Transhumanism, Eugenics and the Dirrogate Immigration Challenge
Technology without borders:
There is an essay on IEET titled: The Specter of Eugenics: IQ, White Supremacy, and Human Enhancement.
It makes for interesting reading, including, the comments that follow the essay. The following passage from the novel “Memories with Maya” is relevant to the essay:
He took a file out and opened it in front of us. Each paper was watermarked ‘Classified’.
“This is a proposal to regulate and govern the ownership of Dirrogates,” he said.
Krish and I looked at each other, and then we were listening.
“I see it, and I’m sure you both do as well, the immense opportunity there is in licensing Dirrogates to work overseas right at clients’ premises. BPO two point zero like you’ve never seen,” he said. “Our country is a huge business outsourcing destination. Why not have actual Dirrogates working at the client’s facility where they can communicate with other human staff.
A little explanation: Dirrogates are Digital Surrogates in the novel. An avatar of a real person, driven by markerless performance capture hardware as simple as a Kinect like depth camera. Full skeletal and facial tracking animates a person’s Digital Surrogate and the Dirrogate can be seen by a human wearing Augmented Reality glasses. Thus a human is able to “tele-travel” to any location on Earth, given its exact geo-coordinates. At the chosen destination, another depth cam streams a live, real-time 3D model of the room/location so the Dirrogate can “see” live humans overlaid with a 3D mesh of themselves and a fitted video draped texture map. In essence – a live person cloaked in a Computer generated mesh created in real-time by the depth camera… idea-seeding for Kinect 2 hackers.
What would a Dirrogate look like in the real-world? The video below, is a crude (non photo-realistic) Dirrogate entering the real world.
Dirrogates, Immigration and Pseudo Minduploads:
This brings up the question: If we can have Digital Surrogates, or indeed, pseudo mind-uploads taking on 3D printed mechanical-surrogate bodies, what is the future for physical borders and Immigration policies? Who controls this parallel “space-time” construct that is naively labeled “Augmented Reality”?
In the story, there is discussion of putting forward legislation to govern and regulate the release of geo-coordinates for virtual real estate within the federal borders of a country. If we think about it, if everyone in the next few years “transhumanizes” themselves by enhancing their vision and augmenting their IQ via devices such as Google Glass (for lack of a more popular AR visor at this time), we will have multiple layers of Augmented life, pin registered to the real-world. Plugging in to a different ‘space-time’ will be as easy as switching channels on today’s television sets. Bored of living in the desert? augment the world with exotic tropical flora…
Which brings us to the point: Does one need a visa to visit the United States of America to “work”? As an analogy, consider the pseudo mind-upload in the video below.
Does it matter if the boy is in the same town that the school is in or if he were in another country? Now consider the case of a customer service executive, or an “immigrant” worker from a third world country using a pseudo mind-upload to “drive” a Google Taxi Cab until such a time that driverless car AI is perfected.
Transhumanism, Eugenics and IQ:
The aim of this short essay is not to delve into philosophy, yet on some level it is un-avoidable when talking about Transhumanism. The aim of transhumanism is the use of technology for the enhancement, uplifting and even perhaps…the transcendence of the shortcomings of the human condition. Technology in general seems to be keeping pace and is in sync with both Moore’s law and Kurzweil’s law (and predictions). This can only mean that soon enough, at least IQ Augmentation technology will be within reach of the common man. – Think Google glass again – An on demand, non-invasive memory augmentation device. Read an article on 4 ways that Google glass makes us Transhuman.
A few passionate yet forceful Transhumanists could be taking a path that may just lead to disillusionment in the movement. We have to remember: there is a reason that scientists don’t rule the world (yet). Politicians and crafty “diplomats” do. Intelligence it seems… is not about academics alone.
Transhumanator:
Until we get rid of some biological artifacts– greed, envy, selfishness… we have no hope of being able to design friendly AI, because without us even knowing it… like DNA, these traits, these carcinogens, may get transferred in the code we write…eventually creating cancers in so-called friendly AI. If there’s one lesson to be taken from theism, it could be: successful movements weren’t born by the conversion of religious elders and the elite. It was because fishermen and common people found salvation in its premise.
If the true ethos of transhumanism is to be propagated, it makes sense to stay away from any strains of fundamentalism or supremacy, and certainly to resist inadvertently resurrecting the ghost of Hitler’s mindfile… even with those questionable subroutines deleted and a version 2.0 upgrade in place.
