Category Archives: Transhuman

To be or not to be a machine? That is indeed the question. To sleep, perchance to dream of becoming a robot? Give those fellows credit for being immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and being designed to outlive us all. But author Mark OConnells subject in To Be a Machine is not robot envy. He has been trekking various terrains to report on the brave new world of transhumanists. This assemblage of scientists, entrepreneurs, dreamers and the odd philosopher is dedicated to out-maneuvering our mortal destiny.

He toured Alcora, a facility near Phoenix, where he is prepped on how humanitys primary adaptations need to be reset after death derails them. Until that breakthrough, clients invest in a post-mortem cyronic suspension that freezes our mortal flesh for future uploading, especially the separated heads that encase our vital core. Seriously, if life began with a handful of elements and has so far evolved homo sapiens amazing brain, why stop now?

But why the singular focus? Because the superstar of the computer age is our brain. Its ability to accumulate and organize ever-greater masses of data is regaled by scientists. Brains are being credited with keeping us active players, not only in improving our lot but also in enabling our species to feel more uniquely alive. And so it is this constant flow of data fueled by 100 billion neurons that entices us to double down against death. With such infinite resources, why not embrace the transhuman task of phasing it out?

Because its also complicated. OConnell doesnt shy away from this agendas doubling back on itself. Enter AI: Artificial Intelligence, far more superior to mastering data than our cumbersome biology permits. But as AIs leave us in the dust, many fear were at their mercy, as well. Some in the field speculate that the new bosses might condescend to us as pets; others propose that since we cant beat em, join em and become robots. Crazy; but havent we already begun? Robocars can make pizza runs, drones can fight our wars, disembodied voices guide grocery self-checkouts, Dr. Google dispenses free medical advice. Face it, bit by bit humans are becoming redundant. Phasing out death, we may end up phasing out ourselves. Where will it end? No one dare say. But OConnell has devised an indispensable GPS for negotiating todays tomorrow-land.

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TO BE A MACHINE: Adventures among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

By Mark OConnell

(Doubleday, $29.95, 256 pp.)

Publication: Feb. 28

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Book review: Author delves into transhumanist movement in 'To Be a Machine' - SCNow

While diehard Resident Evil 2 fans wait (and wait) for any news regarding Capcoms remaster of the classic sequel, according to Gematsu, fans of the series will have another game to chew on while we wait.

Announced on Gematsus Twitter a few days back, Resident Evil: Code Veronica X will be released for the Playstation 4 this week. According to an earlier post on Gematsu, this version of Veronica X will likely be the same version that was released for the Playstation 3 back in 2011, upscaled and with added trophy support. This is also in addition to Resident Evil: Revelations, which is set to be available for download this fall.

Also joining Veronica X will be Transhuman Designs Butcher, which had previously been released this past October on Steam and GOG.com. The game is a tough one, but satisfying if you enjoy seeing copious amounts of pixellated blood everywhere (and are a bit of a sadist).

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'Resident Evil: Code Veronica X', 'Butcher' Hit PS4 This Week! - Bloody Disgusting

Dearest reader, this week has been much better for me, many thanks for all the condolence emails about Bosley. Not only have I managed to retain the life of my one remaining cat, HMS Tiny Pudding, but Ive also registered for postal voting, thus honouring the nameless women and men who gave their lives for our democracy. Its also been national hedgehog week so, honestly, what more could I ask for in my simple life? More podcasts of course!

Now Ill admit, I love a bit of theology, so this podcast, written by Meghan OGieblyn, leapt from my screen, through my ear tubes and sat squashily and cosily in my brain. This is theology and then some. Like all the best podcasts it mixes personal stories with learning: it begins with Meghan, a former evangelical Christian with dreams of becoming a missionary, losing her faith. She could no longer ratify a benevolent God with all the suffering in the world. But she still longed for there to be a plan, a purpose to being alive, but she also needed evidence, and for most people that evidence is the very broad term of science. Whilst latching on to this notion of science she found herself religiously following the theories of transhumanism.

Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient.

Meghan submerged herself into the various subgroups of transhumanism: the idea that we are all in a computer simulation run by future beings recreating the past, of robots gaining souls, and eventually culminating in Meghan finding Christian transhumanism.

Christ had said to his disciples: Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these. His earliest followers had taken this promise literally. Perhaps these prophecies had pointed to the future achievements of humanity all along, our ability to harness technology to become transhuman.

What a wobble of a circle that is.

Often we find ourselves listening or watching stories like this with a tone of mockery but that isnt the case here. Its easy to see how Meghan fell into transhumanism in the religious sense, it could just as easily happen to any one of us. These things make sense if you really want them to, you just have to have a little faith.

God in the Machine is a rollercoaster of a listen prepare yourself for information overload. I had to listen to it three times before it all went in, but each time was as good as the first. Though I must admit, I stopped playing the Sims when I was a little girl because of the stress that maybe, just maybe, they were real and I was God.

Another podcast that brought my week oodles of joy was Beginner. Its the story of Misha, a 24-year-old Pakistani-American immigrant, learning to do the things she didnt get to do as a child. When she came to the US she was top of her class, but quickly she began to lose her identity. The show follows her story as she learns to belong by living out a childhood she never had, and it begins with something synonymous with childhood learning to ride a bike.

Sadie Mae wrote in to tell me why she loved it so much:

Beginner shot right to the top of my favourites list, the trailer alone had me in tears, hearing the love and kindness between Misha and her brother. I could relate to almost every part of the first episode, even though I was born in the States. Im an older sister that has had to navigate new places and new things on my own, faking it while I figured out what was right. Mishas storytelling is veracious, drawing you in, and inviting you to be part of her journey. Her vulnerability and honest self-introspection is relatable and captivating, setting this millennial coming of age podcast apart from the rest as it resonates across the board.

We can all relate to that fear of not knowing something we feel we should, the fear of doing it wrong, the fear of feeling out of place, the walls that we build and the hacks we use so we can fit in. Mishas desire for authenticity drives her to confront her fears and explore breaking away from them as she tackles being a beginner. I know this is new but seldom does a budding podcast come off so well-polished and with such a captivating start.

Mishas charm from episode one has me rooting for her and I look forward to hearing more of her adventures, triumphs and potential failures. This storytelling podcast truly is one to add to your podcast subscription list. Who knows, maybe itll inspire you to be a beginner again.

When Ed Boff wrote in to tell me about his absolute favourite podcast Cheapshow, I was initially sceptical, but after a couple of listens I completely understood why. It made me howl with laughter at some points, its really fantastic.

It is an anarchic comedy podcast celebrating the best of the cheap and cheerful. Its a mix of standup, chat show and twisted games and challenges all based around the hunt for long-lost treasures or bargain basement deals. Cheapshow aims to find the humour among the bric-a-brac of charity shops, junk sales and Poundlands in the UK. And honestly, they have achieved it and then some. This is what Ed had to say:

Two guys talking about stuff found in pound stores, charity shops, and/or car boot sales, while occasionally descending into a shouting match. That may not sound like much on its own however, its a question of personality. Hosts Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman bring a lot of themselves to this, both in terms of character and experience.

Cheap discoveries often include items with a strong nostalgia factor (like their recent special on TV game show-based board games), and this is where Paul shines. Eli, with his work as a DJ, provides a love of all things music, particularly vinyl records. So theres plenty to talk about, including Elis spectacular tales from the dance floor. Not that this is purely a dry exercise in consumer analysis the comedy here runs from merciless mockery of the concepts at work, to often sheer surrealist confusion. Quite a lot of the stuff on cheap eats will make you wonder for what species this foodstuff was meant for. The hosts are never exactly above the level of what they look at, they self-deprecate (and deprecate each other) mercilessly, such as calling out Pauls own brand of spoonerisms, Gannonisms.

There is nothing amusing about austerity when times are tough, places like Poundland may be your only option so its good to know theres someone out there braving the culinary delights they have to offer, before you go in blind ... If they dont end up killing each other in one of their arguments first! Highly recommended.

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Transhumanism and cheap laughs: podcasts of the week - The Guardian

Miloslav Dvoak, Le Golem et Rabbi Loew prs de Prague (1951), oil on canvas, 244 x 202 cm (Prague, idovske Muzeum Jaroslav Horejc) (all images courtesy of muse dart et dhistoire du Judasme, Paris, unless noted)

Noise-math philosopher Norbert Wiener once aptly compared the old Jewish myth about the golem with cybernetic technology. Viewed through that lens, everything from transhuman artificial life cyborgs to anthropomorphic robots to humanoid androids to posthuman digital avatars bear the mystical mark of an artificial body madly turning on its creator. This oily tale is the oldest narrative about artificial life and is now subject of the exhibition Golem! Avatars dune lgende dargile at Muse dart et dhistoire du Judasme.

The golem was first mentioned in passing as in the Bible in Psalm 139:16, but the first golem story was spun by the 16th-century Talmudic scholar Rabbi Loew ben Bezalel. In it, he supposedly used Kabbalistic magic, Hebrew letters, paranormal amulets, or mystical incantations to conjure into existence the Golem of Prague: a colossal figure built from mud or other base materials, who protected the Bohemian Jews of the country from the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Though initially a savior, the Golem of Prague eventually became harmful to those he had saved and had to be destroyed. There are myriad subsequent versions of the story, with many variations and contradictions. It is generally agreed that what animated this mystical entity was an inscription either applied to its forehead or slipped under its tongue, and the golem has largely been understood to be an artificial man that is part protector and part monster, but many other differences abound. This specious aspect makes the golem particularly interesting to artists because such contradictory vagueness yields opaque and elusive visual iconography.

The legend spread in the late 19th century, popularized by the 1915 novel The Golem by Gustav Meyrink and three movies by Paul Wegener: The Golem (aka The Monster of Fate) (1915), The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917), and The Golem: How He Came into the World(1920). An essential general reference for the golem-phile is Idel Moshes 1990 book Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, published as part of the Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion series by the State University of New York Press in Albany. In it, Moshe maintains that the role of the golem concept in Judaism was to confer an exceptional status to the Jewish elite by bestowing them with the capability of supernatural powers deriving from a profound knowledge of the Hebrew language and its magical and mystical values.

I first encountered this titillating thesis mixing creation and destruction at Emily Bilskis 1988 show Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art, which she curated for The Jewish Museum in New York City. I still remember seeing Louise Fishmans fine painting Golem (1981) there, and I was disappointed that the plucky street performance artist Kim Jones (aka Mudman) wasnt included.

This show in Paris follows on the heels of the Golem exhibit at The Jewish Museum Berlin. Both venues had the idea for an exhibition on the golem at the same time, and the institutions cooperated on loans and exchanged ideas. The Muse dart et dhistoire du Judasme show has 136 works, including paintings, drawings, photographs, cinematic clips, literature, comics, and video games by the likes of Charles Simonds, Boris Aronson, Christian Boltanski, Joachim Seinfeld, Grard Garouste, Amos Gita, R.B. Kitaj, and Eduardo Kac. Animated films included are Jan Svankmajers masterful Darkness Light Darkness (1989), Jakob Gautels First Material (1999), and David Musgraves Studio Golem (2012). But the best dramaturgical presentation is the humanoid robotic metaphor of an awakening of posthumanity in School of Moon (2016), a dance choreographed by Eric Minh Cuong Castaing for the Ballet National of Marseille in conjunction with digital artist Thomas Peyruse and roboticist Sophie Sakka. Their impish portrayal blurs our perception of the human and the nonhuman by mixing ballet dancers with children and anthropoid robots.

The show kicks off with a large straightforward illustrative painting by Miloslav Dvoak, Le Golem et Rabbi Loew prs de Prague (1951) but soon turns weirder with a 1964 Dennis Hopper photograph of the great beatnik Wallace Berman. Berman is known for his underground film Aleph (195666), in which he uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire noise montage into a bit of wonder. Moving on, I was fascinated by an odd printed book page from the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) (1562), in which Kabbalists, wishing to bring a golem to life, looked for the aid of alphabetic formulae. Other powerful pieces include Lionel Sabattes redolent sculpture Smile in Dust (2017), Philip Gustons cartoonish painting of a cuddly Ku Klux Klanner In Bed (1971), Anselm Kiefers crusty stout block Rabi Low: Der Golem (19882012), Antony Gormleys rusty condensed sculpture Clench (2013), and Niki de Saint Phalles swashbuckling Maquette pour Le Golem (1972), her model for the architecturally scaled triple-tongued monster slide Le Golem (1972), which she built in Jerusalem, that represents the three monotheistic religions plummeting from a golem-monsters merry mouth.

One of the more delightful displays was the room full of Ignati Nivinskis 1924 watercolors made for the costumes of the 1925 theatre piece The Golem, on loan from the Russian National Archives of Literature and Art. The play was based on the 1921 text The Golem: A Dramatic Poem in Eight Scenes by H. Leivick, a Yiddish poet and political radical who served jail time in Siberia. On the other hand, I was startled and disturbed to see Walter Jacobis distasteful 1942 book Golem, a flagrant anti-Semitic propaganda text concerning a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory within the Czech Jewry, issued during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Seeing it made me think that a Trump-era cyber-golem would busy himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, publicity, disinformation, counter-facts, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography (which in the 16th century was considered a branch of magic).

The show winds down wonderfully with Walter Schulze-Mittendorffs sculpture Robot from Fritz Langs film Metropolis (1926), which was recreated by the Louvre in 1994, standing in front of Stelarcs Handwriting: Writing One Word Simultaneously with Three Hands (1982). The combination of these works suggests that golems have to do with an abiding conviction that cold and inert matter may be brought to life through the correct application of words. But rather than a sign of human accomplishment, the golem casts a sour shadow onto our gleaming technological age. The power of human language to summon golems to artificial life is experienced as hubris in this exhibit. This vanity enhances the sexy love-hate of spooky computer-robotics we feel at the root of Alex Garlands 2015 film Ex Machina, a poster for which is on display. We cannot and do not escape the triumphal attraction of the golem here, as we are confronted (again) with the fetid fact that a determinative force in human life is the virtual merging with the actual. As such, the golem is the minotaur at the heart of our viractual labyrinth.

This brave new word-world was suggested back in 1965 by Kabbalah philosopher Gershom Scholem, when he officially named one of the first Israeli computers Golem I. Because just as the golem is brought to life by combinations of letters, the computer (which is behind any artificially intelligent robot) only obeys coding language. And that coded situation slots us back into Norbert Wieners excited trepidation toward machine learning. While learning is a property almost exclusively ascribed to self-conscious living systems, AI computers now exist that can learn from past experiences and so improve their operative functions to the point of surpassing human capabilities. This posthuman transcendence raises concerns both aesthetic and ethical, casting around the art in this show an apologetic air heavy with ambivalence toward human cunning and trickery and seductive art and technology.

Golem! Avatars dune lgende dargile continues at Muse dart et dhistoire du Judasme (Htel de Saint-Aignan, 71, rue du Temple, 3rd arrondissement) through July 16.

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From a 16th-Century Book to a Robot-Assisted Performance, Artists Explore the Legend of the Golem - Hyperallergic

If you believed that the necessary next step in our species evolution was to merge with artificial superintelligence, and to thereby transcend our animal condition and become immortal, what effect might that have on your politics?

This is not an entirely abstract question. There are people who believe that the future of our species involves shedding our humanity in a marriage with AI; this is known as transhumanism, and it has not unreasonably been called a new tech religion. Though the movement has no explicit political affiliations, it tends, for reasons that are probably self-explanatory, to draw a disproportionate number of Silicon Valley libertarians. And the cluster of ideas at its center that the progress of technology will inevitably render good ol Homo sapiens obsolete; that intelligence, pure computational power, is to be pursued above all other values has exerted a powerful attraction on a small group of futurists whose extreme investment in techno-libertarianism has pushed them over an event horizon into a form of right-wing authoritarianism it might be useful to regard as Dark Transhumanism.

The English critical theorist turned far-right cult thinker Nick Land is usefully representative of this intellectual tendency. Although he has never identified as a transhumanist, his ideas are infused with the movements delirious faith in the coming merger of humans and machines. His current political vision, which he has given the flamboyantly portentous title the Dark Enlightenment, is one in which the programmer elite and their ingenious technologies rule the world. Increasingly, he wrote in 2014, there are only two basic human types populating this planet. There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else. Many transhumanists would be inclined to reject the political implications of Lands futurism, but his vision is only really a darker, more explicitly fascistic rendering of the kind of thinking you find in the work of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or for that matter Wired founder Kevin Kelly, who believes that we humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

For Dark Transhumanists, as for the neo-reactionaries from whom they take their cues, egalitarianism is inherently incompatible with any posthuman future. Take Peter Thiel, the Facebook investor who in a 2009 essay for the libertarian journal Cato Unbound announced, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. Asked in a 2011 New Yorker profile whether the kinds of life extension technologies he was investing in might exacerbate already grotesque levels of social inequality, Thiels response offered a glimpse into the ethical simple-mindedness of his techno-libertarianism: Probably the most extreme form of inequality, he said, is between people who are alive and people who are dead.

Or theres Michael Anissimov, a former media director at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute a think tank in Berkeley devoted to preventing superhuman AI from destroying humanity who has in recent years basically cornered the white-supremacySingularity crossover market.

Anissimov, with his weird synthesis of 19th-century racist pseudoscience and fantastical futurism, is a Dark Transhumanist par excellence. In a 2013 interview, he outlined how the cultural ingraining of the notion that were all created equal left us unprepared for a future of technologically enhanced beings. There are, he insists, already significant disparities in intelligence between existing races. Transhuman technologies, he says, would mean situations in which people could be lording over one another in a way that was never possible before in history. Its pretty clear that Anissimov sees nothing to fear in such a future, confident as he is that it will be people like him doing the lording. Despite being approvingly quoted in Kurzweils The Singularity Is Near, Anissimov is these days something of a pariah from the transhumanist movement. But it is worth asking whether his specific mutation of transhumanist thinking is troubling not just because of its extremist right-wing implications, but because it magnifies illiberal, radically elitist tendencies that are inherent in transhumanism itself. Although its intellectual and spiritual roots can be traced back as far as the gnostics, transhumanism is a fever dream of contemporary technocapitalism, and it is nave to suppose that the technological enhancements it conjures would do anything but exacerbate already existing social inequalities.

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There is, in transhumanism itself, a strain of old-timey historical romanticism: a sense of history as an inexorable progress toward a teleological vanishing point, where all human meaning is subsumed and obliterated by a godlike technology. This belief that flesh is a dead format, and that our future or that, at least, of a technological elect involves a final merger with machines is one that interlocks in sinister ways with the view of democracy as a failed and outmoded institution. Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state, the body politic, in much the same manner. Seen in a certain way, this is a mind-set a reductionist understanding of the world as a hackable system inherent in the culture of computer science. The flesh is weak, and democracy is entropic; both are subject to forces of decay, to human inefficiencies and failings. As eccentric and fringe a phenomenon as Dark Transhumanism may be, its usefully viewed in this sense as an extrapolation of tendencies inherent in the mainstream techno-capitalism of Silicon Valley.

*A version of this article appears in the May 1, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

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The Techno-Libertarians Praying for Dystopia - Yahoo Tech

Transhuman Designs uncompromising, skill-based carnage will launch on PS4 May 9th and Xbox One on May 10th.

Warsaw, Poland, April 28 th, 2017: BUTCHER is a fast-paced 2D shooter and a blood-soaked love letter to the cult classics of the genre, developed by Transhuman Design the studio behind Soldat and King Arthurs Gold. The game will be published on PS4 and Xbox One by Crunching Koalas in May 2017.

As a cyborg programmed to eradicate the last remains of humanity, your sole purpose is to well... annihilate anything that moves. Grab your weapon of choice (from chainsaw, through shotgun, to grenade launcher) and kill your way through underground hideouts, post-apocalyptic cities, jungles and more. And if you're feeling creative, there are plenty other ways of ending your enemies' misery - hooks, lava pits, saws... no death will ever be the same.

If kicking corpses into a lava pit and adorning walls with blood is your idea of a good time, BUTCHER is THE game for you.

BUTCHERs main features:

Game info:

PS4 Pre-Orders (Europe): https://store.playstation.com/#!/cid=EP2627-CUSA07809_00-BUTCHERPS4PREORD

Announcement trailer (YouTube both platforms): https://youtu.be/8sMkdNJN_lY

Announcement trailer (PlayStation YouTube channel): https://youtu.be/tOXchno4gGE

Announcement trailer (Xbox YouTube channel): https://youtu.be/GipHgSx7AYE

Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One

Standard Price: $9.99, 9.99, 7.99 (Standard version), $12.99, 12.99, 9.99 (Special Edition Bundle including the base game and soundtrack)

Developed by: Transhuman Design

Published by: Crunching Koalas (PS4 / Xbox One)

For review codes please contact Tom Tomaszewski: tom@crunchingkoalas.com

About Transhuman Design

Transhuman Design is an independent studio led by Michal Marcinkowski, creator of Soldat, the indie classic that dominated the 2D multiplayer world and directly inspired games like N, Showdown Effect and Take Arms. Soldat was followed by King Arthurs Gold, a very successful (and crazy) multiplayer buildnkill game featuring ridable sharks, shields used as parachutes and catapults employed as rapid means of transport into enemy base. The current projects range from Butcher, a blood-soaked love letter to Doom and Quake, to the atmospheric, story-driven Transmigration.

Facebook: http://facebook.com/TranshumanDesign

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thdtweet

About Crunching Koalas

Crunching Koalas is a small game development team based in Warsaw, Poland. After developing and publishing MouseCraft, an indie puzzler commonly described as a mix of Lemmings and Tetris, they decided to start helping other indies in getting their titles (like BUTCHER, Lichtspeer or Sky Force Anniversary) published on consoles.

Facebook: http://facebook.com/CrunchingKoalas

Twitter: https://twitter.com/crunchingkoalas

For more info please contact Tom Tomaszewski: tom@crunchingkoalas.com

Games Press is the leading online resource for games journalists. Used daily by magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, online media and retailers worldwide, it offers a vast, constantly updated archive of press releases and assets, and is the simplest and most cost-effective way for PR professionals to reach the widest possible audience. Registration for the site and the Games Press email digest is available, to the trade only, at http://www.gamespress.com

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BUTCHER, a 2D tribute to the Doom series from the makers of Soldat, hits PS4 and Xbox One in May 2017! - Develop

PARIS Rene Bastians New York-based Belladonna Productions, producer of Michael Hanekes Funny Games US and Abel Ferraras Welcome to New York, is teaming with Germanys ZDF Enterprises, the expanding commercial arm of the German broadcast network, to develop Genesis, an English-language sci-fi thriller.

Genesis is created by Narina Jabari, a young Canadian scientist-turned-screenwriter. ZDFE is handling sales rights to the series.

A film company with a distinguished pedigree, Belladonna moved into TV series production with the Sundance Channel-aired Hap & Leonard, now in its second season, executive produced by Belladonna principal Linda Moran. For ZDFE, Genesis represents one of its earliest series in English and linkup with a U.S. production company as ZDFE acquires world sales rights not only to ZDF drama but third-party productions drawn from Europe and beyond.

Genesis also joins a fast-growing cannon of sci-fi drama think Stranger Things, Westworld, Humans as the genre returns towards the mainstream, diversifies across a huge range of variations and platforms and questions the human condition. Here, Genesis follows the story of Asphodel, El, a head-strong university student who surrenders her body and mind to an underground, experimental research movement and becomes the first trans-human, Belladonna and ZDF Enterprises said in a statement Friday.

The series watches as she slowly transforms, becoming the face of the Hybrid Generation, one of test subjects for post-human technologies. In parallel, Janus, the host of a popular counter-culture TV show, preaches to create an altogether new subspecies of humanity one that has the power to not only control its own biology, but the fate of its own existence.

Genesisis being driven by Jabari, Bastian, president of Belladonna Productions, and producers Robert Franke and Sebastian Krekeler at ZDF Enterprises.

I was immediately drawn to Narinas unique vision for this timely, groundbreaking story about the next phase of human evolution, one in which biology and technology are becoming indiscernible from one other, Bastian said.

Our heroine Asphodel, El, agrees to become a trans-human and is tossed into a world of controversial science and ethical ambiguity with plenty of drama and action, he added, calling Genesis completely unprecedented on television.

Genesis is an important addition to the ZDFE program lineup since the series not only deals with a topic which defines the future of cultural and civil development of human kind by telling a sophisticated and entertaining story but also because of the players involved in the project, said Franke.

ZDFE just recently added Genesis to its new development and financing slate. Belladonna and ZDFE are currently busy putting together the writers room. Itexpects to kick off the financing process within the next couple of months, once its full package is market ready, Krekeler said.

Bastian has produced first features by Michael Cuesta (L.I.E.), Dito Montiel (A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints), Duncan Tucker (Transamerica) and Jim Mickle (Cold In July).

Belladonnas current TV development slate takes in historical drama The White Rhino Hotel, set in Africa and based on Bartle Bulls acclaimed novels, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi seriesElement Lost,and Beat Club, a political drama about 60s/70s youth counter-culture in Germany.

Genesis sees ZDFE ranging ever farther and wider to tap talent and producer relationships, as it builds a slate that combines ZDF productions and third-party pick-ups, on which it can be involved at a early stage of development.

A presentation at Series Mania of ZDFEs current line-up served to underscore its current range as well as links to some of Europes most dynamic producers.

Current series on ZDFES slate include the upcoming Tabula Rasa, an intense Flemish psychological thriller starring (and co-written by) Veerie Baetens and produced by Caviar Films (The Brand New Testament) about a woman who comes to distrust her own memory, airing in October on Belgiums VRT. ZDFE is also selling Swedish mega-hit Before We Die, a mother-son drama and crime thriller produced by B-Reel Films, in co-production with SVT and ZDF; and Maltese, produced by Italys Palomar and Germanys Maze Pictures, set in the 70s Sicily, soon to air on RAI, and with Kim Rossi Stuart as a police commissioner in the so-called Golden Age of the mafia.

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Belladonna Productions, ZDF Enterprises Team For 'Genesis' | Variety - Variety

Transhumanists say we could engineer ourselves to live forever.

Human beings desire eternal life. Since ancient times, they have sought elixirs of life, fountains of youth and other means of escaping death. In a more recent iteration to this quest to live forever, we have turned to science. Some leading biotechnology experts are now predicting that the human body may be obsolete in 60 years as something more long-lasting takes its place.

The movement called transhumanism is now moving from the fringes of science fiction into the academic mainstream. This movement aims to achieve nothing less than transcending the biological constraints on human beings. Its supporters are developing new technologies to enhance human intellectual and physical abilities. Scholars like Prof. Yuval Harari are suggesting that breakthroughs in biotechnology will soon allow humans to upgrade themselves into gods.

Many people are currently debating the scientific plausibility of such revolutionary ideas. Far fewer are seriously considering the moral ramifications. Transcending our biological limitations can only be a good thingright?

Evolutionists often claim there is no omnipotent Creator who designed human beings. For one, why would He create the human body with so many limitations? But what if there is a Creator, what if He designed the human body to be limited for a good reason?

Transcending our biological limitations would take us deep into the unknownand it may be a very dark place.

Utopian Dream

Transhumanism is the belief that the human race can exceed its current physical and mental limitations by using science and technology. The father of the modern transhumanist movement was evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. In a 1957 essay, New Bottles for New Wine, Huxley claimed that after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution by natural selection, mankind was finally ready to become the managing director of the biggest business of allthe business of evolution. He claimed powerful new technologies were just over the horizon, technologies that would allow the human race to reengineer their own biology and become their own creator.

For decades after Huxley coined the term, many dismissed transhumanism as a fringe idea. But in the 21st century, it is now moving toward the mainstream of futurist thinking in Silicon Valley and other centers of innovation.

Hedge fund manager Joon Yung is now offering $1 million to any scientist who can hack the code of life and genetically engineer humans who can live beyond 120 years. Molecular biologist Cynthia Kenyon has already engineered roundworms that live six times longer than usual. Google has opened an entire division, which includes Kenyon, that is dedicated to reverse engineering the genes that control human life spans.

The chief science officer of the sens Research Foundation, Aubrey de Gray, claims that the first person to live to 1,000 years old has probably already been born.

Other scientists claim that the key to extending longevity isnt necessarily biological, but technological. They have dedicated their lives to inventing mechanical human organs. These organs could be substituted for natural organs, and they themselves could be replaced when they wear out, similar to replacing an automobile alternator every 100,000 miles. The first synthetic trachea, grown from a patients own stem cells, was transplanted into a man with tracheal cancer in 2011. With synthetic tissue growth and 3-D printing technology, scientists say it may soon be difficult to distinguish natural biological organs from manufactured mechanical ones.

The term cyborg was coined in 1960 to describe a fictitious, mechanically enhanced human who could survive in extraterrestrial environments. Fast-forward 57 years. There are now over a million people with mechanical pacemakers regulating their heartbeats.

Devoted disciples of transhumanism foretell a day when our bodies, our brains and the machines around us will merge into a single massive communal intelligence. At the core of transhumanism is the technological singularity. According to computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, this is the hypothetical moment when artificial intelligence will exceed natural human intelligence. Sometime after the singularity, the great transhumanist hope is to be able to upload a human consciousness to a computer. Then, when that computer becomes obsolete, that human consciousness could be transferred to another computer, then to another computer. Biological human bodies with limited life spans would no longer be necessary, and human beings could finally experience immortality.

Dystopian Nightmare

Most people are excited about technologies like the pacemaker, which has saved lives. Yet technologies like stem cell research and genetic engineering have been more controversial. Many are concerned that scientists playing God with human genes could inadvertently create new diseases and/or super viruses. On the other hand, there is concern over what will happen if these scientists are successful. If we get what we want and we liberate ourselves from our current biological constraints, what will happen?

Ironically, Julian Huxleys younger brother Aldous is famous as the author of Brave New World. This dystopian novel warns of a dark side to scientific progress. It describes a future where a totalitarian world state genetically engineers humans to fulfill predetermined roles in a caste system. Aldous did not share his older brothers blind faith in human progress. He feared technology could be misused to bring about unprecedented suffering.

Political philosopher Francis Fukuyama describes transhumanism as perhaps the worlds most dangerous ideology. The first victim of transhumanism might be equality, he wrote for Foreign Policy. 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. If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess compared to those left behind?

Sir Winston Churchill wrote an essay in 1932, warning of the dangers of technological advancements without moral progress. [I]n a future which our children may live to see, powers will be in the hands of men altogether different from any by which human nature has been molded, he wrote. Explosive forces, energy, materials, machinery will be available upon a scale which can annihilate whole nations. Despotisms and tyrannies will be able to prescribe the lives and even the wishes of their subjects in a manner never known since time began. If to these tremendous and awful powers is added the pitiless sub-human wickedness which we now see embodied in one of the most powerful reigning governments, who shall say that the world itself will not be wrecked, or indeed that it ought not to be wrecked? There are nightmares of the future from which a fortunate collision with some wandering star, reducing the Earth to incandescent gas, might be a merciful deliverance.

What Aldous Huxley, Francis Fukuyama and Winston Churchill feared was human nature. Providing human beings with new tools, new weapons and enhanced bodies does not change how human beings think.

Whether or not it is possible for humans to transcend their biological limitations, just imagine what the world would be like if they did. It would be a world ruled by bionically enhanced superhumanswhose human nature remains profoundly unenhanced. Imagine a world where dictators like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin used their positions of power to take advantage of such enhancementsand lived for 1,000 years. Imagine corrupt governments awarding political lackeys with perpetual youth; power hungry generals deploying super-soldiers to slaughter their enemies. Imagine the rich using their wealth to buy not only more things, but more life. Imagine a world where Aldous Huxleys Brave New World wasnt a dystopian nightmare, but a living reality.

Foundational Choice

Humanitys most serious problems are not biological or technological or even physical in nature. They are spiritual in nature. Human beings can send spaceships to Mars, map the human genome, craft synthetic organs, and unlock the secrets of the atom. But they cannot figure out how to stop wars. They cannot engineer a country, a province or even a city that is free of vice. They cannot do itthey have tried.

In other words, human beings cannot solve evil. In fact, mankinds most powerful technological achievement has been the invention of weapons powerful enough to exterminate all life from Earthhuman, transhuman and otherwise.

Some scientists still hold out hope that human beings will achieve moral perfection on their own, but the grand lesson of human history is that mankind does not know the way to peace, joy and abundant living.

Transhumanists, biologists and scientists in general have no explanation for human nature, what it is, or where it comes from. The Bible offers an explanation that is more than plausible. It says that the Creator of human beings required the first humans to choose a giving, sharing, peaceful way of life or to choose a getting, selfish, violent way of life. They chose the latter.

The Creator designed human beings so that if they chose the selfish, competitive, destructive way of life, they would not have to live eternally in a dystopian nightmare. He created humans to die and return to the dust they were made out of (Genesis 3:19). As Romans 6:23 puts it, the wages of sin is death.

Why did God choose to make man out of physical matter instead of spirit? Herbert W. Armstrong asked in What Science Cant Discover About the Human Mind. If God had made us of spirit, once the decision was made to reject God, we could never have repented. Man, composed of matter, is subject to change. Man, if called by God, can be made to realize that he has sinned, and he can repentchange from his sinturn to Gods way. And once his course is changed, with Gods help he can pursue it. He can grow in spiritual knowledge, develop character, overcome wrong habits, weaknesses and faults.

Human beings simply do not have the capacity to live much beyond 70 or 100 years. They simply do not have the capacity to achieve anything close to moral perfection. They are made out of physical matter. Their physical bodies inevitably wear out and die.

But their physical bodies and their minds also enable them to do something else. They can choose the other way of life. The way that leads not only to a relationship with their Creator, but to the power to achieve nothing less than moral perfection and to the other eventuality listed in Romans 6:23: the gift of God is eternal life.

God made humans out of physical matter so that they could repent and change. He also made humans out of physical matter so that they could die if they refused to repent and change. This is why the omnipotent Creator did not create the human body with more longevity. He created it subject to decay for a very important reason. Man can fight to extend his natural life span, but eventually he has to face the reality not only that he is mortal, but that he is immoral. Those who refuse to repent and turn from sin perishas though they had never been created in the first place (John 3:16; Obadiah 16). But those who repent of their evil pasts and willingly choose to become converted can ultimately receive eternal lifenot in a computer, but as the gift of God.

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Immortal Cyborgs: Is This Humanity's Future? - theTrumpet.com

I first read Ray Kurzweils book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicagos southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the spectre of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass.

At Bible school, I had studied a branch of theology that divided all of history into successive stages by which God revealed his truth. We were told we were living in the Dispensation of Grace, the penultimate era, which precedes that glorious culmination, the Millennial Kingdom, when the clouds part and Christ returns and life is altered beyond comprehension. But I no longer believed in this future. More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this narrative, which envisioned all of history as an arc bending towards a moment of final redemption. It was a loss that had fractured even my experience of time. My hours had become non-hours. Days seemed to unravel and circle back on themselves.

The Kurzweil book belonged to a bartender at the jazz club where I worked. He lent it to me a couple of weeks after Id seen him reading it and asked him more out of boredom than genuine curiosity what it was about. I read the first pages on the train home from work, in the grey and ghostly hours before dawn.

The 21st century will be different, Kurzweil wrote. The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future.

Like the theologians at my Bible school, Kurzweil, who is now a director of engineering at Google and a leading proponent of a philosophy called transhumanism, had his own historical narrative. He divided all of evolution into successive epochs. We were living in the fifth epoch, when human intelligence begins to merge with technology. Soon we would reach the Singularity, the point at which we would be transformed into what Kurzweil called Spiritual Machines. We would transfer or resurrect our minds onto supercomputers, allowing us to live forever. Our bodies would become incorruptible, immune to disease and decay, and we would acquire knowledge by uploading it to our brains. Nanotechnology would allow us to remake Earth into a terrestrial paradise, and then we would migrate to space, terraforming other planets. Our powers, in short, would be limitless.

Its difficult to account for the totemic power I ascribed to the book. I carried it with me everywhere, tucked in the recesses of my backpack, though I was paranoid about being seen with it in public. It seemed to me a work of alchemy or a secret gospel. It is strange, in retrospect, that I was not more sceptical of these promises. Id grown up in the kind of millenarian sect of Christianity where pastors were always throwing out new dates for the Rapture. But Kurzweils prophecies seemed different because they were bolstered by science. Moores law held that computer processing power doubled every two years, meaning that technology was developing at an exponential rate. Thirty years ago, a computer chip contained 3,500 transistors. Today it has more than 1bn. By 2045, Kurzweil predicted, the technology would be inside our bodies. At that moment, the arc of progress would curve into a vertical line.

Many transhumanists such as Kurzweil contend that they are carrying on the legacy of the Enlightenment that theirs is a philosophy grounded in reason and empiricism, even if they do lapse occasionally into metaphysical language about transcendence and eternal life. As I read more about the movement, I learned that most transhumanists are atheists who, if they engage at all with monotheistic faith, defer to the familiar antagonisms between science and religion. The greatest threat to humanitys continuing evolution, writes the transhumanist Simon Young, is theistic opposition to Superbiology in the name of a belief system based on blind faith in the absence of evidence.

Yet although few transhumanists would likely admit it, their theories about the future are a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology. The word transhuman first appeared not in a work of science or technology but in Henry Francis Careys 1814 translation of Dantes Paradiso, the final book of the Divine Comedy. Dante has completed his journey through paradise and is ascending into the spheres of heaven when his human flesh is suddenly transformed. He is vague about the nature of his new body. Words may not tell of that transhuman change, he writes.

Dante, in this passage, is dramatising the resurrection, the moment when, according to Christian prophecies, the dead will rise from their graves and the living will be granted immortal flesh. The vast majority of Christians throughout the ages have believed that these prophecies would happen supernaturally God would bring them about, when the time came. But since the medieval period, there has also persisted a tradition of Christians who believed that humanity could enact the resurrection through science and technology. The first efforts of this sort were taken up by alchemists. Roger Bacon, a 13th-century friar who is often considered the first western scientist, tried to develop an elixir of life that would mimic the effects of the resurrection as described in Pauls epistles.

The Enlightenment failed to eradicate projects of this sort. If anything, modern science provided more varied and creative ways for Christians to envision these prophecies. In the late 19th century, a Russian Orthodox ascetic named Nikolai Fedorov was inspired by Darwinism to argue that humans could direct their own evolution to bring about the resurrection. Up to this point, natural selection had been a random phenomenon, but now, thanks to technology, humans could intervene in this process. Calling on biblical prophecies, he wrote: This day will be divine, awesome, but not miraculous, for resurrection will be a task not of miracle but of knowledge and common labour.

According to Kurzweil, we would soon reach the Singularity, when we would be transformed into Spiritual Machines

This theory was carried into the 20th century by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and palaeontologist who, like Fedorov, believed that evolution would lead to the Kingdom of God. In 1949, Teilhard proposed that in the future all machines would be linked to a vast global network that would allow human minds to merge. Over time, this unification of consciousness would lead to an intelligence explosion the Omega Point enabling humanity to break through the material framework of Time and Space and merge seamlessly with the divine. The Omega Point is an obvious precursor to Kurzweils Singularity, but in Teilhards mind, it was how the biblical resurrection would take place. Christ was guiding evolution toward a state of glorification so that humanity could finally merge with God in eternal perfection.

Transhumanists have acknowledged Teilhard and Fedorov as forerunners of their movement, but the religious context of their ideas is rarely mentioned. Most histories of the movement attribute the first use of the term transhumanism to Julian Huxley, the British eugenicist and close friend of Teilhards who, in the 1950s, expanded on many of the priests ideas in his own writings with one key exception. Huxley, a secular humanist, believed that Teilhards visions need not be grounded in any larger religious narrative. In 1951, he gave a lecture that proposed a non-religious version of the priests ideas. Such a broad philosophy, he wrote, might perhaps be called, not Humanism, because that has certain unsatisfactory connotations, but Transhumanism. It is the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition.

The contemporary iteration of the movement arose in San Francisco in the late 1980s among a band of tech-industry people with a libertarian streak. They initially called themselves Extropians and communicated through newsletters and at annual conferences. Kurzweil was one of the first major thinkers to bring these ideas into the mainstream and legitimise them for a wider audience. His ascent in 2012 to a director of engineering position at Google, heralded, for many, a symbolic merger between transhumanist philosophy and the clout of major technological enterprise.

Transhumanists today wield enormous power in Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel identify as believers where they have founded thinktanks such as the Singularity University and the Future of Humanity Institute. The ideas proposed by the pioneers of the movement are no longer abstract theoretical musings but are being embedded into emerging technologies at organisations such as Google, Apple, Tesla and SpaceX.

Losing faith in God in the 21st century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the west dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnamable sense of dread. There were days I woke in a panic, certain that Id lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat.

At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined.

To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. Its not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting that there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical to it.

What makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself has obliterated. Transhumanists do not believe in the existence of a soul, but they are not strict materialists, either. Kurzweil claims he is a patternist, characterising consciousness as the result of biological processes, a pattern of matter and energy that persists over time. These patterns, which contain what we tend to think of as our identity, are currently running on physical hardware the body that will one day give out. But they can, at least in theory, be transferred onto supercomputers, robotic surrogates or human clones. A pattern, transhumanists would insist, is not the same as a soul. But its not difficult to see how it satisfies the same longing. At the very least, a pattern suggests that there is some essential core of our being that will survive and perhaps transcend the inevitable degradation of flesh.

Of course, mind uploading has spurred all kinds of philosophical anxieties. If the pattern of your consciousness is transferred onto a computer, is the pattern you or a simulation of your mind? One camp of transhumanists have argued that true resurrection can happen only if it is bodily resurrection. They tend to favour cryonics and bionics, which promise to resurrect the entire body or else supplement the living form with technologies to indefinitely extend life.

It is perhaps not coincidental that an ideology that grew out of Christian eschatology would come to inherit its philosophical problems. The question of whether the resurrection would be corporeal or merely spiritual was an obsessive point of debate among early Christians. One faction, which included the Gnostic sects, argued that only the soul would survive death; another insisted that the resurrection was not a true resurrection unless it revived the body.

Transhumanists, in their eagerness to preempt charges of dualism, tend to sound an awful lot like these early church fathers. Eric Steinhart, a digitalist philosopher at William Paterson University, is among the transhumanists who insist the resurrection must be physical. Uploading does not aim to leave the flesh behind, he writes, on the contrary, it aims at the intensification of the flesh. The irony is that transhumanists are arguing these questions as though they were the first to consider them. Their discussions give no indication that these debates belong to a theological tradition that stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Common Era.

While the effects of my deconversion were often felt physically, the root causes were mostly cerebral. My doubts began in earnest during my second year at Bible school, after I read The Brothers Karamazov and entertained, for the first time, the problem of how evil could exist in a world created by a benevolent God. In our weekly dormitory prayer groups, my classmates would assure me that all Christians struggled with these questions, but the stakes in my case were higher because I was planning to become a missionary after graduation. I nodded deferentially as my friends supplied the familiar apologetics, but afterward, in the silence of my dorm room, I imagined myself evangelising a citizen of some remote country and crumbling at the moment she pointed out those theological contradictions I myself could not abide or explain.

I knew other people who had left the church, and was amazed at how effortlessly they had seemed to cast off their former beliefs. Perhaps I clung to the faith because, despite my doubts, I found and still find the fundamental promises of Christianity beautiful, particularly the notion that human existence ultimately resolves into harmony. What I could not reconcile was the idea that an omnipotent and benevolent God could allow for so much suffering.

Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient. Within months of encountering Kurzweil, I became totally immersed in transhumanist philosophy. By this point, it was early December and the days had grown dark. The city was besieged by a series of early winter storms, and snow piled up on the windowsills, silencing the noise outside. I increasingly spent my afternoons at the public library, researching things like nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.

Once, after following link after link, I came across a paper called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? It was written by the Oxford philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom, who used mathematical probability to argue that its likely that we currently reside in a Matrix-like simulation of the past created by our posthuman descendants. Most of the paper consisted of esoteric calculations, but I became rapt when Bostrom started talking about the potential for an afterlife. If we are essentially software, he noted, then after we die we might be resurrected in another simulation. Or we could be promoted by the programmers and brought to life in base reality. The theory was totally naturalistic all of it was possible without any appeals to the supernatural but it was essentially an argument for intelligent design. In some ways, Bostrom conceded, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation.

One afternoon, deep in the bowels of an online forum, I discovered a link to a cache of simulation theology articles written by fans of Bostroms theory. According to the Argument for Virtuous Engineers, it was reasonable to assume that our creators were benevolent because the capacity to build sophisticated technologies required long-term stability and rational purposefulness. These qualities could not be cultivated without social harmony, and social harmony could be achieved only by virtuous beings. The articles were written by software engineers, programmers and the occasional philosopher.

The deeper I got into the articles, the more unhinged my thinking became. One day, it occurred to me: perhaps God was the designer and Christ his digital avatar, and the incarnation his way of entering the simulation to share tips about our collective survival as a species. Or maybe the creation of our world was a competition, a kind of video game in which each participating programmer invented one of the world religions, sent down his own prophet-avatar and received points for every new convert.

By this point Id passed beyond idle speculation. A new, more pernicious thought had come to dominate my mind: transhumanist ideas were not merely similar to theological concepts but could in fact be the events described in the Bible. It was only a short time before my obsession reached its culmination. I got out my old study Bible and began to scan the prophetic literature for signs of the cybernetic revolution. I began to wonder whether I could pray to beings outside the simulation. I had initially been drawn to transhumanism because it was grounded in science. In the end, I became consumed with the kind of referential mania and blind longing that animates all religious belief.

Ive since had to distance myself from prolonged meditation on these topics. People who once believed, I have been told, are prone to recidivism. Over the past decade, as transhumanism has become the premise of Hollywood blockbusters and a passable topic of small talk among people under 40, Ive had to excuse myself from conversations, knowing that any mention of simulation theory or the noosphere can send me spiralling down that techno-theological rabbit hole.

Last spring, a friend of mine from Bible school, a fellow apostate, sent me an email with the title robot evangelism. I seem to recall you being into this stuff, he said. There was a link to an episode of The Daily Show that had aired a year ago. The video was a satirical report by the correspondent Jordan Klepper called Future Christ, in which a Florida pastor, Christopher Benek, argued that in the future, AI could be evangelised just like humans. The interview had been heavily edited, and it wasnt really clear what Benek believed, except that robots might one day be capable of spiritual life, an idea that failed to strike me as intrinsically absurd.

One transhumanist believes we may reside in a Matrix-like simulation of the past created by our posthuman descendants

I Googled Benek. He had studied to be a pastor at Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the most prestigious in the country. He described himself in his bio as a techno-theologian, futurist, ethicist, Christian Transhumanist, public speaker and writer. He also chaired the board of something called the Christian Transhumanism Association. I followed a link to the organisations website, which included that peculiar quote from Dante: Words cannot tell of that transhuman change.

All this seemed unlikely. Was it possible there were now Christian Transhumanists? Actual believers who thought the Kingdom of God would come about through the Singularity? I had thought I was alone in drawing these parallels between transhumanism and biblical prophecy, but the convergences seemed to have gained legitimacy from the pulpit. How long would it be before everyone noticed the symmetry of these two ideologies before Kurzweil began quoting the Gospel of John and Bostrom was read alongside the minor prophets?

A few months later, I met with Benek at a cafe across the street from his church in Fort Lauderdale. In my email to him, Id presented my curiosity as journalistic, unable to admit even to myself what lay behind my desire to meet.

He arrived in the same navy blazer he had worn for The Daily Show interview and appeared nervous. The Daily Show had been a disaster, he told me. He had spoken with them for an hour about the finer points of his theology, but the interview had been cut down to his two-minute spiel on robots something he insisted he wasnt even interested in, it was just a thought experiment he had been goaded into. Its not like I spend my days speculating on how to evangelise robots, he said.

I explained that I wanted to know whether transhumanist ideas were compatible with Christian eschatology. Was it possible that technology would be the avenue by which humanity achieved the resurrection and immortality? I worried that the question sounded a little deranged, but Benek appeared suddenly energised. It turned out he was writing a dissertation on precisely this subject.

Technology has a role in the process of redemption, he said. Christians today assume the prophecies about bodily perfection and eternal life are going to be realised in heaven. But the disciples understood those prophecies as referring to things that were going to take place here on Earth. Jesus had spoken of the Kingdom of God as a terrestrial domain, albeit one in which the imperfections of earthly existence were done away with. This idea, he assured me, was not unorthodox; it was just old.

I asked Benek about humility. Wasnt it all about the fallen nature of the flesh and our tragic limitations as humans?

Sure, he said. He paused a moment, as though debating whether to say more. Finally, he leaned in and rested his elbows on the table, his demeanour markedly pastoral, and began speaking about the transfiguration and the nature of Christ. Jesus, he reminded me, was both fully human and fully God. What was interesting, he said, was that science had actually verified the potential for matter to have two distinct natures. Superposition, a principle in quantum theory, suggests that an object can be in two places at one time. A photon could be a particle, and it could also be a wave. It could have two natures. When Jesus tells us that if we have faith nothing will be impossible for us, I think he means that literally.

By this point, I had stopped taking notes. It was late afternoon, and the cafe was washed in amber light. Perhaps I was a little dehydrated, but Beneks ideas began to make perfect sense. This was, after all, the promise implicit in the incarnation: that the body could be both human and divine, that the human form could walk on water. Very truly I tell you, Christ had said to his disciples, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these. His earliest followers had taken this promise literally. Perhaps these prophecies had pointed to the future achievements of humanity all along, our ability to harness technology to become transhuman. Christ had spoken mostly in parables no doubt for good reason. If a superior being had indeed come to Earth to prophesy the future to 1st-century humans, he would not have wasted time trying to explain modern computing or sketching the trajectory of Moores law on a scrap of papyrus. He would have said, You will have a new body, and All things will be changed beyond recognition, and On Earth as it is in heaven. Perhaps only now that technologies were emerging to make such prophecies a reality could we begin to understand what Christ meant about the fate of our species.

I could sense my reason becoming loosened by the lure of these familiar conspiracies. Somewhere, in the pit of my stomach, it was amassing: the fevered, elemental hope that the tumult of the world was authored and intentional, that our profound confusion would one day click into clarity and the broken body would be restored. Part of me was still helpless against the pull of these ideas.

It was late. The cafe had emptied and a barista was sweeping near our table. As we stood to go, I felt that our conversation was unresolved. I suppose Id been hoping that Benek would hand me some portal back to the faith, one paved by the certitude of modern science. But if anything had become clear to me, it was my own desperation, my willingness to spring at this largely speculative ideology that offered a vestige of that first religious promise. I had disavowed Christianity, and yet I had spent the past 10 years hopelessly trying to re-create its visions by dreaming about our postbiological future a modern pantomime of redemption. What else could lie behind this impulse but the ghost of that first hope?

Main photograph by Liam Norris/Getty Images

This is an abridged version of an essay from the latest issue of n+1, on sale now. To find out more, visit nplusonemag.com/subscribe.

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God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism - The Guardian

To be or not to be a machine? That is indeed the question. To sleep, perchance to dream of becoming a robot? Give those fellows credit for being immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and being designed to outlive us all. But author Mark OConnells subject in To Be a Machine is not robot envy. He has been trekking various terrains to report on the brave new world of transhumanists. This assemblage of scientists, entrepreneurs, dreamers and the odd philosopher is dedicated to out-maneuvering our mortal destiny.

He toured Alcora, a facility near Phoenix, where he is prepped on how humanitys primary adaptations need to be reset after death derails them. Until that breakthrough, clients invest in a post-mortem cyronic suspension that freezes our mortal flesh for future uploading, especially the separated heads that encase our vital core. Seriously, if life began with a handful of elements and has so far evolved homo sapiens amazing brain, why stop now?

But why the singular focus? Because the superstar of the computer age is our brain. Its ability to accumulate and organize ever-greater masses of data is regaled by scientists. Brains are being credited with keeping us active players, not only in improving our lot but also in enabling our species to feel more uniquely alive. And so it is this constant flow of data fueled by 100 billion neurons that entices us to double down against death. With such infinite resources, why not embrace the transhuman task of phasing it out?

Because its also complicated. OConnell doesnt shy away from this agendas doubling back on itself. Enter AI: Artificial Intelligence, far more superior to mastering data than our cumbersome biology permits. But as AIs leave us in the dust, many fear were at their mercy, as well. Some in the field speculate that the new bosses might condescend to us as pets; others propose that since we cant beat em, join em and become robots. Crazy; but havent we already begun? Robocars can make pizza runs, drones can fight our wars, disembodied voices guide grocery self-checkouts, Dr. Google dispenses free medical advice. Face it, bit by bit humans are becoming redundant. Phasing out death, we may end up phasing out ourselves. Where will it end? No one dare say. But OConnell has devised an indispensable GPS for negotiating todays tomorrow-land.

Dan Dervin

is a freelance reviewer in Fredericksburg.

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Book review: Author delves into transhumanist movement in 'To Be a Machine' - Fredericksburg.com