As technologies integrate with human bodies, a dark future awaits.

By Alexander Thomas, University of East London

The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater morphological freedom we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this convergence may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology that we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankinds attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, transhumanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankinds nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then well need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanism one that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary advancements are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of techno-anthropocentrism, in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamics often imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge.

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesnt lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being upgraded to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defence department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create metabolically dominant soldiers, is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the ultimate weapon. Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of the singularity the idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programmed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal could an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

Its also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be improved by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanitys evolution without taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets dont wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximising ones spending power maximises ones ability to flourish hence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhuman though very efficient technological entity derived from humanity that doesnt necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolution technology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracy and particularly our moral nature that should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescus morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to cure? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. Hes also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of morality is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucaults notion that we live in a panoptic society one in which the sense of being perpetually watched instils discipline is now stretched to the point where todays incessant machinery has been called a superpanopticon. The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being weve come to assume in healthcare. Its not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the new logics of expulsion, that capture the pathologies of todays global capitalism. The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalisation.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centrelessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors The oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanising treatment of todays expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries dont always extend to those who dont share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance).

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite power effectively to serve God by becoming God. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking while the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for Humanity 1.0, Fullers term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the genetic commons.

The neoliberal preoccupation with privatisation would so extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debt simply by being alive you are invested with capital on which a return is expected.

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite progress of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and cultural not technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic. Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value progress and efficiency above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes. Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesnt allow us to escape these questions it doesnt permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been more important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

Alexander Thomas, PhD Candidate, University of East London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.

See the article here:

Transhumanists May Lead Us Into a Dystopian Future - Inverse

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologiesnanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive scienceare giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, aging and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater morphological freedomwe could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

Daily Emails and Alerts - Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inbox

Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this convergence may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technologythat we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankinds attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, transhumanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankinds nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then well need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanismone that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Artificial intelligence GLAS-8/Flickr

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary advancements are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of techno-anthropocentrism,in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamicsoften imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

A customs officer in Bulgaria displays Captagon pills in Sofia, 12, 2007. Pills could give advantages to peoplebut only those who can afford them. Reuters/Nikolay Doychinov

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge."

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesnt lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being upgraded to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defense department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create metabolically dominant soldiers," is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

U.S. army soldiers in a joint military drill together with Serbian and Bulgarian soldiers, at Koren military training ground, Bulgaria, July 15, 2017. DAPRA is currently working to create metabolically dominant soldiers. Stoyan Nenov/Reuters

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the ultimate weapon." Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of the singularitythe idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banalcould an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

Its also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be improved by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanitys evolutionwithout taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets dont wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximizing ones spending power maximizes ones ability to flourishhence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhumanthough very efficienttechnological entity derived from humanity that doesnt necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolutiontechnology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracyand particularly our moral naturethat should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescus morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to cure? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. Hes also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of morality is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucaults notion that we live in a panoptic societyone in which the sense of being perpetually watched instills disciplineis now stretched to the point where todays incessant machinery has been called a superpanopticon." The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being weve come to assume in healthcare. Its not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

A man moves his finger toward a robotic hand at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots in Madrid on November 19, 2014. AFP

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the new logics of expulsion," that capture the pathologies of todays global capitalism."The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalization.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centerlessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors The oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanizing treatment of todays expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries dont always extend to those who dont share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance.)

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite powereffectively to serve God by becoming God. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking while the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for Humanity 1.0," Fullers term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the genetic commons.'"

The neoliberal preoccupation with privatization would extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debtsimply by being alive you are invested with capital on which a return is expected."

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite progress of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and culturalnot technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic). Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value progress and efficiency above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes. Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesnt allow us to escape these questionsit doesnt permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

Alexander Thomasis aPhD Candidate at theUniversity of East London.

Read more here:

AI and Transhumanism: Could Quest for Super-intelligence and Eternal Life Lead to a Dystopian Nightmare? - Newsweek

Distant Earth.

The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater morphological freedom we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this convergence may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology that we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankinds attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, transhumanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankinds nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then well need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanism one that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary advancements are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of techno-anthropocentrism, in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamics often imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge.

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesnt lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being upgraded to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defence department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create metabolically dominant soldiers, is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the ultimate weapon. Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of the singularity the idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programmed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal could an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

Its also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be improved by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanitys evolution without taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets dont wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximising ones spending power maximises ones ability to flourish hence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhuman though very efficient technological entity derived from humanity that doesnt necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolution technology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracy and particularly our moral nature that should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescus morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to cure? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. Hes also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of morality is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucaults notion that we live in a panoptic society one in which the sense of being perpetually watched instils discipline is now stretched to the point where todays incessant machinery has been called a superpanopticon. The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being weve come to assume in healthcare. Its not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the new logics of expulsion, that capture the pathologies of todays global capitalism. The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalisation.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centrelessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors The oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanising treatment of todays expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries dont always extend to those who dont share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance).

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite power effectively to serve God by becoming God. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking while the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for Humanity 1.0, Fullers term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the genetic commons.

The neoliberal preoccupation with privatisation would so extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debt simply by being alive you are invested with capital on which a return is expected.

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite progress of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and cultural not technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic). Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value progress and efficiency above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes. Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesnt allow us to escape these questions it doesnt permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

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Super-intelligence and eternal life: transhumanism's faithful follow it blindly into a future for the elite - The Conversation UK

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Liam Paynehasofficially added his name to the list of celebrities who are openly and explicitly in support of trans human rights. With anInstagram post earlier today, Payne quoted Thomas Jefferson and hashtagged the image lgbtqrights.

Paynes support comes as part of the recent flood of support for trans people following President Donald Trumps declaration via Twitter, and apparently without taking the extra old-fashioned step of consulting his staff first that transgender citizens will no longer be allowed to enlist in the military. Though the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff insist that there will be no change in the militarys enlistment tactics until an official piece of legislation is passed, Trumps tweets are nonetheless a codification of hate towards trans people. It sets a dangerous precedent for whimsical lawmaking from ones own phone.

That, of course, provides ample opportunity for everyone with a platform to make sure everyone else knows that theyre a great ally. So great that they wave rainbow flags during Pride Month and are very, very against this nonsensical announcement. Even Senator John McCain can try to win some brownie points. Not as many as Payne, and certainly not as many as James Cordens musical routine, but some.

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Liam Payne Joins Ranks of Trans-Supportive Celebrities - PopCrush

A decade ago, personal video testimonials of people "coming out" as gay exploded on YouTube. Now, search the term "ex-gay," and you'll find an explosion of testimonials from those who've left the homosexual lifestyle and have never looked back.

But this is the news the LGBT lobby doesn't want anyone to know, because it bursts the myth that people are "born that way" and they can never really change. So invested are they in the narrative that they've lobbied states to outlaw reparative therapy voluntary counseling that helps diminish or eliminate unwanted same-sex attraction. Currently, nine states and counting have banned such therapy for minors, meaning youth who seek help in ridding themselves of homosexual desires can no longer do so with a licensed therapist in those states.

But counselors are hitting back. Remarkably, in a stunning federal filing in May, tens of thousands of licensed therapists and clients lodged a massive fraud claim against the LGBT lobby accusing them of misinformation and outright lies regarding the "born that way" narrative and reparative therapy. And secular media are propping up the fraud, promoting the false notion that reparative therapy resorts to torture, shaming and "shock treatment" none of it true.

The late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a pioneer in reparative therapy, helped many men recapture their heterosexual orientation.

"Homosexuality is not about sex," Nicolosi said. "It is about a person's sense of himself, about his relationships, how he forms and establishes relationships, his self-identity, his self-image, personal shame, his ability to sustain intimacy."

"Homosexual behavior is always prompted by an inner sense of emptiness," he explained.

Often, when childhood wounds were healed, men would find their same-sex desires diminish or disappear completely, replaced with a healthy, heterosexual attraction.

"Findings from preliminary data collected over a 12-month period indicated statistically significant reductions in distress and improvements in well-being, significant movement toward heterosexual identity, and significant increases in heterosexual thoughts and desires with accompanying significant decreases in homosexual thoughts and desires," he summarized.

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What the Gay Lobby Doesn't Want You to Know - Church Militant

2.5

Release Date: July 25, 2017 (DVD and VOD platforms)Director:Andrew FinniganMPAA Rating: NR Runtime: 92 mins

The very concept of transhumanism, the belief that the human body can be pushed past its physical and mental limitations through an incorporation of technology, seems like a narrative concept that is almost impossible to make mundane and stale. The implications, possibilities and risks of the wavering status of humanity transhumanism challenges would supply even the most basic science fiction writer with a wealth of existential questions.

Simple Creature, however, never bothers to ask any of these questions in its Bionic Woman-like fable because, beyond skimming the surface of the possibilities of mechanical augmentation, director Andrew Finnigan shows he hasnt the drive or perhaps the budget to delve any further.

Bearing its catchpenny budget on its shoulders with sets of laughably barren mise-en-scne, the film unfolds uneasily as if confused to what particular issue related to the transhuman debate it wants to address. Millennial college student Em (Carollani Sandberg), whose supposed mastery of modern technology is marked by her dependence on a smartphone, is involved in a near-fatal bus accident that prompts her father to rebuild her because of course we have the technology.

Mind you, we never actually see any of this technology due to budgetary constraints, but the script poorly fills us in with its bizarre, layman techno jargon, making one doubt that Finnigan, who along with directing and writing this dreck is also responsible for the screenplay, hasnt the slightest clue about medical technology. Hes more comfortable with employing buzzwords like nanotechnology as insipid catchalls to the process to ensure no one could be intellectually stimulated by his story.

As Em recovers from her condition, Finnigan demonstrates how uninterested he was in transhumanism to begin with by diverting the films attention to her boyfriend, Seth (DAngelo Midili), and his struggle to keep his family farm operational after his fathers passing. For some unknown reason, Finnigan thought it was prescient to draw parallels between human augmentation and corporate farms infringing on the family-owned business under Simple Creatures blanket thesis: technology does not equal humanity. These scenes before Ems reintegration into the films narrative are only useful to highlight its atrocious sense of pacing.

Half of the film is presented in flowing montage, which dances around things like character building and story through excessive cutting, while the other half is comprised of monotonous dialogue exchanges that played more like the actors building a demo reel, seeing how much personality they could cram into their blank characters.

It is as if the film is permanently stuck its own Kickstarter promotional video, trying to secure enough budget to have makeup effects beyond Em sticking an iPhone cord into her arm to check her vitals. Filming, as he does, from natural light obstructing long shots of utter apathy, Finnigans inconsistent aesthetic practically broadcasts the fresh-out-of-film-school pretensions that one harbors when they earnestly think they can be the next Shane Carruth. As the film goes on, it spirals into a lackluster conspiracy thriller involving the facility in which Em was transformed and the farmers plotting to expose them before limply petering out. Simple Creature is a surprising film in that it somehow made transhumanism boring. Not sure where it wants to place its mistrust of technological advancement that stems from its own ignorance of the topic, Simple Creature spins its wheels futilely without a solid point to make or the means to do so.

Simple Creature review

Written by: Chris Luciantonio

Date Published: 07/25/2017

2.5 / 10 stars

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SIMPLE CREATURE Review - Film Pulse

Many Americans subscribe to the annoying belief that our nations military-industrial complex is the surest way to remain the wealthiest and leading superpower in the world. After all, its worked for the last century, pro-military supporters love to point out.

However, Americas dependence on warmongering may soon become a liability that is impossible to maintain. Transhumanism, globalization, and outright replacement of human soldiers with robots are redefining the countrys military requirements, and they may eventually render defense budgets far smaller than those now. To compensate and keep America spending approximately 20 percent of the federal budget on defense (as we have for most of the last few years), well either have to manufacture wars to use all our newly-made bombs, or find another way to keep the American economy afloat.

It just so happens that there is another way a method that would satisfy liberals and conservatives alike, as well as other politically-minded folks (Im a libertarian candidate for California governor). Instead of always spending more on our military, we could transition our nation and its economy into a scientific-industrial complex.

Theres a compelling reason to do this beyond what meets the eye. Transhumanist technology is starting to radically change human life. Many experts expect to be able to stop aging and conquer death for human beings in the next 25 years. Others, like myself, see humans merging with machines and replacing our organs with bionic ones.

Such a new transhuman society will require many trillions of dollars to satisfy humans ever-growing desire for physical perfection (machine or biological) in the transhumanist age. We could keep our economy humming along for decades because of it.

Whatever happens, something is going to have to give in the future regarding military profiteering. Part of this is because in the past, the military-industrial complex operated off always keeping a few million U.S. military members ready on a moments notice to travel around the world and fight. But theres almost no scenario where we would need that kind of human-power (and infrastructure to support it) anymore.

Increasingly, small teams of special operation soldiers and uber-high tech are the way America fights its wars. We just dont need massive military bases anymore, nor the thousands of companies to support the constant maintenance of ground troops. Such a reality changes the economics of the military dramatically, and will eventually leave it a fraction of its size in terms of personnel and real estate.

The coming military age of automated drones, robot tanks, cyberwarfare, and artificial intelligence just doesnt require that many people

Well still have the need for technology to fight the wars and conflicts we entangle ourselves in, but itll be mostly engineers, programmers, and technicians who wear the uniform. The coming military age of automated drones, robot tanks, cyberwarfare, and artificial intelligence just doesnt require that many people. In fact, expect the military not just to shrink, but to mostly disappear into ones and zeroes.

Many people think that the beast of a military-industrial complexmade famous by President Dwight Eisenhowers warning against it in his farewell address appeared only in the last 50 years. However, others persuasively argue that America has been at war 93 percent of the time since the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 so its been with us from the beginning.

In liberal California where I live, such facts annoy just about everyone I know except, of course, those who are shareholders and beneficiaries of the defense industry. Thankfully, despite Congress being led by mostly older white religious men, the younger generation clamors for an improved Americaone that can keep its economies running smoothly in a more peaceful way.

This is where the scientific-industrial complex comes in and could satisfy most everyone. And best of all, a society of science requires actual people. Lots of them: nurses, scientists, start-up CEOs, designers, technologists, and even lawyers. The advent of modern medicine to treat virtually every ailment and the whole anti-aging movement, in general affects all 325 million Americans. Over half of us suffer from health issues that can be improved but often arent, for a variety of reasons. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that 40 percent of people over the age of 65 suffer from a disability and for two thirds of them, its mobility-related issues. And millions are already racking up the symptoms of heart disease that will kill them. And a younger generation is just waiting to explore bionics, chip implants, and how to upgrade their genes to avoid health problems in the future. All this means we have the fodder to reshape the American economy from a militaristic-based one to a type that thrives off scientific and medical innovation.

Instead of spending American money on sending our soldiers to risk their lives for the whims of war, we could be giving civilians the medicine and healthcare they need to live far better and longer. And living longer has unseen benefits, too. In the future, bonafide transhumans wont have to retire if they dont want to. Their bodies will be ageless and made so strong through technology that work and careers may continue indefinitely and therefore, theyll be able to continue contributing to the economy indefinitely. Transhuman existence is a self-fulfilling economic-boom prophesy for both individual and country.

Currently, the U.S. Constitution (which I personally think needs a significant rewrite for the 21st century) is overly concerned with protection of national sovereigntywhich is one major reason why the military-industrial complex is allowed to grow undeterred. If the U.S. Constitution was endowed with precise wording to also protect an individuals health, well-being, and longevity, then a scientific-industrial complex could rise. This new cultural and legal reform would help to provide the most modern medicine, technology, and science possible to its people. And since I believe interpretation of the non-aggression principle should include harmful natural phenomena like aging, existential risk, and disease I believe minarchist values could support limited government to help people overcome these things.

Shamefully, the Iraq War will cost the U.S. approximately $6 trillion dollars by the time were actually done paying all our bills despite the fact that its highly questionable whether Iraq was ever even a serious national security issue. However, our country undeniably faces a serious national security issue today in fact, Id call it a full blown crisis. Nearly 7,000 Americans will die in the next 24 hours from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, aging, and other issues. And the same amount of people will die tomorrow and the day after.

Overcoming disease and aging in the transhuman age will inevitably occur. The question is not if, but when? The answer lies in how much our nation is willing to spend on scientific and medical research and how soon. But so long as it continues to spend money on the military instead of citizens health, human beings will die which is ironic since its the military that is supposed to protect us (and not inadvertently sabotage us by swallowing funding for bombs instead of medicine). All we need do as a country is change the direction of our spending, from defense to science. If we can transform America into a scientific-industrial complex, well still be able to keep our economy chugging along. Let Americas new wars be fought against cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers, and aging itself. Its a win-win, except for body bag and casket makers.

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Let's Turn America's Military-Industrial Complex Into A Science-Industrial Complex - HuffPost

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Transhuman Design have released a newplayable demofor their chainsawtastic take on 2D platforming, Butcher.

For more small-scale goodness, here's our list of thebest indie games.

Describing itself as a blood-soaked love letter to the cult classics of the genre, this 2D shooter puts you in the mechanical boots of a cyborg programmed to eradicate the last remains of humanity [and] your sole purpose is to well... annihilate anything that moves.

The demo features a pack of three levels from the beginning of the game.

This isnt for the fainthearted, either. Even if you reckon youve got the cojones to stomach the gore, the games so feckin' hard, the developers had to retrospectively release an easy mode called W.I.M.P. DLC for some players (like me, lets face it) to get through it.

If you like what you see, you can also secure 50 percent off the price of the full game at just 3.49 / $4.99 / 4.99. Theres also a half-price bundle if youd like to pick up the soundtrack, too. The discount ends July 17, 2017.

Thanks, RockPaperShotgun.

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Get bloody with Butcher's free Steam demo | PCGamesN - PCGamesN

The Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, (MACBAN) has said that the porous nature of Nigerian boarders is responsible for the free entry and exit of killer herdsmen.

Addressing a press conference in Kaduna On Saturday, MACBAN assistant national secretary general, Ibrahim Abdullahi said, "In Nigeria, our borders are porous, people come in anytime and go out anytime they want, in fact it is a shameful thing today that we don't even know those that are indigenous Fulani or the transhuman Fulani.

"We don't know and that is why people mixed things up, you begin to suspect the Fulani man that you grew up with when anything happens. He has not traveled far where did he get the AK 47."

Abdullahi added "It is either Nigeria opt out of the ECOWAS protocol or we should apply the conditions. We should ensure that anybody coming into the country, we know when he is coming, where he is going and control what they are coming with.

"Another problem we have that you people don't know is that, these migratory Fulani that come into the country with all forms of weapons, many at times they come in with less than 50 cattle, but when going back they go with thousand cattle rustled from our own Fulani, so our economy is also affected.

"One other issue we need to know again is that, some of these countries that Fulani come from in Africa have crises, like Chad or central African Republic were there is rebellion. Weapons have become like pure water or bread, so people from there see it as normal to hang AK 47.

"So it is left for the government to do the right thing, let us decide who comes in because it is our country, let us decide the terms for the person coming, let us not because of ECOWAS protocol leave everything to fate, that is not going to help us."

Commenting on the alleged killing of four of their members by Kadara and Gwari communities in Kajuru local government areas of the state, Abdullahi said, "A kidnap incident took place in the area allegedly by Fulani herdsmen, but instead of trying to get to the root of the matter the communities descended on the nearest Fulani community."

He insisted that there is need for people to understand the different types of Fulani saying, " Fulani are categorized into three including the settled Fulani, the semi settled Fulanis and the trans human Fulani, those that are constantly on the move and they can also be categorized into two, some of them are Nigerians, some are foreigners from our neighboring countries like Cameroun, Chad and even Niger.

"Those Fulanis are constantly on the move and there is a law that provides for that movement, the ECOWAS protocol on nomadic transhuman movement, but the unfortunate thing is that all the signatories to those protocols, there are conditions governing people entering into your country or going out of your country.

He called on the government to ensure stringent checks at Nigerian boarders with a view to ending the spate of crises in the state and he country at large.

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Southern Kaduna crises: Porous boarders responsible for free e - Daily Trust

This past week, Bruce Buffs first novel, The Soul of the Matter (Simon & Schuster/Howard Books), which debuted last year, was released in paperback.

In The Soul of the Matter, former cyber-intelligence analyst Dan Lawson seeks to unravel the mysteries his geneticist friend claims he discovered encoded in DNA: secrets that could destroy humankind. After a catastrophic experiment, Dan races against time and deadly pursuit to uncover whether the human soul can survive sciences conquest of nature.

Along the way, charactersare forced to confront the reality of their existence.In his book, Buff examines intriguing questions about science and philosophy.

Does DNA coding demonstrate that we are here by intent?

And is the brain itself enough to produce perceptions, feelings, thoughts and awareness?Perhaps not maybe rather, every moment of our lives is our souls in action.

Find excerpts from the book here, here, and here. And in case you wondered, the rumors are true: Discovery Institute plays a role in the story. Well, were not the main character, but you cant have everything.From David Klinghoffers reviewhere at Evolution News:

As of today, ID is also something else that I wouldnt have predicted: the main theme and dramatic backdrop of a pretty effective and tense thriller by debut novelist Bruce Buff. Following the adventures of ex-CIA officer turned computer hacker Dan Lawson and eerily compelling pediatric oncologist Trish Alighieri, Mr. Buffs The Soul of the Matterexpertly invokes a range of ideas including irreducible complexity, the Cambrian explosion, the enigma of protein evolution, and the malign illusion of a transhuman future.

Imagine Dan Brown meets Stephen Meyer meets Wesley J. Smith and youll have an idea of whats in store for readers. A turning point in the story involves a visit to Seattles Pioneer Square and, yes, Discovery Institute. If Mr. Browns knockout The Da Vinci Code were to be rewritten from a design perspective with the combined insights of Doug Axe, Michael Behe, and Jonathan Wells, you would have something like Mr. Buffs impressive book.

[I]ts a novel that makes your foot jiggle nervously and your palms sweat, even as it deftly deals with a range of ideas connected with ID, and makes some points I hadnt thought of before.

Publishers Weekly declares, A thrilling plot filled with deception and international intriguethis book will leave readers to ponder big questions of existence. B&N Reads describes the book as, A thriller that will have you thinking and questioning everything long after you read the last page.

It is the first in a fast-paced three-book series by Mr. Buff. Get it now!

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The Soul of the Matter Now in Paperback; Read Bruce Buff's Thriller on Intelligent Design! - Discovery Institute

We've all had a moment where an extra pair of hands would have been incredibly useful, but who has ever wondered what they could do with just an extra thumb? London-based designer Danielle Clode not only wondered, but went on to build one. Her 3D-printed, foot-controlled, Third Thumb offers an insight into how prosthetics can do more than just replace disabled limbs, but actually extend our natural abilities.

Danielle Clode created the Third Thumb as her Masters graduate project at the Royal College of Art in London. This human hand extension is centered around a hinge-based thumb, 3D-printed out of a flexible filament called Ninjaflex.

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The thumb is strapped to a hand and powered by a motor that sits like a small watch on the wearer's wrist. The thumb is then controlled by two pressure sensors that sit under a person's feet and connect up wirelessly via Bluetooth.

Clode's intent with the design was to alter people's perception of prosthetics. She wants the design to allow people to see prosthetics as more than simple limb or body replacements, but rather as devices that can extend our potential abilities.

"When we start to extend our abilities, and when we reframe prosthetics as extensions, then we start to shift the focus from 'fixing' disability, to extending ability," Clode writes on her website.

A video accompanying the project illustrates a variety of everyday tasks that the Third Thumb could potentially benefit. From scrolling through pages on a tablet to playing guitar where the extra thumb could open up entire new chords, the extra thumb certainly offers wonderfully strange and new ways to interact with ordinary objects.

The design is obviously just a concept, although the working prototype is notably well-realized. Clode has developed a couple of different aesthetic pathways for the device, from the obviously functional piece to a more jewelry-orientated design.

As we move towards a transhuman future, ideas like this offer a fascinating glimpse at how augmented bodies could allow us to achieve physical feats that were previously impossible.

Take a look at the Third Thumb in action in the video below.

Source: Dani Clode Design

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Three thumbs up to this 3D-printed prosthetic thumb - New Atlas

Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker, as a potsherd with the potsherds of the earth! Shall the clay say to him that fashioned it: What makest thou? Or: Thy work, it hath no hands? Isaiah 45:9 (The Israel Bible)

Photo: Shutterstock

Transhumanism, an intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities, a concept once limited to the realm of science-fiction, is now becoming more of a reality than ever before. The once outlier philosophy is quickly becoming mainstream, an accepted part of the social conscience that is the new religion for the anti-religious, including its own Messianic vision.

There are many aspects to the transhumanism philosophy, often abbreviated as H+ or h+, including physical longevity through medical breakthroughs and/or merging mankind with machines. Many transhumanists advocate transferring the sum total of a persons knowledge and experiences into a computer and recreating the individual as a form of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to extend an individuals life.

In its most extreme form, transhumanism advocates limiting human population. This extreme philosophy is criticized for being eugenicist master-race ideology and infringing on basic reproductive rights.

Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman, director of Ohr Chadash Torah Institute, noted that as in any social reform, the driving intention behind the movement is the key element, the factor that decides whether it will be a positive or negative influence on human history.

There is an aspect of this movement that is a culture of Me, Rabbi Trugman told Breaking Israel News. Individual freedom has become a form of self-idol worship. For example, having children for many people today does not fit into this emphasis on the individual as it necessarily limits ones personal freedom.

With technology as a central element of transhumanism, Rabbi Trugman noted that Torah is compatible with science and technology within certain limits.

Science allows us a certain control, ruling over the natural world, Rabbi Trugman said. But the verse that says we can rule over the world comes along with the commandment to be fruitful and multiply.

And God blessed them; and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth. Genesis 1:28

Many environmentalists blame religion for ruining the environment, Rabbi Trugman explained. But the Bible commands us to rule over the destructive aspects of nature, not to destroy the very earth that supports and nurtures us.

The synergy of science and Torah is a positive thing, but it requires limits, continued Rabbi Trugman. Technology cannot trump everything. There is an aspect of hubris, taking the place of God, when people set out to create a new being, which is forbidden by Torah law. Or ruling over creation and life through euthanasia or selective eugenics, choosing who reproduces.

Many of the new techno-billionaires are attracted to transhumanism: Peter Thiel, the founder of Paypal, adheres to a form of the philosophy called immortalism and invests heavily in projects to extend life indefinitely. Rabbi Trugman explained that this aspect of transhumanism is an exaggeration of love of self, a necessary and positive attribute.

The rabbi warned, however, that this trait can be exaggerated to the point where it becomes harmful to the individual and to the culture.

Zoltan Istvan, known for his endorsement of transhumanism as his political party and own philosophy, puts forth the idea that all humans desire to reach a state of perfect personal power, to be omnipotent in the universe. In this, the movement is a form of alternate Messianic movement. And therein lies a much larger danger.

I am sure that some of them have good intentions, to fix humanity and solve the economic and social problems of the planet, Rabbi Trugman said. But as we have seen throughout history, science, guided just by human nature, can run amok. A higher morality is required as a guide to ensure that technology doesnt end up being hijacked by those who would use science for less than benevolent purposes.

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Synergy Between Torah and Science: How Far is TOO Far? - Breaking Israel News

An intelligence so capable it can perceive every cause and effect. The promise of eternal life. The dawn of a new age in whichsuffering will be eliminated, every need will be met and the individual will find fulfillment by subordinating himself to something far greater than himself.

These are the promises of most great faiths. The capacityto understand and predict everything thatcould possibly occur is a characteristic most would ascribe toGod.

But today, thisrhetoric surrounds an ostensibly scientific and secular movement. Transhumanism, the attempt to overcome the bodys limitations through technology, and the hunt for artificial intelligence are promoted with evangelistic language.

Around the world, heavily funded by billionaire philanthropists, researchers are probing whether aging can be curbed or even prevented, just like any other disease.

Indeed, scientist Aubrey de Grey, chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation, argues the biggest obstacle to immortality is simply a lack of funding to fuel research.

Even dissident and Wikileaks head Julian Assange confidently predicted de facto immortality would soon exist because people would upload their consciousness to an artificial intelligence and live forever as part of a simulation.

Its like a religion for atheists, Assange said.

Assange is not alone in identifying the fundamentally religious impulse behind the movement. In a recent piece at Aeon a digital magazine on science, philosophy, society and the arts Beth Singler of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion pointed out how despite itsscorn for religion, the AI community often sounds like a group of believers in a coming god.

[B]elievers in a transhuman future in which AI will allow us to transcend the human condition once and for all draw constantly on prophetic and end-of-days narratives to understand what theyre striving for, she writes.

The community has also generated thought experiments in which the singularity, the creation of artificial intelligence thatwill spark runaway growth, is framed as something akin to the formation of a god. For example, Rokos Basilisk posits an AI which, because it would conceive of itself being able to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, would actually punish humans, even after death, who do not labor to bring it into existence.

Joseph Farah, founder of WND and author of The Restitution of All Things, argues secularists and scientists who seek to escape the need for God ultimately and inevitably find themselves groping back towards the divine.

Theres an old saying, If you dont believe in something, youll believe in anything,' he said. Theres an absolute, fundamental need for human beings to believe in something.

If its not the God, it will be a god. Transhumanists offer an alternative god. You can be like God, the old lie the serpent told Eve in the Garden. You can still have eternal life apart from serving God and obeying His commandments. Its as simple as that. Transhumanists are peddling that kind of lie, again, so naturally they would have their own doctrines, gospel story, creation story, etc.

Ultimately, Farah maintains transhumanism and the quest for immortality, despite its supposedly secular orientation, leads to anti-Christian spiritual and even demonic connotations.

Absolutely, I think thats implied in the way this plays out, he said. Its about living forever. We all know these bodies wear out over time. But you can conquer death. Thats a spiritual idea and it comes from Gods consistent message to us. Its hardwired into our fallen genetic material. And, I believe it is at least inspired by the father of lies.

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Mark Biltz, the discoverer of the Blood Moons phenomenon and the author of Gods Day Timer, pointed out the term transhuman ultimately came out of religious literature.

He pointed to an article in the London Guardian profiling how a former Christian fell into transhumanism.The very word first appeared not in a work of science or technology but in Henry Francis Careys 1814 translation of Dantes Paradiso, the final book of the Divine Comedy, Biltz noted.

Dante, in this passage, is dramatizing the resurrection, the moment when, according to Christian prophecies, the dead will rise from their graves and the living will be granted immortal flesh, he said.

The vast majority of Christians throughout the ages have believed that these prophecies would happen supernaturally God would bring them about, when the time came. But since the medieval period, there has also persisted a tradition of Christians who believed that humanity could enact the resurrection through science and technology.

Whats amazing to me is how transhumanists are not just made up of atheists exclusively but Christian involvement has been growing exponentially, he said.

It is hard to believe how this is coming into mainstream Christianity! Indeed, there is even a Christian Transhumanist Association, headed by a preachers kid who was saturated in the Bible and Christian thought but has identified as a transhumanist since the mid-90s. He states in an article in Vice that we may see the next wave of Christians embrace transhumanist technologies as part of a sacred duty to participate with God in the redemption of the world.'

Biltz says he is troubled by such theological innovations.

When I read this I see how the deception of Christians in these last days will be so persuasive, he said. Christians are like the proverbial frogs in the boiling water. Believers need to get on Gods calendar so they realize we are at the time in history were we really need to be looking up, for our redemption draws nigh. Man has always wanted to become god or at least create a god in their own image. This just demonstrates how close we are to the coming of the Messiah.

The Bible story is more miraculous and astounding than you could have imagined. See the incredible proof of the unchanging nature of God and the exciting clues to what awaits at the end of days in Gods Day Timer by Mark Biltz, available as a book or documentary now in the WND Superstore.

Joel Richardson, the New York Times bestselling author of The Islamic Antichrist and Mystery Babylon, believes what is occurring is part of an old pattern in human behavior.

Mankind is essentially religious, whether they will admit it or not, he explained. If someone claims to deny the one, true God of the Bible, and every other god, they will inevitably find another created object to worship, most often themselves.

Richard said the Silicon Valley techno-gods of our time are among the most arrogant and most overt of the self-worshippers.

Perhaps understandably so. Never before in human history has technology and particularly the kinds of technology that is just on the horizon, so deeply challenge not only the essence of what it means to be human, but also our very perception of what it means to be God, he said.

Because of technology, mankind is entering a very dangerous spiritual phase of its existence. The tower of Babel is once again being erected. Those who are at the vanguard of these technologies, though denying true religion, understand the fundamentally religious nature of their work. This is why you will find so much of their work enshrouded in such religious language.

Richardson argues all of this was foretold in the Bible.

As always, it is mankinds arrogance that is his undoing, he said. Ultimately, these are those who the apostle Paul spoke of long ago when he said, that though they self-profess to be wise, they become fools, darkened in their understanding. After all, we all know how the story of the Tower of Babel ends. There is only one true God. He is the one who once warned, Though you say you are gods, you will die like mere men.'

One of the greatest mysteries in Scripture solved at last! Discover the terrifying truth behind the shadowy identity of one of the greatest horrors of the end times. New York Times bestselling author Joel Richardson reveals the secret of Mystery Babylon, available now in the WND Superstore.

Jan Markell of Olive Tree Ministries suggests transhumanism is comparable to the theory of evolution in how it assertsknowledge will evolve to a higher level likely without God.

Man just has to play God or at least be godlike, she said. This advancement comes through cloning and genetic manipulation. Transhumanists look to the future and believe the human condition will see improvement in physical ability, lifespan, mental acuity and health. In addition, the world conditions can also be improved. Such technological advancements, some have said, would even redefine what it means to be human.

It says in the Bible that knowledge will increase. It doesnt suggest this knowledge will be used to good or evil, but I believe, like everything else today, man is trying to be like God. Man will abuse this increase in knowledge and understanding. Thus, transhumanism is almost a religion in itself.

An incredible story about finding Gods light in a time of darkness. Dont miss this testimony about faith in the midst of the Holocaust. Trapped In Hitlers Hell, now available as a book or documentary now in the WND Superstore.

Pastor Carl Gallups, who examines current headlines in the light of end times prophecy in his book When The Lion Roars, argues the reason transhumanism so closely resembles a religion is because it was predicted in the Bible itself.

From the Garden of Eden to the book of Revelation we watch the story unfold, and the prediction that humankind would eventually, near the return of Jesus Christ, accept the very same lies that started in the Garden, the pastor explained.

Those lies can be summarized as: Man can be God-like, man can live forever without obeying Gods morality code, and therefore man can create God, life and morality in his own image, rather than the other way around. This is exactly what the transhumanists imagine themselves doing. Thus they are in a constant dilemma of trying to explain exactly what it is they are up to without falling into biblical language and imagery. If this scenario wasnt so clearly predicted thousands of years ago, complete with the somber results that are soon to come, it would almost be comical.

Gallups warned transhumanists are pursuing something the Bible warned about in the last days.

Even the transhumanist prophets predict an ultimate and soon-coming intelligence that will surpass any human capability perhaps even leading to unthinkable brutality, the pastor said. They even admit that what they are up to is, ultimately, rebellion against human existence as it has been given. Again, exactly what the Bible predicted. Demonically, that intelligence, rebellious spirit and brutality will manifest itself in the personage of the Antichrist. Transhumanists are not only saying basically the same thing as the Bible but are actually working feverishly to usher in the same biblical predictions they mock.

Gallups said ultimately Christians have a choice: whether they will place their faith in the promises of technology or the prophecies of Scripture thatseem to be predicting exactly whats happening today.

Which came first, the Word of God and the lies of the Garden of Eden or the modern transhumanists pursuit that matches the Bibles description of the last days? The answer is so obvious that apparently even some of the transhumanists see it the Word of God and its prophecies came first. Therefore, Im sticking with the original source, Gods holy Word.

Extraordinary events predicted centuries in advance are unfolding now. Here is your guide to the incredible prophecies being fulfilled before our very eyes. Dont miss the bestselling sensation from one of Americas most prolific and beloved pastors. When the Lion Roars: Understanding the Implications of Ancient Prophecies for Our Time by Carl Gallups, available now in the WND Superstore.

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Transhumanism just another 'religion' in which man seeks to become God - WND.com

Having a new social machinery to hand is no guarantor of success

Amy Lombard/The New York Times/Redux/Eyevine

By Pat Kane

FACEBOOKS Mark Zuckerberg is king of all he surveys in social media. His next horizon is near-mythical: techno-telepathy. Direct mind-to-mind contact is the ultimate communications technology, the mogul says.

Youll think a text or update and send it, affirmed his experimental tech director, Regina Dugan. The old Arthur C. Clarke line that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic seems evergreen in 2017.

Look around your streets or better, a mall, lobby or campus and youll see a generation of humans already deeply entangled in, and entranced by, their communication devices. As the next incessant blink, buzz or chirp pulls you towards the touchscreen yet again, havent you ever felt the urge accompanied by a twinge of your carpal tunnel to just respond, or receive, in a purely mental way?

Zuckerbergs aspiration to go from iPhone to psy-phone seems more like a shift in degree than kind. Yet what Ray Kurzweil once called the age of spiritual machines sometimes has to deal with the sweaty, fleshy, emotional reality of human beings as they are, particularly younger ones budding through those (so far) unavoidable heaves and surges we know as adolescence and early adulthood.

Going by these two fascinating ethnographies, even the digitally naturalised Generation Z (the kids of Gen X) are hardly ready for the direct and pure mingling of minds. Not while theres selfie-taking, sexting, cyberbullying or Yik Yakking to be done, day after day.

Yik Yak a controversial Twitter-style app which shut down in April this year provides Donna Freitass The Happiness Effect with its malevolent subtitle. Through hundreds of interviews with undergrads and graduates in 13 US colleges, Freitas lays out the regime of nervy identity construction through social media that occupies much of their emotional lives.

Nervy identity construction via social media occupies much of students emotional lives

Whether its due to their awareness that their timeline is a potential CV, or that their likes are an indicator of social status on campus, they are under pressure to display their best and most positive selves at all times. Now you dont have to wait for your 10-year high school reunion to show off how great your life is, says junior student Brandy. Its like that every day.

The anonymised Yik Yak app released a torrent of mutual abuse through some of Freitass campuses. Out from under the compulsion to display public happiness, the Repressed returned with a vengeance. Yik Yak was like a bad soap opera, said one. Another abandoned the service because I was overwhelmed by the racism and homophobia that exists on my campus.

So many of the tales here are about trying to establish some kind of autonomy over, or even just etiquette around, the endless connective demands of social media and smartphones. Ethics and mores are being established on the fly. Among Freitass students, the general attitude towards visually led dating apps where you display your wares to engage in hook-ups was an extended eewwww. For these febrile, nervy souls, steamy liaisons still need sociable encounters first.

Consistent with this reserve, the new ritual for courtly romance would seem to be the declaration that ones new boy/girlfriend is now Facebook official. When a couple agree to change their relationship status on the platform, they are (in one male students words) standing on top of a mountain and shouting it out to the world.

So far, so sweet, so familiar. The ecstasies of online communication are tempered by recognisable real-world (and real-body) anxieties and modesties.

Freitas is obviously a good pastor and counsellor to these fluttery kids, even as she mines them for research. But her matronising tone does remind you that Facebooks founding circumstance was as a campus social network, profiting from playing around with the status anxieties of Harvard University students.

The idea that the stifling managerialism behind Zuckerbergs network is seeking to enter your intimate mental life, at some stage in the neurotech future, feels like something that would invite neo-Luddism, if not outright rebellion.

One might have a romantic notion the agenda-setting SF novels of Cory Doctorow come to mind that the kids from the wrong side of the tracks would be the ones who demanded something different, less managed, more edgy, from their communication platforms. (Freitass students are clearly attending prestigious universities, where pressures to succeed keeps things normative.)

Jacqueline Ryan Vickerys book Worried About the Wrong Things has a cast of quirky, eccentric and talented young digital users, circulating in and around a working-class school near the Mexican border, with the pseudonym Freeway High. But the tale it tells is how, amid circumstances of socio-economic distress, education fails to be the haven that can generate possibilities and progress. And one predictor of school failure is whether it uses digital technology from a harm-driven rather than an opportunity-driven perspective.

The book has an intriguing tension. The authors teacherly interests are evident she promotes a connected learning model that imagines it can bring all the learning moments of a pupil, wherever and whenever they happen, into one educational framework.

Petty and futile constraints on classroom tech use sets a tone of defeatism and alienation

Yet the stories that unfold when she talks to the Freeway High students are pretty difficult to assimilate into any inclusive teaching system. In complete contrast to the compulsive communicators of Freitass book, two sensitive young Latino high-school film-makers (Sergio and Javier) often chose not to post their material on YouTube because they are insecure about its quality, and worried it might harm their career prospects, precarious and tentative as they are.

Freeway High has a classic teacher-liberator of the Dead Poets Society type a Mr Lopez who runs evening Cinematic Art Projects and Digital Media Clubs for the pupils. But, as Vickery charts in great and persuasive detail, the schools prevailing harm-driven view of social media muffles and excludes the digital creativity that already thrums through these kids lives. Petty and futile constraints on classroom tech use, and on the kind of digital material that children can bring in from their own enthusiasms, sets a tone of defeatism and alienation among some of the Freeway High kids.

The author has an obvious favourite pupil, a disruptive, deprived but poetic girl called Selena, with whom she spends considerable time. But she hears later that Selena has dropped out of school in the midst of her college preparations, and now has no connection with her. The book is strewn with tales of exclusion and struggle, in which parental backgrounds are chaotic and the demands of care, commuting and finding a place to live bear down too heavily on digitally ambitious youth.

Across both studies, and no matter the social positioning of each set of users, these young people evidently know they have a new kind of tangible social machinery in their hands (and minds): a machinery made of devices, networks and digital information, with which they can make a mark, pooling their knowledge and consciousness.

As responsible pedagogues, Vickery and Freitas are institutionalised (and institutionalising). And with Mark Zuckerberg as with any Silicon Valley visionary mogul you have to follow the profit-driven interest, not just gawp at the transhuman ambition.

Somewhere between the caring educators and the corporate disruptor, Generation Z is forging its own new society out of a digital revolution still in its early days. The streets will have their uses. And young, yearning bodies wont be ignored, either. The Happiness Effect: How social media is driving a generation to appear perfect at any cost Donna Freitas Oxford University Press

Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, risk, and opportunity in the digital world Jacqueline Ryan Vickery MIT Press

This article appeared in print under the headline Best behaviour?

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How to stay pro-tech when social media can eat young lives - New Scientist

Editors note: Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews his personal and professional friend Rick Rosner, who claims to have the worlds second highest IQ. Errol Morris interviewed him for the TV series First Person. This is an excerpt of that interview, originally some 100,000 words. Additional excerpted segments will appear here on The Good Men Project in the coming weeks.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Many, arguably most, women have greater difficulties than their male counterparts in equivalent circumstances.Their welfare means our welfare men and women (no need to enter the thorny, confused wasteland of arguments for social construction of gender rather than sex; one need not make a discipline out of truisms.).

Net global wellbeing for women improves slowly, but appears to increase in pace over the years millennia, centuries, and decades.Far better in some countries; decent in some countries; and far worse, even regressing, in others.Subjugation with denial of voting, driving, choice in marriage, choice in children, honour killings, andsevere practices of infibulation, clitoridectomy, or excision among the varied, creative means of femalegenital mutilation based in socio-cultural or religiouspractices; objectification with popular media violence and sexuality, internet memes and content, fashion culture to some extent, even matters of personal preference such as forced dress or coerced attire, or stereotyping of attitudinal and behavioral stances.All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God intended us to occupy.Sarah Moore Grimke said.

Everyone owes women.International obligations and goals dictate straightforward statements such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the United Nations (UN) in addition to simple provision of first life.MDG 3, 4, and 5relate in direct accordance with this proclamation in an international context mind you.MDG 3 states everyones obligations, based on agreed upon goals, for promotion of gender equality and theempowerment of women. MDG 4 states everyones obligations for reduction ofinfant mortality rate. MDG 5 states everyones obligations towards improvement ofmaternalhealth.All MDGs proclaim completion by 2015.We do not appear to have sufficed in obligations up to the projected deadline of 2015 with respect to all of the MDGs in sum.

In addition to these provisions, we have the conditions set forth in theThe International Bill of Rights for WomenbyThe Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women(CEDAW) of the United Nations Development Funds (UNDF) consideration and mandate of the right of women to be free from discrimination and sets the core principles to protect this right. Wheredo you project the future of women in the next 5, 10, 25, 100 years, and further? In general and particular terms such as the trends and the concomitant subtrends, what about the MDGs and numerous other proclaimed goals to assist women especially in developing areas of the world?

Rick Rosner: Predicting gender relations beyond a century from now is somewhat easier than predicting the short-term. In the transhuman future, bodily form, including sex, will be changeable. People will take different forms. And when anyone can change sexes with relative ease, there will be less gender bias.

Lets talk about the transhuman future (100 to 300 years from now) in general, at least as its presented in science fiction that doesnt suck. Three main things are going on:

Theres pervasive networked computing. Everything has a computer in it, the computers all talk to each other, computing costs nothing, data flying everywhere. Structures are constantly being modified by swarms of AI builders. A lot of stuff happens very fast.

Your mind-space isnt permanently anchored to your body. Consciousness will be mathematically characterized, so itll be transferrable, mergeable, generally mess-withable.

People choose their level of involvement in this swirling AI chaos. Most people wont live at the frenzied pinnacle of tech its too much. There are communities at all different levels of tech.

Also, horrible stuff old and new happens from time to time bio-terror, nanotech trouble, economic imperialism, religious strife, etc.

For more about this kind of thing, read Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, David Marusek, or Neal Stephenson.

So, two hundred years from now, gender wont be much of a limiting factor, except in weird throwback communities. In the meantime, idiots will continue to be idiots, but to a lesser extent the further we go into the future. No one whos not a retard is standing up for the idea of men being the natural dominators of everything. If it seems like were not making progress towards gender equality, it may be because theres a huge political/economic/media faction that draws money and power from the more unsavoury old-fashioned values, with its stance that anyone whos concerned about racism or sexism is nave and pursuing a hidden agenda to undermine American greatness.

Dumb beliefs that arent propped up by doctrine eventually fade away, and believing that men or any elite group is inherently superior is dumb, particularly now and into the future as any purportedly superior inherent abilities become less significant in relation to our augmented selves. Across the world, the best lazy, non-specifically targeted way to reduce gender bias is to open up the flow of information, serious and trivial (however you do that).

In the very short run, maybe the U.S. elects a female President. Doubt this will do that much to advance the cause of women, because Hillary Clinton has already been in the public eye for so long shes more a specific person than a representative of an entire gender. Is thinking that dumb? I dunno. I do know that her gender and who she is specifically will be cynically used against her. I hope that if elected, shes less conciliatory and more willing to call out BS than our current President.

In the U.S., theres currently some attention being paid to rape. Will the media attention to rape make rapey guys less rapey? I dunno. Will increaseattention to rape in India reduce instances there? I dunno. A couple general trends may slowly reduce the overall occurrence of sexual coercion and violence. One trend is the increased flow of information and the reduction of privacy cameras everywhere, everybody willing to talk about everything on social media, victims being more willing to report incidents, better understanding of what does and does not constitute consent. The other trend is the decreasing importance of sex. My baseline is the 70s, when I was hoping to lose my virginity. Sex was a huge deal because everything else sucked food, TV, no video games, no internet and people looked good skinny from jogging and cocaine and food not yet being engineered to be super-irresistible. Today, everybodys fat, and theres a lot of other fun stuff to do besides sex.

I think that some forms of sexual misbehaviour serial adultery, some workplace harassment will be seen as increasingly old-school as more and more people will take care of their desire for sexual variety via the vast ocean of internet porn. Of course, sexual misbehaviour isnt only about sex its also about exercising creepy power or a perverse need to be caught and punished so, unfortunately, that wont entirely go away. During the past century, sexual behaviour has changed drastically the types of sex that people regularly engage in, sex outside of marriage, tolerance for different sexual orientations, freely available pornography and sexual information, the decline in prostitution you could say, cheesily, that sex is out of the closet. And sex thats not secretive or taboo loses some of its power.

But I could be wrong. According to a 2007 study conducted at two U.S. public universities, one fifth of female college students studied suffered some degree of sexual assault.

A version of this post was originally published on In-SightJournal.com and is republished here with permission.

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An Interview with Rick Rosner on Women and the Future (Part 1) - The Good Men Project (blog)

Butcher is essentially a fast based 2D side scrolling bullet hell shooter from Transhuman Design and published by Crunching Koalas. Originally released on the PC last October, Butcher is a very hard game; indeed the games own tagline is The Easiest Mode is Hard. Beyond that is Harder, Hardest and then Impossible. So is it really as difficult as it seems?

You are a cyborg charged with exterminating the last of humanity. This most reductivist plot equates to shooting everything that moves, and everything that moves is shooting at you. The pixelated visuals deliberately evoke the likes of Duke Nukem and DOOM as does the just keep moving and shoot gameplay itself. Controls are a bit tricky to begin with and important to master, with the right stick and right trigger aiming your reticule and firing, whilst the jump button is on the left trigger. Movement is on the left stick with down allowing you to drop through most floors. Clever level design adds a lot of verticality meaning you are always leaping about on the move from the constant threat that the many enemies bring. As the difficulty levels ramp up, they take away a third of your health and there are no longer any medkits or armour drops, as if it wasnt already tough enough.

Each level comprises of 4 progressively longer and more difficult grim and grimy stages. Quite often you will get locked into a room and wont be able to progress until you have cleared out all of the grunts and dive bombing jet pack wearing enemies. Youll pick up old faithful weapons like assault rifles, shotguns, rail guns and of course, chainsaws to tear through and obliterate the waves of enemies. You will paint the screen crimson with their bloodied entrails as they scream in agony. A loud throbbing industrial metal soundtrack again reminds us of those early 3D shooters, and it does capture the spirit of DOOM. This game is hardcore and it is tremendous fun.

You only get one life to complete a level, the health bar drops quickly on damage and often one false move means youll have to start over again. You can certainly clear the early levels in just a few minutes, but after a while, as the levels in the stages get longer and more complex, the red mist and controller rage begins to seep in, and I find at that point its best to walk away for a bit. This is definitely a game where you will need to Git Gud. I found I was not particularly Gud and I will admit I laughed when the repeat a single level 10 times achievement popped. Before any others had. I should add that if youre prepared to sacrifice your self respect, a casual mode has been included. This whacks your health up to 400% and doubles the values of pick ups. Apparently

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Butcher review - ThisisXbox (press release) (blog)

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Let it be weird.

No need to explain it. No need to figure it out. No need to tame it with reason or theory.

Just let it be weird. For now.

Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return was the David Lynch on heroin wed been promised. For the most part, it was a mesmerizing rush of pure-cut WTF, albeit one that made a certain amount of sense for those versed with the shows symbol system and Lynchian motifs. Still, I officially gave up trying to make sense of everything during my first viewing right about the time the eyeless transhuman entity known as Experiment started barfing foamy ejaculate containing speckled (Easter?) eggs and a creamed corn glob of BOBs face. I quit taking notes, quit pressing PAUSE so I could Google things like The Manhattan Project, quit sweating that I wasnt getting it. I decided to accept Gotta light? as an act of pure Strangelove. I stopped worrying about it and just enjoyed all the crazy bomb drops.

This is not to say we wont be trying to understand it in this recap. We will! We should! Part 8 was this shows version of Losts Across the Sea episode a big bang creation myth for the evil that haunts and poisons Twin Peaks America and gave rise to abominable mutants and brought otherworldly cosmic horror to a fallen world; it was Lynchs version of a 50s sci-fi/horror movie. (From this perspective, you could see the episode as a big bang creation myth for pop culture.) Still, everything I have to offer in the way of being Mr. Explainer is mostly speculation, and the last thing I want to do is confuse you more than you might be. So Ill try to be disciplined in my theories. I do hope Lynch and Mark Frost will offer some illumination for what we saw here in the episodes to come, especially since some of it was actually hard to see; this was a dusky, dim episode, appropriate for a story about spiritual darkness, but some images were hard to make out. Example: the shot of the BOB embryo harvested from the chest of Dirty Cooper. But for now, Im okay to just let it be weird, and delight in that weirdness. Also, its my girlfriends birthday, and I promised Id celebrate her with an energetic, attentive presence unimpaired by a recap-broken brain. Priorities, people.

Part 8 opened with Dirty Cooper and Ray, newly sprung from prison, traveling by yellowy rental car at night to a place Ray liked to call The Farm. Fitting for a creature from the deep web of Black Lodge space, Dirty Cooper used one of his dark devices some kind of black magic cell phone full of cheat codes for techno-reality to exorcise the vehicle of three tracers and/or cast them upon a truck. (Poor hexed scapegoat truck!) He then threw the phone out the window, the big litterer. The earth cried from mans indifference to the environment, and not for the last time in this episode.

Tension between these two criminals: palpable. Dirty Cooper knew that Ray had accepted a $500,000 contract to rub him out. But he needed to extract some information from his treacherous associate before he made him say hello to his little friend hidden in the glove compartment. (No, not Ike the Spike a gun!) What Dirty Cooper didnt know was that Ray was pretty hip to all this. He had no intention of giving up whatever it was that he knew a string of numbers; coordinates, I believe unless the man he called Mr. Cooper wished to pay for them, or so he intimated; I think Ray has no intention of giving Dirty Cooper anything he wants. Ray also knew all about the concealed weapon, and he wasnt worried abut it for a few reasons, including the fact that he had a revolver of his own, courtesy, we might assume, of the warden whom Dirty Cooper blackmailed last week. Truly, there is no honor among thieves and their corrupt jailers.

Dirty Cooper directed Ray to exit the highway and take a smaller road to their final destination. This led to some long, Lynchian shots of Cooper and Ray driving in silence or shots from their point of view of the car following highway lines and directional markers and pushing into darkness across rough, uneven, unpaved terrain. In retrospect, Lynchs filmmaking choices foreshadow the protracted odyssey to come: This was an episode that basically departed from the shows main narrative (such as it) to go off-roading into the wilderness of Twin Peaks mythology.

Ray stopped the car in the woods because he had to take a leak, because by now, it just wouldnt be an episode of Twin Peaks without someone peeing. (The shows biggest whizzer, coffee-chugging Dougie, was MIA this week.) Perhaps Dirty Cooper could smell the bulls on Ray. He retrieved the gun, checked the chamber, and demanded that Ray cough up the digits in his head. Ray spun around with a gun of his own. Dirty Cooper was the first to pull trigger but the gun didnt fire. Click-click-jammed! Tricked you, fer, quipped Ray, who then put Dirty Cooper down with two bullets in the chest.

And thats when s got weird. (Recap continues on page 2)

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Twin Peaks recap: 'The Return: Part 8' - EW.com

June 24, 2017 at 11:25 am news

I'm marching today because I finally have the freedom to be the person I always wanted to be"

By Zach Ruiter Photos by Mitchel Raphael

The mood was jubilant as thousandstook part in the 9th annual Toronto Trans MarchonFridayevening. Marcherstook off from Bloor Street at Church, headed southdown Yonge Street, turned left on Carlton Street, endingup inAllan Gardens.

This years march was the fifth year the procession has been officiallypermitted to proceed down Yonge.

For Shadmith Manzour, who marched on Friday, the Trans March is about highlighting the capacity for everybody to really be true to themselves and be proud of who they are.

Many participants were celebrating the recent passing of federal trans rights legislation, Bill C-16, which introduces protection for gender identity and gender expression within the Canadian Human Rights Code and the Criminal Code. We were [one of] the first countries to pass equal marriage and we are the first country to grant rights to trans people, said Rachel Lauren Clark, a Trans March participant.

Somemarchers were reluctant to celebrate the new protections. Theres huge problems with homelessness, with suicide, and violence against transgender people especially trans women of colour, Qaiser, another marcher, says. And well need a lot more than Bill C-16 to address those problems.

The Trans March has established itself as one of the most important events in thePride calendar because it is equal parts a celebration of individualityand a defiant act of resistance and protest against the everydaytransphobia in our culture.

Filed under Cheri DiNovo, kristyn wong-tam, Paul Ainslie, Pride Toronto, Bill C-16, LGBTQ, PFLAG, Pride 2017, toronto trans march, trans rights, transgender

2017, Ink Truck Media All rights reserved.

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Video and Photos: Trans Marchers Celebrate the Passing of Trans Human Rights Bill - Torontoist

By Meg Miller 3 minute Read

In 2012, 25-year-oldJames Young was in a rail accident in which he lost both his left arm and left leg. An avid video gamer, Young taught himself how to use a controller using only one hand and, occasionally, his teeth. At the 2016BodyHacking Con in Austin, Young debuted a $76,000 carbon-fiber arminspired by the video gameMetal Gear Solid. The high-tech limbhe designed not only gives Young the dexterity todo most of the things he could before his accident, it also charges his phone, displays his social media feeds, and features a mount for a miniature dronecontrolled froma panel onhis forearm.

[Photo: courtesy David Vintiner and Gem Fletcher]Young, who designed the limb along withprosthetic sculptor Sophie de Oliveira Barata, is 1of 30-odd subjects shot for an ongoing photo series by photographer David Vintiner and creative director Gem Fletcher. The series, Transhuman, documents a rapidly growing international movement of the same name. Spanning the fields ofmedicine, technology, philosophy, art,and academia, transhumanism looks at the ways technology canenhance the physical and psychological capabilities of humans beyond the natural limits of biology. Like Young, some within the movement are developing bionic limbs for differently abled bodies. Others experiment with machines to enhance their sense of sight or touch.

Fletcher and Vintiner discovered the transhumanism community through a meet-up that takes place in the basement of a University College London building. In 2015, the pair released partof the ongoing series, called Futurists, which captured many of the main figures in Londons transhumanism scene.

The latest series of images,Transhuman, expands the scope to subjects throughout Europe and the United States.The movement itself is in intense flux, Fletcher tell Co.Design. Its going through a period of rapid growth, so there are new people in the movement all the time. Its truly a shape-shifting subject matter.

[Photo: courtesy David Vintiner and Gem Fletcher]Fletcher andVintiners subjects frequently introduce them to others in the movement; Fletcher says that the community, though international, is relatively tight-knit and inclusive. Meet-ups like the one at UCL, or the BodyHacking conference Young attended in Texas, have made it easy for members to meeteach other. Some, like Aisen Caro, who invented a set of headphones that allows humans to experience echo-location, are scholars. (Caro is aPhD candidate in human informatics at Tsukuba University). Others, like the London-based F_T_R design studio, are inventing ways to blur the lines between the physical and digital worlds. F_T_Rs Skinterfaceproject is a full-body suit equipped with actuators that convey a sense of touch to the wearer while she is experiencing a virtual worldwhile wearing a VR headset, for example.

[Photo: courtesy David Vintiner and Gem Fletcher]Another technology featured in theTranshuman seriesis a fantastical-looking wearable called the Eyesect, designed by the interdisciplinary lab The Constitute. The Eyesect is an otherworldlyheadset that covers the users head completely, and comes equipped with two handheld cameras. The camera feeds what they are seeing onto a screen inside the headset, giving viewers a sense of 360-degree vision. You can move around the camera eyes, so that you have complete freedom to look up, down, forward, and backward all at the same time, says Fletcher. It gives humans the experience that lots of different animals have with this expansive spatial perception.

[Photo: courtesy David Vintiner and Gem Fletcher]Fletcher and Vintiner will continue the series, traveling next to Russia to shoot subjects there, and adding insome film and sound elements to the project as well. The movement is evolving at an exciting rate, says Fletcher, andmore people are gettinginvolved,particularly when it comes to biohacking. The most popular forms of small bodyhacks theyve seen are peopleexperimenting with DIY RFID (radio-frequency identification) implantsthat allow themtounlock doors or turn on lights with the swipe of a hand, for instance. Also popular in this community areimplantable biomagnets,whichallow people to interact with the world in new wayslike by picking up magnetic objects with the touch of a finger.

Its becoming more accessible, Fletcher says of the transhumanism movement. We keep seeing more and more people with chips or small implants. Its almost like the popularity ofpiercings in the 90s.

Meg Miller is an associate editor at Co.Design covering art, technology, and design.

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Meet The Biohacking Pioneers Who Are Redesigning Their Own Bodies - Co.Design (blog)

Could the intensity of Americas abortion debate be like the last burst of light from a dying star? Thanks to social trends, especially those arising from technology and transhumanism, our familiar forms of argument are becoming obsolete.

The New York Times recently ran a series of opinion pieces for and against abortion, framing the debate in familiar terms. The pro-life movement is increasingly young, female, and spunkyso it does not appear to be on its way out. Statistics indicate that Americans, especially younger Americans, favor some restrictions on abortion, and a record number of millennials think abortion should be illegal altogether. Meanwhile, abortion-rights advocates have turned up their rhetoric, seeking to celebrate or normalize abortion. Presenting abortion stories as a badge of honor is increasingly popular. Teen Vogue has spent the better part of a year aggressively marketing abortion to pre-pubescent girls.

Structured in this way, this debate will have no winner and no loser. Abortion and the arguments surrounding it will slowly become antiquated. I believe this for three reasons.

Abortion rates are decliningas are rates of conception. In 2016, birth rates in the United States hit an all-time low: 59.6 births per 1,000 women. Both these trends are due in part to the effectiveness of long-term contraception. Abortion providers have hitched their wagons to universal access to low-cost contraception; ironically, this choice is hurting their business. It turns out pregnancy is a pre-condition for abortion, and Western Europe and North America are no longer fertile markets. This likely accounts for Planned Parenthoods aggressive efforts to relax abortion restrictions abroad, in Africa and South America.

The fewer abortions and fewer pregnancies we have, the less salient the abortion issue will become. The pro-life movement has done little to combat the poverty of imagination that makes children into commodities to be discarded or fetishized. This singularity of vision means that we have failed to make a positive case for children as a social good, a sign of a society that is vibrant and alive, a source of joy, and a sign of hope. Addressing this poverty is a complex intellectual task, one that requires articulating the humanness of the human, and presenting children and childrearing as fundamental to the common good. It requires making a case for having children. This task is more difficult, and for a long time it seemed less urgent, than arguing against violent death and Roe v. Wade. But today we see the consequences of not adequately attending to it.

Finally, technological advances are enabling transhumanist ideologies and eroding our understanding the humanness of the human.

Transhumanism holds that, with the aid of technology, human beings can and should evolve beyond our current physical and mental limitations. Transhumanists point to the history of human manipulation of the environment, of medicine, and of bodily ornamentation to argue that transhumanism is merely one step on the road of progress. Absent a persuasive and compelling vision of human nature and human dignity (in other words, of the humanness of the human), transhumanism exerts enormous pressure on the social imagination. In less than a decade, scientists have perfected human cloning and gene editing. They have created the first inter-species entitya human-pig chimeraand developed a functional artificial womb. Such technologies hold tremendous possibilities, but it would be nave to imagine that they dont pose fundamental challenges to our ideas of what it means to be human.

These scientific and technological innovations should spark lively debate and fresh articulations of what it means to be human and what role technology should have in shaping culture. Yet the sacred neutrality of science shields technology from serious critique. In a study released earlier this year, scientists from the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia detailed artificial womb technology, which has the possibility of revolutionizing care for pre-maturely born infants. This study seems to have been met with general indifference.

What public conversation did take place occurred within a legal-moralistic framework, a framework that fails to persuade when we lack a vision of what it means to be human. Pro-choice and pro-life advocates both focused on the same reality: the visibility of developing life. Pro-choice advocates were predictably concerned that the advent of artificial womb technology will have the adverse effect of humanizing the unborn. Pro-life advocates, on the other hand, expressed cautious enthusiasm that artificial wombs might humanize the unborn.

Scientists and researchers tell everyone not to worry. The lead researcher on artificial womb technology insists that scientists will never push the limits of viability to the point where womens bodies are functionally replaced by technology, and human gestation becomes mechanized. When you do that, he says, you open a whole new can of worms. But thisassurancerings hollow in an age governed by an ethos of what we can do, we may do. Thus, when legitimate ethical concerns are met with dismissals like Thats a pipe dream at this point, one ought to beware the qualifier, at this point. The scientific community has shown very little ability to regulate itself.

Technological possibility will increasingly eclipse the very terms of our debate over abortion, and I suspect that abortion politics as we know it is on its way to being a relic of the pasta particularly brutal way we eliminated human life back when humans used to have children.

Jessica Keating is director of the Office of Human Dignity and Life Initiatives in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

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Our Outdated Debates - First Things