Oh My God.  Barney Frank (D-Eviant) is making sense.  Scan the skies for the Four Horsemen.

 

Key Quote:  "The vast amount of human activity ought to be none of the government's business," Frank said during a Capitol Hill news conference. "I don't think it is the government's business to tell you how to spend your leisure time."

 

Mankind has traditionally sought to overcome mortality through breeding, which evolution cleverly combined the fun of sex with the pleasure of parenthood to achieve.  I am no different.  But my children or grandchildren may well be.

 

As we've all heard ad nauseum since grade school, this is the computer age.  The information superhighway.  A new renaissance.    Thus far in this revolution we have concentrated on computers, auxiliary hardware, coaxial cable, keeping Moore's law constant, and other things I don't understand.   That emphasis will likely continue for a long time to come.  Soon, however, (defined as sometime over the next 40-100 years) we will graduate to biological-computer data exchange.  This will open up challenges and possibilities that we cannot begin to imagine.  But I’d like to try.

 

Short term, we can expect all sorts of enhancements to our ability to process, store, and recall information.   Initially this will happen through the continued development of Ritalin-type concentration aids - mental steroids - and will move on to installed or injected mechanical/nanotech improvements.  This will be achieved through the slaughter and accidental lobotomizing of thousands of brave and desperate souls in the name of science.  Eventually, I expect that we will decode the programming of the brain such that we will be able to upload intact minds into computers and, from there, into android or robot bodies. 

 

We will, in effect, have achieved immortality.

 

This will raise many important ethical and metaphysical questions.  I'll skip the ethics; I am more interested in the implications for the soul.  Will the uploaded brain files function as well or better in an android as they did in a human body?  Will the new 'person' be indistinguishable from the old to its friends and family?  Will we be able and allowed to divide the brain's programming into its parts and subroutines such that, for example, we could streamline the personality - rid it of guilt, excess ego, dishonesty, hate?  Who makes the decision of which changes are allowed versus mandated?  There will almost certainly be a legislated requirement to vet any personality applying to a government committee for immortality prior to approval.  Immortality will not be a right, you know, not at first.  Because of cost and limited resources, it will only be allocated to the truly exceptional – think scientific geniuses - and the truly wealthy or otherwise extraordinary.  Later, as scope and scale curves come into play, we will allow the masses to access immortality - but at a price, and only upon conditions set by the government(s). 

 

What happens after that will not be pretty.   Civil liberties will become much more restrictive as ‘thought-police’ type actions, a by-product of dramatically increased data monitoring and processing capacity, become an accepted norm.  The only chance of avoiding this is if an incident of such egregious severity takes place - basically, a national incident that shocks the conscience on an almost universal level - that privacy guarantees become a core and inviolable cultural and political value.  (America and Australia are probably the only nations that have even a small chance of preserving the traditional value of privacy, and even they have eroded it severely in recent decades.)

 

As with most government control programs, what is originally intended as a public good - probably guised as "public health and safety" - will morph into something else entirely.  Eventually the government will stifle almost all dissent.  This will become increasingly easy as it has more and more of the best and brightest minds processed through government filters into immortality, each one tailored to support actions in furtherance of social stability and national prosperity.  Which, of course, will be whatever the government says they are.  It will be very difficult to fight against this unless we move away from the concept of large-scale governments as legitimate political units.  (I think the only hope to escape ultimate benevolent government tyranny over the human race is if we evolve to a loose world government that administers to many micro-communities in a limited fashion, but I digress.)

 

Somebody will, in rebellion, figure out how to alter personalities in ways that encourage efficiencies that are different from the government-approved mandates and limitations.  These will not necessarily be ‘progressive’ as this ultimate term of community approval will eventually be understood.  At some point somebody will remove that pesky sense of right and wrong that almost all humans seem to be born with.   Perhaps they will learn how to spread a virus that removes this from all uploaded beings.  The fall-out would be interesting in a detached, macabre sense. 

 

This is all incredibly hypothetical, but I am reasonably certain that the story of humanity will inevitably play out along these lines as we continue to deploy technologies to the masses with implications that they are not ready to properly assimilate. 

 

Anyway - aside from the Luddite fear mongering, my point is that we may be the first generation whose children or grandchildren have a real chance at immortality as humanity arrives at the beginning of its destiny.  I just hope that we don’t leave all that we currently understand as ‘human’ behind in the process.

What if they were wrong?   This makes sense to this ignorant layman.  I am putting it out there for my kids to call me prescient or idiot many years in the future.  Or maybe a prescient, lucky idiot.

 

 

Very interesting reading.   One of the main reasons for my scepticism on anthropogenic activity as the main cause of global warming theory, besides the shoving it down people's throats, loud cries of no dissention allowed, and evidence that other planets in the system are warming at the same rate as the earth, is all the muddled talk about what consensus exists and who belongs to that consensus.  It seems to me that the leadership announced a consensus where none existed, and that the dissenters are making their feelings known.