Anti-uploader rants

If you really want to die in a really horrible way, I mean a real nightmare death well beyond Lord of the Flies or anything any author has come up with, here’s a suggestion: Get together among wealthy investors, elite academics and private research organizations and plot out the future of humanity. Ignore that there are a hundred million Americans (and people in similar situations in other countries) who made exemplary life choices but were not even given the possibility of competing with H1B foreign workers for the unforgivable mistake of recognizing that programming was a future-proof occupation and trying to get a job in the field. (I was told recently that I would be kept in mind for any job for which an H1B visa worker was not available). Work in secret, or with as little fanfare as possible on brain scanning, VR technologies, etc. At no point acknowledge public feedback or contributions. Anyone not in favor of brain uploading is obviously wrong and have no interesting ideas or anything else to contribute to the future of civilization, so why even ask them for ideas, acknowledge that they might want different futures, or give them any chance at all to pursue those goals…

When your preparations are complete, come out and announce the glorious new future that you are going to build, quite literally, over their dead, decapitated, and brain-scanned bodies. How is it possible for you to imagine that there will not be a backlash of biblical proportions? That people deprived of all opportunities to build the futures they want (or simply make a living!) suddenly being expected to line up at the bologna machine and trust you to spend CPU on, what to a rational observer, would be indistinguishable from a talking headstone.

If you manage to get to the point that people start to take you seriously, literally millions of people will rise up and kill you with greater wrath and with more fury than any human being has ever suffered.

On second thought, ignore this post! Keep doing exactly what you are doing, uploaders…

On third thought, no this sucks. If you keep going there will be a backlash but that will wipe out all transhumanism and end all hope for non-uploaders such as myself.

Since I have no job, and no prospects, and nobody understands much less listens to my ideas, I guess I’ll go back to my regular schedule of trolling. =(

I will collect your anti-uploader rants in this thread. Just for the case that people will have any interest in them.

The backstory of this is that I’m reading Robin Hanson’s “the age of Em” and it’s really pushing my buttons. =|

Anyone would have expected that. Why have you started reading that book in the first place? I think Robin Hanson’s work is important, simply because it portraits a problematic vision of the future that we will get, if we continue to do “business as usual”.

Robin attends local events and I expect to be sitting next to him at a table in September and I need to be able to debate him.

Ah, that’s interesting. What point do you want to convince him of? With what kind of argument?