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I've been thinking about that with Childhood's End and a few book series. The thoughts also re-emerge with Star Trek TNG and Transcendence. And I can't say I'm all against it.

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Higher level of connectivity seems to be a 'natural' direction for humanity. People tend to overshare online. There was a rise in reality-tv and other less directed shows. We're connected to our social media more and more. Taking this to a whole new level is the desirability program of China, which is a step away from things like Black Mirror episode Nosedive, or the Orville Season 1 Episode 7, Majority Rule.

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But taking that similar concept even further, we start to arrive to a hive-mind like Dreams Must Die. In Dreams Must Die, the entire humanity is connected into a single collective and is governed by a select group of individuals. People still act as individuals, but they still are constantly a part of the collective and their actions are heavily influenced by this. So there is still a sense of self, but uniformity of thought is far larger, and shit gets done with greater efficiency. I'm sure some individuality is lost when the thoughts of everyone is shared with you instantly, there's less opportunity for nuance since everyone has all the information at once.

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Taking the hive-mind a step further we get into Star Trek Borgs. Borgs as I understood it were also a true hive-mind with no leaders at first, so the collective as a whole decided the most effective way towards their goals. They've also underwent so much modifications that emotional/hormonal responses to things were already greatly reduced and so cold hard logic prevailed. With that I assume the innovation side of humanity was also lost, which is why the scavenger nature of borgs stemmed from.

This kind of downsides were also at the heart of Transcendence, where the scientist uploaded became a single super-intelligence who then enslaved the townspeople to do his heavy lifting. Inefficient, since he had the nanite technology as well, and against our current sense of individuality. The idea overall isn't bad, humanity is stupid at the best of times so handing over the control to something beyond ourselves to me sounds like a fucking brilliant idea. Self-interests of the rich and powerful is what causes most of the mess we see today, and so an impartial ruler would just be a step up. But the notion of enslaving inefficient humans for drones seems ridiculous when you could just stow a cube of nanites on a satellity to mars and transform all that metal into a gigantic processor for yourself to improve and live in.

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Ultimately individuality is something I'm pretty fond of. But if we were to merge into a single consciousness in stages like sampled in popular media (from constantly monitored/connected individuals to a "Dreams Must Die" hive-mind, to a Borg like hivemins), would we even notice our sense of self disappearing? And more to the point, would we know how to miss it? If the change is gradual enough, we might still feel like ourselves, even though the entire human race thinks as one.

Okay, so I wasn't sure how to present this, but I recently created a really long reply to this video to address some concerns that the general public had with transhumanism (or at least as portrayed by Istvan). I wanted to bring it to you guys for a couple of reasons:

1. So that you can help improve my argument (challenge, recommend changes, supply better sources, etc).
   
   
2. So that I can get your opinions/thoughts on Istvan; is representing transhumanism well?
   
   
3. So that you can help argue for transhumanism over on YouTube as well.
   
   Here is a quote of my thread:
   > Okay... So I'm a transhumanist, but I'm rather disappointed in Zoltan Istvan and his run for candidacy for a variety of reasons. Before I get into that let me go ahead and clear up many misconceptions I see about transhumanism in the comments with sources and science!
   
   > Transhumanism is generally the belief that technology should be integrated to augment human life. Most Transhumanist do not differentiate between the use of something like a robotic prosthesis to enhance already fully functioning humans (that is, non-disabled becoming enhanced by technology) and the use of something like a cell phone to enhance our day-to-day activities. They are both potential boons to mankind. Generally there are three aspects to transhumanist thought, that is life-extension (anti-aging), life-quality improvement (better bodies and minds) and intelligence improvement.
   
   > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTMS9y8OVuY
   
   > First lets address the concerns about the process of life extension... There exist some pretty interesting studies that involve preventing telomeres from decaying. Telomeres are little caps that are responsible for replenishing our DNA. In a nutshell as we age we use up those telomeres and when we eventually run out our cells become unable to replicate, causing our cells to slowly die and therefore us to eventually stop functioning and die as well. However, what we have learned is that there are some animals that exist that DO NOT AGE. Yes, you heard it right, they don't die of old age. But this is not the most solid example, as lobsters do die eventually, typically to infections. Jellyfish are a better example. They are seemingly immortal, from a biological standpoint. But this does mean that methods of life extension are rather natural.
   
   > The most important thing to realize here is that old age, while seemingly natural, unyielding, just how the world works the truth is that old age is the leading cause of death EVERYWHERE. More than cancer, hiv, car accidents, drunk drivers, terrorist attacks, wars, etc, etc, etc.. But we don't treat it as a disease that can be cured. We accept it's death tolls. But why? Maybe this guy can convince you that death is unnecessary:
   
   > https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging?language=en
   
   > For those concerning with overpopulation, as now this is where most people bring it up... Let's ignore the reason that Aubrey de Grey gave for now. I could counter simply by inquiring that cancer is preventing overpopulation; why do we treat cancer, but instead I'll challenge it directly. You're not wrong, in a world where people don't die (to old age) population wouldn't not decrease in the substantial amounts that it does. But realize first that population growth is continuing regardless. Our population is growing at an increasing rate so the question remains how to stop population growth? I imagine most rational people would not say, "kill off X percentage of the population". So why do we accept death from old age? There are many interesting ideas on how to stop population growth, one is that by increasing longevity and intelligence at exponential rates we'll (relatively) soon be able to colonize other locales in our solar system (and beyond) and in my opinion this is the end game, but to give you one that has good and relevant data for our present situation check out:
   
   > https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language=en
   
   > For those concerned with immortality, let me cure your woes as well as I can. Not dying from old age doesn't mean death from other causes aren't possible, but even assuming that we cannot die from any cause this simply means that instead of dying untimely that you are in control of your own time of death. You will be able to choose when you want to die rather than letting random variables assess and determine that for you. My thinking is that when we develop to be able to live forever we'll quickly become versed as to how to deal with this phenomena but ultimately as society we have a ways to go with this, as this falls under the classification of suicide. I can't really speak to those fronts at the moment as I'm having trouble consolidating those sources (perhaps in another thread). Ask me directly if you want more direct answers for immortality concerns.
   
   > For those concerned with Technology and its use on the human body... I usually attack the conversation a bit like this: biology is a complicated mechanism that we are only just beginning to understand and unravel. However, even though that is true some things will long be mystery to us and there are many things about biology that aren't quite elegant. That's not to say it's not marvelous but there are many arbitrary functions, bad designs and crazy chemistries that we can't fully predict. Just think about all the controversy over medications and their side effects and imagine just having to deal with faulty functions like a limp leg or mental disorder. Truth is, it's very possible to make our design better. With clean, minimal structures we can sidestep the complicated biology and match the same functions with simplicity that's easy to understand. For reference check out Hugh Herr and his works (a rough quote from his talks, "we figured out how to model the leg perfectly just from three lines of C# code):
   
   > https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let_us_run_climb_and_dance?language=en
   
   > For those concerned with Artificial Intelligence and its role in human society.. let's begin by removing everything we know from science fiction and apocalypse movies. Truth is, we don't know if true artificial intelligence (also called Strong AI) is possible and if it is we don't know what will happen. But we can speculate: If we create a intelligence that is allowed to think for itself it will be on us to ensure that we treat it as we would a human. If we act like bigots/xenophobes and suppress them like we have to our own kind in the past, they'll probably react with violence like we have to our own kind in our past. I think that as society we have a long way to mature to be able to handle Strong AI. And by the time we get to that point we will probably not being able to differentiate ourselves from the AI counter parts as we both would be functioning on similar levels of intelligence what with the technology we augment ourselves with. And worst case scenario, if AI is turned against us they would very likely maintain us the same way we maintain lesser species here on earth. I doubt this did much to cure your woes, but luckily Strong AI is a far off technology:) The best I can say is that if technology keeps increasing at this rate, it will happen and it is up to us to determine what that means. The AI we currently have is called soft AI, and is not capable of self-learning and if you want to see when AI is predicted to escalate you can reference:
   
   > http://www.amazon.com/Are-We-Spiritual-Machines-Kurzweil/dp/0963865439 - And generally all of George Kurzweil's writings speak to this eventual phenonma, called the singularity, however do take his predicition with a grain of salt as he is motivating by his own hopes of self-preservation, you can see my reddit post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/transhumanism/comments/3flqj4/kurzweil_skepticism_what_do_you_guys_think/
   
   > Anyways, I think that about covers the concerns... I know it's a mess, this thread was a bit of an undertaking, so please, if anything was confusing or you want me to better present an argument, just ask me. I'll gladly clarify or challenge assertions.
   
   > So why am I disappointed in Istvan? Honestly, it's too soon to fight this battle. There are still many more people we need to convince and more disagreements that need to be resolved before we decisively act. Istvan simply failed to convince and along with terrible advertising just comes across as crazy because he doesn't cater to those who DON'T support transhumanism. You must educate and inspire before you can jump straight into all the mess of science and transhumanism. And you surely have to have a stronger voice with strong supporters to fight past the muck of the absolute shit fest of politics concerning gun-laws and terrorist (and tigers and bears, oh my!). No doubt that electing Istvan would probably be better than ANY other candidate, but he simply is not selling anyone on the idea. IMO he should have done better to unify the scientific community around him and then use that to convince the public that these silly little things we fight over yield no fruit but just more hatred in the world. But he failed and will probably fade to ambiguity, setting back the transhumanist movement.
   
   
   
   
   > ....
   
   
   
   
   > That about wraps it up. If you want to know more about transhumanism, don't follow Istvan, come check out the subreddit:
   > https://www.reddit.com/r/transhumanism/
   
   > And watch this video (if you haven't already): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTMS9y8OVuY

With all due respect current cryonics methods are just as deluded as pill-popping. I'm on the board of The Brain Preservation Foundation. We award motivational cash prizes (like X-Prizes) to advance new methods of brain preservation. In 2016 and 2018 we awarded our small and large mammal prizes for preservation of a rabbit and pig brain using new methods that passed peer-reviewed rigorous verification. The methods used by existing cryonics companies are almost certainly killing you. At the least, they have not passed, nor really submitted to, third-party, objective, or peer-reviewed verification. I don't mean to rain on cryonicists' parade, but I'm scientific and practical about the realities involved.


Here's my article following the large mammal prize:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/implications-of-the-bpf-large-mammal-brain-preservation-prize/


I'm also the author of A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading btw.


Cheers!

http://www.amazon.com/Daemon-Daniel-Suarez/dp/0451228731

That two part series has a lot of things like this. Virtual objects interacting with the real world etc... Definitely a neat idea and a good read.

http://www.brainpreservation.org/links/

and as a bonus

https://www.amazon.com/Taxonomy-Metaphysics-Mind-Uploading-Keith-Wiley/dp/0692279849

I think I win

>Literally has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism or free markets.

The scientific method is making a hypothesis, and objectively analyzing the results. The birth of what most people consider modern economics is usually attributed to the "Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith, one of the earliest work of economic scientific literature. He impartially observed the properties of countries that get rich, and ones that don't. He objectively came to the conclusion that wealth comes from individual pursuits. Before you armchair-economics your way out of this, try to understand what the implication of that is. Don't give me this "not-science" angle. This is the application of the scientific method in economics. Before that, the entire globe thought like you. "But what if corporations get too rich?", "What happens when we run out of resources", "Who will keep them in check" were all the kind of things that everyone believe before the age of science. Then OBJECTIVE, IMPARTIAL analysis suggested something counter-intuitive. So either you're tunnel visioning into your own perspective without fully researching what you're talking about, or you're spreading lies.

>And to say that the free market has only raised the standard of living is to be horrifically Euro-centric.

Not even close. Counter examples: Singapore, Hong-Kong, South Korea (especially if you compare to North Korea), Japan, Israel, South Africa, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, etc, etc, etc... Evidence is on my side. Not even the reddest communist would disagree with me on this, so I'm not sure what point you're making.

> I would suggest that you look into countries that are currently in poverty, and realize the staggering amount of harm that came from Western "free markets."

Oh, really? Have you heard of the Soviet Union? They didn't collapse because they were militarily weak... Ever hear of communist China? You probably haven't because as far as you can remember everything was probably made in China.... A little disclaimer China before the 1980s was not the same it was today. The high-school debate class level arguments you're throwing at me right now was national propaganda there for decades.


>In the 1300s and 1400s, the system of Mercantilism (effectively proto-capitalism, where countries tried to maximize their profits and encourage the expansion of the merchant class) caused endless war and strife.

Wrong. War and strife for trade didn't start and end in the 1400s... In fact the little detail that separates our version of capitalism and the form of mercantilism practiced in western Europe is a little thing called property rights - an exclusive PRIVILEGE that only used to be handed to kings. Then a little thing called the magna carta extended this to knights, earls, dukes, and other nobility. It was considered a PRIVILEGE to own and trade things on your own whim, so don't give me this stupid shit about it always being there... It was the age of enlightenment that gave this right to ALL citizen. No one advocates for mercantilisim, but they do for free markets are private property rights. A great book to read on this would be this.


>Then, in the 1500s, Europe collectively discovered they could conveniently export all this strife to other continents and just get the money. Colonists enslaved natives wherever they went, stealing land to live on and goods to send back to the mainland. The standard of living in Europe began to rise, but only on the backs of the exploited.

Yes because there was no more strife in Europe since the 1500s... The reason for colonialism was the desire for European monarchs to DOMINATE the trade routes with India... not to export manufacturing like we do now... Using the government to kill people for money has nothing to do with economic systems. You're confusing two separate things into one ( monarchism + capitalism = capitalism, apparently) because you want a capitalist enemy to hate. That would be like saying whites were the ones did all the conquering and killing, and therefore all whites are evil (white culture + capitalism = white culture). But this would be wrong and stupid. You need to be able to separate issues, or you'll end up blaming the wrong things your entire natural born life, without ever actually solving anything.


>It was entirely the fault of the Company, which had most of the parliament in its pocket due to lack of regulation. A huge amount of MPs actually owned stock in the Company, and many even sat on its board of directors. This meant that the people in the British government stood to directly profit off the success of the Company, regardless of whether it's actions were actually beneficial to the country (which they weren't). In the end, this left the Company with almost absolute power. A single corporation managed to get an entire country addicted to Opium, culturally assimilate their primary (stolen) product until it was ingrained into the mind and soul of every citizen, and then influence the government into funding expeditions and raising taxes on their exports to artificially create scarcity.


Creating artificial scarcity is a work of government, not markets. Markets are lifeless. They have no ultimate end. Markets simply mean the lack of barriers in trade between private entities. They are an organic system that works around problems. Which is the exact reason why black markets exist in the most dangerous of totalitarian regimes. The colonization of India under the British Empire officially started in 1857... The East India Company was started in the 1600s. Not that it matters, as you think violence by kinds = capitalism or something which is blatantly wrong... In fact, most of the people of what is now Bengal and Orissa did not view the East India Company as tyrants when they started.


>This is your precious "free market" in action. The whole point of capitalism is that somewhere along the line, someone is trying to make a profit more than they are trying to help anyone. The only way capitalism can create a higher standard of living for any given number of people is by exploiting an equal or greater number of others.


The free market is the fact that we have far fewer natural resources than we once did, yet we have FAR more energy and output than we EVER did, and that is AFTER a population explosion. Free markets allow regular people to get rich by solving problems that societies want. They are not influenced by votes or governments. They grow organically, and they will exist even if you ban it.



EDIT: I have lived in a country that didn't believe in capitalism, and then my family fled to one that does. There are good people and bad people everywhere. But if you care about the human spirit, and freedom, capitalism is OBVIOUSLY superior, by any metric. Do some traveling - see the world. Visit countries that have adopted opposite philosophies than the West. Try to see if it truly is corruption and only that keeps other countries down.

> programs can't run while they're in transit

You'd have a signal delay that was no higher than the actual signal propagation delay to get halfway around the world, which is about 100ms, 150-200ms roundtrip. Higher than that, you can just forward the signal to the copy still running on the source node and get the answer from there. Practically, at some point we'd probably understand the brain well enough that it wouldn't feel like an interruption, more like having to think a bit longer before certain things came to mind.

The way that this could actually become an issue is if emulated brains can run a lot faster than biological brains. A factor of 1000 does not seem implausible, and that would also multiply any transmission delay.

On the other hand, travelling around the world in 20 minutes is still a significant improvement on the status quo, which people are fine with.

For more on this, I would recommend Robin Hanson's Age of Em, which goes into this scenario in a lot of detail.

TL;DRs are fine, but I still encourage you to read the whole article.

For further reading see www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-Makes/dp/0547508182/

There is a nice book called "age of em" that explains how a capitalist world with mind upload could look like:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198754620/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0198754620&linkCode=as2&tag=transhumanism-20&linkId=7b799c47657f5de5c73b71098c70db38

I just finished up Perilous Waif. It's not super well written but it was very fun.

Yes, the first paragraph of each section should not be indented. Look at the interior for The Girl on the Train here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Girl-Train-Paula-Hawkins/dp/1594633665/
The first line is flush, and the rest of the paragraphs of each section are indented. This is Chicago Manual of Style, just picked a best seller as it was quick to find.

220k is quite long. I'm currently editing a sci-fi book to go to publishers to get it down from 140k as that's a bit too long. (I edit for pubs and a lit agency).

If it's e-book only it's not as big of a deal, though you may have a difficult time sustaining readers for a book that long. Having said that, it seems you're pubbing independently, so you have the choice of what you would like to do. If this came across my desk for work, I would likely suggest either tightening severely (150k max) or splitting into more than one book.

You're probably aware already, but for anyone reading along there is some good history to this general idea, or at least something close to what you're discussing. Martine Rothblatt wrote about the links between transgender and transhuman in 2011.

Going back further:

>At the 2003 Transvision conference Vanessa Foster, the chair of the National Transgender Acton Coalition, took the podium in the “The Future of Sex and Gender” workshop and announced that she was a pre-operative transsexual. Her presentation was built around the theme of the village mob’s attack on a misunderstood Frankenstein’s monster. Between images of beautiful transsexuals and stills from Frankenstein movies, Ms. Foster declared that transsexuals were the first transhumanists. As history we can debate the point, but as politics it was an historical moment. Transhumanism as a vanguard civil rights movement had arrived, and the stunned but open expressions on the faces of the largely straight male audience showed the work that transhumanists still needed to do to reach out to the disparate constituencies that will build democratic transhumanism.

Link.

This is an offshoot from the grand volume titled The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution. You may get it in print on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Syntellect-Hypothesis-Paradigms-Minds-Evolution/dp/0578451204

Recently, I read Humans: 3.0 and I enjoyed it. One reason was that its current events/ immediate future discussion and not 'end game' speculation.

The Transhumanist Reader has some good essays if one wants such:

The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118334310/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_Ziy6Bb354ENSC

A relevant book: Race Against the Machine.

At $4, the Kindle version is a bargain.

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI

This is an excerpt from a new book by Josh Mitteldorf and Dorion Sagan:

Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old-And What It Means for Staying Young

Start with the already mentioned Transcendence - The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity. Then The Transhumanist Reader.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Transhumanist-Reader-Contemporary-Technology/dp/1118334310

Similar, and newer book by the same author: https://www.amazon.com/Biotechnology-Abolish-Suffering-David-Pearce-ebook/dp/B075MV9KS2

Here you go!

> For the record, telling people what they should and shouldn’t want to do with their own body is decidedly not transhumanist.

Thank you for clarifying. I was however, not 'telling' this person or anyone what to do. I was pleading with them not to do this.

> You’re right about OP not taking it seriously enough, but that’s pretty much as far as it goes.

It would be nice if you could offer sources. As it stands now, I did about an hour of research to learn more, as apparently I was so wrong about this. What I found:

Magnets can indeed become a nuisance. I don't know where you live, but I live in a dense city of 14 milllion+-, and there would be a large volume of interference, and I could imagine it becoming very annoying (especially depending on the sensitivity).

There are NO outlines for safety procedures that I could find on the US FDA webpage, which should be raising alarm bells about safety considerations!

The Wikipedia article is disturbingly short and has lines like:

> Both is often done without numbing or just ice water (most countries just allow doctors to use numbing).

This implies that a surgeon is NOT implanting an item into someone's body? Again, alarm bells.

From one of the only articles I could find about the topic (which seems to be arguing in favor of it):

>Risks include a failure of the biocoating, or having the magnet shatter. You could end up with heavy metals being exposed to your internal body. This leaves people with the horrible decision of whether to cut it out immediately — when it’s in several pieces — or wait to see what happens. There are accounts where, over time, a shattered magnet reassembled itself, and where function and sensation returned."

So, again, what I had said in my comment. I spent some time trying to sift through some medical journals I have access too and couldn't find any serious research (which isn't to say it doesn't exist, it may very well exist), however there is plenty about issues with infections happening after medically necessary implants are implanted by medical professionals (surgeons) (here's just one of the first ones that popped up in a google scholar search -This is focusing more on a specific infection, species, and biofilms forming [and becoming drug resistant]). So if its a concern with legitimate medical implants, who wouldn't we be worried about it in these magnet implants, which would not likely be implanted (or even permitted to be implanted) by a surgeon?

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I don't feel I am gatekeeping. I don't see the transhumanism of doing this. I see that it sounds awesome... Which is why I looked into it a few years ago, as I wanted to try it myself, but after looking into it then, I wasn't confident of the safety of such a procedure. And I ask again, how does this enhance the human condition? Yes it makes us 'more than human' in that you can sense a magnetic field, but you can get the same effect with an external device, without any of the medical risks (first thing that came up on amazon for EMF detector). I think if this were a proven and safe technology I would not have the same concerns. I also think that if the cost is the primary concern, this is probably not a good idea for you, as it is NOT well tested.

I am sorry if I offended you or anyone else, but I don't think this is advisable and isn't really what I consider H+. If you disagree thats fine. I am not stopping you.