"Beating the chip" requires a response to transhumanism

Time to think differently about surviving surveillance

BTC -- One thing relevant to "beating the chip" is that we are always inventing and searching for new and different ways to do just that. The requirement is to think creatively about it. Surveillance continues to creep up on us.

What is beating the chip?  How do we beat the chip?  Why can't we just do it once and be done with it?

These are the expansive, nagging questions which pursue doggedly long into the night, head underneath the pillow,  back turned to the conscious world.

EN LOCO PERENTIS

In order to "beat the chip" we need to first understand what the chip represents.  The chip represents the social adoption of some transhumanist ideas including pervasive electronic surveillance, abdication of privacy boundaries.  If the transhumanists get what they want identity would become a possession overpowering the personal rights and property of the individual for a collective run by an unknowable entity via remote control.  It is staggeringly presumptive; to a point where it's almost unbelievable.

Unfortunately, "we have the technology".  Handheld computers, wi-fi enabled laptops and GPS systems tell on us all the time.  It's just the next platform for transhumanists to get the computer inside of your body to perform the same function.  They would just get a more proficient admin, who does more, faster with the increased piles of data you and your body would generate.

The individual rightly fears a global tech collective for all the same reasons we fear the manifest abuses of empire.  Who wants to delegate their personal power to a central control grid completely dedicated to watching all the worker ants in society?  In a few words, it's dehumanizing.  At the end of the day, humanity may seem cheap, but it's really all we've got.  To rely on it's strength and combined frailties has its own integrity.

There are more than a couple of people who can't embrace the eventual breakdown of their mortal coil. They fear the eventuality of death, seeking to control what they can't. They can't leave the human and animal well enough alone, tampering and tinkering with DNA, genetics in evolutionary folly. Humanity becomes defined and interchangeable with imperfection in advertising and marketing.  Bettering ourselves and each other is one way to make a living in this world.

Transhumanism is supposed to be about shuffling off this mortal coil in exchange for a more decent robot who will execute our desires without the problem of societal judgement, legal intercession, morals or ethics. There is no need to incarcerate anyone, all harm is done robot-to-robot in this "evolved" scenario.

More than a few warnings have been issued, mainly from the film industry, one of the latest of which is in the film Gamer about the fundamental flaws of getting out of the way of Transhumanists.  In Gamer, an intermediate virtual society employs people to perform robotic functions as entertainment for other people in live versions of video games.  Some other films connecting the dots with the profound problems of using robots as intermediaries for human excesses are Surrogates, Minority Report, and of course The Matrix.

Transhumanism is one way to give up and keep on living if your desires can in no way be reconciled with the laws of physics, reality or concrete morals.  Wealthy cynics are it's victims and their bank accounts become the hosts for a parasitic involvement with the can-do ingenuity of whatever technology can provide.  In fact, CNBC decided to come front and center with, Surviving the Future, a documentary which took over 45 minutes of apocalyptic runaround to get around to the propaganda: the future of humanity will require us to surrender to singularity.


Surviving the Future - Montage from Gabriel Rocha on Vimeo.

The transhumanist message is; the sooner you adopt this way of life the easier it will be to incorporate your chances of surviving an economic or geological collapse.  However, what kind of life is it if someone else can eclipse your life into some sort of efficiency pill form?

With so much apocalyptic detritus rolling around in media and on the Internet, you might consider the notion of an apocalypse occurring in the near future.  The transhumanists believe they can beat it if we all band together and fight it with comprehensive technocracy.  The point of an apocalypse is that you have absolutely ZERO control over an economic, sociological and ecological breakdown.  If you survive the disaster, you get to rebuild.  However, you don't ask for obedience in advance, like some sort of undeliverable form of life insurance.  The message of the apocalypse is that nothing can save us.

The apocalypse is the biggest problem transhumanism will ever have in that there is no way to control it.

GROUND ZERO

Disaster is a return to an uncontrolled unknown, the great chaotic void, and it may be the one place where you cannot generate any more data.

If we sit on the pregnant shores of decline, we can ponder a lot of great human questions which escape the mandibles of government and social controls.  Giving up on humanity is too easy. Letting a machine do the work of mankind beats us out of our soul's survival.  Hard work assists mankind in accepting mortality as a personal handicapp.  Tiring of the body coerces epic efforts to forage into the unseen, the subtle and the creative on the premise that there must be something more than the demands of the animal.  Technology exists for this seat too; but it is not the substitute. It is designed to propell the expression of a mortal human being.  We are duty bound to help one another up from a place of frailty, not to a place of isolated proprietary absolutes or egotistical enshrinement.  Some of the greatest inventions come from terminally exhausted people; after being forced into a corner their gifts benefitted all.

I realize this runs a lot more philosophical than other commentary forged here.  I don't have an answer to comfort the overconfident ideals of transhumanists.  However, someone did suggest an idea of how we can learn to think ahead to all the possibilities that do not yet exist; or to become a quantum activist.  You may find something trustworthy there, if you didn't delegate that task to a robot.


The Quantum Activist : Dr. Amit Goswami Movie Trailer from BlueDot Productions on Vimeo.

SEE ALSO: Sages and Scientists 2011