Is Transhumanism the Great Filter?

The future of humanity and where our path over the next century will take is clouded in uncertainties and futurism as to which model will ultimately win out or if it will be some mixed bag of outcomes related to all four foreseeable paths. There has been much talk of some of these paths during the current AI craze and less talk of the others. Only the march forward into the midst of the future. This is of course the various flavors of transhumanism, the idea of transcending the human and whatever form that takes and related subjects in the four evident paths are these. The first is that we continue to create increasingly powerful and capable AI systems. This is not in itself a threat to a civilization. AI can be extraordinarily useful, but it is a double-edged sword that does bring with it the reality that a great many jobs could be lost to AI and automation in general. Those that are developing AI systems and those that promote them often glance past that reality and will continue to paint a vision often devoid of part of what is human of a future where humans at best live in some utopian situation where they no longer have to work and pretend that such a society spends money on their products. That's not going to happen. What really happens is that political ideology returns as the driver of the world rather than technological development, which will become ideology's tool and often its nemesis. This is coming. The sabo have not yet begun to fly into the machines. The reality is that job loss has been happening with automation since the beginning of the industrial revolution, but the difference is that up until this point job creation had a strong tendency to outstrip job losses to technological advance. That was technology's ace in the hole, but in recent decades this has been because of the creation of increasingly more technology at a faster pace, which then costs more jobs. And eventually a tipping point is reached where technology no longer creates the jobs, and that tipping point is AI. It can fill the job it might have created the moment it was created. That brings economic upheaval, social and economic reordering, and so on. And while painful, it is survivable for civilization. Of course, the extreme of AI is the creation of dangerous generalized artificial intelligence, which we are moving towards, but it remains distant that it could overthrow us, put us in a matrix, bring about our extinction, or so on, and then supplant humanity entirely with its own machine civilization. The red flag here is the moment that you no longer know how your technology exactly works, and that is AI. When you don't know that, and you also don't know how the human brain does what it's doing, you are in the undiscovered country of humanity. No other technology we have ever developed was created under such conditions. No one knows the outcome of that. I suspect the real problem is that those creating AI don't realize that they are in danger of overestimating what the human brain does and what it means to be human, rather than underestimating their own technology. If you don't know how human con- consciousness emerges from a bunch of largely cholesterol, you will not know how to avoid doing that in silicon. You literally can't know from only one half of the equation. That's a funny point here. If we don't know what human consciousness is and how it arises, how do you assess it? You really can't as far as the nuts and bolts of how that happens is concerned. It may actually be the processes that produce so we term as consciousness are a lot easier to produce than we think. And there is a good indicator of that in that a brain the size of ours is managing to do it and a ton of other things all at once. It may be simpler than we think. Yet the hubristic claims remain that we can never accidentally reproduce it because we're humans. Just cuz. An example here is very recent news. OpenAI's disproof of a mathematical problem called the unit distance problem. I won't rehash what this is since it's so prominent in the news, but the fact is the reason no one had solved it in 80 years is because all human mathematicians looking into it were looking at it the wrong way. That could be the case with the brain. Yet the very same technology they defend has the ultimate goal in many visions of completely replacing the human. The second path is emerging between technology and biology and humans increasingly become cyborgs. This is not new. Humans have augmented themselves with the products of technology ever since tattoos and wearable jewelry came about in prehistory. Now medical prosthetics and

so on continue it to beneficial effect, but it can be taken much further and humans can be made by technology to be better than what biology originally equipped humans with. We already know this with certain prosthetics. There will come a time when a limb prosthetic exceeds the ability of a biological limb because we already can do this if we want to. The scenario isn't an inherently bad outcome, we'd still be humanity at heart just with a lot more prosthetics. Because then such things become a matter of physical improvement rather than solely medical applications. The only real far future danger there though is a borg collective scenario where everyone lives in a virtual reality Utopia while our cyborg bodies are controlled in the real world by a collective or an entity that keeps things in the world of reality going or the great Borg Empire assimilating the galaxy. While disturbing if everyone is happy with the outcome then it's not really a problem unless something unforeseen goes horribly wrong and the human version of the Borg collective gets hacked — or some outcome like that. I always wondered why that didn't happen to the Borg. You start assimilating the wrong minds into the collective, bad things might happen as the internal culture shifts. But the Borg were another of those species like the alien. We should have never been told how the sausage is made with that species. It was best left mysterious and spooky. The third path is a rejection of the whole thing. We could liken it to the Butlerian Jihad of Dune where everyone just decides that we only go so far with technology and regulate it to the point globally that it never goes any further. This is starting up with no less than Pope Leo the 14th authoring a recent encyclical on AI. I'm not a religious person obviously despite having started out Catholic. But a voice on the world stage was needed in this question. This of course risks someone breaking the rules for military gain or some other nefarious plot but fundamentally in this scenario in 500 years we are still generally still us and a focus on technology that improves our lives rather than transforms them into something no longer fully human. I personally think this to be the most likely scenario. I myself do not want digital immortality nor do I believe biological immortality is possible. You will always get hit by the meteorite eventually. — Nor would I choose transhumanism. I do not think I'm alone globally in this thinking on the contrary. And then there is a fourth. And this is one that is talked about, but the implications of it are not well discussed, and it may in fact be the scariest possible one because it arises in a mix of outcomes, but a very specific mix. It's if we start making multiple species of human tailored for different environments. Where this is sometimes talked about in sci-fi, the outcome is never particularly good. It's usually dystopian and may even reflect a great filter as to why we do not see other alien civilizations in the galaxy. It's not dystopian for the story's sake, but a practical reason. Human populations have trouble getting along. The problem here is that humans are suited for Earth. We evolved here, and yet some parts of it are so harsh such as Antarctica or deep in the oceans that we need various forms of technology to exist there. Everywhere else in the solar system quite literally is worse than Antarctica, which means to exist on Mars we need even more technology. But one area of biotechnology that has been pointed out to be useful here is the genetic augmentation of ourselves to make a variant of Homo sapiens suited better for living on Mars. While it would be basically impossible to create a human brain able to function without oxygen on Mars, only machine can do that, probably permanently requiring any human variant to require a suit, there are things that can be addressed such as problems with lower gravity and other issues that could be tackled genetically. But it has to be asked, at what point is the Mars human and the Earth human no longer variants of each other, but different species altogether? Still hominids of course, but not quite close enough any longer to call both Homo sapiens sapiens. There are many other reasons why divergences in the human species might occur. The same question can be asked of genetic augmentation for various reasons, even custom humans, all done here on Earth. This is probably coming, and very likely will step beyond just mitigating genetic diseases, but actually cosmetic, mental, or physical augmentation as well. After all, surgery led to cosmetic reconstructive surgery, which led to purely cosmetic surgery, some of which

qualifies as true augmentation already. This will happen with genetics as well. Well, at what point does it go too far? Do entire populations of genetically distinct, different species of humans inhabit the Earth? And if they do, at what point is it that these groups no longer get along? Especially between fully natural humans and augmented ones. No one knows the answer. The history isn't written yet, so can't be predicted. And it's not known if any of this would end up happening at all, but that too shows up in sci-fi. Star Trek again. With Khan. The point is though, if two groups of people want the same thing and only one can have it, then conflict ensues. Any kind of conflict like that has the power to stagnate a civilization, or even destroy and reset it. If a cycle develops where this never stops or stabilizes, then you have a highly advanced civilization gridlocked by its own genetic development and conflicts. This of course has been visited in science fiction before as well. Even George Lucas visited in it with the idea of the Clone Wars, but variations on the theme include the Xindi from Star Trek, which had as I recall six intelligent species having evolved on the same planet, and were in a haphazard truce arrangement after wars in which one of the species, the Avians, had gone extinct. Or even the Cylons of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, where the line between robot and human is blurred, and conflict results. You could even bring the expanse into this and others. The point is we have enough problems with factions on this world and always have, especially when it comes to controlling resources, but this gets worse when the factions are no longer even the same species. It might even go on so long that no one actually knows which was the original species at all, if Homo sapiens even still exists among its offspring technological species spawned from it. All too often transhumanism, no matter the scenarios, painted as a good thing, often by the very people in the field of artificial intelligence that are bringing that about. But they also often warn that there are paths that aren't so easily foreseen, yet they trudge on. What overall is happening is a lack of ability to envision what the end result technologies will be. No one predicted, for example, that the first areas to fall to AI would be the areas of writing, film, making art, and so on. Yet they are. And while we can still tell an AI-produced artwork or movie, it's getting harder and in a few years it becomes impossible to tell the difference, even with YouTube. I already have AI clones out there with channels based on my voice. I try to fight them, of course, but it does little good. A losing battle, ultimately, as any creative endeavor will be. Just look at how well AI-derived music does in the music charts these days. But the other paths, such as the human genetic augmentation path, actually threaten everything, including human civilization itself, or at least what we currently recognize what human civilization means. But as a solution to the Fermi paradox and the Great Silence, it is often painted that the digitization of the species better allows the exploration of space and the expansion of what at least used to be human into space. I posit that this a potential great filter and actually does happen in practice, or else there would be digital aliens here. Rather, I think the commonality may be that all civilizations stumble blind into a bunch of technologies all around the same time that have unforeseen repercussions to all of them. And it ends up greatly stagnating their development to the point that they never actually reach a stage where they can go interstellar, even if that was the original stated point. Rather, it creates a confusing civilization marked by constant social upheaval, — change for change's sake, and because of that mix of bad paths, no one ever ventures out to the stars. They're too busy dealing with the internal realities of their own technology to ever get that far. And so, they sit. Thanks for listening. I'm futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier, currently warning against uplifting the animals and plants to superintelligence and then uploading them into the digital cloud. There is just no way that will go well, emphatically. To upload the caribou, the psychic corn, the octopus, all into a utopian virtual existence with us. This world does not yet know the treachery and tyranny of an AI that is based on an uploaded carrot that has been uplifted sufficiently to realize what we've done to it. Think Brocco's carrot. Very worrying, and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer, and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird, and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live. One with futuristic, transhumanistic

carrots, apparently.