The Orion's Arm Universe Project Forums

Since OA's a transhumanist hard sci-fi space opera, you'd probably want to know who the heck exactly coined the term "transhumanist". Well, that person's FM-2030, an Iranian-born futurist and the 1st self-described transhumanist. Instead of writing an essay about who he was, I'll post links to essays and videos about him. After reading and watching these items, you may discuss about this interesting man.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/201306...rticle_mar
An essay by Believer about him

http://bryanlawver.com/21st-century-man.html
An essay about him by Bryan Lawver

http://fm2030.us/larry-king-interviews-fm-2030/
A video interview of FM with Larry King, discussing fossil fuels, the end of money and more

http://www.scribd.com/doc/10948503/Up-Wing-Priorities
A newspaper article by FM predicting a post-scarcity economy by 2010, among other things.

I have heard of him; he is almost certainly the first self-described transhumanist, although there were others who have explored the concepts of enhancement and technological singularity earlier. He was remarkably optimistic to expect post-scarcity by 2010; we will be lucky to have it by 2610, in my opinion (but OA tends to take the long view).

FM-2030's ideas about the 'Up-Wing' should be included in OA, and we could probably draw a political compass showing this tendency; the axes could be

..... Technological Transcendence
.......................^
Collectivism<-------->Individualism
.......................v
.....Technological Conservatism

and/or

..... Technological Transcendence
.............................^
Authoritarianism<-------->Freedom/Anarchy
.............................v
......Technological Conservatism

(06-24-2014, 06:45 PM)stevebowers Wrote: [ -> ]FM-2030's ideas about the 'Up-Wing' should be included in OA, and we could probably draw a political compass showing this tendency; the axes could be

..... Technological Transcendence
.......................^
Collectivism<-------->Individualism
.......................v
.....Technological Conservatism

and/or

..... Technological Transcendence
.............................^
Authoritarianism<-------->Freedom/Anarchy
.............................v
......Technological Conservatism

These two should be combined. Why just two axes when you can have more.

Absolutely. Three dimensional compasses are a little more difficult to illustrate, but that just makes the challenge interesting.

By chance I was looking around in Google Images for an example of a three-dimensional phase space as a reference for this sort of thing; here's a cube which describes the various attributes of the Kaballa Tarot symbols:



I'm beginning to see why the Sephirot is considered a useful tool for understanding the attributes of the Terragen archailects...

(06-25-2014, 02:01 AM)stevebowers Wrote: [ -> ]

I suggest we make a page on the Upwing political compass using a 3d cube like these. Anyways, back to FM-2030. He successfully predicted in the '70s that:

• the arms race'd de-accelerate
  
• the current dress-down style'd be adopted
  
• globalization'd occur
  
• telemedicine, telebanking and the like'd exist in the future
  
• predicted a coming "Age of Abundance" when everyone was freaked out over the "population bomb"
  
• 3d printers would appear by 2010
  

His predictions only seem to be amazing in hindsight because everyone else was preoccupied with pop future hype about nuclear war and the population bomb; he was the (almost) only one to take note of long-term trends and cutting-edge bluprints of nu tech.

What I find personally intriguing about him is his worldview, which required drastic reforming of human nature. For example:

• he believed that people would replace marriage with dating and making kids thru artificial wombs if they felt like it
  
• people'd replace given names w/ changing usernames
  
• people'd switch from families to groups of groups of adults raising kids like a daycare center
  
• all hierachies'd collapse to e-democracy
  

Of course, these changes never happened because they were too drastic for most folks to swallow.
More on FM later.

Just one last thing about that compas: if possible we should make it rotable.
But when I think about it three axes is not exactly enough so how about star diagram instead?
Something like this:

This reminds me we tend to use ahuman to describe human hostile ai, to me this suggests indifference, like asocial/antisocial. An antihuman ai would be an active threat to a nearbaseline, but an indifferent one wouldn;t be an active threat and may not or may harm the neb depending on what the two of them are doing at the time.

This quote might be helpful:

Quote:The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
-Eliezer Yudkowski