JulianMorrison comments on Guardians of the Gene Pool - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 December 2007 08:08PM

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Comment author: JulianMorrison 17 December 2007 02:24:02AM 3 points [-]

The Soviets weren't what I'd call transhumanists, because their New Man wasn't a definable goal or factual trend, he was a utopian catch-all of projected virtue. A transhumanist will be able to break down his goals ("uploading") into subgoals ("AI and brain scans") and roughly sketch a research path ("symbolic AI") that would either approach the goal, or fail in an informative way ("combinatorial explosion"). The Soviets could do no such thing, because NSM was nothing definable. He would certainly pop up as a consequence of the experience of enough Marxism. Timescale couldn't be defined. Success could not be predicted until it was encountered. Keep plugging on and have faith.

I call that religion. It isn't set in the *real* future. It's set in the same never-never land that contains the Second Coming. Importantly, it doesn't lead to a future-oriented culture, which is more precisely a realist goal oriented culture. Nobody works towards NSM (except in propaganda posters) and so he never gets any closer.