4 replies to this topic

[Live Forever]

Thanks for the suggestion. [thumb] I am going to make sure and get it and watch it. It looks very interesting.

IMDB for it:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0870112/

[Live Forever]

I ended up watching it, and it was really good. The last bit was the best, where he made one of the most convincing cases I have ever heard for artificial intelligence taking over most of the tasks that humans do, especially governmental tasks.

[advancedatheist]

Jacque Fresco (b. 1916) bases his model of human nature on radical behaviorism and General Semantics, two early to mid 20th Century ideas (the latter more of an intellectual fad) which have fallen out of scientific and philosophical favor. Modern cognitive science and evolutionary psychology argue that the human brain doesn't have nearly as much plasticity as the radical behaviorists and General Semanticists claimed. Their conclusions suggest we face some pretty refractory limits to building a utopia based on merely re-engineering the human environment as Fresco proposes.

BTW, General Semantics ideas show up all over the place in American science fiction published from the 1930's through the early 1960's. Robert Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt and H. Beam Piper allude to General Semantics frequently in their stories from that era.

[Athanasios]

Modern cognitive science and evolutionary psychology argue that the human brain doesn't have nearly as much plasticity as the radical behaviorists and General Semanticists claimed.

Overcoming this is one of the most intriguing things about transhumanism stuffis, IMO.