"Flesh is a dead format," writes Mark O'Connell in To Be a Machine, his new nonfiction book about the contemporary transhumanist movement. It's an alarming statement, but don't kill the messenger: As he's eager to explain early in the book, the author is not a transhumanist himself. Instead, he's used To Be a Machine as a vehicle to dive into this loosely knit movement, which he sums up as "a rebellion against human existence as it has been given." In other words, transhumanists believe that technology specifically, a direct interface between humans and machines is the only way our species can progress from its current, far-than-ideal state. Evolution is now in our hands, they claim, and if that means shedding the evolutionary training wheels of flesh itself, so be it.

O'Connell, who comes from a literary rather than a scientific background, plays up his fish-out-of-water status, which is one of the book's great strengths. To Be a Machine isn't written as an insider-baseball account of transhumanism; instead, it's framed as an investigation. With a winning mix of awestruck fascination and well-chilled skepticism, he tracks down various high-profile transhumanists on their own turf, immerses himself in their worlds, and delivers dispatches wryly humorous, cogently insightful that breathe life into this almost mystical circle of thinkers and doers.

Big names in the tech field such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Ray Kurzweil are part of the story, but O'Connell digs deeper. His quest takes him to Anders Sandberg, a monklike proponent of cognitive enhancement; Max More, founder of the world's foremost cryonics company, who freezes the heads of deceased clients in the hopes they can one day be revived; and Arati Prabhakar, former director of the Pentagon's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), whose competitive development of robotics has fostered everything from killer robots to those designed, eerily enough, to hug people.

Not only does O'Connell apply a healthy curiosity to his subjects, he places them in illuminating context. Amid vivid firsthand reportage, he dwells on the history and ramifications of transhumanism: economically, anthropologically, sociologically, theologically and culturally. He deftly probes the existential risk to humans in regard to the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence. He balances the impulse for self-betterment with the potential recklessness of runaway innovation. And he uses the transhumanists' current efforts to transfer the human mind to a digital vessel as a way of rephrasing the age-old philosophical question, "What is consciousness?"

Unexpectedly, faith becomes a large component of his query he cites the writings of Saint Augustine and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas alongside the physicist John von Neumann and the science fiction visionary Philip K. Dick, and a conversation with a Buddhist transhumanist reveals a profound unity in how ancient religions and modern futurists view suffering.

To Be a Machine packs in a lot, but it never feels overstuffed. O'Connell lays the book out like a travelogue, going from one tech conference to another and never failing to tap into his own mix of awe and incredulity in the face of what he calls the "metaphysical weirdness" and "magical rationalism" of the transhumanist scene. He injects just enough personal background and anecdotes into his story to help humanize it up to and including some beautifully funny and poignant insights into his own everyday struggle with technology, fatherhood, and mortality.

In one of the book's most shocking chapters, he visits a collective of biohackers, or "grinders," in Pittsburgh who surgically implant sensors into their flesh in order to more intimately interface with the machine world. The details are both horrifying and strangely noble, and O'Connell depicts them with sensitivity, sympathy, and a novelist's eye for narrative. Rather than a dry treatise on science, To Be a Machine is a lucid, soulful pilgrimage into the heart of what humanity means to us now and how science may redefine it tomorrow, for better and for worse.

Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.

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'To Be A Machine' Digs Into The Meaning Of Humanity - WPSU

According to some versions of Buddhist apocrypha, the condition of our species mankind varied tremendously across vast ages. We live in an age of decadence and finitude wherein life is short and mankind is inexorably menaced by pain and death. Under these conditions, The Compassionate Buddhas bearing a salvific message appear before us and preach the sublime doctrine of total liberation from the forces of Karma and endless reincarnation.

All is not gloom and doom however because of the cyclicity of nature and its processes there were periods in the grand history of the Cosmos when our kind Homo sapiens were long-lived giants leading a salubrious existence with pain and suffering a distant shadow. Such beings, perforce, were unreceptive to the noble message of salvation and total release from the bondage of Karma hence The Buddhas did not appear to solace a grieving cohort of mankind and the healing truth lay in abeyance for long periods.

The great question to be answered is whether such periods of existential joy can be recaptured by the clever use of the science and learning now available for the advancement of our species when heavens and hells are forgotten and Planet Earth albeit briefly becomes the New Elysium.

The Transhumanists led by such stalwarts as Ray Kurzweil and Noah Harari believe that Homo sapiens can be made Homo deus by the clever use of the science and technology currently available if this goal is assiduously pursued. They pose the question What is it to be God-like? They find and most will agree that immortality, bliss and the power to do things at will are key attributes of divinity.

These seemingly divine attributes can be made part of the equipage of Homo sapiens with a sufficiently advanced science and the collective will to make the best of what we know and have. Heavens and Hells become paltry and negligible when divinity becomes commonplace.

Most futurologists believe that the life-span of Homo sapiens can be indefinitely extended and our knowledge base made God-like so that we can have what we wish. The issue of bliss is tricky because conventional Gods are debarred from the Four Fs and spend their idle days contemplating a non-functional navel.

Transhumanists believe that Homo deus can do much better with a form of active divinity based on a study of virtual worlds and computer simulations. In brief, death and the terrors of the associated afterlife can be actively expunged while all that is good and gracious can be made the norm.

If such a beatific scenario is a possibility our best efforts must be attuned to its realization religions must fade away and the torture-chambers called hells that disfigure all religions will become emblematic of a false spirituality that sees the suffering of others as a kind of sounding board for the boastfully virtuous.

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Buddhism and Transhumanism - Lankaweb

Zoltan Istvan is a transhumanist, journalist, politician, writer and libertarian. He is also running for Governor of California for the Libertarian Party on a platform pushing science and technology to the forefront of political discourse. In recent years the movement of transhumanism has moved from a niche collection of philosophical ideals and anarcho-punk gestures into a mainstream political movement. Istvan has become the popular face of this movement after running for president in 2016 on a dedicated transhumanist platform.

We caught up with Istvan to chat about how transhumanist ideals can translate into politics, how technology is going to change us as humans and the dangers in not keeping up with new innovations such as genetic editing.

New Atlas: How does transhumanism intersect with politics?

Istvan: For me you can never make any headway in the universe, or on planet Earth, if you don't involve politics because so much money for innovation or research and development comes from the government and so many laws about what you can do. Genetic editing, chip implants, can you get a brain implant that makes you smarter than other people? These things are often directed by the government determining whether it's illegal or not. You can either be thrown in jail or not thrown in jail so you must have a political footprint, you must have attorneys on the ground, you must have that kind of legal position that can explain things in terms that a government will understand.

One of the things that happened to me was that when I became a public figure in the movement, I realized very quickly there was zero political framework for this entire movement. It was one of the reasons why I founded the Transhumanist Party and also then went through the process to become the 2016 nominee.

As part of his 2016 Presidential campaign Zoltan Istvan traveled through the United States in a bus shaped like a coffin(Credit: Zoltan Istvan)

You've recently announced your run for California governor as a libertarian. How do you reconcile the small government "hands off" ideals of a libertarian ideology with your transhumanist goals of keeping technological innovations accessible to all?

Well, tranhumanism began as a libertarian philosophy really, with most early people who though about it having the point of view that we should have the right to merge with machines, we should have the right to overcome death.

To actually make real headway in politics it would takes years, maybe decades, to get the transhumanist party with enough funding and infrastructure to make a difference. But with the libertarians you walk directly into a party that got four million votes for Gary Johnson, its 2016 presidential nominee. Four million votes is a lot of votes.

That's one of the reasons why I am running for the libertarian party. Its not that in any way am I changing my science or technology beliefs. It just happens to be that the libertarian philosophy is pretty equivalent with tranhumanism and it fits very well for the next journey of my life.

What do you see the government's role is in preventing technological inequality between the rich and poor?

In my opinion the government should obviously be around to make sure we don't create a dystopia. Everyone thought the transhumanist party was totally optimistic of technology and while it totally is, it is also very fundamentally concerned with things like being able to go onto eBay and for a thousand dollars buy some kind of a virus making kit where you can create a virus that could take out millions of people. Or the idea of artificial intelligence, some people just want to let AI run wild whereas I'm not really sure we want a species on Earth that is smarter than human beings. I'm not sure that makes any sense.

So despite the optimism of the transhumanism party and that political element, we were also very conscious that inequality was growing because of technology. That said the standard of life was improving around the world even if inequality was growing. But still, I think the role of transhumanism in politics is not just to say, 'this is the greatest thing ever, let's go full force with whatever new technological development is happening.' We need to be concerned about these things.

Transhumanists can play a political role by stepping up and saying there are limits to where technology goes, and at the same time some things like genetic editing are things that we should put our foot down and say this should be open market. We should find out where this takes us and seek to improve ourselves as human beings. As you probably read all the time, Christian America is literally trying to shut down genetic editing and they are only getting certain types of things going. It's just like when George W Bush ran the government and stopped stem cell funding for seven years. They are trying to do the same thing now with genetic editing, which is perhaps the most promising science of the 21st century. This is where transhumanists have to stand up and just say no, this has to be determined by the market. If people start creating monsters and those monsters do evil things that's a whole different story, but what we're trying to do right now is eliminate cancer, augment our intelligence so we can become smarter, and do away with hereditary diseases. Very few people in congress are talking about it, yet it is probably the most important science of our time.

So for example in terms of genetic editing that creates IQ boosting - how do you manage that so it's not just an expensive process only available to the rich? Do you agree there needs to be a heavy regulatory hand from the government to ensure we don't move towards a dystopian future?

Tough question. I would've answered in the past that certainly some regulatory hand has to be involved, and I still think some regulatory hands have to be involved. I just think at this point in time we're not really talking about the rich becoming super smart and the poor not getting these kinds of technology. We're just fighting for the right to even do experiments.

I do believe that there's a libertarian version of universal health care and universal income out there that would be good. I just think at the very top of the food chain is where we really need to let people, those very rich and super innovative people, do exactly what they want to do. But as a left-leaning libertarian I'm probably always going to say that some regulatory hand has to be in there to protect the poor.

My entire goal, and one of the things I'm standing behind is that we all have a universal right to indefinite lifespans. That's something I can promise you in the 21st century will become one of the most important civil and ideological rights of humanity. That everybody has a right to live indefinitely. Right now we still think death is natural but that's gonna be changing over the next five, ten, fifteen years.

I want people to feel entitled to an indefinite lifespan where if they choose to live for a long period of time they will. And to get there we're gonna need some type of government hand that says, enough with the bandaid medicine, enough with your Christian antics where you must die to meet God and it's okay to age. I believe aging is a disease. I believe the government needs to classify it as a disease. We need to tackle aging, let's stop it.

It's not really libertarian or democratic or republican. It's a humanitarian point of view. People should have the right to live as long as possible. We should stop trying to fix the human body when we need to realize that moving beyond the human body is probably the very best scenario for getting rid of some of the maladies and diseases we suffer from. And you can call this universal health care, the libertarians may get all grumpy and angry, but the reality is I think there is a very libertarian nature to it. The most important thing about the libertarian point of view here is private property, and this private property extends all the way to yourself. If you see yourself as something that wants to be left alone, then you want to be left alone, not only from other people, but from the ravages of nature, from the ravages of disease and I think the libertarian calling could be to come up with these solutions that could change humanity forever so we really could live a truly libertarian life where you're not constantly attacked. We're all being bothered by biological issues so I'd like to take that libertarian philosophy one step further and apply that to the human body.

You've done a little biohacking yourself. Can you tell us about the chip in your hand and what it does?

On my bus tour recently, the very first stop on that four month tour was this place called Grindfest. All the biohackers across the country fly in and they do things to themselves. They put chips in, they electrocute each other, they party, they do drugs, it's a very free society. One of the things I did was I got chipped. I got a tiny little implant in my hand. It's about the size of a grain of rice and it allows me to open my front door. I'm trying to get the software right now to get my car to start with it. It also sends out a text message if you get close enough to me and have the right software. It can do all sorts of little things.

The biohackers are some of the most important people in the transhumanist movement. They're some of the ones that are really out there beyond the academics of it. They're doing things, they're testing things. I'm a big believer that a lot of people will get chip implants soon. I'm a surfer and when I go surfing I don't have to hide my keys underneath my car somewhere or worry about them getting wet. I just go because the housekeys are in my hand.

Do you think there is a line in how far human enhancement and augmentation can go before we can't really classify ourselves as humans anymore?

I would say that when we start really merging with machines, maybe over the next five or ten years, that's when mainstream people will say yes, we are fundamentally crossing that line of becoming less human.

I think when we start affecting our thoughts, and that's gonna come through the neural laces or the neural prosthetics. When you start getting into the matrix you're really no longer a human being, but the reality is that we're probably going to keep the best of our human traits with us for a long time. There's this idea that we may not ever even see that change because it happens so slowly and it will be hard to diagnose when it does. We'll always just think, oh, we're who we are.

So you're not afraid that we're moving into a phase where we are potentially losing an essential sense of self or individuality through this augmentation? You're embracing a future with a new type of human?

Oh I'm totally embracing it! I have called for the end of humanity as we know it and I don't mind mincing the words at all. The reality is that I think the human body is frail. I don't want to say the human body is evil, but I don't like it. I'm not a fan of the human body. I think it's something that is designed to be replaced and replaced as quickly as possible.

When you tell me that a third of everybody I know dies from heart disease and my father has had four heart attacks, I'm not saying the human body is something wonderful. I'm saying look, the heart is a terrible frigging mechanism. Awful mechanism. Terrible. We need to replace it and we need to replace it quickly. Frankly you could say the same thing about the human body as a whole. Every single part on the human body has to go and can be substantially improved. And will be substantially improved over the next 25 years.

We need to get over this idea that the body is something holy. Of course this is classic Christian ideology teaching us that, the human body is holy, marriage is holy, all these things are holy. Listen, none of that is holy. The only thing that really makes sense is what's most functional to increase our living standards for ourselves, for our families and for our community and humanity as a whole. And frankly, to do that, the most functional thing is to upgrade ourselves. To get rid of limbs. To get rid of blood. To get rid of breathing air. To get rid of eating and pooing. I mean if you were to create a machine, you had all the power in the world, you would never create a human being. You would never create the human mind, three pounds of meat. It's nowhere near as sophisticated as the Empire State building having servers lined up to the windows. Here, in just a few years we're gonna see exactly how complex a machine we can create.

The human mind is something that's just evolved over a period of 150,000 years from being essentially apes and we think we're really smart, but we have no idea the sophistication we can get to. If you look at the trajectory of how intelligence is increasing in the machine world. If you take that out a hundred years, just on that trajectory, the artificial intelligence would probably be approximately one trillion times smarter than a human being. We have no idea what a trillion times smarter than our brains would look like. I think we should do the best to be that change and go with it rather than be left behind.

Do you see it as an imperative to augment ourselves so as to make sure that AI doesn't speed past us and render us irrelevant? Elon Musk recently said that artificial intelligence could at some point view us as house cats in terms of usefulness.

Hah, house pets would be lucky! We would be much more like ants! If an ant sees a human being it has no idea what that human being is. It just sees something moving in its vision. In fact I've often speculated that this is why we have never made contact with any other species out there or any other kinds of intelligence. Any other intelligence out there is almost certainly going to be some kind of machine, perhaps even more complex than we even know.

Elon Musk is 100 percent right. That is why the Transhumanist Party never advocated for artificial intelligence to go beyond the human being. I would not be surprised whatsoever if machines suddenly decided, why would we want to keep humans around?

What I have advocated is that we need to spend more time working on neural prosthetics so that when we create an AI that can become smarter than us we can directly tie ourselves into that AI and become an intrinsic part of it. So that anywhere the AI goes, we also go. That's the only way I'd like to let loose a machine like that, where we were a huge part tied directly into it.

Just finally, is there a specific area of research or technological development that is happening right now that excites you?

To me the most important development of the last decade, or even century, is genetic editing. It's here, it's real and it's now. It's not just about giving babies blue eyes or brown eyes or blonde hair or black hair. It's about going in and eliminating cancer before you ever get it. It's going in and saying, this is something that Einstein had in his brain and we're going to create a genetic component so that you have it and then all of a sudden you are 20 percent better in physics than you would have been.

And this is something that the Chinese have been working on and leading the way. They're moving forward on it in ways that America is totally stopped on because we have all these laws in place. So we're very much stuck at a point where the most important science, being genetic editing, we could lose our entire teeth on it while Asia takes the lead.

What does it matter if a couple of hundred million Chinese kids have augmented intelligence that makes them twenty to thirty percent smarter than us, but for religious reasons Americans aren't? What happens in the fifteen years after that? There is no way to compete against them.

It becomes a great controversy not only between rich and poor but between Chinese citizenry and American citizenry. This is a very real civil rights debate that America and the world has to have. Everybody knows how thorny it is, but none of the politicians want to discuss it because it is so thorny. There is no right way about it and yet the technology is here and we all know it has the potential to completely change human nature.

Ed's note: This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Zoltan Istvan on transhumanism, politics and why the human body has to go - New Atlas

A sociologist in the United Kingdom is citing advances in technology that enablepeople to fulfill their potentialin contrast to a metaphysical assumption shared by liberals, that humans are equal.

Steve Fuller, who holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, explained in the business review section of a blog for the London School of Economics that under capitalism,people have been free to exchange goods and services, which he calledan inalienable right.

There were dangers, he noted, from exploitation, and Marxists say the asymmetrical power relations in the marketplace run roughshod over human rights.

Now comes transhumanism, he wrote, challengingboth capitalism and socialism, which had created a sense of humanism with the balance of a right to work and participate in the marketplace, yet a right not to be controlled by another.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans can evolve to physical and mental capacities beyond those that exist now, especially by means of science and technology.

Investigate the growing trend of blending human and machine, called transhumanism, at the WND Superstore.

Computers now mediate both work and non-work aspects of life, and the markers that oncedivided themhave become smaller and smaller, Fuller said.

An obvious case in point is the idea of working from home. People who operate this way typically shift back and forth between performing work and non-work activities on screen in an open-ended and relatively unstructured day. Meanwhile, all the data registered in these activities are gathered by information providers (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon), who then analyze and consolidate them for resale to private and public sector clients, he wrote.

Is this exploitation? The answer is not so clear. The information providers offer a platform that is free at the point of use, enabling users to produce and consume data indefinitely. Of course, such platforms are the source of both intense frustration and endless satisfaction for users, but the phenomenology of these experiences is not necessarily what one might expect of people in a state of exploitation.

On the contrary, there is reason to think that people increasingly locate meaning in their lives in some cyber-projection (avatar) of themselves, notwithstanding the third-party ownership of the platform hosting the cyber-projection, he said.

Ones personhood, he wrote, strongly implicates transhumanism, which can involve a person changing genetically or prosthetically.

On the other hand, in the case of transfer, the person might do more than simply bequeath various assets to already existing individuals and institutions say, in a will which comes into force upon ones death. Rather, the person might in his or her own lifetime invest energy and income in support of virtual agents, second lives. with the effect of turning ones physical self into a platform for launching the more meaningful cyber-selves.

The result, Capitalism 2.0, he called it, is morphological freedom.

It is the freedom not only to do what you want but also to be what you want. It is worth observing that this sense of freedom violates a key metaphysical assumption shared by liberals and socialists, namely, that humans are rough natural equals, not in the sense that everyone is naturally the same but that everyone has roughly the same mix of assets and liabilities, which in turn justifies a harmonious division of labor in society.

The violation of this assumption implies that whatever problems of social justice relating to material inequality have emerged over the history of capitalism are potentially amplified by transhumanism, as the prospect of morphological freedom explodes stopgap liberal intuitions about the natural equality of humans, he said.

WND has reported about opposition to the general transhumanism movement, most recently by the Family Research Council.

FRCwas objecting to a plan last year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Barack Obamato have taxpayers fund the mixing of human stem cells with animal embryos to create chimeras, creatures that have part animal and part human elements, in pursuit of better lives.

WND has previously reported on such goals. In one case, a U.S. biotech company was given permission to obtain 20 brain-dead patients to test if parts of their central nervous systems could be regenerated.

The company, Bioquark Inc., plans to use a soup of stem cells and peptides on the brains of the patients over a six-week period to see if it can jump-start their functions.

Philadelphia-based Bioquark asks on its website: What if your body came with a restart button?

WND also reported last winter on the growing promise of anti-aging or gene therapy science, a technology known as CRISPR/Cas9. It purports to deliver immortality to human beings and has attracted support from some of the worlds richest men, including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal; Ray Kurzwell of Google; Oracle founder Larry Ellison; venture capitalist Paul Glenn; and Russian multi-millionaire Omitry Itskov.

Carl Gallups, a Christian pastor, radio host and author of several books, including Be Thou Prepared and Final Warning, said there are moral and ethical dilemmas.

What entity or governmental power will make the decisions concerning who gets their death reversed and who must die? Gallups asked at the time.

Investigate the growing trend of blending human and machine, called transhumanism, at the WND Superstore.

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Sociologist: 'Capitalism 2.0' about to slay liberalism's sacred cow - WND.com

TREXIT?: TRANSNATIONALISM AND TRANSHUMANISM AND WHY THEY ARE THE REAL ISSUES OF 2016

NASHVILLE Are you ready to cede your body to the global body and to Transhumanist technology under Transnationalistss control? Or, are you looking for the Trexit?

U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, recently invited a group of Northeastern University commencement students to see the future with him. As they peered into his crystal ball, Kerry urged his audience to see a world with no nations or borders.

Imagine. One world. No boundaries. It sounds wonderful, futuristic, hopeful; like an apple anyone would wish to pluck from a tree.

This is the transcendent world vision of the Transnationalists.

Transnationalism is a new type of consciousness. Also called Globalism, it is a social agenda, or revolution, grown out of the accelerating technology-driven interconnectivity and interdependence between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states.

Free flows of capital and people (legal and illegal) across the sphere of earth is one goal of Transnationalism. The unity of all of the rolling stones of humanity into a monolithic rock is the other.

As Kerry noted, hiding behind walls in this new borderless world will be impossible.

The walls reference was a shot at Donald Trump, who wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

What Kerry did not say is that this wall-less world will happen via technologywhich sooner than later will be implanted in our bodies. The technology we now depend on for our very lives in the online world will soon mesh with our flesh and make our flesh and blood lives a transparent and open book. No physical walls will be necessary.

The technical term for meshing our flesh with technology is Transhumanism. Not every Globalist advocate is a Transhumanist, but sooner or later, they will realize that turning humans into cyborgs IS the globalist agenda and certainly is the key to its success. If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, SONY and other mega corporations driving Globalism have their way, this technology will soon come off your desktop and inside your body. Soon equals 2020-2030.

Clearly, Globalism offers unparalleled new opportunities matched only by its potential for unmatched tyranny. This is its great danger. Combined with Transhumanism, the results could be catastrophic for humanity. In fact, it is the end of the human race as we know it.

WE are the ones who are deciding the future for all of humanity. Many seek a Trexit. Others embrace a Trentrance or the Transhuman/Transnationalist route.

AGENDA 2030

One World government and one economy is the globalists next great leap forward in what the UN calls the new universal agenda for humanity that it hopes will be fulfilled by 2030. Called Agenda 2030, this far-reaching program was unanimously adopted on September 25, 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly. Its noble goal is to improve the lives of poor people the world over.

According to the Agenda, by 2030, the majority of us will cease identifying ourselves with the nationality or country of our birth and will instead get religion and see ourselves as global citizens living in the light.

Massive redistribution of wealth is the cornerstone of the Agenda.

Whether or not the 1% who control 85% of the worlds wealth will voluntarily give their billions away is yet to be seen.

Whether or not Agenda 2030 is a positive development is also yet to be determined.

Agenda 2030 has raised alarm bells among analysts who do not see it as a way for all of us to love each other. They see it as a move toward a global totalitarian state.

Membership is mandatory. Non-negotiable. It is already a done deal.

Some believe this plan can only be achieved by absolute dictatorial power or at the point of a gun. My belief is that no guns will be involved. Microchips will do the job. The UN has already begun giving biometric identity cards to refugees in order to track them as they make their way to their new homes. Agenda 2030 calls for ALL of humanity to have biometric cards in their hands by 2030. These cards may literally be IN our hands, YOUR hands. This is why Transnationalism and Transhumanism are linked.

If we the people do not like the Agenda, now is the time to speak.

Silence is consent.

Britains June 23, 2016 vote to Brexit the Globalist EU will have a lot to say about the rise of Transnationalism and Transhumanism across the globe and the fulfillment of the UNs agenda.

Americas vote in November will amplify the feelings on both sides of Brexit.

The larger choice here is to take the Transnational / Transhuman path or to Trexit.

SMARTEN UP

Socialist Democrats in America have the global body or Global U (a pun on you) of Agenda 2030 in mind. They aim to unify the human body. Their message is come together. Smarten up.

Donald Trumps popularity is partly attributed to his stand against Transnationalism. Instead of eliminating walls, Trump is promising to build one between US and the World. Donald Trumps America First strategy is as mosaic as his autocratic lawgiver tendencies and he is wrong about building the Wall, but not completely. Personally, I think we need gates, not walls. Trumps stand-ins are providing further warnings or insight into the possible dark side of the light of Transnationalism or Globalism, which they equate with Fascism. The perceived global stakes of Trumps America First strategy are spelled out in a May 12, 2016 USA Today editorial by Senator Jeff Sessions who wrote: For the first time in a long time, this November will give Americans a clear choice on perhaps the most important issue facing our country and our civilization: whether we remain a nation-state that serves its own people, or whether we slide irrevocably toward a soulless globalism that treats humans as interchangeable widgets in the world market.

Sessions is partly right about globalism being soulless. Some believe the process of globalization will result is a religion-less world. Others think it will lead to greater understanding among the worlds religions. Globalisms relationship with religion and spirituality is complex. Sessions is totally right about the globalist agenda to treating humans as widgets, which means mechanical devices, in the globalist marketplace. For clarity, what I believe Sessions should have said is that soulless globalism treats humans as interchangeable smart or transhumanist widgets in the world market. Smart widgets or things are electronic objects connected to and communicating with the Internet. Sessions and Globalists alike must realize that, since 2003, the U.S. Government has been promoting the transformation ofour bodies into widgets via smart technology and the evolution of humanity into a hive mind. This is the core of globalist apple. By smart is not meant more intelligent. It means interfaced with computer technology that makes us more watchable, programmable, trackable and controllable.

PLAYING GOD In my 2015 book, The Skingularity Is Near, I documented how this smart technology is now in the wearable phase, but ULTIMATELY is aimed at our skin.

In the wearable phase body-born devices are being used to augment the human body. These include smart watches and sensors.

These devices will become less and less about performing functions such as biometric measuring for us and more and more about our identity. These devices will resemble jewelry with an extraordinary array of functions.

The ultimate wearable is Googles proposed nano-nutrient garment that is designed to promote longevity. This robe of many colors will send nano bots into every orifice of your body on missions to seek and destroy pathogens in your blood and keep your arteries clean as a whistle. The result will be dramatically extended life spans. It echoes the miracle garments or robes of power of the ancient gods. It is the coat of light once worn by Adam and Eve, who were hermaphrodites or two-sexed.

The wearable phase will not last long. This technology will shrink in the immediate future so that systems can be embedded or implanted in the body. The smart phone in your hand will sooner-than-you-think be implanted in your ear.

SkinTrack, a new wearable technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University, basically turns the entire lower arm into a touchpad. It differs from previous skin-to-screen approaches because SkinTrack requires the user to wear a special ring that propagates a low-energy, high-frequency signal through the skin when the finger touches or nears the skin surface. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink.

In another few blinks of the eye, smart contact lenses that will give us super-human vision and will offer heads-up displays, video cameras, medical sensors and more. These are safest of these new technologies. Sony, Samsung and Google have all filed patents for smart contact-lens technology in the early months of 2016.

2020 here we come!

Or is it 2030?

By safe I dont mean they wont have potential harmful effects. Rather, I mean that like other implantables, smart lenses can be removed or inserted by the user. They are not under or in the skin permanently.

Googles Verily Life Sciences is leading the way to bring the IoT to your eyeball. In the new cognitive era, as IBM calls it, human beings will hike over to Best Buy, or some other electronics outlet, to pick out your new lens. Your natural lens will be removed from your eyeball. A fluid will be injected into your eye. In a few moments this fluid will fuse with your eyes lens capsule. As it solidifies your new eye contains storage, battery, sensors, a radio and other electronics. When you leave the store you will now be a transhuman being who will have perfect vision, the ability to see in the dark, sensors to detect blood glucose levels and other applications we havent yet dreamed of.

Of course, with super vision glasses comes supervision. The great fear is that the implantation of this technology will come at a cost greater than our organic eye lenses. It will cost us our free will and will turn us into emotionless cyborgs.

Another Google start-up, Magic Leap, has raised a billion dollars to create an implantable contact lens that injects computer-generated images or floats virtual objects into the real world field of view. Called the worlds most secretive startup, its aim is to bring magic back into the world by rethinking the relationship technology has with people. Its aim is remove the shackles binding humanity by tossing away the boxes on our desk by uniting the brain and body with technology. Actually, Google may want you to think about eliminating your physical body altogether.

Its chief futurist, author Neal Stephenson, is most famous for the concept of Metaverse from his 1992 sci-fi classic Snow Crash. Stephenson imaged a virtual universe where users create avatars to communicate and interact. Who needs a physical body when your avatar is so much better?

TRANSHUMANISM Brexit just put a wrench in that plan, just like the rejection of Google Glass slowed down Googles aim to control your body, mindand soul. Transhumanism promises to take the potentials of this right to new levels. Life extension via synthetic organs, drugs and other new technologies eliminate the barriers to our pursuit of life, liberty and immortality.

Transhumanism is a human re-engineering project based on the meshing of human flesh with smart technology or electronic devices. Born out of NASAs realization in 1962 that we will not be able to transcend earth in our flesh and blood suits, the U.S. Government began working on the transformation of humans into cyborgs (a term coined by NASA).

Transhumanism is aimed at perfecting the human body by seeding it with or ceding it to Artificially Intelligent technology, giving it a new layer of skin, and connecting every human on the planet to the Internet of Things (IoT). In less than ten years every organ and body part will be replaceable by a technological version.

These new technologies comprise the Internet of Things (IoT) that drives Transnationalism / Globalism. The IoT is presently composed of 20 billion+ smart things or widgets phones, toasters, refrigerators, cars, computers that will balloon to over 50 billion such smart things by 2020.

The IoT will essentially become an Artificially Intelligent global brain of which each individual human brain is a neuron.

How the Internet of Things Will Change Everything-Including Ourselves.

Presently included among these things are nearly four billion human beings, who are rapidly shedding all that is human and adopting the transhuman upgrades devised by the wizards of Silicon Valley. If you wonder how dependent, if not addicted, we are to these technologies we are just try to take our cell phones away. Just try to run a One World without them.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg, has made it is his life to goal to have every human being online as a human being thing. Facebook will be the portal or conduit linking all human being things.

Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of these present and future Facebook users do not have toilets or clean water. They are the poor the UN seeks to uplift. How turning them into smart things and wiring them to IoT will make them better humans is an, as yet, unanswered question.

However, it is certain that the Internet is a great leveler. Take a look at this Microsoft Empowering commercial. Today, more than half the worlds population does not have access to the Internet. We believe that everyone deserves the social and economic opportunities afforded by connectivity.

Ultimately, the global citizen view promoted by transnationalism is a transient step toward a trans-earth or multi-planet civilization with transhumans (machine-enhanced humanoids) transcending the boundaries of earth life and coming and going between earth, the moon, Mars and beyond.

I am for helping the poor to elevate their lives and for transcending the boundaries of earth. But Im just not sure about doing so as man-chines.

As I discussed in The Skingularity Is Near, Transhumanism is the fulfillment of both the Christian prophecy and ethos of a new, perfected human and Americas we can do anything with the right technology attitude.

Ever since Adam and Eve were evicted from Eden, humanity has sought to redeem itself and reclaim our original perfect status.

Some Globalists and Transhumanists believe our species should embrace our transition to smart human being things as part of our hive evolution and our return to perfection. For them, a new human race connected by implanted technologies is a quantum leap. Others believe this vision is trumped-up.

However, human rights advocates, including this author, warn that as technology becomes more and more invasive and merges with us we become and more transparent. Privacy (or hiding) will become impossible. Homo sapiens as a species will cease to exist.

In this way, the 2016 American election is a vote for Transhumanism and Transnationalism or against it. Will we make a Trentrance or a Trexit?

You decide.

Read more here:

Trexit?: Transnationalism and Transhumanism and why They ...

November 17, 2016

(Market Watch) Interest has been spreading, with Watson quickly working through his latest supply of magnets. One woman recently traveled to Ice 9 Studio from Australia for a radio-frequency identification chip she uses to store personal information. Watsons business Read More

September 21, 2016

(Scientific American) The cosmos has never been particularly loquacious with its intentions, often requiring Brobdingnagian-sized venturesfrom particle accelerators and space telescopes to genome and connectome projectsto tease out its deepest secrets. Can the same be done for death? A Read More

August 5, 2016

The New Bioethics(vol. 22, no. 2, 2016) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: The Human Figure and Urban Ground: Cyborgs and the City by Aaron Parkhurst Managing Bodies, Managing Persons: Postmortem Care and the Role of the Nurse Read More

July 14, 2016

(The Atlantic) And why stop with Granny? You could have the same afterlife for yourself in any simulated environment you like. But even if that kind of technology is possible, and even if that digital entity thought of itself Read More

July 6, 2016

(The Conversation) But transhumanisms mixing of essentially religious ideas with scientific language matters because it distorts the way we think about technology. Transhumanism tends to see technology as a way to grant all our wishes. And this is often Read More

July 5, 2016

(The Guardian) According to the foundation a wave of new cyborgs will be breaking at the end of the summer and now you can be one, too. The foundations sister organization, Cyborg Nest, is currently taking orders for Read More

June 27, 2016

(Quartz) Harbissons transformation was extensively covered by the media, and elicited correspondence from people all over the world interested in new senses. In response, he and a team of collaborators have launched Cyborg Nest, a company that aims to Read More

June 8, 2016

(Public Discourse) Indeed, Savulescu thinks cognitive enhancement might make us humans even more dangerous to each other, given our technological prowess at building weapons of mass destruction and our propensity to pollute our environment. He regularly invokes the fear Read More

May 31, 2016

(The Telegraph) Advances in artificial intelligence could lead to computers and smartphones developing consciousness and they may need to be given human rights, an expert has claimed. Marcus du Sautoy, who took over from Richard Dawkins as Professor for Read More

May 31, 2016

(News-Medical) Our excitement with and rapid uptake of technology and the growing opportunities for artificial brain enhancement are putting humans more firmly on the path to becoming cyborgs, according to evolution experts from the University of Adelaide. Read More

Originally posted here:

Transhumanism | Bioethics.com

Many of the tropes of science fiction can be viewed as similar to the goals of transhumanism. Science fiction literature contains many positive depictions of technologically enhanced human life, occasionally set in utopian (especially techno-utopian) societies. However, science fiction's depictions of technologically enhanced humans or other posthuman beings frequently come with a cautionary twist. The more pessimistic scenarios include many dystopian tales of human bioengineering gone wrong.

Examples of "transhumanist fiction" include novels by Linda Nagata, Greg Egan, Zoltan Istvan, and Hannu Rajaniemi. Transhuman novels are often philosophical in nature, exploring the impact such technologies might have on human life. Nagata's novels, for example, explore the relationship between the natural and artificial, and suggest that while transhuman modifications of nature may be beneficial, they may also be hazardous, so should not be lightly undertaken.[1] Egan's Diaspora explores the nature of ideas such as reproduction and questions if they make sense in a post-human context. Istvan's novel The Transhumanist Wager explores how far one person would go to achieve an indefinite lifespan via science and technology.[2] Rajaniemi's novel, while more action oriented, still explores themes such as death and finitude in post-human life.

Fictional depictions of transhumanist scenarios are also seen in other media, such as movies (Transcendence), television series (the Ancients of Stargate SG-1), manga and anime (Ghost in the Shell), role-playing games (Rifts and Eclipse Phase) and video games (Deus Ex or BioShock).

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Transhumanism in fiction - Wikipedia

Over the past few years, a new paradigm for thinking about humankind's future has begun to take shape among some leading computer scientists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists and researchers at the forefront of technological development. The new paradigm rejects a crucial assumption that is implicit in both traditional futurology and practically all of today's political thinking. This is the assumption that the "human condition" is at root a constant. Present-day processes can be fine-tuned; wealth can be increased and redistributed; tools can be developed and refined; culture can change, sometimes drastically; but human nature itself is not up for grabs.

This assumption no longer holds true. Arguably it has never been true. Such innovations as speech, written language, printing, engines, modern medicine and computers have had a profound impact not just on how people live their lives, but on who and what they are. Compared to what might happen in the next few decades, these changes may have been slow and even relatively tame. But note that even a single additional innovation as important as any of the above would be enough to invalidate orthodox projections of the future of our world.

"Transhumanism" has gained currency as the name for a new way of thinking that challenges the premise that the human condition is and will remain essentially unalterable. Clearing away that mental block allows one to see a dazzling landscape of radical possibilities, ranging from unlimited bliss to the extinction of intelligent life. In general, the future by present lights looks very weird - but perhaps very wonderful - indeed.

Some of the possibilities that you will no doubt hear discussed in the coming years are quite extreme and sound like science-fiction. Consider the following:

These prospects might seem remote. Yet transhumanists think there is reason to believe that they might not be so far off as is commonly supposed. The Technology Postulate denotes the hypothesis that several of the items listed, or other changes that are equally profound, will become feasible within, say, seventy years (possibly much sooner). This is the antithesis of the assumption that the human condition is a constant. The Technology Postulate is often presupposed in transhumanist discussion. But it is not an article of blind faith; it's a falsifiable hypothesis that is argued for on specific scientific and technological grounds.

If we come to believe that there are good grounds for believing that the Technology Postulate is true, what consequences does that have for how we perceive the world and for how we spend our time? Once we start reflecting on the matter and become aware of its ramifications, the implications are profound.

From this awareness springs the transhumanist philosophy -- and "movement". For transhumanism is more than just an abstract belief that we are about to transcend our biological limitations by means of technology; it is also an attempt to re-evaluate the entire human predicament as traditionally conceived. And it is a bid to take a far-sighted and constructive approach to our new situation. A primary task is to provoke the widest possible discussion of these topics and to promote a better public understanding. The set of skills and competencies that are needed to drive the transhumanist agenda extend far beyond those of computer scientists, neuroscientists, software-designers and other high-tech gurus. Transhumanism is not just for brains accustomed to hard-core futurism. It should be a concern for our whole society.

It is extremely hard to anticipate the long-term consequences of our present actions. But rather than sticking our heads in the sand, transhumanists reckon we should at least try to plan for them as best we can. In doing so, it becomes necessary to confront some of the notorious "big questions" about the structure of the world and the role and prospects of sentience within it. Doing so requires delving into a number of different scientific disciplines as well as tackling hard philosophical problems.

While the wider perspective and the bigger questions are essential to transhumanism, that does not mean that transhumanists do not take an intense interest in what goes in our world today. On the contrary! Recent topical themes that have been the subject of wide and lively debate in transhumanist forums include such diverse issues as cloning; proliferation of weapons of mass-destruction; neuro/chip interfaces; psychological tools such as critical thinking skills, NLP, and memetics; processor technology and Moore's law; gender roles and sexuality; neural networks and neuromorphic engineering; life-extension techniques such as caloric restriction; PET, MRI and other brain-scanning methods; evidence (?) for life on Mars; transhumanist fiction and films; quantum cryptography and "teleportation"; the Digital Citizen; atomic force microscopy as a possible enabling technology for nanotechnology; electronic commerce.... Not all participants are equally at home in all of these fields, of course, but many like the experience of taking part in a joint exploration of unfamiliar ideas, facts and standpoints.

An important transhumanist goal is to improve the functioning of human society as an epistemic community. In addition to trying to figure out what is happening, we can try to figure out ways of making ourselves better at figuring out what is happening. We can create institutions that increase the efficiency of the academic- and other knowledge-communities. More and more people are gaining access to the Internet. Programmers, software designers, IT consultants and others are involved in projects that are constantly increasing the quality and quantity of advantages of being connected. Hypertext publishing and the collaborative information filtering paradigm have the potential to accelerate the propagation of valuable information and aid the demolition of what transpire to be misconceptions and crackpot claims. The people working in information technology are only the latest reinforcement to the body of educators, scientists, humanists, teachers and responsible journalists who have been striving throughout the ages to decrease ignorance and make humankind as a whole more rational.

One simple but brilliant idea, developed by Robin Hanson, is that we create a market of "idea futures". Basically, this means that it would be possible to place bets on all sorts of claims about controversial scientific and technological issues. One of the many benefits of such an institution is that it would provide policy-makers and others with consensus estimates of the probabilities of uncertain hypotheses about projected future events, such as when a certain technological breakthrough will occur. It would also offer a decentralized way of providing financial incentives for people to make an effort to be right in what they think. And it could promote intellectual sincerity in that persons making strong claims would be encouraged to put their money where their mouth is. At present, the idea is embodied in an experimental set-up, the Foresight Exchange, where people can stake "credibility points" on a variety of claims. But for its potential advantages to materialize, a market has to be created that deals in real money and is as integrated in the established economic structure as are current stock exchanges. (Present anti-gambling regulations are one impediment to this; in many countries betting on anything other than sport and horses is prohibited.)

The transhumanist outlook can appear cold and alien at first. Many people are frightened by the rapid changes they are witnessing and respond with denial or by calling for bans on new technologies. It's worth recalling how pain relief at childbirth through the use of anesthetics was once deplored as unnatural. More recently, the idea of "test-tube babies" has been viewed with abhorrence. Genetic engineering is widely seen as interfering with God's designs. Right now, the biggest moral panic is cloning. We have today a whole breed of well-meaning biofundamentalists, religious leaders and so-called ethical experts who see it as their duty to protect us from whatever "unnatural" possibilities that don't fit into their preconceived world-view. The transhumanist philosophy is a positive alternative to this ban-the-new approach to coping with a changing world. Instead of rejecting the unprecedented opportunities on offer, it invites us to embrace them as vigorously as we can. Transhumanists view technological progress as a joint human effort to invent new tools that we can use to reshape the human condition and overcome our biological limitations, making it possible for those who so want to become "post-humans". Whether the tools are "natural" or "unnatural" is entirely irrelevant.

Transhumanism is not a philosophy with a fixed set of dogmas. What distinguishes transhumanists, in addition to their broadly technophiliac values, is the sort of problems they explore. These include subject matter as far-reaching as the future of intelligent life, as well as much more narrow questions about present-day scientific, technological or social developments. In addressing these problems, transhumanists aim to take a fact-driven, scientific, problem-solving approach. They also make a point of challenging holy cows and questioning purported impossibilities. No principle is beyond doubt, not the necessity of death, not our confinement to the finite resources of planet Earth, not even transhumanism itself is held to be too good for constant critical reassessment. The ideology is meant to evolve and be reshaped as we move along, in response to new experiences and new challenges. Transhumanists are prepared to be shown wrong and to learn from their mistakes.

Transhumanism can also be very practical and down-to-earth. Many transhumanists find ways of applying their philosophy to their own lives, ranging from the use of diet and exercise to improve health and life-expectancy; to signing up for cryonic suspension; creating transhumanist art; using clinical drugs to adjust parameters of mood and personality; applying various psychological self-improvement techniques; and in general taking steps to live richer and more responsible lives. An empowering mind-set that is common among transhumanists is dynamic optimism: the attitude that desirable results can in general be accomplished, but only through hard effort and smart choices.

Are you a transhumanist? If so, then you can look forward to increasingly seeing your own views reflected in the media and in society. For it is clear that transhumanism is an idea whose time has come.

_______________

Postscript

(September, 2001)

This article was first published in 1998. Since then things have developed, both technologically (of course) but also philosophically. I want to say just a few words about the main changes in my own thinking that have occurred over the past years.

1. When the first version was written, the main challenge was to make people aware of potential developments that the article discusses. That has been happening increasingly. Although there is still a long way to go, the focus for me has shifted to getting into the details, taking more account of the obstacles and downsides, and trying to develop a more sensitive treatment of the complex issues involved.

2. Many people are scared by transhumanism. While some of the fear is based on misconceptions, a significant part of it reflects a legitimate concern that in the process of pursuing technological improvements, we could risk losing some of the things that we regard as most valuable. The challenge, therefore, is to be sensitive to our fundamental values and to find a vision and a roadmap that will not lead to their disappearance but rather their enhancement (albeit, perhaps, in a transposed form). We must emphasize that what we should strive for is not technology instead of humanity, but technology for humanity.

3. In addition to the somewhat intangible risk that we create a utopia where we have forgotten to include the things we care about most, there are various concrete risks of technology being used destructively, either by accident or malicious intent (consider e.g. the risks from nanotechnology referred to above). Planning to minimize these risks is a central concern.

4. A fundamental fact about us humans is that we care about how we relate to each other. Love, affection, envy, and friendships are such important parts of who and what we are that they cannot be left out of the equation. And there are no easy technological fixes to these issues. For example, maybe future technology could give you the illusion and the feeling of being loved. But maybe what you really want is to actually be loved and not just by some custom-made lovebot, but by this currently existing human being that you have given your heart to. The best technology could do is to help you create the conditions under which your love could flourish and grow indefinitely, unencumbered by the erosive forces of current material and psychological conditions.

_______________

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Im grateful to Anders Sandberg and David Pearce for comments on an earlier draft.

About Nick Bostrom

Dr. Nick Bostrom received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the London School of Economics in the year 2000. He is currently a Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. A founder of the World Transhumanist Association, he is the author of numerous publications in the foundations of probability theory, ethics, transhumanism, and philosophy of science, including the book Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (Routledge, New York), which is due out in April 2002. For more information, see: http://www.nickbostrom.com

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WHAT IS TRANSHUMANISM? - Nick Bostrom

For the last several decades, a strange liberation movement has grown within the developed world. Its crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates. They want nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As "transhumanists" see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolutions blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species.

It is tempting to dismiss transhumanists as some sort of odd cult, nothing more than science fiction taken too seriously: Witness their over-the-top Web sites and recent press releases ("Cyborg Thinkers to Address Humanitys Future," proclaims one). The plans of some transhumanists to freeze themselves cryogenically in hopes of being revived in a future age seem only to confirm the movements place on the intellectual fringe.

But is the fundamental tenet of transhumanism that we will someday use biotechnology to make ourselves stronger, smarter, less prone to violence, and longer-lived really so outlandish? Transhumanism of a sort is implicit in much of the research agenda of contemporary biomedicine. The new procedures and technologies emerging from research laboratories and hospitals whether mood-altering drugs, substances to boost muscle mass or selectively erase memory, prenatal genetic screening, or gene therapy can as easily be used to "enhance" the species as to ease or ameliorate illness.

Although the rapid advances in biotechnology often leave us vaguely uncomfortable, the intellectual or moral threat they represent is not always easy to identify. The human race, after all, is a pretty sorry mess, with our stubborn diseases, physical limitations, and short lives. Throw in humanitys jealousies, violence, and constant anxieties, and the transhumanist project begins to look downright reasonable. If it were technologically possible, why wouldnt we want to transcend our current species? The seeming reasonableness of the project, particularly when considered in small increments, is part of its danger. Society is unlikely to fall suddenly under the spell of the transhumanist worldview. But it is very possible that we will nibble at biotechnologys tempting offerings without realizing that they come at a frightful moral cost.

The first victim of transhumanism might be equality. The U.S. Declaration of Independence says that "all men are created equal," and the most serious political fights in the history of the United States have been over who qualifies as fully human. Women and blacks did not make the cut in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson penned the declaration. Slowly and painfully, advanced societies have realized that simply being human entitles a person to political and legal equality. In effect, we have drawn a red line around the human being and said that it is sacrosanct.

Underlying this idea of the equality of rights is the belief that we all possess a human essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty, and even intelligence. This essence, and the view that individuals therefore have inherent value, is at the heart of political liberalism. But modifying that essence is the core of the transhumanist project. If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind? If some move ahead, can anyone afford not to follow? These questions are troubling enough within rich, developed societies. Add in the implications for citizens of the worlds poorest countries for whom biotechnologys marvels likely will be out of reach and the threat to the idea of equality becomes even more menacing.

Transhumanisms advocates think they understand what constitutes a good human being, and they are happy to leave behind the limited, mortal, natural beings they see around them in favor of something better. But do they really comprehend ultimate human goods? For all our obvious faults, we humans are miraculously complex products of a long evolutionary process products whose whole is much more than the sum of our parts. Our good characteristics are intimately connected to our bad ones: If we werent violent and aggressive, we wouldnt be able to defend ourselves; if we didnt have feelings of exclusivity, we wouldnt be loyal to those close to us; if we never felt jealousy, we would also never feel love. Even our mortality plays a critical function in allowing our species as a whole to survive and adapt (and transhumanists are just about the last group Id like to see live forever). Modifying any one of our key characteristics inevitably entails modifying a complex, interlinked package of traits, and we will never be able to anticipate the ultimate outcome.

Nobody knows what technological possibilities will emerge for human self-modification. But we can already see the stirrings of Promethean desires in how we prescribe drugs to alter the behavior and personalities of our children. The environmental movement has taught us humility and respect for the integrity of nonhuman nature. We need a similar humility concerning our human nature. If we do not develop it soon, we may unwittingly invite the transhumanists to deface humanity with their genetic bulldozers and psychotropic shopping malls.

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Transhumanism | Foreign Policy

by Gregg Prescott, M.S. Editor, In5D.com

While there are many movies that expose the globalist agenda, four movies particularly caught my attention.

There seems to be several agendas going on simultaneously, such as the alien agenda and the New World Order agenda, but one other agenda is being shoved down our collective throats for at least 30 years: The transhumanism agenda.

The premise of transhumanism dates as far back as mans first search for the elixir to immortality and in recent years has segued into glorifying the idea of combining man with machine.

IMDb describes Chappie as:

In the near future, crime is patrolled by an oppressive mechanized police force. But now, the people are fighting back. When one police droid, Chappie, is stolen and given new programming, he becomes the first robot with the ability to think and feel for himself. As powerful, destructive forces start to see Chappie as a danger to mankind and order, they will stop at nothing to maintain the status quo and ensure that Chappie is the last of his kind.

Chappie is glorifying the transhumanism agenda in conjunction with artificial intelligence where people will soon be offered to live as immortal gods in exchange for being hooked up to the matrix, which inevitably, will make these same people perpetual, subservient slaves.

We are starting to see the beginning of this through digital tattoos, smart tattoos, ingestible RFID chips, and nanoparticle RFIDs. Globalist shill Regina Dugan, former DARPA head who now leads advanced research for Motorola stated, It may be true that 10-20 year olds dont want to wear a watch on their wrists, but you can be sure that theyll be far more interested in wearing an electronic tattoo if only to piss off their parents.

For many people, The Matrix was just another science fiction movie but for even more people, this is the initial movie that truly woke the masses out of their collective stupor.

IMDb: A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.

Thomas A. Anderson is a man living two lives. By day he is an average computer programmer and by night a hacker known as Neo. Neo has always questioned his reality, but the truth is far beyond his imagination. Neo finds himself targeted by the police when he is contacted by Morpheus, a legendary computer hacker branded a terrorist by the government. Morpheus awakens Neo to the real world, a ravaged wasteland where most of humanity have been captured by a race of machines that live off of the humans body heat and electrochemical energy and who imprison their minds within an artificial reality known as the Matrix. As a rebel against the machines, Neo must return to the Matrix and confront the agents: super-powerful computer programs devoted to snuffing out Neo and the entire human rebellion.

More and more people are beginning to realize the many truths in this movie which basically shows how we are living in a simulated reality while our bodies are living as an energy source for our overlords.

Similar to Chappie, transhumanism takes precedent as a means of going in and out of the matrix. While caught within the matrix, we all assume that this is real but relatively few people question why we need to work for money and cannot comprehend the premise behind the question, If there was no such thing as money, what would you be doing with your life? Weve been brainwashed for millennia about living in this false reality constructed to keep us living in subservience, control and conformity to a system designed to keep us living in fear as economic slaves.

When you look at it from this perspective, does it make sense to waste the majority of your life working some job that you hate for a boss whos an a*hole, only to get that 1 or 2 weeks off a year to enjoy as a vacation while your literally recharge your battery? Theres a reason we look forward to the weekend because by the weekend, we are weakened.

Mark Passio does an amazing job analyzing The Matrix trilogy:

IMDbs description of Network: A television network cynically exploits a deranged former anchors ravings and revelations about the news media for its own profit.

In the 1970s, terrorist violence is the stuff of networks nightly news programming and the corporate structure of the UBS Television Network is changing. Meanwhile, Howard Beale, the aging UBS news anchor, has lost his once strong ratings share and so the network fires him. Beale reacts in an unexpected way. We then see how this affects the fortunes of Beale, his coworkers (Max Schumacher and Diana Christensen), and the network.

The star of the film, Howard Beale, even hinted at transhumanism:

The whole world is becoming humanoid creatures that look human, but arent. The whole world, not just us.

The bottom line is how the nightly news influences and persuades public opinion, even through blatant lies. Youll never feel good after watching the nightly news. Why? Because when you live in the lower vibration of fear, you can be easily controlled and manipulated. The current terrorist agenda is the perfect ploy by the globalists because its a war that can never be won. Additionally, people will gladly give up their civil liberties and freedom in exchange for perceived protection by the government to fight these non-existent entities.

David Icke calls this Problem. Reaction. Solution in which the government creates a problem through false flags, we react by saying the government needs to address the problem and the government has a solution to the problem, which ALWAYS involves the loss of civil liberties and freedom.

We are just starting to see a group of disgruntled reporters leave the industry because they do not agree with how the news is scripted or the propaganda that is being pushed by the CIA in order to influence public opinion regarding everything from how well the economy is doing to why we should start yet another war. Unfortunately, there are plenty of buffoons in search of fame and notoriety (ego) who are willing to take the places of these reporters who have left the business, and they will conform to whatever their overlords desire, even if that means hurting their friends and family by reporting lies to the masses.

John Carpenters 1988 cult classic, They Live combines an alien agenda with how the mainstream media is brainwashing the masses.

IMDb describes the movie as A drifter discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to wake up to the fact that aliens have taken over the Earth.

Nada, a down-on-his-luck construction worker, discovers a pair of special sunglasses. Wearing them, he is able to see the world as it really is: people being bombarded by media and government with messages like Stay Asleep, No Imagination, Submit to Authority. Even scarier is that he is able to see that some usually normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the massive campaign to keep humans subdued.

An intriguing part of the movie is when the aliens throw a party for their human collaborators who agree to push the alien agenda. This is very reminiscent of lobbyists who push agendas for Monsanto, Big Pharma, etc.. The bottom line is that if you support the alien agenda, you will be generously compensated to keep your mouth shut. Does this sound familiar to you?

The Terminator

IMDb:

A cyborg is sent from the future on a deadly mission. He has to kill Sarah Connor, a young woman whose life will have a great significance in years to come. Sarah has only one protector Kyle Reese also sent from the future. The Terminator uses his exceptional intelligence and strength to find Sarah, but is there any way to stop the seemingly indestructible cyborg?

Lucy

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It was supposed to be a simple job. All Lucy had to do was deliver a mysterious briefcase to Mr. Jang. But immediately Lucy is caught up in a nightmarish deal where she is captured and turned into a drug mule for a new and powerful synthetic drug. When the bag she is carrying inside of her stomach leaks, Lucys body undergoes unimaginable changes that begins to unlock her minds full potential. With her new-found powers, Lucy turns into a merciless warrior intent on getting back at her captors. She receives invaluable help from Professor Norman, the leading authority on the human mind, and French police captain Pierre Del Rio.

While it may seem like a glamorous idea to have infinite knowledge, there will be a price to pay. For example:

Its not enough to expose these agendas. One needs to be cognizant of what is being forced upon us and be willing to make decisions that are proactive, such as refusing any RFID chip implantation or simply not buying into the false promises of how great your life will be as a cyborg. By choosing artificial intelligence, there is no spiritual progression for the soul, if any part of the soul remains.

The power of thought can also create the world you want to see. Try envisioning a world without transhumanism, money or globalist agendas. Replace the negative things in this world, such as nuclear energy, gas or coal, with free energy. We have the ability RIGHT NOW to create a world where everyone can live in abundance and prosperity without the need for economic subservience.

You were born as a PERFECT soul and upon returning to the Creator, you will remain in complete perfection without the need for artificial intelligence or transhumanism.

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About the Author: Gregg Prescott, M.S. is the founder and editor of In5D and BodyMindSoulSpirit. You can find his In5D Radio shows on the In5D Youtube channel. He is also a transformational speaker and promotes spiritual, metaphysical and esoteric conferences in the United States through In5dEvents. His love and faith for humanity motivates him to work in humanitys best interests 12-15+ hours a day, 365 days a year. Please like and follow In5D on Facebook as well as BodyMindSoulSpirit on Facebook!

Tags: agenda, artificial intelligence, chappie, gregg prescott, lucy, movie, movies, network, propaganda, RFID chip, the matrix, the terminator, they live, transhumanism, transhumanism agenda

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Hidden In Plain Sight 4 Movies That Expose The Globalist ...