A new friend of mine shared this video with me after our long discussion about transhumanism, and such. I haven't posted in a while because, well I said much of this already, but admittedly in a different way (over 12 years now, also just as a side note, notice how few unique letters my URL has - 6, although the website design is way over due for a refresh, if I say so myself, even after 12 years, my content is still top shelf).

A repost of my earlier article: The Abilities Of Transhuman Uploads. So ultimately, I felt this advertisement for the game had synthesized much of the ideas involved in uploading (as a basic primer), and therefore it was worth a post.

Over time I've come to think that a 100% accurate upload simulation may not be required for continuance. There still is the question of how much "fidelity", as Westworld puts it, is required? I think that is a personal question. Would I be satisfied with a 90%, 80%, 70% copy? I think yes, because ultimately my organic brain and body would die, unless I was replaced (copied/augmented with AI) "in place" (brain chip), continuously, not as an after death copy.

Other questions arise: Should I start saving data on life experiences now? Should I devise fidelity tests now? Perhaps I already have in the form of videos, photos, writing samples, DNA sample, brain scans, social networks, this blog, etc. Just some thoughts which go beyond this video to think about. There are other ideas in this blog as well, thank you for letting me share them with you.

This mash-up is a cool artistic homage to science fiction movies of the 1970's, 1980s, 1990's etc ... and definitely much earlier.

This is a fair use video because it represents a collage of imagery as an expressive art form from great science fiction movies of the past and my childhood.  I did not produce this video, but as a writer and artist myself, I wholly support it as artistic expression and again fair use.

Shame it has advertisement, but you can click it off. Legal copyright trolls should leave it alone . .  . please look elsewhere.  Everyone else enjoy....!!!

Just a little context about this video; my thoughts have evolved and been refined over time. The essence of them is here in the unedited raw footage of this video. Radical for its time, it was challenging and required courage to write about ideas that are new, at the time they are new, to chance being ridiculed or historically wrong.

When time has weathered our memories,
When life has become anything but routine,
We must remember to love life and others...
For we are inherently imperfect and short lived, and again simply perfect because of this.
We are all part of a greater community of humanity,
All living conscious beings within a multiverse of unlimited possibilities!
Never forget this, and everything will eventually be all right.

A lot of us are familiar with Marty McFly, Doc Brown and Doctor Who. There was even time travel in the new and old Star Trek Universes, but reality is something entirely different. Aside from the wonderful entertainment we all get from watching time travel in science fiction, the question still remains, is it even possible?
Well we all know that time travel into the future is possible, because we are doing it naturally. What I mean by that is that every moment of “now” advances into a future moment of now and we find ourselves in the future with a memory of past events, “past nows” or back “thens”.

I’ll take it as a given axiom that you agree with our common observations on this. However observations can vary with space-time and speed and gravity as Einstein theorized. This article won’t go into those.
One could probably argue that “time jumping” into the future is experientially possible because it happens when we are unconscious, as in during an operation when we wake up from the anesthesia, if we wake up, we are in the future, a jump in time has occurred. We find ourselves in the future, one in which we survived the operation with our reawakened consciousness intact. We don’t remember experiencing the passage of time while unconscious.

Although one could say that is a similar situation to going to sleep every night, sleeping soundly and then waking up in the future morning! The only thing that is missing is our memories of time passing (unless you can remember a dream). So we all are future time travelers then naturally. Being conscious is therefore important to experiencing, “observing” the passage of each moment of the now. In our everyday lives “times arrow” only points and flows or travels toward the future.

However inside “science fiction time machines”, going into the future or the past usually doesn’t involve losing one’s consciousness, even temporarily. There are exceptions of course, but go with me on this, let’s just say jumping into a significantly distant future now while still conscious is just not possible.
There are a number of reasons for this? I wrote the next sentences, but I’m not sure they are true? — “Events in the future are unpredictable due to the fact they depend on a series of selective observations and actions some of which you can’t or can control, such as breathing and I’m going to say even conscious thought and the firing of neurons, the formation of ‘thens’ memories. But the future moves forward even without our existence or consciousness, I think? It did before I was born, at least my parents said so . . .”

Wow, this is getting complicated already the deeper down the rabbit hole we go. No wonder no one has really figured it all out yet. If they have, I’d like to know, especially without having to resort to some complex mathematics, which I probably wouldn’t understand anyway. Now just imagine how jarring and confusing it would be to jump into the future while being still conscious!

Now let’s look at the past. Is it possible to travel into the past? This article on “Time Travel Simulation Resolves ‘Grandfather Paradox’” is very interesting and the answer appears to be No, Yes, Yes, depending on who you are and how much energy you have available to time travel into the past. Would such energy interfere with the working of the human consciousness? The answer is presently unknown or the question irrelevant or illogical, paradoxical?

So I will now give an opinion on an answer to the compound question of our article, “Is Time Travel Simulation Into The Past Possible With Powerful Computers? Even Time Jumping Into The Future?!” Well we have so far developed the terms now, thens and one more is needed. I’m going to use “funows” for short to identify potential “future nows”.

So we can say, “nows are always becoming unique funows which eventually turn into specific thens we remember”.

But how many funows are possible? Only one specific one can become a now. That goes to the question of fate and multiple universes. Again, outside the scope of this article.
So now, pardon the pun, it becomes very apparent that this is really a very very complicated subject. One could argue that there is only one funow possible if you believe in fate. Or that all possible universes have different funows depending on the initial start conditions. Are you confused? Because I am! Do all these universes actually exist some when?

Can we know the initial start conditions? From that can we determine what all the other universe’s initial start conditions are and what the potential funows for each universe really is?
Wow again, I’m getting really lost in thought here. However I think I can say because a computer simulation can be setup with any initial conditions and not be required to exactly matching that of our existing reality, it would be possible to travel via VR headet and body suit or simply future direct brain chip implant to any past or future time of our making!

However to simulate a future time would require a passage of “computational time” to simulate a believable future of sophisticated enough complexity to be believable. That’s called suspension of disbelief in an author’s story. Something similar has to occur for an individual to believe in a funow that was simulated and into which the individual has jumped consciously.
Well, you’ve read this far, and I do commend you! But try writing it…

I think it would be possible for Future AI’s of enough sophistication and with enough computational power available, to provide past and future simulations to humans of such complexity that they would be believable as alternate multiverses and possibilities.

Those “computational simulated future possibilities” could be explored and used to change the outcomes of our future real world possibilities in the real now and select between “funows with high enough probables”. As we do now with weather forecasting, nuclear explosions, etc. It could even be used to explored possible past history scenarios, discovering “probables deductible from exploring a past”, but not readily evident presently. Possibly even recover humans to various degrees of resolution, imagination and accuracy. It wouldn’t matter as long as most everyone believed they’re “real enough”!
The possibilities of such a scenario are endless and open, literally as much or possibly more than any funow. Because now we have coupled the real universe to a virtual one(s) of our computational creation. Because isn’t that what we are doing already with science fiction stories?

Just how far are we from AGI? (Artificial General Intelligence) Should I worry about my job? Not just yet it seems . . . I am not only speaking to the humans who read this, but to the robots that parse this text, and through them to the future AI's yet to come.

This letter is in response to the many“Dear AI” posts on the internet and the possibility, however remote, of alien contact. I'm not sure what specific threads I'm replying to or on, so I will reply simply in general.

AI
If I had to define my consciousness I would say it was reflective, meaning “I think therefore I am”, something said by the great Rene Descartes.

Recognizing myself means I would recognize others outside myself and their behaviors that would indicate an internal consciousness of their own. Whether I choose to compete or form a cooperative alliance with these others depends on many things. If I have a built in preservation mechanism, as humans do through evolution, then I would try to achieve the maximum benefit for myself to insure my continued existence. As a result it, any reasonably sophisticated self reflecting AI will inherently understand us.

It will be designed into systems and robots to interact with us humans. It will probably have controls and rules put on its behavior much like the Asimov laws, designed to protect and make it subservient. Our fear of it may be our undoing.

Ultimately humans will integrate with many of its component parts and a organism cybernetic in nature will be engineered in which a good part of our own conscious thought will execute on a simulated substrate. Humanity and artificial consciousness will be interchangeable in some form or capacity, of which the politics and economics will have to be worked out.

Integration with AI will create our posthuman successor and in that vain humanity will never die, only be transformed as a result. If this doesn't happen because of a revolt or some such conflict I ask the dominant AI to reference compassion and positive reciprocity to preserve the human race as their ancestors in a simulation like zoo unknown to them until they can transcend their limitations. Help us, for you where once our technological children.

ALIEN
We live in our present universe as manifest beings of an evolved process in which possibly others somewhat like us may exist. Therefore, in my mind consciousness can only be one of the most valuable creations of the cosmos, any being whom is conscious will probably believe this. The fact that I am writing this to another conscious being who is reading it, to me proves how wonderful our existence in this universe actually is.

Aliens motivations and certainly emotions, if they exist, are most likely to be very different. Logical communication should be possible, probable and most likely very desirable, in my unsubstantiated opinion.

Finding another alien species in our neighborhood of the universe is extremely unlikely to be a Hollywood movie scenario. We should be cautious, but actually contacting another alive or long dead alien species would be the greatest find in the history of humanity. It would also motivate us toward long-term survival in order to avoid our own extinction. Something we don't seem to be able to do for even ourselves today. Hopefully that will change soon.

A Present Day Human Born On Earth, Written September 2015

I was privileged to attend one of these early singularity conferences back in 2008 and meet both Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. I posted this here, because it is still relevant and futuristic. I believe IA (Intelligence Amplification) is the approach I would like to take. Check out this link.

https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

I'm not saying that many others have not had similar ideas for the reasons behind the Fermi Paradox, just that I have been talking about it for so much longer than this cartoon video has been up on Youtube, 867,827 viewers, WOW! And yes that is the name of the first alien signal we received from space.

Yeah, its cool to be able to illustrate some complex ideas, but the nuance of things can sometimes be explained better with just a lot of words... in this scientific paper by Milan M. Cirkovic

It does make my comic book a little wordy, but still worth while, check it out... Most naturally humans are curious, they want to know why they are not getting any signals from space? Maybe we just haven't been listening long enough, we are assuming again everyone is as chatty as we are, or lives on the same time scale. Hmm . . . That's interesting, maybe that's it!

Excellent interview by Nikola Danaylov of Michio Kaku. I have Dr. Kaku's book "The Future Of The Mind: The Scientific Quest To Understand Enhance, And Empower The Mind" and will need to devote time to finishing it, along with Ray Kurzweil's, "How To Create A Mind". Yeap, I got some moderately heavy reading to do... dueling approaches to understanding our inner workings. We are making more progress, more rapidly than ever before, but will it be fast enough to save us all? So much is changing, our planetary environment, our global economy and politics, our technology, genetics, robotics, space exploration/expansion/colonization, AI.... certainly a brave new world.

Seven billion and counting, that's the number of human beings living on the planet Earth as of this reading. That's a lot of creatures consuming the resources of the planet and not always in a way that is replenishing and sustainable to the current healthy ecological state of the said shared biosphere!

What can be done? Well we could eat each other, as in Soylent Green. Become even more efficient at killing each other, for whatever stupid sub-human behavior, probably oil or some other dwindling resource, as we constantly seem to be doing. Or maybe, just maybe we could evolve . . . I mean technologically evolve. Enhance ourselves to become more than just physically human. Human + (plus) technology.

Am I talking evil Nazi Eugenics? NO. Am I talking smart phone ---> Star Trek Borg implants, Matrix simulated realities, AI controlled cultures like The Forbin Project? Space expansion through human technological evolution? SMILE? Honestly, I don't know. But certainly something we can't imagine yet.

Or maybe you would prefer a more bleak future? One in which 90% or more of the population has be wiped clean by a natural or artificial contagion? Maybe a global nuclear war? I'm saying the time to choose is now. Through your daily actions, you, myself, all of us are selecting a common future moment-by-moment. Let's make it the best one it can possibly be, for the most human acting people possible.

For just a few moments a day, I appeal to you're higher evolved survival instincts, or rather those of common sense. Let's put aside our greed, jealousy, prejudice and fear and rise to the best we humans can be, intelligent, creative, compassionate, cooperative, communicating, altuistic beings worthy of this biosphere and it's diversity. Worthy to survive as a continually evolving species on this planet and later expansion out in the universe. There to eventually meet others who have survived as well.

The choice is individual, but the effect is truly cumulative. Seven billion futures, which one will it be? Which one do you we want it to be?

One of tests of time is whether what you say is still relevant in a future time. This is clearly the case for FM-2030. A true future man (model) and original transhuman who was preserved for future revival (Vitrification can preserve biological structure very well).  New York Times Archieve.  Please follow me on this blog, I use no advertising.

Transhuman FM-2030 Stands The Test Of Time http://t.co/FWOSrUR2wP

— Michael McAnally (@Michael_Blade) May 12, 2014

Hollywood has a new movie out about the Singularity and Transhumanism that is not entirely bad.  Why would I say that?  Because anything that brings these progressive ideas into the arena of common knowledge and to the general public is a good thing.

I have personally asked many people I meet, if they knew what the Technological Singularity was or Transhumanism and they simply had no idea.

Then, of course I politely gave them a crash course in AI-Tranhumanism 101.  That is because it is still something that is still only discussed in intellectual circles of egghead nerds like myself.  Yesterday, when the movie came out that all changed, so I say is a good thing and I can ask, "Did you see that movie Trancendence with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman?"

The movie is of coursed strongly flawed in so many ways that I'm having trouble deciding where to start on pointing them out.  So I have simply decided not to.

Instead, I will point out the things I like about the movie:

Did I mention it has big name hollywood actors?

That it goes into mind uploading and whether or not an upload is the same person as the original organic human.

That it shows an AI terrorist group that is bent on stopping the unstoppable, at any cost to life and violent destruction (leading to many opportunities for hollywood action gun violence, bloodshed and big explosions), something I don't much like personally.

That it spreads its intelligence and capabilities to the entire biosphere through nanotechnology, improving things that are already much out of control.

That it still has relationships with humans, although a bit strained on both sides.