Human life, as life on Earth, is boring/pointless without the Singularity, from my point of view.
Can you expand on this? I’m not sure I see how one would reach this sort of value system. Even if we only say double human lifespans that seems better than nothing. And even if things end up being pretty similar to how they are now, that won’t mean there won’t be interesting things to examine. Whether P = NP and whether the Riemann hypothesis is true, and whether there’s any FTL travel, whether supersymmetry is correct, all seem to be interesting questions whether or not there’s a Singularity.
It seems like comments like this are the sort of thing that makes a lot of transhumanists and singulitarians pattern match to being religious. A major part of many religious outlooks is the certainty that things are meaningless without their specific religion. Some forms of Christianity have been made this into an important theological claim, and other religions make similar claims.
I think the key point is that the exclusion of transhuman and posthuman tech makes the scope of possible futures orders of magnitude less appealing, even at maxima, than that of possible futures that do include such tech.
The jump from there to outright refusal to consider such futures and a rejection of their utility seems a bit extreme, but I would never have made or seen a parallel with religion until someone else mentioned it. IME, the grandparent comment would mostly / most frequently be interpreted (even by random people) as “Hey, wouldn’t it be really really awesome if we had X? The rest / real life seems pretty boring by comparison.”
Can you expand on this? I’m not sure I see how one would reach this sort of value system. Even if we only say double human lifespans that seems better than nothing. And even if things end up being pretty similar to how they are now, that won’t mean there won’t be interesting things to examine. Whether P = NP and whether the Riemann hypothesis is true, and whether there’s any FTL travel, whether supersymmetry is correct, all seem to be interesting questions whether or not there’s a Singularity.
It seems like comments like this are the sort of thing that makes a lot of transhumanists and singulitarians pattern match to being religious. A major part of many religious outlooks is the certainty that things are meaningless without their specific religion. Some forms of Christianity have been made this into an important theological claim, and other religions make similar claims.
Aaarrrgh, The Enemy!
I think the key point is that the exclusion of transhuman and posthuman tech makes the scope of possible futures orders of magnitude less appealing, even at maxima, than that of possible futures that do include such tech.
The jump from there to outright refusal to consider such futures and a rejection of their utility seems a bit extreme, but I would never have made or seen a parallel with religion until someone else mentioned it. IME, the grandparent comment would mostly / most frequently be interpreted (even by random people) as “Hey, wouldn’t it be really really awesome if we had X? The rest / real life seems pretty boring by comparison.”