“transhumanism”

He is my namesake and in many other ways my electronic soulmate but nothing that Eliezer Yudkowsky has written has left a deeper impression in me than his goodbye to his death brother I read this morning.

We shall, indeed, have to work faster (and smarter).

Wow. Just wow. A pretty weird way to begin the day.

Even longevity. In the 18th century, every year, we added a few days to human life expectancy. In the 19th century, we added a few weeks, every year, to human life expectancy—so this is double exponential growth. We’re now adding about 150 days, every year, to human life expectancy,

and with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.

The Human Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the Twenty-first Century, Ray Kurzweil

The offhand references, several per paragraph, to mind-bending concepts (animal uploading, the first AIs, reputation markets, stream-of-consciousness blogs, metacortex, algamics, post-scarcity economy, AIneko, Matrioshka brains, computronium, 3D printers…); the reckless pace; the nonpareil geek protagonist, Mannfred Macx, a “venture altruist”; the kinky BDSM sex thread; its undeniable modernity; its staggering density (this is an information-overload short-story; to be read with Google, Slashdot, Answers.com, and Wikipedia handy)... Charlie Stross’s Lobsters is as unique a sci-fi short story as you’re likely to find. It has been almost a year since I read it but in the meantime it has only become more impressive, more unnerving in its increasing overlap with our present. It was the story that made me believe again in a literature that said something about my present, about our impending singularity future. It’s also the first story of Stross’s Accelerando novel, easily one of the best nonfiction books of 2005 (and it’s not like I don’t see its flaws, it’s that his daring more than makes up for them).

I used to laugh at the elaborate calculations and stratospheric numbers you always find when reading papers about the limits of computation —as in, say, “Just how much computations per second might the entire universe theoretically support?”. It was something more than my incredulity (it involves too much hand-waving at times), it was simply indifference. So what if the universe could theoretically handle one zillion jillions to the gazillion cps? We might as well ponder how many angels might fit on the head of a pin…

I read Ray Kurzweil answer 3 weeks ago and it hasn’t stopped resounding on my head ever since: