on the 28th of January 2024 Noland Arbor a 29-year-old American was the first patient of neuralink to receive a brain computer implant although the small tendrils of the chip slipped out of Arbor's brain only a few weeks after the surgery neural links experim ment seems to have opened up a wide range of future possibilities and many more questions what if diseases aging and ultimately the gruesome fate of death could be lifted off from the shoulders of humankind what if our mortal shells all be it weak and so very fragile could be optimized by technology to reach their fullest potential the rise of artificial intelligence and so-called body upgrades is promising us that we will move forward huge steps in the Relentless run of everlasting progress but where will the race eventually lead us and are there certain dis iian prophecies that could become true after all in this episode we are going to explore the manifold forms of futuristic horror visions and follow the traces of forboding philosophical thinkers but before we can embark on our journey into the near future let us first take a look at the origins of the dystopian nightmares in 1516 Sir Thomas Moore an English lawyer philosopher and Statesman imagined an almost perfect Society on a fictional island called Utopia its name was derived from the Greek word utos and could be translated as nowhere or a non place the mythical Island differed greatly from the chaotic landscape of European politics at Moore's time and was described as being free of greed corruption or social injustice money and private property had been banned completely on Utopia while the people organized themselves in egalitarian community ities although Thomas Moore sought to improve European Society with his idealistic book he also asked the question whether a perfect world of humans could ever exist outside of Wishful Thinking ironically the later utopian dreams that were dragged into reality had the tendency to transform into living nightmares one example is the French Revolution with its Noble ideas of Liberty equality and fraternity even though these values were able to establish themselves over time the revolution itself became the cause of a veritable bloodbath Pierre vict Vero was a celebrated leader and orator of the French Revolution but however fervent his passion for the movement might have been it did not protect Vero from the more radical forces that later came to overthrow his group in March 1793 he was guillotined together with his friends and his famous quote like Saturn the revolution devours its children turned out to be true in the end maybe the countless experiences of Humanity's dark Nature has led people to feel fascinated by apocalyptic Visions the oldest of these Tales go back 2,000 years before Christ and often depict the theme of a great flood in Mesopotamian mythology in anent Egypt the Prophecies of neferti foretold the breakdown of society and a vicious Civil War which then later was ended by the rise of a great Egyptian king while we attribute pessimism and the longing for the good old times mainly to our modern world the people of the Medieval Time had every right to be frightened of the future as one era was slowly ending and Paving the way to big societal changes unrest quickly followed between 1400 and 1650 the feudal system and the authority of the church in Europe eroded as a result people fell prey to the witch hunting Mania and the growing anxiety of plagues famine and raging religious wars what seems unimaginable for most of us today was a normality for the religious Scholars of that period the end of the world or the Christian day of judgment was not said to happen in a distant future instead people who were educated enough had to fear it baleful rough breaking loose at any time just like falling stars or a natural disaster as we have seen so far images of the apocalypse and the fear of dark Forces are a relatively old phenomenon since the beginning of time humanity has imagined its own downfall the idea of a dis Opia however showed up only relatively late in 1868 the English philosopher John Stewart Mill used its term to describe a bad place criticizing the British governance of Ireland in a speech before Parliament he was inspired by Morris Utopia and used his new idea to comence on the political problems of his country but it was not until the 20th century and its frightful totalitarian experiences that the modern thought of a dystopia as the first place imaginable became popular in literature with the many examples of real life failed Utopias authors from that time had more than enough inspiration to feed their morbidly Sinister creativity with two writers in particular have ascended to the pantheon of world famous dystopian novelists olders Huxley and George Orville can be called literary Legends and this episode would not be complete without having mentioned them but whil 1984 Orville's nightmarish tale of a totalitarian surveillance State focused on the horror of coercion imprisonment and slavery huxley's Brave New World struck a different note in the all encompassing World State nearly 600 years in the future everyone was happy and clearly assigned to the level of their caste babies were mass-produced and cloned in bottles to supply a NeverEnding stream of simple-minded content workers and if one ever came to feel a sentiment of melancholy in a world full of distractions s the drug of choice made everything look bright again what is so special about Huxley novel is that it combines both utopian and dystopian themes to remain a highly ambiguous satire up until today on the one hand Brave New World showcased the downsides of a so-called Paradise on Earth with its bizarre eugenic traits and the collectivized society on the other hand Wars and famine had finally been ended by sacrificing men's personal Liberty thus putting a stop to the chaos and the dangerous possibility of Anarchy quite to the contrary of Orville's vision of a totalitarian Big Brother huxley's story tells of a technologically highly Advanced society that has perfected sedation and the manipulation of its Carefree subjects in this sense a strong oppressive government is no longer necessary as Neil Postman beautifully put in his book amusing ourselves to death Orville Wars that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression but in huxley's Vision no big brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy maturity and history as he saw it people will come to love their oppression to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think what Orville feared were those who would ban books what Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one or orell feared those who would deprive us of information Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism Orville feared that the truth would be concealed from us Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance better faster smarter this this seems to be the Mantra of both today's economy and restlessly pacing Society many Western philosophers have dreamed of Humanity's development as linear towards continual growth and cultural progress upon closer inspection however this Outlook is not shared by everyone the idea that the world has a clear beginning and the final end is typical for the three monotheistic religions of Judaism Christianity and Islam countless other beliefs however see nature and existence as cyclical in theravada Buddhism for example samsara stands for the cycle of birth death and rebirth only enlightened beings are able to break through this repetitive pattern to find peace in the state of Nirvana moreover the Mayans just like many other ancient civilizations built their life around cyclical calendars dictated by the sky IB khaldun an Arab sociologist philosopher and historian lived in the 14th century and is often times called the father of modern sociology he famously compared the development of societies with the different life stages of an individual according to him both people and dynasties lived through phases of their birth maturity and death ibben khaldun believed that history was an endless cycle of BL booming civilizations and their Decay into ruins in which life switched back and forth from primitive rural communities to civilized Urban settlements however surprisingly ibben khaldun was far from commending the more advanced societies instead he called them morally corrupt and lacking solidarity whereas the primordial nits were praised as strong and Fearless by him in the end the characteristics of the wandering tribes LED them to conquer the more advanced cities with their inherently self-destructive Lifestyles leading to the downfall of a civilization and starting the cycle all over again although it can be argued that we have come awfully far with our modernday technology and the advancement of science other aspects of Our Lives leave a lot to be desired When comparing the masterful craftsmanship of architecture only 100 years ago with today's drab cubic concrete blocks one cannot help but feel a bit depressed the humanistic fixation on beauty seems to have given way to a more practical efficiency-driven attitude that permeates every aspect of our hectic modern lives Kor a French philosopher and film maker of the 20th century saw the free market as the driving force behind what he called the spectacle in it human beings had been subjugated by the economic order and workers as well as consumers were ruled by their Commodities in that sense duor saw the degradation of people in the sentiment that human fulfillment no longer was defined by what one was but rather by what one possessed opening the stage to empty appearances and a deep feeling of alienation when connecting the spectacle with modern Technologies dor interestingly describes them as something that contributes to a vicious cycle of isolation even though his thoughts were written many decades ago in 1967 they have gained all the more relevance to their and seem to perfectly describe our fears when it comes to the nature of social media in his book The Society of the spectacle dear States from automobiles to televisions the goods that the spectacular system chooses to procure Also Serve its weapons of constantly reinforcing the conditions that in gender lone crowds the spectacle was born from the world's loss of unity and the immense expansion of the modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this loss the abstrac defying of all individual labor and the general abstractness of what is produced are perfectly reflected in the spectacle whose manner of being concrete is precisely as abstraction when n said that God was dead in the 1880s he was referring to the growing loss of faith in the Supernatural world and its Untouchable religious Secrets science had begun to explain and demystify all aspects of human life thus leading to a disintegration of the one great truth most people people used to share with each other Society no longer saw a common picture but rather many different fragments of reality debar mentions this loss of unity that is so very Central to our postmodern world and connects the feeling of being lost with the hypnotic power of the media the more he The Spectator contemplates the less he lives the more he identifies with the dominant images of need the less he understands his own life and his own desires the spectacles estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own they are the gestures of someone else who represents the them to him The Spectator does not feel at home anywhere because the spectacle is everywhere without going too far into a distant dystopian future we could ask ourselves today how many of our wishes and desires are actually our own and how many of them were ignited by a subliminal message of an online advertisement with the so-called loneliness epidemic On The Rise people increasingly find themselves glued to their screens wasting away hours and hours by passively consuming short form videos and many of us have become so anxious of human social interactions that we choose to instead engage with parasocial one-way relationships possibly even personified by an artificial intelligence when coming back to the all encompassing uniformity of simplistic buildings and cheap plastic objects that surround us they all seem to represent a general decline of cultural refinements AI in particular has now reached the field of human creativity to flood it with monstrous numbers of deformed and soulless content quantity over quality seems to be the verdict of our times similarly duar writes in his book the loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality the commodi form reduces everything to quantitative equivalents the quantitative is what it develops and it can develop only within the quantitative as we have seen so far technology has connected us all to an incredibly large worldwide web and yet ironically we seem to be more isolated than ever with the first brain chip transplant in January 2024 Humanity has taken a leap into a largely unknown and highly speculative realm at its core the transhumanist belief aims to enhance the mind's and bodies of human beings by the use of Technology thus breaking the chains of biology and bringing man one step closer to a Godlike state in the transhumanist manifesto there can be read aging is a disease the aim is to mitigate aging and extend life beyond the maximum lifespan the criteria for measuring ing chronological age are changing and countering the biases of agist behaviors that restrict and dampen people's purposefulness in life transhumanism seeks to reach this goal by Concepts like a tertiary brain called The Meta brain which could augment our intellig and support the memory through an AI engineered preis on a similar note in his book the age of spiritual machines from 1999 futurist Ray czw dreams of scanning and downloading the human brain to transfer it to a Computing medium this copy of a mind would then have the same personality history and memory as the person from which it was drawn courtz also discusses the slightly unsettling question of finding a new body that would host the digital brain scan there is the small matter of the new person's body what kind of body will a reinstated personal mind file have the original human body an upgraded body a synthetic body a nano engineer body a virtual body in a virtual environment according to courts while the 21st century will be marked by the phenomenon of Singularity a point at which human beings would merge with their machine inventions once this breakthrough will have been realized CWI believes that we will see a trend towards replacing parts of our brains with neural implants while at the same time making sure to stop the aging process of our cells genetic therapies and nanot Technology will according to courtz while help us rebuild the smallest building blocks of our bodies with more durable materials there will be Nostalgia for our humble carbon based roots but there is Nostalgia for vinyl records also ultimately we did copy most of that analog music to the more flexible and capable world of transferable digital information the leap to Port our minds to a more capable Computing medium will happen gradually but nonetheless the ultimate goal of transhumanism is to lift human existence up to the next level and to eventually get rid of the cruel reality of our own mortality czw adds up until now our mortality was tied to the longevity of our Hardware when the hardware crashed that was it for many of our four Bears the hardware gradually deteriorated before it disintegrated as we cross the Divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology our identity will be based on our evolving mind file we will be the software not Hardware our immortality will be a matter of being sufficiently careful to make frequent backups yet as promising as the this Outlook sounds it also could be called a little naive in some way modern thinking and its rationalism has made the brain the center of our identity by contrast most ancient civilizations saw the heart as the seat of a human soul and intelligence it was the only organ in the ancient Egyptian process of mif ation that was left in its place while the liver lungs and the stomach were preserved separately and stored in canopic chars the brain on the other hand was not even deemed worthy to be starred and was thrown away after it had been pulled through the nose with a hook to make things more complicated recent Studies have found that there is a second brain in our gut with the digestive system and its large colonies of bacteria directly influencing our mood overall health and the way we think scientists even go so far as to say that more than half of our body is not human as the human cells make up only 43% of our total cell count the rest stems from microorganisms that live mainly in the gut therefore it might not make sense to Simply scan our brain transform it into software and to separate it from our physical body then there is also the big question of how our brain functions and what Consciousness actually is in his book The idea of the brain Matthew Cobb points out that all of these Mysteries have remained unsolved up until today the human brain project cost roughly 600 million e and ran for 10 years it sought to model the brain with computers to understand its underlying mechanisms yet in 2023 after the project of officially had ended people still had no idea about the basic functioning of our central nervous system the brain just like most algorithms continues to be an obscure blackbox transhumanists strive to uncover this last Terra incognita by taking more unconventional paths that might sound shocking to most people to put things into perspective Ray czw Compares himself to the Renaissance genius Leonardo DaVinci who against the approval of the leading sist dissected corpses to gain more insight into human anatomy but while the Sci-Fi like visions of Mind uploads seem like a light-hearted thought experiment first attempt to combine computer chips with brain like tissue have already been made aiming to create a hybrid intelligence that is both Ai and organic matter this backs the question where will all of these current developments lead to if we believe McKinzie and Company's study automatization could take over up to 30% of the hours worked globally and while a lot of new tasks might be created to make use of the new technologies some people seem to feel how their purpose in the world is slowly fading yal Noah Harari a medievalist and Military historian predicts that humans will lose their economic and military use in the future according to him they will be valued only as a data producing Collective feeding the algorithms with an endless stream of personal information and becoming fully predictable nothing but a small case of technologically enhanced experts will stay relevant as the elite whereas the algorithms might morph into legal persons and become the new Gods although Thomas malus's frightful vision of a population whose numbers would outrun the food supply did not become true our NeverEnding growth still has its price certain scientists are now speaking of a sixth mass extinction caused by human activities since the Industrial Revolution Nature has been plundered to feed the Moc of consumption as a consequence humans have transformed More than 70% of land surfaces and use 34s of freshwater resources for themselves with almost 8 billion people on the planet that want to have a full belly nature in intensive agriculture is never allowed to take a rest leading to soil degradation and a massive surge of deforestation studies estimate that about 75% of the insect population has disappeared in the last 50 years given the importance of these animals for the whole ecosystem this insect apocalypse should be taken seriously yet so many people maybe because they feel powerless resort to their distractions and forget about the Urgent problems in his book the age of spiritual machines czw writes that computer chip implants could not only be used to enhance our memory but also to excite the brain with simulated sensory inputs making a stay in the digital spheres even more tempting than it is already now later in the 21st century as neural implant Technologies become ubiquitous we will be able to create and interact with virtual environments without having to enter a virtual reality Booth your neural implants will provide the simulated sensory inputs of the virtual environment and your virtual body directly in your brain ultimately your experience would be highly realistic just like being in the real world in the virtual world you will meet other real people and simulated people eventually there won't be much difference now imagine a world in which a vast group of people have lost their jobs and simply don't bear The Bleak hopeless reality anymore to prevent these individuals from revolting against the system a new kind of opium could be offered to them a perfect world directly located in their brains in which they were allowed to be and feel everything without ever having to step outside of their time tiny little Chambers they would be nothing more than bodies rotting away in their hallucinatory dreams although we could have discussed many more aspects of futuristic dystopian scenarios let us take a quick breath and come to a conclusion here while images of the Apocalypse are as old as humankind it itself dystopias are more modern and often times seem to be born out of the dreams of a failed Utopia on a planet where different life goals and Views are all gathered under one unified Vision people must be either subjugated by force or like Huxley suggested in his Brave New World Through The Temptations of pleasure similar to The Tale of Frankenstein we have created a power that threatens to turn us into the victims of our own invention transhumanists seek to control technology to the extent of merging with it yet other thinkers like duor see our modern world more critically and find that we do not get uplifted but rather dehumanized by an never growing and expanding system what is your view on artificial intelligence and brain chip implants do you think that we will profit from the current developments or will they lead to our own demise as always I thank you so much for your time and for having stayed with me to the very end of this episode next time we are going to unravel the ancient Mysteries of the world's mummies until then have a magical time
2024-09-22