– Would you prefer it to give up eating or orgasming for the rest of your life?
+ can I give up both?
AI is looming over the globe, bioengineering, genetics and neurology are changing the way we look at human experience. To me it’s becoming more and more apparent that a booming change is about to come, some call it singularity, but I like to think of it as the “Extinction of the Human Race”.
I think what we are witnessing at the moment is by all means a complete destruction of all things “human”. I see two futures, I have no idea how or when they are about to come true, I don’t know which of this is more likely, all I know is that that the future of life is one or the other. It cannot be both, it cannot be neither.
• Dystopia
In this future, humanity is doomed, I do not know how, but there are many good candidates that are ready to destroy it. Meteors and viruses, atom bombs and Artificial Intelligence, smart humans try to sort them and find remedies for them, but no guarantees exist. Many things can go wrong and only few missteps are required to destroy civilizations, history can attest to that.
How ever when this dystopian end of humanity comes about, I think it’s going to catch us off gaurd, last humans remaining will be the most miserable of all time because they will know that our time, the boring little time of tick-tocks and reels was the pinnacle of humanity.
They would miss and reminisce about this glorious time of human civilization, when our worries were so high-minded: We got depressed over not getting into medical school, or convincing the most attractive mate to marry us… Without a care in the world for food or shelter, we overstuffed our stomachs and overstimulated our brains and lived in a constant trans-like state.
The biggest sorrow was that we didn’t appreciate what we have, we were so lost, so desperate for neat little useless awards that we missed the opportunity to truely seize what was right in front of us: peace, plenty, health.
And those humans, in their last dying days, rue the days that they missed to enjoy this heaven, to let go a little more and to try a little less. Especially if it was what that in the end brought about the dystopia was “humans trying so hard to become even better”. Which I think is a very reasonable possibility.
I think it is impossible for civilization to remain stagnant. Because there are so many things that can go wrong and will go wrong if humanity doesn’t get on top of them, and in order to get on top of them, humanity has no choice but to bring about the utopia.
• Utopia
I think it is impossible to think of utopia with our current minds. I believe people can have visions into that future, but for the most part, it will remain a great mystery until it happens.
My vision into this utopia also tells a story of human destruction. However it is a pleasant kind of destruction. Similar to how it feels when pulling out a bad tooth, or emptying an abscess: our consciousness is shackled by its humanity: hunger, lust, anger and angst, they all prevent it from experiencing what is deeper then mere eating and sex. Imagine a muscle that can pull heavy loads but instead merely twitchs because of it’s great desire to twitch all the time. Our mind is the muscle of our life and the meaning of this life is the load that this muscle can pull. However because it is governed by archaic algorithms, instead of looking for the biggest loads to carry, it merely twitchs.
In this future, whatever it maybe, humans are not going to face the same choices that we face today, they won’t have to stay in traffic or go to the gym to make muscles. They will be living a life without any of it.
Of course a muscle can still twitch when it begins carrying more load, our minds can still experience orgasm and food if they desired to, but I believe that when our minds are freed of their humanity, they won’t be much interested in sex or eating, it would probably become something like skiing, or playing the piano for us, it is pleasurable, some still do it because they enjoy it, but even for them it is not “need” it is something that they can do without.
Even the advantages that we enjoy as humans seem slow and inefficient. We walk and can run, why can not we fly? We can think logically and solve problems. But why with a mean IQ of 89? Why not 137? Why isn’t everyone as intelligent as John Von Neumann?
In this utopia, minds and personalities are as free from bodies as can be. Bodies become like cars, a vessel, a machine to hold and carry your mind, one no longer belongs to a single body, one can switch and change and customize the body to fit the needs of the mind, while it is no longer shackled by it.
However these beings, who can fly, speak all languages there is, can be of no sex, both sexes or even different sexes at will, run a hundred kilometres an hour and consume energy by recharging their batteries, are perhaps similar to humans, but they are definitely not humans anymore. They might remember that they came from us, but they know that they are not us.
In this world, our time is no longer the pinnacle, we are probably a time of less importance in history. There is not much that is interesting about our time: no great wars, no great leaders or heros, nothing. Just a bunch of humans suffering, mostly from their own humanity. We will be the generation that didn’t suffer the sorrows of Cesar and Christ, but didn’t enjoy the fruits of their suffering either. We will be the generation that reached the peak, but could not fly off of it to go higher and higher.
-Oss Ahmad
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P.S. I have written and published this text hastily, sorry in advance for all the syntactic and conceptual errors.
P.S. for a job interview I recently brushed this text up, it’s less erroneous now.