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This was a fabulous interview. If I hadn't read about the transhumanist plan directly on the Gov of Can website, I might still be imagining it was only science fiction.

https://horizons.gc.ca/en/2016/04/01/emergence-of-a-knowing-society/

Allen gives us a complete picture of the invasive digitization of our reality, and it is such a relief to hear someone articulate the truth so many of us are sensing. I like that he circles back around towards the end to talk about how we can stay human.

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So glad you enjoyed the interview! I wish more of us were at least a bit more technophobic (ha). I think in general we need to start trusting our inherent aversions... Of course it's good to push yourself to try new things, but I have never quite understood why it's important for me to try things that waste my time and don't make me any happier/smarter/a better person.....

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Agreed. Even without the darker, long-term implications raised in the interview, surely enough of us can collectively agree that digital technology is powerful and dangerous, and at the same time realize we're stuck with it. I feel we humans could retain more of our autonomy if we were able to just be honest about all the harms that have come from mass digitization, as well as the benefits, and choose when we engage with it, rather than the seeming insistence we all be connected 24/7. P.S. I ditched Facebook and I am 100% happier.

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Yes. I am always baffled and enraged by people who insist to me that social media, dating apps etc are neutral, or nothing more than an aid to our lives. It is so maddeningly naive, and they always tend to tell me this as though I am ridiculous for being 'paranoid', or that I somehow just don't 'get it'.

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This was in some ways difficult to listen to, but the basic thesis/message I agree with.

I don't consider myself a transhumanist. I am a scientist that has made nucleotide vaccines to: COVID-19, Ebola, Hantavirus (Sin Nombre), West Nile virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, Kyasanur Forest Disease. I understand the mRNA vaccines (did a lecture on their design & execution), as well as why mRNA is used in gene therapy. I have criticism of "the jab" but not the concerns expressed here.

The study mentioned isn't terribly meaningful because virtually all cell culture is cancer cells, and those don't entirely act like normal healthy cells that will die after they hit their Hayflick limit of ~ 50 cell divisions. They mostly have active telomerase, which is different from all but stem cells. You can't make DNA from RNA without a reverse transcriptase enzyme. There are a set of viruses-- HIV, murine leukemia virus, avian myeloblastosis virus, Rouse sarcoma virus, and others that have reverse transcriptase. Normal stem cells have telomerase reverse transcriptase that maintains the telomeres of stem cells (and most cancer cells), but that's not active in normal somatic cells that aren't stem cells. And there are transposons that work this way in normal cells. This kind of cut and paste system has been very important for evolution. However, there is no evidence that any of that results in DNA editing from mRNA. Editing of DNA is quite difficult to accomplish on purpose. Trust me, I've worked on that for HBRV and several methods to treat polymerase gamma (PolG) G848S mutation.

My main work the past 15 years has been gene therapy both for rare disease and for transformation. I have a roadmap to near Marvel comics type transformation, but there are some basic stumbling blocks to that. The most basic is that there's about 10 trillion somatic cells in the body. But inoculation with the quantity of virions required to deliver a gene therapy kills the subject long before enough cells are transformed to matter. So, for now, we can't do that near Marvel comics type of change. (Look up Jesse Gelsinger).

I am also a gene therapy experiment. Many frown on that, but it does make one careful. There are things that can be done to transform people that are essentially hacks. For instance, if all the longevity benefits of one of those is realized by humans a woman would go through menopause at over 100 years of age. But, we are not mice, so who knows? Ultimate life span of 150 perhaps? With lots of energy and strength, svelte and youthful? That seems worthwhile.

A motivator for me is that we need to adapt people for space travel and low-G living, such that we don't deteriorate much. High radiation environments too, so that we can thrive and harvest energy from it.

Kurzweil and his graph? That's just not how biology works. We are the product of about 4 billion years of evolution, perhaps more if we count the slow creation of organic molecules that could self-assemble for the most difficult phase of pre-life. Much of it is rube-goldbergish OMG, this... works? We have evolved blind alleys that limit us. And life span limits are nearly the most conserved element of life. To evolve fast enough to survive requires death. Long lived beings evolve the slowest, so it's easiest for them to die out. We can tinker and I am sure we will, with amazing results sometimes. This will result in an eventual explosion of human and other earth life in our solar system and beyond. But it's very difficult to interface directly, though it could happen.

Neuralink is like an alien spaceship deciding to communicate with humans via electrical signals by firing 10 cm diameter telephone poles from orbit into Times Square when it's packed at New Years. Something would happen, and New York would perhaps adapt, but it's not optimum to communicate with people gy shooting poles through them. We will probably need to make fungal type organisms mixed with other genetics to create something like the Trill that's alive and becomes part of us. Not that this is likely within the next 100 years! That is a very, very, very, extremely hard problem.

Can we make an artificial brain interface that implants into people from a young age and networks the brain and peripheral nervous system? That progress is very slow. Parkinson's implants are a primitive form of this. They get tissue formed around them. Our bodies evolved to encapsulate or destroy foreign material for a very, very long time. The innate immune system evolved around 1 billion years ago. We will get there with implants, probably, at some point. But realize that things happen when stuff is put into us. Rare events happen, like bacteria getting into a person's spine and ... it's really not good at all. I had a discussion about this relative to doing things to the thymus, which is behind the sternum near the heart and lungs. This is an area that can be worked on, but you don't do it unless you absolutely have to. For a widescale common use thing? There will be problems sometimes.

Silicon copy of us? Not happening. It's sillier than suggesting that you could slice your computer into hair-thin slices with a laser, scan those, and from this, create a simulated laptop running all the software. The difference is that we don't really know how the brain works, and we are not electrical in our nervous system. My favorite rant on this is from mathbabe. https://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/

Add to this that 90% of our nervous system is not in our heads, and that "external" nervous system learns and 'thinks' too. We are all of that, and that nervous system is connected to every lymph node of our immune system. I could elaborate on this, but mathbabe's guest post is excellent foundation. To hers I would add that those electrical signals? Those probably don't matter much, which is why they are all over the place.

I am alarmed at what I see with so-called AI, which Grady Booch agrees is probably more properly called "Fake Intelligence." It's not intelligence. It's statistical prediction, and it degrades mysteriously for no particularly obvious reason. I corresponded a bit this past week with Cummings about issues with LLM approach to self-driving. https://spectrum.ieee.org/self-driving-cars

That LLM approach gets really interesting early gains. But it flattens out at "kinda-sorta mosta" level, it can't go beyond its training. It's weirdly hackable with what amount to Harry Potteresque incantations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15043

Perhaps most disturbing is that it can fluctuate wildly in accuracy over fairly short periods of time. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09009

I am more alarmed by what is happening to young people, who are not learning and not learning to learn. They are being sold this hype that AI is smarter than them, (it's similar to being taught they can switch sex) and in certain ways it seems to be. So they aren't learning math, aren't learning science, don't learn to read or think logically. Many are terrible writers and don't think it matters. But it does. A key part is the navigation apps. Kids should be learning what so-called AI is, and it should be renamed FI for fake intelligence. People can anthropomorphize rocks and trees, and this happened long ago with the simple "ELIZA" program.

Teach kids and young adults to train mini-AIs so they can get the hang of it and understand this tech. Teach them to hack FI, so they learn its vulnerability. Have them monitor how FI fluctuates. Yes, Sam Altman is hyping it to the moon, playing "Who wants to be a billionaire?" (And he is executing his fiduciary duty to his company as it has become understood in the current time.) Have people see what happens when you generate a kind of feedback scream in AI by feeding its output back into itself. Teach them that this is actually happening, right now, because LLMs are being used to create mass content to monetize.

Teach kids that Meta trained an AI on science papers and it was a disaster, because AI does not think.

The part of the brain that navigates from point A to point B, is also the part that correlates information in ways that aren't just "chaining". Chaining is how animals learn, by association with something happening near another thing. These navigation apps are preventing kids and adults from having to figure out how to get from A to B in a sensible way. This is creating generations of fools. You can see it in the stringing-word-salad that passes for thought in quite a bit of the internet, and that is being exacerbated by LLMs barfing up content.

It would make sense that map-reading and orienteering should be a required class to maintain each year of schooling so that people develop that part of their brains more.

So what am I? I'm not transhumanist, or I don't see myself that way. I'm not exactly a luddite either. I want people to have opportunities, and good lives. I'd like people to understand their environment so they can master it.

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What is the reasoning with regard to electric cars?

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I mean, personally I just don't want to have to rely on electricity to power my vehicle... Like what if the grid goes down, there's some kind of natural disaster, or you are trying to get somewhere where there are no charging stations? I also don't like the idea of having a vehicle that one cannot fix oneself...

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Oh, ok, got it. sad but true, that in the current economic system (which is as entrenched & destructive as ever, leading us toward pure dystopia at accelerating speed) fossil fuel cars do have advantages.

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