It deserves a scathing poem.

It will get one!

why not just augment ourselves into unbound super-intelligences?

(“I think we should pretty much just go ahead and try to build AI anyway, even if it turns out to be about as friendly as a rabid-Nazi-tarantula with a hangover.” — one of my favorite sentences ever.)

@Mark: I wrote something recently trying to make an explicit case for building AI, whether it’s friendly or not. As previous comments probably indicate, I am profoundly sceptical of FAI. To be honest, I doubt it’s even an option. But I think we should pretty much just go ahead and try to build AI anyway, even if it turns out to be about as friendly as a rabid-Nazi-tarantula with a hangover. To try to justify my argument, I framed it in eschatological terms, which usually seems to be something that serious AI researchers frown on. When a civilisation reaches a sufficiently advanced level of technological maturity, it will either destroy itself or transcend itself. Therefore, in the long run, sustainability isn’t a realistic option. Personally, I like the idea of building God before we fuck it up forever.

Perhaps I am just seduced by the poetry and the language, but it seems to me that biblical allegories, myths, such as the Basilisk, etc, are potentially just an earlier blueprint stage for designs we are only now becoming technologically capable of realising. Kinda like if the Bible Code wasn’t a load of complete rubbish, but was what it purported to be: a computer programme hidden in an ancient text, which can only be unlocked by our current technology, which would allow us to predict events in the future. Just like science fiction has speculative powers which actual science can tap into and drag into being. And there is a fantastic Borges essay called ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, which disrupts the usual causal chain of artistic influence and shows how the water can run upstream…

https://sites.google.com/site/jimeikner/home/borges/kafka-and-his-precursors

But that’s probably just served to make whatever it is that I am trying to claim sound even more opaque.

I liked your post – but I wasn’t entirely sure what you meant here. Obviously this is really interesting to me. It relates to what I’m trying to write about… and in fact the ‘impulse to dissolve into the other’ is major theme in what I’m interested in too.