To Be A Machine summary

Many people with the desire to live indefinitely have pinned their hopes on the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. This foundation offers their customers a significant discount if they opt to have their heads cut off. That’s because Alcor specializes in cryonic suspension, the long-term preservation of bodies after death, and it’s far easier to store your disembodied head than your entire cadaver.

The idea is simple. According to Alcor’s founder Max More, there’s a brief window between clinical death and the actual breakdown of the body, and it’s during this gap, before the process of decay sets in, that Alcor intervenes.

One way to avoid the problems associated with reanimation and the duplication of minds is simply to avoid dying. At least, this is the attitude of Aubrey de Grey, an English biomedical scientist and the director of Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).

According to de Grey, we shouldn’t regard aging and death as natural and unavoidable aspects of life; on the contrary, he argues, aging is an illness which can be cured.

The Technological Singularity might sound like something straight out of science fiction, but it’s an event we’re quickly approaching.

On the most basic level, the term describes the point at which the intelligence of machines will outstrip our own, drastically altering the course of human history. But what exactly this will look like, and what the consequences of this development will be, is anyone’s guess.

The notion of an intelligence explosion was first put forward in 1965 by the British statistician I. J. Good. What would occur, Good asked, when machines with superhuman intelligence became capable of designing newer, improved machines themselves?

With each iteration of machines producing its own more powerful successors, artificial intelligence would rapidly exceed anything we humans could have created. This sudden, machine-driven increase in the powers of AI is exactly what the intelligence explosion refers to.

For upwards of a hundred years, robots have exerted a powerful hold over the imagination of humankind – but up until now, they’ve been more significant as cultural icons than as actually useful machines.

One reason that the development of robots has been slow compared to, say, the progress of AI, is what’s called Moravec’s Paradox. This refers to the fact that, although our machines are capable of outperforming us on high-level cognitive tasks, it’s been tremendously difficult to make robots perform simple physical jobs, like exiting vehicles and opening doors.

One thing that seems to define transhumanists is their focus on the future. After all, the advent of the singularity, life-extension technology, and useful robots are all decades away.

But the transhumanists at Grindhouse Wetware are different; they focus on what can be done in the present.