There are anxiety disorders which can have a crippling effect on someone's ability to function and turn their life into a living hell. There are many entrepreneurs who suffer from them. Entrepreneurs tend to be out there on the fringes of what is neurotypical, with all the attendant pros and cons.
I suspect if your reaction is "personally I'd rather be myself than think this way," you're simply not the target audience of the article.
Wolfram's A New Kind of Science really changed my thinking about how we look at computational spaces.
Similarly, the concept of cybernetics predates the naming of the field by a few centuries, considering tools like eyeglasses, and possibly millennia, if we include dentures, canes, or wheelchairs.
While we're on analogies that irritate you but have reasonable historical and scientific contexts, I'd like to remind you of the idea of humans as colonies of trillions of cells. A human isn't one thing, but trillions of things, much smaller and more autonomous than one might think.
- I believe the sophistication and complexity of what makes us feel living forms is still way outside the current science radar and that all that think they're onto an improvement are myopic
- the dig down process of improving the somatic layer (bodies, cells) seems backward to me, our "souls" live on another plane, and doesn't really need much improvements down below. I'd rather see a cultural effort toward.. well culture. Simpler, leaner bonds and sharing.
There is no doubt we are incredibly complex, so much so that we've not been able to crack the puzzle that is "us". We invent crude medicines to carpet-bomb some bacteria/virus, which can potentially harm another part of the body, we staple cadaver-parts onto our knees to move well again, we're incredible crude in a bio-hackish way.
We've not even begun to understand what goes on in our heads.
Room for improvement? I'm not sure we are there yet. Room for understanding what is going on? A lot of room there. Its a massive empty hangar to put all our future knowledge into.
Bottom line is ... I don't think we should go about pulling strings without caution because it will not happen without consequence.
When it's pointed out that our minds are computer-like, it's because they include aspects which resemble computers: e.g. when some subset of its behavior is describable by an algorithm that could in principle be executed by a computer (even if that algorithm is just an approximation).
Same with the idea that we're monkeys: it's true that we have shared characteristics with other animals, that while we're unique in some ways we are not totally apart from the rest of life on earth.
> I like being a monkey
Unfortunately the only option is to be a human: part monkey, part computer :P
Other way around, these computers we use resemble us (however not particularly closely) because we created them, not vice-versa.
The fact that we took inspiration from ourselves in developing computers only strengthens my original point.
I imagine many of us from a young age find an interest in math and science because the logic makes sense. We build on first principles and everything has an objective truth. Perhaps in our early lives we experience things that don't "make sense" in this way, so we throw ourselves into a world of logic that we can more easily understand. Great for academic success, and after all, when we're young we're probably in a world where academic success is lauded (school or college). We are quite literally rewarded with good grades and honor societies for thinking in this way, so it reinforces the idea that this way of thinking is "right". Or at least, this was the case for me throughout high school and college. I remember thinking at the time, "All of these people around me partying, having fun, getting into trouble, living illogically -- they're doing things wrong."
But then at a certain point we leave these structured environments and are on our own. And we continue to run into experiences where we try, again and again, to apply algorithms to life, and they almost always fail. It seems like we can come to one of two conclusions: Either the algorithm is still incomplete and the parameters need tweaking, or we realize that there is no algorithm, or at least no knowable algorithm. We're just too complex, too irrational by nature, to be described by some knowable set of rules.
Every time our "life algorithm" fails it hurts, because it feels like we failed. So we do whatever we possibly can to avoid failure in the future, and yet those failures keep coming and hurt more and more each time.
Until, hopefully, we arrive at that second conclusion which comes with both relief and regret. Relief because instead of trying to describe life with an algorithm, we can actually start living it. And regret because we no longer have the freedom to make those same sorts of mistakes that help us build character when we're young, because they probably have real consequences now. Plus it's really damn hard to give up the way we've been living since childhood. Things like practicing mindfulness and meditation help a lot.
Anyway...that's my two cents.
Not that I don't believe we aren't complex systems, we are, to be sure, and it's not that life doesn't hurt sometimes, as it surely does.
But the whole idea really just grates on me. I like being a monkey, with all my strengths and weaknesses, I wouldn't trade that to be a cyborg for all the money in the world. Each to their own I guess! I guess I just don't think the analogies, simulations, etc. really do us much justice as a species.