It’s like buses, you wait ages for one and then a load come at the same time. Recently I blogged about discussion of transhumanism in Second Life and beyond :
The topic has long been considered controversial, but it’s a discussion area that was once very vibrant in Second Life. I am surprised we have not seen more of a resurgence in this area of discussion within the Virtual Reality hype cycle.
Before I go further, with regards to the previous post I linked to, Giulio Prisco has commented on that post to say that people are welcome to go to the meeting mentioned in that post.
Over at Motherboard Vice there’s an article by Zoltan Istvan : Wild Transhumanist Campaign Tech We’ll See in Future Presidential Elections.
There are links between the post at Motherboard and my previous post, the common denominator is Terasem.
Zoltan Istvan is a 2016 USA presidential candidate for the Transhumanist party. In the article he talks about how wearable tech, the rise of VR and changing technology could very well change the way election campaigns are run. Zoltan is no stranger to the tech, indeed he was in Second Life last year and in the article he says :
As a presidential candidate myself, I also recently gave a virtual speech in Second life. At the Terasem Annual Colloquium on the Law of Futurist Persons, I spoke to an audience that consisted of about 50 avatars—some who appeared as creatures, cyborgs, and significantly mutated transhuman beings. My own avatar—kindly created by transhuman spiritual organization Terasem for this event—looked quite like me, and even had the afternoon shadow, which apparently I’m often guilty of having.
I also see from the video that Extropia DaSilva was there. The article talks about augmented reality, suggesting that candidates may want to use AR to demonstrate pie charts, live stream how walls would look and more.
I feel Zoltan is a little too enthusiastic as to where tech and VR can take politics, there’s certainly the uncanny valley aspect to be wary of and if people don’t like the look of a holographic representation of a candidate, the tech could backfire on their campaign badly. However it’s extremely interesting to read Zoltan’s views, you can feel his enthusiasm and in a world where people seem to be fed up with the old politics, there’s certainly room for new avenues to explore in terms of campaigning.
Where things get a tad more dystopian or exciting, depending upon your view, is when Zoltan talks about the future of politics and the potential for a president not to be human at all :
It’s possible the coming age of artificial intelligence and robots may replace the need for politicians. At least human ones. Some experts think superintelligent AI might be here in 10 to 15 years, so why not have a robot president that is totally altruistic and not susceptible to lobbyists and personal desires? This machine leader would simply always calculate the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, and go with that. No more Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, or whatever else we are.
It’s a brave new future we face, but technology will make our lives easier, more democratic, and more interesting. Additionally, it will change the game show we go through every four years called the US Presidential elections. In fact, if we’re lucky—given how crazy these elections have made America look—maybe technology will make future elections disappear altogether.
This side of the pond, in the UK, there are many of us who aren’t exactly happy about how crazy the EU Referendum has made us look, so there may be something in this. The rise of the machines via politics and programming is the nightmare that many sic fi novels warned us to be wary of and all of those science fiction authors can’t be wrong!
Those of us who work in tech know that our scripts can be working fine for some time and then a spanner gets thrown in the works to make them go wrong.
Whereas I find Zoltan’s article fascinating, I do feel politics will always need the human touch. We complain about loud and crazy candidates but all too often we miss the little things our politicians do, the way they help people with what many would consider minor issues but to the person involved it’s extremely important. Will a bot ever be able to replicate the level of richness human to human interaction can? I sincerely doubt it, but it’s a fascinating area of discussion.