUIVOCA EL TRANSHUMANISMO?

• La condición humana es la de continua trasformación de su propia naturaleza

• Las grandes transiciones cambiaron la naturaleza humana: agricultura, escritura, imprenta, colonización de la energía, control de la información.

• Pero las grandes transiciones son resultado de los compromisos del presente.

• Siempre fuimos transhumanos.

EL ARGUMENTO (CHALMERS (2010)

1. Habrá IA (suponiendo ausencia de obstáculos “derrotantes”)

2. Si hay IA, habrá IA+ (tarde o pronto suponiendo ausencia de OD)

3. So hay IA+, habrá IA ++ (suponiendo…)

4. Por consiguiente, habrá IA++

SUPUESTOS DEL ARGUMENTO

• “The argument depends on the assumption that there is such a thing as intelligence and that it can be compared between systems: otherwise the notion of an AI+ and an AI++ does not even make sense”

EL PROBLEMA

1. Todas las medidas de “inteligencia” que conocemos son relativas a la capacidad de resolver problemas.

2. Un problema es, desde la perspectiva del humanismo, una forma de experiencia humana que proyecta una posibilidad en el futuro desde una proyección del presente o el pasado.

3. La experiencia humana es siempre contextual: relativa a la subjetividad, pero también a las prácticas y culturas.

4. Una máquina ajena a la experiencia humana dejaría de resolver problemas.

5. Por consiguiente no habría forma de comparar la inteligencia.

6. Sería considerada poco más o menos que un fenómeno natural (no consideramos inteligente al planeta Tierra, por más que muchos consideren que es un ente “Gaia”)

CONJETURAS

• La experiencia no sobreviene a las propiedades físicas del cerebro (solamente) sino a las propiedades históricas y contingentes de una sociedad de cerebros en un contexto de prácticas.

• Los elementos “cualitativos” de la experiencia suponen la capacidad de “reconocimiento”

• Simular (o construir la experiencia) supone antes haber construido sociedades de cerebros.

• En el espacio de inteligencias posibles solamente algunas pueden ser comparadas respecto a la experiencia.

• Pensemos por un momento: podemos comparar la inteligencia de un león con la de una hormiga respecto a la capacidad de información y resolver “problemas” en términos abstractos, pero ¿son comparables respecto a los problemas relevantes de la existencia biológica? (si se responde “sí” entonces cabría una escala de la evolución. Pero no hay ninguna evidencia que el león sea más adaptativo que la hormiga (más bien lo contrario)