Caltrops - Motherfucking News





	[quote name="Bill Dungsroman"][quote name="Ray, of Light"]<a href=http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993488>This</a>: [quote]The world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - is about to be tested in California. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.[/quote] With the demise of communism and Seinfeld, there are few things left to terrify me, and this is one of them. People are talking about entire brains in silicon, and what that might mean, etc. etc., but that reality is decades away, at least. Even if or when, semiconductors of such density are devilishly expensive to produce, and vigorously wasteful in their use of energy.[/quote] Did you just actually say "People are talking about...?" People were talking several decades ago about living on Mars by the present day. The Moon, at least. This isn't a facetious comparison, either. More on that later. [quote name="Ray, of Light"]No, it's another prospect that keeps me up at night. We can grow organs -- skin, at least -- in vats, today. We can synthesize most any hormone. We have an infrastructure that makes communication lightweight and inexpensive. We have the brain's I/O characteristics sussed, though the high-level protocol remains a (partial, unravelling) mystery. [/quote] I must inform you of something: the unravelling of higher brain function is, at this point, a Zeno's paradox. Halfway to halfway, <I>ad infinitum</I>. That doesn't mean it will be forever, but we aren't nearly as close as you'd like to think. [quote name="Ray, of Light"]Now, imagine that someone grows a brain. He figures a way to simulate sensory input, Matrix-style, and gives the brain a faux-life based on, say, trading stocks. Or engineering, or telemarketing. He gives it limited access to the outside, and gets it generating income, and then he grows a thousand more. That man now has 1001 minds in his employ and a payroll of 300 calories per day, per head. Each has studied its trade since birth, and will never sue or strike or leave to compete with him.[/quote] By "he" I assume you mean "they," or else you may as well tell me that "he" will harness the 1.21 Gigawatts from a lightning bolt that will strike the clock tower to power his army of automatons. In the far future, okay, some company builds the hubots or romen or whatever. They lease them to Dean Whitter or NASA or the world's most succesful telemarketing firm ever (even though, it should still come with a protocol for what to do when the police raid). Unless the production company itself has dark ulterior motives (darker than the absurd revenue it would haul in in the first place; good luck on that account), nobody ain't takin' over nuthin' with them ROW-bots, no how. Never mind that, let's get back to cost. Will the point ever be reached where it is less expensive to purchase and maintain these androids than it is to purchase and maintain one supercomputer to handle all the heavy math and hire and maintain humans to do all the monkey work? Why aren't we living on the Moon? You know why. Is one supercomputer+1001 human workers really more expensive than 1001 androids that sell at millions <I>per unit</I>, plus maintenance (cheaper than health insurance, which you subtract from the human worker's paid wage anyway?). [quote name="Ray, of Light"]Or, maybe it will begin as therapy for quads, freed from their vestigal bodies and attached to a box that lets them run and fuck again. It won't be long before someone -- I'm looking at you, Japan -- makes the leap voluntarily, because it's more fun or less expensive or more polite than existing as an "able".[/quote] You totally just switched gears here. Is it a body with an original mortal brain in it, or is it a <I>de novo</I> brain that only simulates a brain grown from the male sperm-fertilized egg of a female? Because the latter is somewhat unquieting, but ridiculously far off, while the former sounds great to me and Christopher Reeve. You should be more worried about all of us getting fitted for new bodies like buying a new car in the future as opposed to androids. [quote name="Ray, of Light"]Either way, the result is a mass of "people" that consume next to nothing and compete with dominating efficiency. If agriculture is economic gunpowder, at-cost brains are the fucking atom bomb. There will be wars fought over this. I'm not sure who I want to win.[/quote] They did all their consuming pre-natal, if you will. What the fuck Ray, Super Androids of the Futurrre! won't be made of recycled paper and old tractor tires. The possibility of existence makes you shudder, the fucking <I>price tag</I> on those mothers makes me shudder. And your atom bomb metaphor was used in the '60's for space travel, 'member? And that war was cold, anyway. BDR [/quote]