Brains in a jar or death? ATH guests on who or what the human of the future will be

How many cybernetic eyes will the human of the future need, and how do you send a robocar to work on your behalf? Leading cryptovisionaries discuss this and more at ForkLog’s All Time Half conference.

Will AI rule the human of the future?

Vladimir Ponimayushchi (POSTHUMAN, Sputnik Network: We already live in a world where people consult ChatGPT on how to act in a given situation. A person follows the answer and gets a good result.

When people are guided by personal views and their ego, they are more likely to get something other than what they expected. Conversely, the chances of success, it seems to me, increase markedly if one listens to the “opinion” of artificial intelligence. So why should I listen to myself if AI suggests a more optimal option?

Or, for example, a person goes to a doctor who says: “Judging by my experience, accumulated over 25 years of case conferences, you have an 87% probability of disease X, 10% of disease Y, and I do not know what might be in the remaining three percent.” Artificial intelligence will tell the same patient: “You have a 98% probability of disease A.” Whom are we more likely to trust? The choice, it seems to me, is obvious.

It is similar with courts. From research popularised by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, we know that a judge’s verdict is highly likely to depend on whether he had a good breakfast on the day of sentencing. So I personally would prefer that such important decisions be made by a normal, objective artificial intelligence.

I am sure we will arrive at a world where people do what AI says. We need to curb our ego and realise that artificial intelligence is capable of more than we are. That is what it was created for.

Is the human future a “brain in a jar”?

Vladimir Ponimayushchi: We have two paths: cyborgisation or death. Those who do not want the former will most likely get the latter, that is, they will die. And vice versa. And the meaning of life, probably, is not to die.

We are in a jar already—just not an artificial one but a biological one. Fragile, exposed to external influences, but moving on two legs. Why not put it on wheels, make it bulletproof, protected from radiation, and so on? What stops us from replacing our natural skin, subject to ageing, with the same skin but better: not letting ultraviolet through and able to change colour at the wearer’s will?

Young people rarely think about this, but the older we get, the more clearly we understand how wonderful it is to have a properly functioning body.

What might digital immortality look like?

Dmitry Starodubtsev (cyber~Congress): I believe in a very simple idea of life extension—transferring consciousness to a computer. Imagine that you have five devices that you have trained on your data to make decisions. Add to these computers a high-speed interface that allows them to exchange information instantly.

Suppose these models are not identical but 99% similar, and they make decisions through multisig. Of course, you are unlikely to get much pleasure from such immortality, but it is already something more than our abstract notions of the afterlife.

These are quite concrete “bodies” with data that will function as long as they have tokens in their account to pay for electricity, if they are computers, or to order food, if they are biorobots.

If you train a neural network on all of Gogol’s texts, will Gogol attain digital immortality?

Vladimir Menaskop Popov (Web 3.0): I think that is what he was striving for when he carried out the burning of the second volume of Dead Souls. It was precisely personal immortality he probably wanted to tell people about with this gesture—so that they would keep asking: what was that? And, in search of an answer, try to reconstruct the destroyed text.

Of course, Gogol did not imagine that some artificial intelligence would arise for this, on which big money would also be made. But he definitely wanted his manuscript to move into a kind of metaverse.

I think this is a very proper use of AI, capable of deciphering texts or, for example, restoring dead languages so that we hear how ancient people spoke. That is the most interesting thing—how a person spoke. If recordings of how dully Joseph Brodsky read his poems had not been preserved, it would have been a great loss for world poetry.

So—yes, Gogol has gained digital immortality. If only because we still discuss him and always will. That is how our historical economy works.

If machines do the work, who will receive a pension?

Vladimir Ponimayushchi: I strongly doubt that such a phenomenon as a pension will survive at all. I think sooner or later we will come to an economy that is neither planned nor market, but algorithmic, built on artificial intelligence.

We will get the very best services and goods at the lowest prices, because AI will find the most advantageous trade-offs, and the economy will be run mostly by robots. As a result, people will cease to need money as such.

Imagine this. I bought a Tesla robocar. I use it for at most four hours a day; the other 20 it just stands under my window. Why not order it: “Tesla, don’t stand idle, go work for Uber.” And the car ferries people, refuels itself, pays for it itself.

If it breaks, it calls to be towed and repaired. If suddenly it has no money for this, let it take a loan. Better still—let it lease another Tesla and send it to work for Uber.

More than one generation fought not to work in old age. Last year there were mass demonstrations in France against pension reform. People took to the streets to fight for the right to retire at 52 rather than 57. But personally I do not understand this. What pension? What are you even talking about?

People simply do not know that one can live differently. It is not that we lacked the tools to realise our natural utopias. The problem is that people do not know these tools exist.

On the other hand, we do not go to some uncontacted Amazonians and tell them: “Your gods do not exist; here is quantum mechanics, let us build spacecraft together.”

Apparently, the future is unevenly distributed. We are obliged to tell people that a better life is possible. But we understand we will not be able to save everyone.

How many eyes does a person need to be happy?

Vladimir Ponimayushchi: The more, the better. At least three; at most—all the eyes of all other people should be mine. We will be a single whole with the help of decentralised data storage.

All people should become a distributed cloud service with neurointerfaces, in which information exchange occurs at the speed of light. Which, by the way, is faster than thoughts arise in the human brain.

Will the human of the future be able to build a state without a state?

Sergey Simonovski (Citizen Web3): In fact, it is closer than it seems. What we call the state exists in digital form. They only lack a properly constructed Web3. If they get it, they will turn into “states without a state”.

Vladimir Menaskop Popov: I will quote the great Siberian philosopher Igor Fyodorovich Letov: “Kill the state within yourself.” That is all that is needed to build a “state without a state”.