God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be…Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940)
As a posthuman, you will be in thorough control of your personal destiny. You will not be subject to any physical, biological, neurological, mental, or emotional deficiencies or limitations (outside of catastrophic annihilation). You will be self-constituting, able to define your own reality.
This opens up the opportunity for "the best of all possible worlds—not just freedom from pain and stress or a sterile round of endless physical pleasures, but the prospect of endless growth for every human being—growth in mind, in intelligence, in strength of personality; life without bound, without end; experiencing everything we've dreamed of experiencing, becoming everything we've ever dreamed of being; not for a billion years, or ten-to-the-billionth years, but forever...or perhaps embarking together on some still greater adventure of which we cannot even conceive."
(from "The Singularitarian Principles", by Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Over the next few decades, as we spend more and more time in virtual environments, our definition of reality will change. A report published in 1999 by the American Council for the United Nations University in cooperation with The Foundation for the Future, predicts this scenario (among many others) for the year 2050:
"Tele-robots give a tele-presence sense by letting users see, hear and often feel what a remote robot is seeing, hearing and feeling at the time. Such tele-presence makes people actually feel that they are swimming in the deep ocean, on the surface of Jupiter, or in an ant colony, when they are sitting a home. Unfortunately some people prefer these simulations to real life. But despite the problems it has generated, simulation is a new educational tool of great power."
Fascinating! But I wonder why the authors of this report consider it unfortunate that some people prefer simulations to real life; one can reasonably argue that life experienced within a high-quality simulation is every bit as real as what we call "real life".
From a philosophical perspective, there is truly no difference between the experience of tele-presence as described above, and the everyday life that we experience today. Consider this: my body functions like a tele-robot; it goes out into the physical world, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting; it transmits those experiences to my brain through electrical pathways; parallel processing computation within my neurons and synapses results in a pattern of thought so complex and elegant that it generates meta-cognition, or self-awareness. I think it is "me" that is out there in the world enjoying direct sensory experiences, but it is not!
The part of me that is really me—the part that is my consciousness and my personality—can never have such direct experiences. Gray matter has neither hands, nor eyes, nor ears, nor mouth, nor nose. My brain must rely on an indirect interface to apprehend "reality". That interface can be the physical body I now inhabit, it could be a tele-robot exploring the surface of Mars, or it could be a substrate of computation providing a "simulated" environmental experience.
The point is that everything we experience is simulated. Nothing is immediate. Over the next few decades, as we spend more and more time in virtual environments, our definition of reality will change. Within a century or less, billions of personalities will be living full-time in cyberspace, inhabiting myriad simulations. Life for them will include, if they choose, full human—or animal—physical sensation and emotional experience. They will undoubtedly discover new sensations and emotions we cannot even comprehend. Will their lives be less "real" than ours today?
Think about this for a moment. Being in thorough control of your personal destiny means you have the ability to choose all of your experiences. It means you can go anywhere, do anything, be anything you want at any time.
Of course, "you" is a rather fluid and elusive concept at this point. You may exist primarily as a data being within a super sophisticated virtual reality simulation (No, not that!) or you may be part of a collective entity, a "group mind" as it were.
But whatever you are, you can exercise total control over your life. The only qualification is that you might not be able to prevent the catastrophic end of the universe. How could that come about? There are at least four plausible scenarios for the end of the universe, two very distant in time and two potentially much nearer.
Let's consider the far possibilities first: one is the Big Crunch, a time billions of years in the future when gravitational pull has finally reversed the universal expansion that began with the Big Bang, and when everything that exists—all the matter and energy in the universe—collapses back together into an infinitesimally small point. Current estimates by astrophysicists make this scenario appear improbable; there may be too much mass for gravity to overcome the expansion.
A more likely end for the universe is the Big Whimper, or slow fadeout, a time trillions of years in the future when entropy finally has its way, when all the stars have died, all the black holes have leaked out of existence, all forms of energy and radiation have expended themselves, and all that is left is a cold, dead, silent universe, an eternally expanding blackness. This seems the most likely fate, if less than palatable to human sensibilities.
The two nearer scenarios are both theoretically possible, but unfortunately impossible to predict. The first is a Quantum Vacuum Collapse. Physicists tell us that our universe could suddenly and without warning pop out of existence like a soap bubble (well, not exactly like that, but the technical explanation is a bit arcane). This remote possibility is not well understood by many (including me), but happily the odds of its occurrence have been calculated to be vanishingly small. MORE
The final, and perhaps most compelling, way to imagine the end of the universe is the Simulation Shutdown. Transhumanist philosopher and WTA co-founder Nick Bostrom has made a reasoned and, to me at least, highly persuasive argument that we are now living inside an almost inconceivably dense computer simulation (see "Are You Living in a Simulation?"). Nick’s arguments appear to be irrefutable, even if the conclusion one arrives at is so bizarre as to seem impossible. In my view, however, the only thing less plausible than that we are living in a simulation is that we are not.
Could this simulation (our universe) be terminated or shut down? And if so, why? One can imagine its designers becoming bored with it (gulp) or deciding that they need to allocate the resources elsewhere (uh-oh). But does it really matter? It seems to me that I will have no way of recognizing that it has ended, because "I" will not be. My universe will just cease, without warning and without subjective effect. I won’t know that I had a shortened life, nor will I lament it. Cold comfort, I suppose.
Aside from the entire universe going away, there are many other ways for our own world to end. Total thermonuclear war, complete environmental collapse, or a massive asteroid strike are but a few possibilities. But here is the key point: once you or I or someone else has reached the level of posthumanity, we will be in a position to prevent these global disasters! There is, as you can see, every good reason for a keen sense of urgency.
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths and utter some new inanity!
The quote above (from the novel "Excession") is attributed to a far future superintelligence, an artificial mind capable of thinking, doing, and being vastly beyond our puny human abilities. Yet we may not have too long to wait until we get there ourselves.
Consider the following fictional—but day by day becoming more plausible—description of a human mind melding with the breathtaking speed and colossal power of advanced computers. This is from a story set in 2028, and it is indeed conceivable that by that time you or I could enjoy a comparable experience:
"He says something like 'What? Oh, of course, you're right, but...' and has weeks of normal mind time to think about it while his response crawls slowly on radio waves to her and her answer to his response limps its way back to him at the speed of light. He has time for his life to run through his mind several times, and each time from a different angle. There was a time when going where no one had ever gone before was the main thing he wanted to do. And that time lasted up until about two weeks ago in real time...
"Which was about eight thousand years ago in time as he knows it now. He uses billions of processors, in fact just about to be a trillion later this afternoon, and each of them is in turn massively parallel so that he runs millions of programs on each processor; he is up into quintillions of parallel programs—yet there is something in his own deep structure that insists on linearizing, insists on making things string out in time in a single chain, so that for the sake of his consciousness, and perhaps of his sanity, he finds it easiest to experience it as thinking for decades in every second (at an accelerating rate, for as he becomes more parallel he becomes faster, and not only new processors, but new processor makers, and better processor-designers, join him constantly)."
(from "Mother of Storms" by John Barnes)
And again, bear in mind that all this is the most minimal, the most trivial way of portraying the essence of posthumanity. We do not know—we cannot know—what it actually will be like; our vain attempts are a bit like slime mold trying to describe the experience of writing poetry. All we can do, at this point, is endeavor to illustrate in human terms the immeasurable distance between what we are now and what we will be then.
And what shall we do with all that power? What will we choose to accomplish when we have no limitations?
Here is a sobering thought experiment: assume that you are the initial posthuman; the primary superintelligence; the first to be in thorough control of your personal destiny; not subject to any physical, biological, neurological, mental, or emotional deficiencies or limitations; self-constituting and able to define your own reality. What this means, of course, is that you will also have the power to define reality for others, to be in control of the destinies of billions of humans — what is your agenda?
As we discussed above, our first priority might be to prevent the end of the world, whether through averting nuclear war, an environmental collapse, an asteroid strike, or some other disaster. Many of us would also use our power to help others less fortunate than ourselves: we could help prevent drought, famine, tornadoes, and typhoons. We could work on curing and eliminating all types of diseases and we could find a way to reverse aging. We could make sure that no one ever went hungry or had to sleep on the street. We could see to it that every child, and every adult, had the opportunity for a quality education.
Fantastic as it may seem, all these amazing results are clearly possible and achievable once we possess the speed and power of superintelligence. What is less easy to foresee is how it could be accomplished within the limits of today's global political structure. As long as sovereign nations are permitted near total control over the lives of their subjects, they can put up roadblocks designed to protect the narrow and selfish interests of national leaders, even if this means their citizens continue to suffer. This problem will not be so easy to solve, but it must and it will be faced.
Having dealt with these political obstacles in an effective way (as I knew you could) it will now be possible for you to prevent unwanted poverty, malnutrition, bondage, oppression, exploitation, and you could even put a huge dent in the amount of crime.
Whew! That's a lot of work for your first few weeks on the job. It's time for a break, so why not go see all your favorite Broadway plays, get a front row seat for the World Series, enjoy a few meals at each of the world's greatest restaurants, have some wild (but safe) sex, and then take a short vacation on Mars. You deserve it!
After you get back, you might turn your attention to preventing, if possible, the end of the universe.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson