Wa Alaikum salaam Most engaging bother Juwayni. Definitely the response we needed. A friend(who is a doctor) of mine had the following to say: "The trans-humanist agenda is completely demonic in my view. These people are as far from celestial consciousness as can be and represent a further descent into materialism. They completely avoid the subtleness of formative forces and bio-resonance except for purposes of weaponization and the manipulation of the human will." I dont want to sound speculative but i believe that the Transhumanist Agenda is definitely paving the road for the emergence of dajjal.
As Salamu 'Alaykum Not aH or Aqdas but I've had to do some readings about this a couple months ago, my 2ยข. I'm not going to touch the biological side of it (such as Aubrey De Grey et al.) but rather the AI points - basically why mere software engineers are not meta-physicians. The first issue with some transhumanists' conception of the potential for AI is that they have "a cluster of software metaphors that had metastasised into a way of thinking about what it meant to be a human being." (quoted from the Guardian's piece on it here; I don't endorse all views in that article). Secondly, in the context of General AI and the 'Singularity', it would seem they have some sort of vague notion that AI will 'think'. This approach is utterly flawed as the essence of an algorithm is not to house an abstract conception of what something is, but rather to transform an input into an output. Machine learning is evidence of this; no matter how refined you cat recognition algorithm is, the algo does not have an internal conception of what it is to be a cat. Rather, it is merely a web of if-then statements that have been optimized to recognize a set of features in an array of pixels that we perceive as a cat picture. Thirdly, an AI has no conception of 'self' in the way we conceive it. If you were blinded, deafened, your nerves fried so you have no feeling and your nose lacerated so you cannot smell, [edit] your tongue cut so that you cannot taste, and I put you in a ball in outer space such that you don't even feel gravity - even without most of this normal input you would still have some inner sense of 'self'. In summary, AI has no sense of 'self' like we do, it has no sense of 'other' like we do, and talking about humans like we do machines does not bridge that gap.
I know i am 7 years late to giving a response, but i feel this topic should be discussed as over the years this fictitious concept is coming closer to a reality. My view is that this should not be embraced rather we should keep our distance from it. We will be losing our humanity and the essence of what makes us human. They (the atheist community ) are trying to manufacture their own immorality (something strictly forbidden by Allah...I can recall Ridaus Saliheen has a chapter on the prohibition of immortality ). For instance death is the finality of our earthly life and transition into Barazakh. Therefore this is essential for us muslims like another phase of life. However atheists (who are the bulk of transhumanist supports) have to hope or belief of a life after death. Also this is an ongoing agenda orchestrated by the elite to turn us to slaves of the system (Not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist) Someone more experienced like Sidi Abu Hasan or Aqdas should give us a better ruling...
:s1: Due to my bioengineering background I am very interested in the technologies which are at the core of what AI scientists call, "the Singularity" i.e. the moment when artificial intelligence overtakes that of the human brain. Current projections based on Moore's Law predict that this will occur sometime around 2030 i.e. at that time a computer will have more processing power than the human brain. Linked to that is the philosophy of transhumanism*. My question is simple: what should be the Islamic response to these technologies-should we embrace them (my own view is yes)? *Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. (Wiki) http://hplusmagazine.com/ I also encourage everyone to watch the documentary Transcendent Man by Dr. Ray Kurzweil. go to btjunkie.org and type Transcendent Man to download the torrent file (about 1.5 Gb)
