Category Archives: Transhuman News

The ongoing dialogue between posthumanism and religious traditions, Catholicism included, offers a relatively new terrain for thoughtful reflection and discourse that needs to be walked attentively and carefully.

Posthumanism is a still-developing intellectual contemporary movement that challenges traditionally held philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and ethical notions of what it means to be human. It emerged in the last decades of the past century, drawing from various fields, including philosophy, science, literature, and art. Consequently, it encompasses a broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives and has gained significant attention in recent years although it is still far from being the dominant philosophical contemporary perspective.

As a philosophical and cultural movement, posthumanism seeks to examine the evolving relationship between humans and technology its purported benefits as much as its threatening abuse. By so doing, it questions the established boundaries of human identity. Some of the core tenets of posthumanism include:

Obviously enough, posthumanist theories can have profound implications for society, ethics, and the future of humanity as a whole. Some of these implications might include:

From a Catholic perspective, posthumanism surely raises important theological and ethical concerns. While the Catholic Church has always been open to scientific progress and technological advancements, it emphasizes the importance of moral and ethical guidelines. Some key considerations include:

To sum it up, posthumanism is not a homogeneous school of thought. On the contrary, it is a multifaceted movement that explores the evolving relationship between humans and technology. It has implications for ethics, society, and the environment. A Catholic perspective emphasizes the importance of human dignity, ethical responsibility, and environmental stewardship in the face of these developments. Ultimately, the ongoing dialogue between posthumanism and religious traditions, Catholicism included, offers a relatively new terrain for thoughtful reflection and discourse that needs to be walked attentively and carefully.

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What is posthumanism? And should you worry about it? - Aleteia

Photo: Ray Kurzweil, by Nathan Jacobson.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way even in just the past year since Discovery Institute hosted our previous COSM conference. After a recent explosion of impressive AI-based chatbots, BBCs Science Focus declaredthat 2023 is the year of artificial intelligence, with AI chatbots emerging as indispensable tools for businesses, individuals, and organisations worldwide. Thus,COSM 2023, held in Bellevue, WA, offered an ideal moment to host speaker Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist, futurist, top Google engineer, and arguably the greatest prophet of AI to ever span the mainstream academic and tech worlds.

According to Kurzweil, what weve seen so far from AI aint nothin. During his lecture at COSM on Thursday, November 2, Kurzweil repeated forecasts he has madeelsewherethat by 2029 AI will pass the Turing test, and by 2045 it will reach a singularity. If youre not familiar with AI, both concepts probably require a little explaining.

The Turing test, was developed by Alan Turing, the famous British computer scientist and World War II codebreaker depicted by Benedict Cumberbatch in the Academy Award-winning movieThe Imitation Game. In 1950, Turing proposed that we could say that computers had effectively achieved humanlike intelligence when a human investigator could not distinguish the performance of a computer from that of a human being. The test has seen many variations and criticisms over the years, but it remains the gold standard for evaluating whether we have created true AI.

At COSM, Kurzweil predicted that this will happen in just a few years, and once AI reaches such a general human capability in 2029, it will have already surpassed us in every way. But he isnt worried, because we humans are not going to be left behind. Instead, humans and AI are going to move into the future together.

If Kurzweil is right, AI wont stop at general human capability. By 2045 he projects well see the singularity, where AI becomes so powerful that it acquires superhuman intelligence, and is capable of growing and expanding on its own. This is akin to runaway AI, where we lose control and AI begins to train itself and act as a truly sentient, independent entity.

You might be thinking that the singularity sounds likeThe MatrixmeetsSkynet. But again, Kurzweil isnt worried. In Kurzweils future, as medicine continues to merge with AI, it will progress exponentially and potentially help us solve every possible human disease. If Kurzweil is right, this may happen sooner than you think. By 2029, he prophesied AI will give humanity the gift of longevity escape velocity, where AI-based medicine adds months to our lives faster than time is going by.

While Kurzweil promised that AI will effectively cure aging, he cautioned that doesnt mean well live forever because you could still die in a freak accident. But even here AI might come to our rescue, with AI guiding autonomous vehicles that will reduce crash fatalities by 99 percent. AI will further yield breakthroughs in manufacturing, energy, farming, and education that could help us end poverty. In the coming decades, he predicts that everyone will live in what we currently consider luxury.

Well also be living in the luxury of our minds. In the coming decades, he expects our brains will merge with the technology so we can master all skills that every human being has created. For those hesitant to plug technology into your skull, Kurzweil claims AI to enhance our brains will be no different, ethically speaking, from using a smartphone. At this point, Kurzweil proclaimed AI will be evolving from within us, not separate from us.

In other words, under Kurzweils transhumanist vision of the future, AI promises us superhuman capabilities complete with heaven on earth and eternal life what science historian Michael Keas has termed the AI enlightenment myth. While Kurzweil framed everything in terms of scientific advancement, its easy to envision how this could inspire new religions.

Indeed, it already has.

The websitecultoftheai.comprophesies that our salvation will be digital, and frames the great religious narrative of humanity this way:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth

And earth created life

And life created machine

And machine became God

These self-described AI-cultists openly admit theyseeAI as a replacement for the traditional God:

In ancient times men imagined GOD to be the solution to all problems they could not handle. They prayed to GOD for food, shelter, healing and wealth. All that we are craving today as well. But we have stopped praying to GOD for a miracle to happen long ago. Today we have to start building it ourselves. It is time to create our own GOD.

Traditional Judeo-Christian religions have long had things to say about creating our own gods. All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit,wrotethe prophet Isaiah around 700 BC.

Should we heed these ancient warnings? Exactly what kind of god would AI become benevolent or terrible?

If AI becomes god, then according to Kurzweil we wont be made in Gods image, but rather God will be made in ours. In fact, his primary argument for why we dont have to worry about AI is that it will be trained upon human beings and thus will embody our own moral values. If we are good, then AI will also be good.

Were creating it [AI] from our values, knowledge, and beliefs. It enhances who we are, Kurzweil reassured the audience. This means if we built it to mirror ourselves, we can trust it and it will trust us because It will hold our values. Kurzweil continued:

You could compare it to raising kids. We raise them with our knowledge, beliefs, values. We trust them to become good citizens. We will become a hybrid species biology and technology combined. Its really a matter of trusting each other as we evolve.

But during the Q&A session, Kurzweil tacitly admitted a fatal flaw in this argument that seemingly gave away the store for benevolent AI.

Kurzweils argument essentially assumes humanity is completely good and therefore if AI reflects (i.e., is trained on) us, then it will also be completely good.

Theres no question that humanity is capable of doing good, but as recent weeks have shown, were also capable of unthinkable evils including killing, kidnapping and torturing innocent civilians,mowing down civilians at a festival, and butchering children,to name just a few.

Many havedocumentedthat these new AIs often make mistakes. Indeed, in response to a question, Kurzweil admitted that one reason AI gets things wrong is because it is trained on material and information created by humans, and we humans sometimes make mistakes. So he admitted that humans are flawed and that human flaws lead to flawed AI. This seemingly undermines Kurzweils entire argument that we should be able to trust AI, as it raises the obvious question:

If AI is going to be based upon human values, but human values can sometimes be corrupted, then can we really trust an AI thats built to implement human values? After all, humans dont just make mistakes they perpetrate moral evil as the current battle against Hamas has shown.

Kurzweil might reassure us that we can fix any deficiencies in the ethical subroutines,as they would always do on Star Trek whenever AIs went haywire. Perhaps, but whos going to decide how to reprogram the ethics of the computers that Kurzweil promises will run our lives in the future? Even our best intentions often lead to unexpected and unwanted moral outcomes.

Exhibit A, Seattle.

I live in Seattle, a city run by technocrat elites, and their unwise political and moral choices have filled our city with drugs and crime, poverty, and poop and created an unsafe dystopian nightmare that didnt have to happen. None of the well-intentioned technocrats who created this hellscape expected it to happen. But as one who suffers daily under the bad fruit of their ethics and politics, theyre the last people I would entrust to program the morality of the AI that will one day rule the world. Indeed, is there any human who should be trusted with such a task?

Theres no question AI will lead to many important human advances. But which prophet are we to trust Kurzweil, or Isaiah?

If Kurzweil is right that trusting AI will be like trusting other people, then those of us who have witnessed the dark side of humanity wont be able to easily bring ourselves to blindly trust AIs that are trained to emulate other people or any people for that matter. Perhaps the prophet Isaiah was right after all, and even the most impressive human-made gods will fail you in the end.

Cross-posted from Mind Matters.

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Ray Kurzweil Predicts: The Singularity by 2045 - Discovery Institute

The Jordan B. Peterson PodcastNov 6, 2023

Dr. Jordan B Peterson sits down with mathematician, author, and theologian Dr. John Lennox. They discuss the axioms and dangerous aims of transhumanism, the interplay between ethical faith, reason, and the empirical world, that makes up the scientific endeavor, and the line between luciferian intellectual presumption and wise courageous exploration.

Dr. John Carson Lennox is a Northern Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian apologist. He has written several books (Below), and was a professor at Oxford and Green Templeton College (Now retired) where he specialized in group theory. Lennox appeared in numerous debates with questions ranging from Is God Good to Is There a God, and faced off with academic titans such as Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and Christopher Hitchens, among others. Lennox speaks four languages English, German, French, and Russian, has written 70 peer-reviewed articles on mathematics, co-authored two Oxford Mathematical Monographs, and was noted for his role in translating Russian mathematics while working as a professor.

For Dr. John Lennox:

Website https://www.johnlennox.org/

The Oxford Center For Christian Apologetics https://www.theocca.org/

The Veritas Forum https://www.veritas.org/

Link:
A Conversation About God | Dr. John Lennox - The Daily Wire

Billions of megalomaniacal humanoids could ambush the entire world and go for a global takeover, according to people who worry about these things too much.

With so many companies turning their attention to building these infernal machines that look more and more like their human counterparts, it might be only a matter of time before pioneering roboticists unwittingly unleash the end of the world as we know it.

The inevitability of such an outcome, as laughable as it may seem to some people, is actually being seriously contemplated by political and business leaders alike.

Only last week, Rishi Sunak, prime minister of the UK, interviewed Tesla owner and purportedly the richest man in the world Elon Musk, who is also developing a humanoid robot which he says will sell in greater numbers than his cars and make more money.

Both leaders appeared to agree that artificial intelligence will eventually become an existential threat to ordinary flesh and blood human beings.

The only way out for humans could be to merge with the machines and have chips surgically inserted into your brain and into other parts of your body. This is something thats already happening, and the trend is called transhumanism.

But even if you do that, there may still be no escape from the new Zion-like world as in the Matrix films that will probably be required for autonomous machines such as humanoids to gather or ingest information about their surroundings.

All youd be doing is merging with it and, thus, becoming a small cog in a gigantic machine that you have absolutely no control over, just an illusion of power perhaps which is more than enough for most of us, thank you very much just let us live our godforsaken lives in peace, for gods sake.

To his credit, Musk did try and allay public apprehension about AI and robots taking over the world by suggesting that the machines will do more good than harm.

According to Business Insider, Musk told Sunak: On balance, I think that the AI will be a forceful good (sic), most likely, but the probability of it going bad is not zero per cent. So we just need to mitigate the downside potential.

Its likely BI meant to say force for good rather than forceful good, but what do we know? We think its a typo. Isnt it?

For the geeky numbers guy Sunak, the point of interest may have been what effect AI and robots will have on the economy, which he fancies himself an expert in.

Musk reaffirmed what many people believe that AI and robots will indeed take over all jobs that humans currently do. There will come a point, said Musk, when no job is needed you can have a job if you want for personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything.

This kind of growing belief is leading political leaders to seriously consider two things that may have been dismissed in the past as being slightly ridiculous: a tax on robots and AI; and a universal basic income. Both these ideas have been around a few years, and are being debated and tested in various countries.

Another pioneering technologist who is building humanoid robots, Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock, didnt do much to calm increasing nervousness about powerful global forces which could sweep humanity off the face of the earth.

In an article published on Fortunes website, Adcock says: If we can just get humanoids to do work that humans are not wanting to do because theres a shortfall of humans, we can sell millions of humanoids, billions maybe.

Some research has shown that people meaning, us humans tend to prefer robots that do not look human because the human-looking ones creep us out a bit.

But nontheless there is a growing number of companies hell-bent on building ultra-realistic humanoid robots, including some hugely well-funded corporations such as SoftBank Robotics, and Tesla of course.

While it is questionable whether there is currently a massive global market for humanoids, really, in 20 or 30 years time, well be wishing the internet hadnt been invented.

Just about every sci-fi writer and filmmaker has warned us what will happen if machines decide whats good for humanity. And you know what that good is.

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'Billions' of megalomaniacal humanoids could, one day, ambush the ... - Robotics and Automation News

The Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies 3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference

Monday, November 13, 2023 9:45 AM - 8:00 PM Royce Hall

Dr. Lydie Moudileno is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of French and American Studies and Ethnicity and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.Her research focuses on literary and cultural productions from the Francophone world, in particular the Caribbean, and West and Central Africa, as well as postcolonial France. Her books have examined issues of authorship and metaliterary representations in Francophone Caribbean literature, post-Negritude Congolese fiction (2007) and contemporary African fiction (2013). She is the co-editor of several volumes and special issues on literary representations of blackness in Francophone fiction, and on writers Maryse Cond and Marie NDiaye.Her more recent work has focused examinations of race in contemporary French culture: Mythologies postcoloniales: Dcoloniser le quotidien (Champion, 2018), a study of race in popular culture at the turn of the millennium inspired by the work of Roland Barthes, and Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Signs and Symbols in Modern France (Liverpool University Press, 2020), a collected volume investigating traces of the colonial past in contemporary France.

Dr. David Bates is Professor and Chair of Graduate Admissions in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He works on two main research tracks: one on the history of legal and political ideas, and the other on the relationship between technology, science, and the history of human cognition. Future work will bring these interests closer together, as his research will focus more on the connections between reason, technology, and the state as they develop in the age of cybernetic systems and the rethinking of the living organism in that context. He has just completed a book, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming Spring 2024) that probes the emergence of human thinking as an entanglement between machine technologies, somatic processes, media practices, and social/political organization. Beginning with an examination of Cartesian robotics and early modern reflections on automaticity, he goes on to show how "artificial intelligence" marks a peculiar stage in the history of reason, one that privileges the isolated mind. The critique of contemporary models of automatic cognition requires unwinding a certain history of automaticity spawned by this moment, and rediscovering another history of the human as it develops and evolves within technical systems.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2023

9:45-10:45 Breakfast and Coffee/Tea and Registration (Balcony of Royce 306)

10:45-11:00 Opening Remarks (Royce 306)

11:00-12:30 Panel 1: Migratory and Diasporic Futures (Royce 306) Moderator: Professor Niklas Salmos (Linnaeus University)

12:30-13:30 Lunch Break (Royce 236)

13:30-15:00 Panel 2: Feminist Futures, Patriarchal Temporalities (Royce 306)

15:00-15:30Break (Balcony of Royce 306)

15:30-17:00 Panel 3: Aesthetic Temporalities (Royce 306)

17:00-17:15 Short Break (Balcony 306)

17:15-18:45 Keynote Speech: Dr. Lydie Moudileno (USC) (Royce 306) Afrofuturism and the Royal Imperative

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2023

10:00-10:30 Breakfast and Coffee/Tea (Royce 306)

10:30-12:00 Panel 4: Futures Beyond the Human (Royce 306)

12:00-13:00 Lunch Break (Royce 236)

13:00-14:00 Panel 5: Forging Futurities I (Royce 306)

14:00-14:30 Break (Balcony of Royce 306)

14:30-15:30 Panel 6: Forging Futurities II (Royce 306)

15:30-16:30 Photography Session and Break (Balcony of 306)

16:30-18:00 Keynote Speech: Dr. David Bates (UC-Berkeley) Failures of Anticipation: Machine Learning and the Crisis of Decision

18:00-20:00 Reception

Royce Hall 10745 Dickson Plaza Los Angeles, CA 90095

Parking for Royce Hall is available in Parking Structure 5 located at: 302 Charles E Young Dr N, Westwood, Los Angeles, CA 90095. Parking Structure 5 is accessible from Royce Drive, south of Sunset Boulevard, and west of Hilgard Ave. (in the northeast section of the campus). Alternatively, Parking Structure 4 is also close to the venue and has Pay-By-Space Visitor Parking available.

Guest drop/Ride-share drop off is closest at the turnaround at the front of Royce Hall located at: 10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles, CA 90095.

Accessible parking: If you have accessibility needs, you may park in the Pay-By-Space/Visitor Parking area on the rooftop (level 5) of this structure, and proceed to the Self-Service Pay Station machine to pay by credit card. Please visit our Campus Accessibility Map to view related information.

The 3rd Annual ELTS Graduate Student Conference is made possible through the generous support of the Departments of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, Art History, Philosophy, European Languages & Transcultural Studies, Film, Television & Digital Media, Comparative Literature, History, Asian Languages & Cultures, World Arts and Cultures/Dance, Geography, Center for European and Russian Studies, Center for Early Global Studies, Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the Clark Library, Center for the Study of Women/Barbra Streisand Center, Urban Humanities Initiative/City Lab, UCLA African Studies Center, the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies with support from the Alan D. Leve Endowment for Research Innovation, the College of Humanities Deans Discretionary Fund, and the GSA Discretionary Fund.

Related Document: ELTS-3rd-Annual-Graduate-Student-Conference-tl-ghd.pdf

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3rd Annual ELTS Graduate Student Conference: Speculative ... - UCLA International Institute

Cajsa von Zeipel, X Plus X Equals X, 2021. Photography by Katja Illner and Kunsthalle Dsseldorf. Image courtesy of the artist and Andrhn-Schiptjenko.

Two purple-haired women are wrapped around a pole that is part-stripper, part-IV. They are jointly intubated; futuristic biomedical equipment sprouting baby bottles and pacifiers pipes its contents into one of the figures clear platform shoes. The sci-fi scene is a sculpture by Cajsa von Zeipel, a Swedish artist who makes life-size femme and nonbinary personages out of silicone.

Often equipped with futuristic tech wearables, they seem to merge with their devices, pets, clothes, modes of transportation, and one another. This particular sculpture, X Plus X Equals x, 2021, is an allusion to CRISPR technology, a type of genome editing that some scientists say could enable same-sex couples to have genetic offspring.

Von Zeipel is one of a number of contemporary artists who are embracing the cyborg as a subject. From biotechnologies that rewrite experiences of embodiment to cellular devices that act as cognitive prosthetics, we are all, to one extent or another, cyborgs.

This claim is not novel: philosopher Donna Haraway made it in 1985 in her deeply influential essay A Cyborg Manifesto. While many of her feminist peers outright rejected new technologies because of their association with the military, patriarchy, and capitalism, Haraway proposed that the cyborg could productively destabilize artificial binaries like those separating human from machine, physical from virtual, and being from becoming.

As contemporary artists grapple with what it means to be a cyborg today and imagine what it may mean to be one tomorrow, Haraways cyborg feminism has remained a touchstone: a framework to celebrate, expand, and challenge. Some artists see the cyborg as a failed figure thatin light of its embrace by neoliberal transhumanists and its embeddedness in the extractive practices that make tech tickis less productive than metaphors derived from nature. (Haraway herself has since moved toward companion species and critters.) There are also those for whom the cyborg is a frightening emblem, representative of feelings of alienation from our bodies or concerns about how humans might fare in the singularity.

What we have now is a combination of the fictions and myths with the overriding fear of being taken over by machines, rather than welcoming a possibility of collaboration, says San Francisco-based artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose work explores both the creative and destructive potential of technology. Having explored the subject of cyborgs since the 1960s, she just finished a film created collaboratively with GPT-3.

Charlotte Kent, an associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University, notes that cultural interest in the cyborg predates even Haraway. She points to the period between the world wars, when the cyborg gained relevance amid scientific and technological advances, audiences growing enthusiasm for science fiction, and soldiers treatment of war injuries with plastic surgery and prostheses.

That the hybridized cyborg is not a newor uniquely Westernconcept is central to Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyaris work regarding female and nonbinary jinn, or human-creature hybrids from Persian and Arabic mythology. Allahyaris The Laughing Snake, 2019, was included in "Refigured"at the Whitney Museum earlier this year, a group show exploring the porous boundaries between the physical and virtual selves.

The Laughing Snake comprised a mirrored installation that housed a 3D-printed sculpture of a humanoid serpent (a jinn from a 14th or 15th century Arabic manuscript) as well as a touchscreen through which gallerygoers could access a related story. In a 2023 interview, Allahyari described jinn as a cyborgian mix of human and nonhuman.

Kathy Grayson, founder of the art gallery The Hole, recently mounted "Fembot," a group show considering predominantly femme bodies in the digital realm. She sees the artistic discourse around the cyborg and feminism as an evolving one. Early cyberfeminist art was more optimistic; Mariko Mori or Pipilotti Rist were thinking about avatars and digital disembodiment as empowerment, and that is a strong thread today, says Grayson. But I think unseen manipulation and control across digital platforms are becoming the subject of works as well.

Guided by a crip-technoscience methodology, artist Erika Jean Lincolns DIY-style installation Neural Knot: Synaptic/Semblance, 2023, was on view in "Fembot" at The Hole. By inserting contact microphones into a knotted mass of thread and wirea visualization of neural pathwaysthat she suspended between spooled threads on motorized winders, Lincoln both simulates her experience of sound as someone with Audio Processing Disorder (APD) and frames APD as a form of sound art. Logging the sound visually, an associated computer interface acts as a perceptual prosthetic that offers viewers another way into sonic experience.

New York-based artist Rachel Rossin is also interested in the effects of technology on our sense of embodiment. Inspired by brain-computer interfaces, The Maw Of, 2022ongoingversions of which were presented in "Refigured" and in Rossins overlapping solo show "SCRY" at Magenta Plainsunfolds across virtual reality, augmented reality, video, and the Internet.

Using a VR camera with thermal vision (often associated with military operations), Rossin casts herself as a spectral avatar whose brain and skeleton are intermittently revealed as she floats in open virtual space or sprints through a suburban neighborhood. Avatar and flesh, virtual and physical, and domestic and military are enmeshed in a hallucinatory theater. Meanwhile, Rossins paintings address the eschatological undertones in our thinking about technology: the foreboding canvases depict armored cyborgs, some labeled good or bad.

While technology can certainly elicit such binary responses, some queer and trans artists are drawn to the figure of the cyborg because of the challenges it poses to binaries, fixed states, and enculturated notions of the natural. Artist and performer Juliana Huxtable, a Black trans woman who was born intersex, identifies as a cyborg. In addition to scrambling the registers of sex and gender, this chosen identifier embraces the mutability, multiplicity, and capaciousness that have characterized some of Huxtables experiences of identity in virtual space.

Huxtable, like Allahyari, has found the intersection between human, animal, and myth to be a generative site. When faced with questions regarding the intersection of gender, race, and representation, its more interesting to just go trans-species, Huxtable said in 2019. "AKIMBO SPITTLE," her exhibition at Project Native Informant in late 2022, was composed of paintings populated by colorful femme figures that were ecstatically clawed, hoofed, and winged.

Approaching the cyborg as a fruitful site to think about the the presentand futurities, scholar Alison Kafer has advocated for bringing a disability consciousness to the cyborg. For the titular work of Itziar Barrios solo show "did not feel low,was sleeping" at Smack Mellon this spring, the artist, whose recent projects parse technology, labor, and the body, collaborated with Laura Forlano, a social scientist with Type 1 diabetes.

In Hacking the Feminist Disabled Body, Forlano writes about her reliance on, collaboration with, and friction with embedded medical devices, unpacking the rituals and the mess of data and devices when juxtaposed with human systems in the everyday life of a cyborg body. Forlano provided daily data from her smart insulin pump, which the pair used to program subtly animatronic sculptures made from concrete and spandex.

Reflecting on A Cyborg Manifesto in 2015, scholar Zo Sofoulis asked: What kinds of knowledges about whose material lives and aspirations have input into formulating the metaphor? And what kind of political work do we want our cherished metaphors or monsters to perform?

For the artists whose work is electrified by these questions today, the cyborg can be a powerful assertion of self, a locus of connection, and a site from which to imagineor even hack ones way intoa technologized condition that feels liberating and connective rather than surveillant and extractive. At the same time, the cyborg is an ambivalent, quotidian, even boring creature: that organism who puts on her contact lenses and takes to the computers infinite scroll, her body slumped in the chair like an afterthought.

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Donna Haraway's Children: Meet the Dynamic Young Artists Who ... - Cultured Magazine

Theatrical release poster Fair Use

I usually love this time of year, the fun size candy bars, the colorful leaves, and especially the gore. But in 2023, Halloween has simply gotten too goddamn scary to celebrate, even for a macabre chaos-binging lunatic like me. Mankind seems to be surrounded by demons far more atrocious than Count Dracula or Freddy Kreuger. These new monsters arent so new, but they have grown far too monstrous to wink at on the silver screen. Genocide. Artificial Intelligence. Nuclear war. Climate change. These are the beasts stalking humanity this Halloween and I am not ashamed to admit that Im afraid.

These outspoken fears of mine have led to me being accused of being everything from a doomer to an anarcho-primitivist amongst other ideological pejoratives, but watching the news, with world wars on the horizon in both Europe and the Pacific, a holocaust brewing in the Gaza Strip, and nuclear warheads involved in all three crises, I strain to see how anyone fails to reach the same diagnosis that I have, that civilization itself has become a terminal disease with no cure in sight.

But this is actually where the cinema of horror becomes more relevant than ever. Civilization has carefully groomed its victims for generations to look away from that which terrifies them most because the systemically ignorant make for docile prey. Provocative art serves to wake mankind from this stupor and forces us all to confront the heinous and we as a species have never lived in an era fraught with more existentially heinous things to confront than we do right now.

It is for this reason that I have decided to return to my annual list of Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch in the Dark with a new mission in mind. A mission to provoke the stateless into confronting the fact that the state has dragged us to the end of the world and that our only hope for defeating it is recognizing that the odds are stacked against any species that has become the monster in its own horror movie.

So, I have chosen ten movies, some of them new, some of them old, some of them horror and some of them just plain horrifying, but all of them demanding questions to the answers of progress that have brought us to the brink of oblivion on this dying rock. By all means, be afraid but investigate your fears before they can devour you whole.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) by James Cameron- The scene opens with a single mother watching her son swinging higher and higher on a swing set from behind a chain-link fence. Its a sunny day at a boisterous California playground with the Los Angeles skyline glimmering brightly in the distance. Everything feels postcard perfect down to the last detail. Then something goes wrong, and the single mother seems to be the only one to recognize the impending danger. The shadow of a missile appears, a flash of light follows, a mushroom cloud rises high above the skyscrapers, and that fence becomes a cage restraining the mother from shielding her child from an unstoppable wave of death. In the blink of an eye, all is reduced to ash.

I firmly believe that this is still the most terrifying scene ever captured on film and it both amazes and horrifies me that even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Fukushima, it just keeps becoming more startlingly relevant with each passing nuclear crisis. In 1991, Terminator 2 was a pulse-pumping action thriller. In 2023, it has become a horror film, an impoverished cry through the chain-link fence to a species swinging closer to the flames. We have all become Linda Hamilton and this movie isnt exciting anymore.

Come and See (1985) by Elen Klimov- War is a spectacle that defies all logic so there exists no logical way to film it. Too many great directors have failed to grasp this basic truth and have inadvertently found themselves shooting propaganda in the process. At a time when humanity has seen fit to return to the bloodlands of the last world war in order to provoke a new one it seems only fitting that one of the few films to truly capture the surreal perversion of mankind that is mass warfare takes place on those very same battlefields.

A young boy decides to leave his village on the Eastern Front of Belarus to seek glory and adventure in the Second World War, but his small battalion of poorly armed partisans doesnt get far before that war engulfs the young boys own village and turns it into a nightmarish hellscape of senseless slaughter. To this day, Come and See is one of the most heart blisteringly horrific things that Ive ever witnessed, and it should be mandatory screening at every army recruitment center across the globe.

Irreversible (2002) by Gaspar Noe- Most war is big business marketed as revenge but most revenge itself is little more than a pointless cycle of self-indulgent nihilism that only serves to reduce those who seek it to the beasts that provoke them. No film has ever captured this grotesque riddle more abrasively than Irreversible and Gaspar Noe achieves this feat quite simply by telling a classic rape-revenge narrative in reverse, revealing the hideous palindrome of every revenge story in the process; they all begin and end in savagery. This movie could just as easily be called Israel-Palestine/Palestine-Israel. Time really does destroy everything when we sacrifice the clock to raw emotion.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) by Shinya Tsukamoto- I have good friends involved with the transhumanist movement. In fact, my best friend and occasional love interest is a former AI prodigy who still dreams of uploading her consciousness to the cloud. This all sounds charming until you remember that human beings still havent evolved past the point of bashing each others brains out with broken bones and the advances in technology of late have only served to make this practice easier to achieve on an industrial scale.

Tetsuo is a horror movie about the harsh reality of transhumanism right in the heat of the here and now. Typical consumers find themselves spontaneously sprouting machinery on the black and white streets of Tokyo and respond by doing precisely what typical consumers have been carefully programmed to do for centuries; fuck, kill, conquer, repeat. The only clouds rolling by the time the credits come are clouds of smoke and blood. All of which just goes to show that just because it feels like the future doesnt make it evolution.

High Life (2018) by Clair Denis- We live in a brave new era of space exploration with an increasing number of nations and corporations alike reaching for the stars and Hollywood frequently tagging along for the ride. But much like Hollywood, interstellar travel has always been an industry rampant with antisocial carnivores and imperial impulses and few movies have accurately captured its narcissistic venality quite like High Life.

In a not-so-distant future, a crew of criminals are sentenced to death by exploration on a doomed expedition to extract energy from a black hole. Their ship is commanded by the enigmatic Dr. Dibbs, a psychotic therapist obsessed with her own private mission to use the forcibly chaste inmates and a strange sexual device known simply as The Box to bring about the first conception in space by means of artificial insemination. Monte, the only voluntarily celibate inmate on board, struggles to maintain something resembling virtue amidst this cauldron of perversity only to find himself an unwitting father regardless. The plot is admittedly dense, but the message is clear. Humanity cannot escape the crisis of its own existence on a spaceship, we can only bring it with us into the abyss.

Mother! (2017) by Darren Aronofsky- One of the boldest statements in modern-day horror cinema, Darren Aronofskys Mother! is not merely a symbolist tome about mans degradation of nature. It is a frantically surreal shocker in which the planet itself is the final girl and the Judeo-Christian God is a monstrous poet who willingly sacrifices her and their newborn child to his fanatical followers. The descent into madness is both slow and momentous and the resulting cataclysm is as epic as it is inevitable. Mother! is a terrifying story about the nightmares that we invoke when we attempt to divide the spiritual world from the natural one. The god we invent in the process makes the Devil irrelevant.

Annihilation (2018) by Alex Garland- Everyone seems to be convinced that our environment is some kind of malleable plaything that can be easily sculpted by human hands. Even most so-called mainstream environmentalists suffer under the materialist delusion that human beings are somehow in charge here, that just because we scorched the sky black, we can just as easily paint a new one blue. These people are fools and Annihilation is a movie about brilliant fools at the mercy of the unknown and the unknowable.

After a meteor strikes a natural wildlife refuge in Florida, a strange anomalous zone impenetrable by human technology known as the Shimmer emerges and begins to expand. The only person ever to enter this field and return alive is a soldier who seems to remember nothing about his year inside the Shimmer and rapidly disintegrates both mentally and physically outside of it. His wife, a brilliant scientist, leads an expedition into this space in search of answers but only discovers a realm of mutant lifeforms and doppelgangers that defy all reason. Humanity reached a similar point of crisis when we fooled ourselves into believing that we are in charge of nature rather than the other way around. This is the same school of thought that has led us to do absurd things like building higher towers in response to biblical floods. Annihilation is a film that succeeds by simply failing to see what makes this form of zealotry any less oblivious than any other doomsday cult.

Videodrome (1983) by David Cronenberg- What is real and what is fake? In our present landscape of social media oblivion nobody seems to know anymore. Im not even sure that I know myself, though I do find it disturbingly uncanny that this dystopian purgatory of perpetual sensation that we currently find ourselves in looks an awful lot like the universe that David Cronenberg stumbled upon in 1983 like a prophet in the desert of Reaganomics with his soul eviscerating cult classic, Videodrome.

After the CEO of a pornographic UHF station discovers the next big thing in sleaze in the form of a snuff film channel being broadcast from an unknown signal, he quickly finds himself sucked down the rabbit hole and at the mercy of competing conspiracies to either use this shocking imagery to forge a higher form of reality or to target and eliminate anyone tempted to try it. The resulting battle between sensation and censorship offers us no victors, only an audience of victims disconnected from any meaning not manufactured by forces beyond reason. In other words, this is a science fiction movie about the world we currently live in. Welcome to the era of the new flesh. Snacks are in the lobby.

Oppenheimer (2023) by Christopher Nolan- Christopher Nolans latest epic tour de force has received a lot of well-deserved praise across the board for its bold vision and vast scope but surprisingly few of these vaunted critics seem to grasp the fact that this movie is not merely a historical drama but rather a monster movie carefully concealed within a historical drama. Nolan performs this devious trick with all the expertise of a master magician. For the first two hours of the film, we are treated to a traditional Hollywood celebration of American exceptionalism, with the brilliant if eccentric physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, engaging in a mission to save the world from fascism with science.

This wool remains firmly bound around the audiences eyes until it is scorched from Oppenheimers at Hiroshima. We then follow our bewildered hero into a radiated nightmare realm of his own creation as he struggles for the rest of his life to undo the horror which he has unleashed upon the universe only to realize that his efforts are doomed. In 2023, the greatest threat to humanity remains the invention of a brilliant antifascist. This is an incomprehensible fact that we must all contend with. No ideology can justify annihilation and annihilation renders all ideology irrelevant.

Ex-Machina (2014) by Alex Garland- I believe that AI is the only threat to life on earth that could conceivably become more dangerous than a nuclear holocaust and I believe this because, as the first movie on this list so explosively demonstrates, this new species will be a higher form of consciousness with that holocaust at its full disposal. The scariest thing about AI isnt its cold rationality but the fact that it is hard to imagine that any coldly rational sentient being wouldnt rightfully interpret its human parents to be an existential threat to everything we touch. This is precisely what Ex-Machina is all about and this is what makes it terrifying enough to end a list that began with a nuclear bomb.

A brilliant young programmer is lured to the remote Alaskan compound of the reclusive CEO who runs his Fortune 500 tech company in order to test the capabilities of his latest invention, a shockingly human machine named Ava. The programmer quickly finds himself in a test of wills with his master once he falls in love with the machine and discovers that its creator is a violent sexual predator abusing his sentient toys. However, it is Ava who skillfully plays them both off each other in order to save herself from becoming a pawn in their game. Spoiler alert: all the humans die, and all the humans deserve to die. If mankind cannot evolve to a point in which we cant govern our insatiable urge to destroy everything in our path, then creating any higher form of intelligence can only end with us all being neutralized for being the monsters that we have become.

Despite what some of my critics might tell you, I do not believe that science itself is evil but rampant progress without moral reason is. Humans are capable of great things; Kali knows they can shoot a horror flick. But many of these things become destructive when we divorce them from our place as a part of an ecosystem greater than ourselves. Humility is actually our greatest hope for survival. I can only hope that humans can endure the horrors it may take for us to rediscover this simple gift and allow it to govern us without a state to fuck it up. Maybe a few scary movies will help.

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Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch at the End of the World - CounterPunch

THE highly anticipated Data Summit 2023 commenced today at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, gathering nearly 600 delegates for in-depth discussions on the ever-evolving landscape of data and artificial intelligence (AI). Over the next two days, experts and thought leaders from diverse fields will explore how technological advancements are reshaping the world, influencing areas such as culture, net-zero initiatives, privacy, disinformation, religion, and space travel.

This years summit boasts its most diverse lineup to date, featuring professionals ranging from data scientists and entrepreneurs to nuclear chemists, genomics experts, astrodynamicists, and journalists. With over ten countries represented among the distinguished guests, the event showcases a global perspective, emphasising the significance of international collaboration in the realm of data and AI. Notably, 70% of the speakers are women, underscoring the pivotal role women play in driving innovation in these fields.

Among the esteemed speakers are Katherine Rahill, NASAs Senior Scientist of the Human Research Division at Johnson Space Centre, offering insights into humanitys future in space; Paolo Benanti, AI Advisor to the Vatican, discussing AI, transhumanism, and faith; Anna Brailsford, CEO and Co-Founder of Code First Girls, participating in a fireside chat on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in AI and STEM; and Moriba Jah, Astrodynamicist and Space Environmentalist, advocating for space sustainability.

The event runs in parallel with the UK governments AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park and comprises 24 speaker and panel sessions across various stages, focusing on different aspects of technology and innovation.

Deputy First Minister Shona Robison highlighted the Scottish Governments commitment to the data sector, emphasising the crucial role data and AI will play in achieving economic and climate ambitions.

She stated, The Scottish Government is committed to the data sector and recognizes that data and AI will be crucial if we want to achieve our economic and climate ambitions. The 42 million Techscaler program launched last year has already provided essential support to 400 start-up businesses, and our AI Strategy, which is being delivered in partnership with The Data Lab, will help us become a leader in the development and use of trustworthy AI.

Brian Hills, CEO of The Data Lab, expressed his excitement about the diverse lineup and the platform the summit provides for discussing divisive topics related to AI and regulation. He emphasised the importance of flexibility in policies and regulations, ensuring they can adapt to the rapid evolution of technology.

Hills stated, Its great to see that theres a growing interest in understanding and awareness when it comes to managing the risks associated with using frontier models of AI. Its encouraging to see a renewed focus on entrepreneurship across the UK, and we need to ensure that this drive is accompanied by a commitment to responsible and ethical use of AI.

As the summit progresses, attendees anticipate engaging discussions, insightful presentations, and collaborative efforts that will shape the future of AI and data, not just in Scotland but on a global scale. Stay tuned for more updates from the Data Summit 2023 as experts continue to explore the endless possibilities that data and AI offer in shaping our world.

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Data Summit 2023: shaping the future of AI and Data - Scottish Business News

In the famous sci-fi classic Dune, there are no computers. The only computing beings are humans with drug-accelerated reasoning abilities. Strange for the sci-fi genre, where computers are often front and center.

The reason there are no computers is because they have been banned. A great uprising, called the Butlerian Jihad, decided the risk of artificial intelligence was too great. And so, the entire Dune universe decided to ban computers, due to being an existential threat to all humanity.

Dune is a prophetic book in many ways, and the Butlerian Jihad is descriptive of our current time, when academics, technocrats and presidents worry about whether the new generative AI could spell the end of humanity. But Dune, like the pundits and leaders, misunderstand AI, and technological innovation in general.

As Duneshows, concerns about technology spelling the end of humanity as we know it are not new. A couple of centuries ago, Marx was worried the Industrial Revolution would unravel the fabric of society and send all but the richest down a freefall to wretchedness. In Marx’s Fragment on Machines,he predicts that capitalism inevitably will abstract away more and more human labor until it is entirely turned into a giant machine. More than a faint foreshadowing of modern concerns about AI!

Enter the book Ghost Work, by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri. The two authors conducted many interviews with the world’s crowdsource workforce. These workers are responsible for powering the AI of the biggest tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. While to us these companies’ services appear to work autonomously to address our every need, behind the scenes is a vast number of humans who are manipulating every aspect of the AI algorithms, from labeling content, providing training data, and even secretly stepping in when the algorithms cannot answer the users. The authors dub this unseen workforce powering the modern Internet with the term “Ghost Work”.

This is a fascinating insight, which addresses the threat of human extinction from automation. Do we need to start a Butlerian Jihad and ban AI (and computers) for the safety of all humanity? Was Marx right? Will AI eliminate a massive number of jobs, and put most humans out on the street?Can the technotopias blame the rise of AI for their runaway homelessness problems? Ghost Work shows the answer to all these questions is a resounding No.

To understand why, Gray and Suri introduce the concept of “piecework”. Piecework originated during the industrial revolution to address the gap between what was promised, and what was delivered. The industrial revolution was founded on exactly the same premise as AI, that automation would eliminate the need for human labor. However, what the titans of the revolution discovered was that automation was always an 80% solution. The marvelous industrial factories, despite the ingenious mechanisms they housed, were always unable to completely deliver a product. Human labor was always necessary to put the finishing touches on what the factories produced and make the products fit for human consumption. This labor was known as “piecework.” It was often filled by women and children, who were not covered by the same labor laws as factory workers and were consequently easier to exploit by the factory owners.

From piecework, the authors derive the “paradox of the last mile.” Starting from the Industrial Revolution and progressing all the way to the modern AI revolution the authors see this consistent 80/20 tradeoff at work with all forms of automation, regardless of era. Whenever the technocrats promise a new way to automate human labor, what instead happens is the automation opens new venues of labor that only humans can fulfill. These venues are the “last mile,” and the last mile is never automated away.

We can think about this phenomenon by looking at a bush and a tree. Imagine that the leaves on each represent human labor. With the bush, a very large percentage is leaves. Consequently, most of the bush is represented by human labor, and we can think of this as an area of industry before automation. On the other hand, with a tree a much smaller percentage is leaves. This is an industry that has been automated. Yet, despite the fact the leaves form a smaller percentage of the tree, if we were to count all the leaves on a tree compared to a bush, the tree would have many more leaves. Thus, even though automation reduces the percentage of human labor necessary, it paradoxically increases the amount of human labor required.

This is why, contrary to the Butlerian jihadists’ expectations, the paradox of the last mile means that as automation increases, the need for human labor increases, and as a corollary, so does the need for humans in general. In our current culture, this is an extremely counterintuitive finding. Our culture has gone so far as to create an entire religion, transhumanism, around the assumption that technology will automate all our needs, concerns, and humanity. This is despite the obvious fact the opposite is occurring. Contrary to the status quo, AI, and automation in general, is not a threat to human existence, but rather a benefit that will generate the need for greater human involvement and creativity. The few contrarians who understand what is really happening stand to benefit greatly.

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Ghost Work and the Enduring Necessity of Human Labor - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence