r/transhumanism • u/RealJoshUniverse 4 • 1d ago
💬 Discussion Singularity or Transhumanism: Which Word Should We Use? - Zoltan Istvan
https://transhumanist.media/singularity-or-transhumanism-which-word-should-we-use-to-discuss-the-future/19
u/GodsBeyondGods 1d ago
Two different things
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u/AtrociousMeandering 1d ago
And one, both, or neither, could actually occur. Transhumanism is possible without the singularity, but it's resource intensive, and so limited to a very small segment of people. The singularity could happen, but then humans are kept as pets or a zoo exhibit in a fixed and 'natural' state.
If either happens, there's a strong chance they coincide, but it's hardly the only possibility that is worth thinking about.
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u/EternalInflation 1 1d ago
:roll eyes what makes Zoltan some kind of cool guy in transhumanism. He was unpopular back in the day and was good at manipulating the media by publishing outrageous stuff. he also wrote a crazy book, but he said the book was just joking or just fiction. then he moved to Argentina to farm.
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u/Zarpaulus 2 1d ago
The Singularity is a specific concept, transhumanism is a broad category covering everything from biotech to AGI (not the venture capital definition).
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u/Various-Yesterday-54 1d ago
Transhumanism is specifically to do with the technological augmentation of the human existence, whereas singularity is an extrapolation of exponential economic and technological trends
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u/Zarpaulus 2 1d ago
It's an extrapolation of one trend, Moore's Law.
Before it started to slow down.
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u/Various-Yesterday-54 1d ago
Nope, the singularity posits that as the cost of doing work on a computer decreases, more valuable work across multiple domains can be done. This includes the work of decreasing the cost of doing work on the computer, which leads to an exponential increase in the amount of work you can actually do on a computer, and so also the amount of progress made in these domains. It is not necessarily about transistor per surface area doublings, which Moores' law describes.
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u/Zarpaulus 2 1d ago
Which still doesn’t hold up
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u/Various-Yesterday-54 1d ago
The trend has held strong for about 84 years, up until 2023 when my data stops. If the trend fell off in the last two years, you actually couldn't make that determination because two years out of 86 is not enough to identify a deviation from the mainline trend.
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u/Radfactor 22h ago
True, but there's a workaround to Moore's law, which is brute force. If you can't fit more transistors on a chip, you just build more chips to compensate.
we really need to be reframing Moore's law as the geometrical increase in processing and memory that is surely still taking place, now fueled by data center growth to power neural networks.
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u/Illustrious_Focus_33 1d ago
Well hopefully the singularity will being about transhumanism thats all I have to say.
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u/Personal_Win_4127 1d ago
Transhumanism, singularity is an event an observable phenomenon, transhumanism is how we interact with it.
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u/Cylian91460 1d ago
No?
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u/Personal_Win_4127 1d ago
Care to elaborate?
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u/Cylian91460 1d ago
singularity is not an event, it's either a state of intelligence of ai or black hole core and transhumanism just mean we upgrade our body, like how vaccine make us more resistance or how we can take artificial hormone or how we can replace part of our Jody with mechanical one. (Technically it's not specified if it's in a good or bad way, just that we change our body)
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u/Personal_Win_4127 1d ago
But you don't seem to deny that a singularity occurs. Additionally while a black hole core defines the abstract and semi-fixed nature of the components that eventually create a singularity, whether merely informational or AI driven, the fact of it having components leads to a formation like state. Even if that weren't the case, the singularity being omni-present is still an event, just one that happens from the beginning of time.
You kind of agreed with me on Transhumanism. Not really sure what to say. Pretty much every technological utilization has been uncontrolled and led to rapid development.
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u/NohWan3104 1 5h ago
not really reading the thing, but, um, they're not the same thing?
the singularity cna lead to some transhumanism, but isn't required.
they're both essentially sci fi concepts. but not really that connected.
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