Category Archives: Transhuman

Cat Sparks meets Gavin from Lockheed Martin who is demonstrating the powers of an exoskeleton

Cat Sparks/Cosmos

Founded 30 years ago, South By is Austins pride and joy, an annual technology, media, movie, music and innovation conference-come-festival that runs from 10-19 March.

This year an estimated 70,000 plus registrants and artists are participating. Speakers include former vice president Joe Biden, CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna, pop star Kesha, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, music legends Nile Rogers and Mick Fleetwood, NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet, ocean conservationist Dr Fabien Cousteau (grandson of Jacques-Yves), Yoda master Frank Oz, and experts from the Pentagon, the CIA, Microsoft, NASA and a mixed bag of bleeding edge technologies big and small.

March in Austin is supposed to be hot. A surprise cold, wet snap resulted in a flurry of hastily overlaid plastic ponchos. Demographically, the crowd ranges from 20s through to 40-somethings, all dressed in casual clothes and sensible shoes. An eclectic blend of techno hipsters sporting backpacks, backwards baseball caps, occasional man buns -- and not as many beards as you'd expect -- each juggling multiple electronic devices, wires trailing out of ears and pockets. Young guys and gals talking incessant start-ups, successive apps, embedding, messaging, backend systems and workarounds, swapping schedules for party intel in the ubiquitous, never ending coffee queues. Every available wall socket is encrusted with barnacle-like charging devices.

Too many topics to cover here, plenty for the scientifically inclined: presentations on AI, AR, VR, impacts of machine learning, military drone swarms, genetically modified athletes, synthetic biology, pattern recognition, the power of geospatial context, drone journalism ethics, space exploration, democratised data access. Hearables, wearables, cleantech innovation, flexible substrates, optical interconnects, devices that charge themselves from light & waste heat.

Kristy Richards, from The Lab Insight and Strategy and I executed a presentation: Sci Fi Realities and Tomorrows Consumer, outlining some of the expectations for a device-free, augmented, AI enhanced and potentially transhuman future.

Meanwhile, transhumanism was taking tentative steps inside the Trade Hall, where Gavin from Lockheed Martin demonstrated passive load transfer via exoskeleton. I sampled cold brew coffee infused with nitrogen courtesy of the American Chemical Society as a Wi-Fi connected, electronic gesture-and-voice-controlled HD mirror analyzed my face, provided a skin index overview and advised me what to do about problem areas.

Beyond the high tech home brewing systems, premium hemp products for humans and pets, e-pulse pain relief, hand crafted acoustic guitars and digital mindfulness and stress resilience training, Animal Equality employed VR goggles to showcase the appalling conditions inside factory farms.

I was overtaken by a robot while passing the Christian Science Monitor stand, en route to the Exoplanet Travel Bureau where a girl handed out travel posters beside a large, steam emitting model of Enceledus.

Outside on the street, the deep, reverberating thrum of base and clash of cymbals drowned out traffic and snatches of breeze-born Japanese and Scandinavian. Skinny girls with blue hair cheered skatepunks doing tricks on boards rimmed with flashing led lights. Music seeped tentatively from corner bars and open windows.

Dropping in to the Google fibre lounge, I immersed myself in a VR headset to experience Skull Island as a helicopter passenger, flying between tall cliffs, only to be smashed out of the sky by bellowing King Kong. Next up, the Google Tilt Brush experience -- VR painting performed by waving hands with results displayed behind on a massive screen.

SXSW is convergence of smart, switched on, curious folk, a welcoming, friendly party atmosphere with more events and experiences on offer than it would be possible to absorb across a year. Whatever the future may bring, I hope it includes more festivals the caliber of this one.

Cat was until recently the Cosmos fiction editor. Her debut science fiction novel, Lotus Blue, was published by Skyhorse Press this month. It is reviewed in the next issue of Cosmos magazine out in April.

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Beaming in from SXSW - Cosmos

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven't watched the movie Logan and are planning to, you may want to read this essay only after you do.)

In generic heroic sagas, the hero leaves home to face numerous tribulations in a pilgrimage of the self.

The obstacles along the way are tests of the hero's strength, molding his/her character through pain and suffering. Glory, when achieved, is bittersweet, as it comes heavy with loss, usually of loved ones, family or companions. In tragic sagas, the hero pays with his/her life in the end so that others may be free.

The narrative line of the new blockbuster movie Logan, starring Hugh Jackman with story and direction by James Mangold, follows this structure to the core. It's a classic tragedy on steroids, with Tarantino-like graphic violence, the kind we don't usually associate with Marvel characters. It's the end of the X-Men as we know and love them. A dark, oppressive end, exploring, once again, the worse of humanity.

It brings to the fore the theme I explored in this space a few weeks back, the moral choices of those in power as they apply scientific knowledge. In the case of Logan, it's an evil corporation, no doubt a defense contractor, attempting to design the ultimate killing machine, mutant soldiers without the ability for empathy. The horror is that the corporation does this by genetically inserting mutant genes into the human genome, creating a gang of children they try to mold into heartless assassins, a sort of Neverland meets H.G. Wells Dr. Moreau.

The movie is so utterly sad it's painful to watch. Logan, the conflicted and beloved Wolverine, is old and broken, alone, drowning his sorrows in alcohol, driving a limo to survive in a harsh 2029 America. His sole job is to care for a nonagenarian half-demented Professor X, who suffers from seizures that threaten anyone near him. A "ticking time-bomb," "a weapon of mass destruction," is how his brain is now described. But good Professor X is still in there, and he feels the presence of a new mutant, the first in 25 years. X-Men character Magneto's worse fears are realized: Humans obliterated the mutants, the Final Solution working as well as it could. No redemption in this story, no Allies to defeat the evil dictators. Only death and loss to an entire kind.

Fortunately, the genetically-modified transhuman children the only redeeming aspect of the movie survived and escaped their torturing captors. One of them, Laura (played with beautiful intensity by Dafne Keen), carries Logan's genes and powers of regeneration. She even has his claws and metal core, although we don't quite know how this inner armor grows with her. But these are details. Much against his will, Logan is roped into rescuing his engineered daughter and taking her to Eden, the Neverland of mutant children, a meeting point near the Canadian border.

Mirroring the dark days we are experiencing in America, the mutant children must leave the country to become immigrants in search of a society that will embrace them.

Faithful to the tragic storyline, the heroes all perish. In the darkest scene of the movie, Laura must bury her own father, after a brief moment of much-needed tenderness as Logan finally understands what loving someone means. The other mutant children walk away, and Laura is alone by Logan's burial place. She picks up the cross that marks his grave and turns it sideways, making it into an X. The saga ends for our beloved X-Men. But the children do cross the border and mutants survive, hopefully to thrive again.

As in real life, the Final Solution will never work.

Read more here:
A Mutant Holocaust In 'Logan' - WAMC

Some science-type bods are getting a bit excited because they believe mankind may be on the brink of merging with machines.

Transhumanism, they call it. Not to be confused with trannie-humans. The theory is that we'll soon have some machine parts implanted in us, to keep up with the relentless march of technology.

Innovative billionaire Elon Musk says humans must merge with machines. And Elon would know, he's the clever bugger who built a rocket that not only blasted off last week, but then reversed back into its parking space. Amazing that someone can do with a space rocket, what most Tauranga drivers can't manage with a Corolla.

Anyway, he reckons a direct brain/computer interface is an absolute necessity for humans to evolve as a species and keep up with the machines.

If we don't merge with the machines, we will become useless and irrelevant, reports New Atlas. At RR, we worry that this may have already happened to Winston Peters.

Although there is a General Election coming up and with his particular system of cryogenics, anything is possible.

Science documentaries

Transhumanism sounds very much like science fiction, and I am well qualified to speak on this subject of future science because I've seen a lot of science documentaries, such as Cherry 2000' at least five times and various other films featuring robots, androids and Mr Vader. Of course, we grew up with Space Family Robinson every afternoon on a black-and-white television. From this vast study of science spanning many decades, I can tell you, humans generally lose in the end. But they get a small consolation, such as living happily ever after with Melanie Griffith.

Personally, I came very close to merging with machines on several occasions in my younger years. Once, while venturing too close to the wringer washing machine, part of my fashionable sixties clothing was inexplicably drawn into the double wringer roller mechanism. My short and precarious life flashed before my eyes as I was about to be interfaced with the Whiteway. Or was it a Maytag?

Previous columns have also delved into character-building experiences with the bean slicer; although these incidents tended to be more like the bean slicer attempting to rid the planet of humans with digits, rather than any peaceful symbiotic bonding.

We all have those crisis moments in life when we've thought: What would Steve Austin do?' Most of us failed, because we did not have the slow-motion function installed. Any attempts to re-enact The Six Million Dollar Man' stunts soon ended up in a shambles more closely resembling the closing sequence of The Benny Hill Show'.

Androids among us

The closest thing we've seen to transhumanism in real life would have to be Michael Jackson, who, until his untimely expiration, was a human perfectly blended with a Tupperware set.

I've long suspected there are already androids walking amongst us and they're doing a darn good job of keeping it a secret, except for Mike Hosking, of course. He was interfaced with Encyclopaedia Britannica from an early age, because he knows everything.

Then there's a musician who has so many piercings and rings in his face, he can double as a shower curtain.

Peter Dunne is rumoured to have survived a brush with a crop duster and Gareth Morgan must have at some point suffered a close encounter with a six-pack of Energizer batteries, because he just keeps going and going and going.

Built-in compass

Lepht Anonym is a Berlin-based biohacker who advocates cybernetics for the masses, says New Atlas. Lepht [who identifies as genderless] has performed numerous body modifications over the past decade, including implanting neodymium metal discs under his/her fingertips to enable the physical sensing of electromagnetic fields, and several internal compass implants designed to give a physical awareness of north and south magnetic poles. Here at RR, we hope Lepht has joined Scouts or Guides, because he/she would be well ready to go for his/her Map Reading and Orienteering Badge.

The new generation of kids may as well have machines grafted into their brains. They already walk around with mobile devices planted constantly in their faces, they experience virtual lives; nothing is true or proven until it's been shared on instabook or facegram and nothing accepted as a true record of history until it has reached 20 likes and a minimum of four smiley faces.

In fact it's a gas

Transhumanist thinking goes beyond the mere fusion of human and machine. It includes genetic modification to help us live longer and be smarter, till eventually we transcend our physical bodies with the aid of technology.

Little do these scientists know, that level of transhuman longevity has already been achieved by a pioneer in the field; not by implants of computer or machinery; but with select drugs, decades of liquid infusion, excessive noise application and being born in a cross-fire hurricane. Long live Keith Richards.

I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots Albert Einstein.

brian@thesun.co.nz

For more science revelations and other true stories, go to Facebook and like' blogger, Rogers Rabbits.

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Man merges with machine - SunLive (blog)

Research has shown that crying at work comes off as unprofessional and weakens your promotion prospects -- and surveys suggest that people cry at work a lot, anyway. So how can you balance your human emotional needs with the necessity of presenting yourself as a productive unit of gut-flora for the transhuman, immortal artificial life form that has absorbed you?

In a 2016 paper published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, a group of business-school researchers led by Harvard doctoral candidate Elizabeth Baily Wolf present the results of a study on how people perceive their co-workers' tears, and which emotional explanations are most favorably perceived.

They evaluated five notional explanations for crying at work -- fighting with co-workers, being assigned undesirable work, being discriminated against, negotiating for higher pay, and being overcome with passion for your job -- and found that subjects viewed the final explanation (overwhelming workplace passion that spills over into tears) as reflecting the most workplace competence.

Of course, this strategy only works for work-related tears, and sometimes people cry at work for personal reasons (though if spotted, you could try to pawn it off on the job). Nevertheless, this dynamic tends to truly crystallize in the performance review, the best known venue for workplace crying. If involuntary tears start welling up during harsh criticism from the boss, instead of apologizing for getting emotional, blame them on passion for your job. The boss might perceive the tears as noble, even endearing, rather than weak.

Workers are generally told to leave their tears at home. Jennifer Porter, a managing partner at the Boda Group, an executive coaching firm, advises clientsparticularly womennot to cry on the job.

If you can find strategies to not cry at work, it's in your career best interests, she said. Wolfs research confirmed that holding back tears still beats all other options. In one of her experiments, when given three options for a potential project partner, participants chose the person who hid distress over someone who admitted to cryingno matter what the reason.

Managing perceptions of distress at work: Reframing emotion as passion [Elizabeth Baily Wolf, Jooa Julia Lee, Sunita Sah and Alison Wood Brooks/Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes]

The Experts Guide to Crying at Work [Rebecca Greenfield/Bloomberg]

(via Naked Capitalism)

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If you cry at work, pretend it's because you're very passionate about ... - Boing Boing

Its a good time to be a transhumanist politician. As faith in the political establishment declines, new technologies, from gene editing to artificial intelligence, are transforming our lives faster than ever. The transhumanist author and politician Zoltan Istvan agrees. He thinks the time is ripe for pro-science and technology governance, and for leaders who will embrace the technologies that could fundamentally transform our conceptions of what it means to be human.

Istvan is a maverick who appears to thrive in an 'outsider' role. He self-published a sci-fi novel, The Transhumanist Wager, in 2013, which became a surprise bestseller on Amazon. In 2016, he made an unlikely run for US president as the leader of the Transhumanist Party. Now, hes making a bid for Governor of California in the 2018 election under a Libertarian Party ticket.

As a libertarian, Istvan believes in promoting maximum freedom and personal accountability, a sentiment that gels well with his championing of human enhancement technologiesand robot and cyborg rights.

Like all transhumanists, Istvan believes in using science and technology to enhance human capabilities and transcend current biological limits. He wants to be smarter, live longer, and eventually merge with advanced technologies to become a posthuman beingone that is impervious, or at least resilient, to aging, and most mortal risks.

jason-silva-on-transhumanism

All Aboard the Immortality Bus

The primary role of transhumanist politicians and parties at present is not to win elections, but to spread awareness and garner political clout. Istvan acknowledges this, and he plays the role well.

When running for president in 2016, he drove around the country in a coffin-shaped Immortality Bus spreading the word that death should be conquered. He got a lot of media attention and helped to generate awareness about transhumanist ideas and technologies. He also seemed to be the only candidate actively desiring to be superseded. Eventually, Istvan hopes that an artificial intelligence will become president, as he thinks it will do a better job.

In 2017, the political newcomer set his sights on a smaller goal: California. He also made the pragmatic decision to switch to the Libertarian Party, which has a larger support base than his own Transhumanist Party. But Istvan hasnt abandoned transhumanism. Many transhumanists are libertarians, or have libertarian sympathies, and Istvan believes that he can promote libertarian and transhumanist interests in tandem.

Henotably opposes federal regulations that could hamper the development of advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence and gene editing, which have many marketable applications, from driverless cars, to the broad and growing field of personalized medicine. These industries are big in California, and Istvan believes they will be instrumental in promoting economic growth.

But what if robots end up taking all the jobs? As a left-leaning libertarian, Istvan thinks that some form of basic income will eventually be necessary to solve this problem.

The gubernatorial candidate is also a passionate defender of the joint transhumanist-libertarian view that the individual should have the right to choose what they do with their own body. The principle ofmorphological freedom,as its called in transhumanist circles, includes basic forms of DIY biohacking (Istvan has an RFID chip implanted in his wrist, which opens his front door)and extends to much more ambitious forms of body modification, like gene therapy, and other biomedical interventions that could stop or reverse aging, enhance physical and cognitive prowess, and even delay death.

Like many transhumanists, Istvan is also adamant that the government needs to classify aging as a disease. He views the fight against aging and death as a (trans)human rights issue, a stance he explained in a 2017 interview:

My entire goal, and one of the things I'm standing behind is that we all have a universal right to indefinite lifespans. That's something I can promise you in the 21st century will become one of the most important civil and ideological rights of humanity. That everybody has a right to live indefinitely.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Apparently, quite a few people. Billions of dollars are being spent by tech corporations and entrepreneurs to unlock the secrets of human biology, reverse aging, and cure disease. Googles Calico Labs, a $1.5 billion initiative,focus purely on anti-aging and life-extension research, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan havepledged $3 billionto cure all diseases by the end of the century.

PayPal co-founder and prominent libertarian transhumanist Peter Thiel is another keen investor in life-extension initiatives. He famously expressed interest in"parabiosis"an experimental procedure in which individuals over 35 receive blood transfusions from those under 25 in the hope of experiencing regenerative effects. Thiel hassaid of death:

You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison has also donated in excess of $430million to anti-aging research, and is similarly outspoken about the tragedy of death:

Death has never made any sense to me Death makes me angry. Premature death makes me angrier still.

But the question remains, is life-extension actually possible? Biogerontologist and co-founder of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senesence (SENS) Foundation, Aubrey de Grey, thinks so.

aubrey-de-greys-plan-to-stop-aging

De Grey believes that aging, and age-related diseases should be thought of as the various types of molecular and cellular damage that the body does to itself as a side effect of its normal metabolic operation. De Greys research focuses on figuring out how to repair that damage and prevent it from developing into a pathology of old age.

Other scientists, like the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, and the Harvard geneticist George Church are also optimistic that cheap genomic sequencing, gene-editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas9, and the explosion of genetic and lifestyle data will help us to unlock and reverse the biological mechanisms of aging in the near future.

Is Life Extension Ethical?

Of course there aremanywho think that living indefinitely is infeasible, or just plain wrong. Like the Jewish historian Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, whobelieves that death gives life meaning and that without it we would be less human. She also wonders: What will people live for, if they live indefinitely? and notes that in the Jewish tradition:

The ideal of indefinite postponement of death is the highest form of human hubris, one more example of human rebellion against God who created humans as finite beings whose life narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Other common concernsare population growth, resource scarcity, the fear that the old will refuse to make way for the young, and the worry that only the rich will benefit.

In a more philosophical vein, the American astronomerSeth Shostakhas mused that if we radically extend our lives but remain biological we could become ultra risk averse and avoid doing everyday things like getting into a car. With so much potential ahead of us, even a small probability of dying would seem unacceptable.

Yet when it comes to upgrading the human condition, Istvan thinks we should go for broke. When asked what he thought about a posthuman future he declared:

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

He makes a bold statement. And, like any politician, he argues (in line with Aubrey de Grey) that it will be good for the economy.

the-economics-of-immortality

But just how open minded is California? It's previously embracedthe Governator, butifIstvan were elected it could end up with a real-life cyborga human who gets upgraded to be more like a machine. For his part, Zoltan Istvan thinks that this is exactly what California, and humanity, needs.

--

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Could This Transhumanist Be the next Governor of California? - Big Think

A new and extensive interview I did at New Atlas, including ideas about my #libertarian California Governor run. Libertarianism has many good ideas, but two core concepts are the non-aggression principle (NAP) and protection of private property rightsboth of which I believe can be philosophically applied to the human body (and the bodys inevitable transhuman destiny of overcoming disease and decay with science and technology):

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

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

New Atlas: How does transhumanism intersect with politics?

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

More:
Zoltan Istvan on transhumanism, politics and why the human body ... - Lifeboat Foundation (blog)

Fashion

Text by Sadaf Shaikh

How have you incorporated the theme of The Indian Pastoralists in your showcase? The Indian Pastoralists represent the varied artisanal communities that inhabit a few pockets across the mountains in India. I have taken inspiration from the life of the highland communities of Lachen and Lachung in the foothills of the Sikkim Himalayas. Almost trans-human in nature, as believed in folklore, they have been living in self-sustaining societies, in harmony with nature. Untouched and unaffected by modernism, they live in a metaphysical state.

What are the elements that influenced your collectionThe Unreached?As the name signifies, these are communities that have rarely been written about or researched on. My designs takea deconstructed approach from the bakhu and honju, which are traditional garments worn by the women from that region.

What are the local elements that you have tried to retain?I have used the indigenous Eri and its yarn waste exclusively for this collection. The fiber is natures own upcycled product, where the cocoon is technically waste after the silkworm transforms and leaves, earning its name of peace or non-violence silk.

What does the P.E.L.L.A woman symbolise?A P.E.L.L.A woman finds poetry in fashion. She is someone who appreciates the beauty of true craftsmanship and has an eye for the most inconspicuous of details.

How have you maintained abalance between an Indian and global aesthetic? My work blurs the boundaries of what we perceive is Indian or global. I think it is very important to appreciate design in its true form, regardless of origin or destination.

What are the techniques and textiles used? P.E.L.L.A as a label incorporates zero-waste design techniques in pattern-making. This means eliminating waste in the design phase itself. You will see garments made out of a single block of fabric which is used to create the silhouette. The finishing is painstakingly hand-rolled and blind-hemmed to create a boundaryless design.

London isDiverse. It has a beautiful mix of people from all around the world, and the very fact they are acceptingis beautiful.

A show that you would want to attend at London Fashion Week J.W.Anderson.

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In Conversation With: Priyanka Lama at London Fashion Week - VERVE

Speakers at a symposium on body-enhancement technology raised the idea that we may converge with our technology to the point that a superhuman entity emerges.

On September 2, 2010, Karen Throsby became the 1153rd person to swim the English Channel, taking 16 hours and nine minutes, and keeping herself going on handfuls of jelly babies.

Many Channel swimmers are purists: wetsuits are banned, never mind performance-enhancing drugs. The sport sees itself as an assertion of human ability in natural form. But Throsby, a sociologist researching the effects of extreme sports, takes a different view.

She was a speaker at Human Limits, a Wellcome Collection symposium linked to its Superhuman exhibition in London on physical and mental enhancement. The question it investigated was how much technology can humans use before they become something else a cyborg, perhaps, or a superhuman, a post-human, or a trans-human. What are our limits?

Some speakers discussed the "singularity": the idea that in a few years' time, we may converge with our technology to the point that some as-yet inconceivable superhuman entity emerges.

Others highlighted the fear we can feel when new inventions threaten our sense of who we are; uneasy about our authenticity, we look back nostalgically to an era assumed to be more human.

Throsby's contribution was to remind us that even something as apparently basic as marathon swimming involves many artificial techniques: gaining weight, acclimatising to the cold, monitoring one's psychology, and developing new micro-senses an awareness of tiny differences in water temperature, a heightened kinetic sense of the body's balance and position, and so on.

It means self-transformation, and is filled with "uncountable, mundane bodily technologies". Channel swimmers use rubber caps, sunblock, Vaseline to prevent chafing, sleek swimsuits, and energy-boosting snacks. They are accompanied by boats with GPS.

And they use goggles, an invention variously attributed to Polynesians, Persians and the Inuit, but later improved by innovators such as first female Channel swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who smeared paraffin wax on motorcycle glasses in 1926 to make them watertight. More recently, goggles have been made with better rubber, adjustable straps, and prescription lenses. It would be hard to swim far or fast without them.

As always, successful technologies tend to disappear in their use, becoming almost indistinguishable from ourselves and our own efforts. A smartphone sits in our hand announcing "I am technology", but the spectacles through which we peer at its screen and the pocket into which we slip it feel as natural as our own hands and eyes. It takes a leap of thought to realise that Vaseline and jelly babies are technology, too.

Human Limits asked how much technology we can add before losing ourselves, but there is also the question of how human we remain if familiar enhancements are taken away.

These could include both devices and practices our mastery of writing, our elaborate educations, our knives and fires and cooking-pots, our language, our laboriously polished social skills. At what point do we cross the line into being no longer ourselves?

As human beings, we tread a narrow ridge where we roughly know who we are but the ridge does not run straight, or lead in a predefined direction. It is partly up to us to decide what a human being is.

"Man is rightly called and judged a great miracle and a wonderful creature," wrote the philosopher Pico della Mirandola in 1486. He opined that we are wonderful not because we live up with the angels, or down with more modest beasts, but because we occupy an intermediate realm in which we invent and alter ourselves.

"Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee," he imagines God saying to man. "Thou, constrained by no limits, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature."

Of course we are hemmed-in by mishaps and errors, and technology goes wrong. But to a large extent we are our own works in progress. And when all goes smoothly, we don't even know it.

Guardian News & Media

Originally posted here:
Technology for the body on the road to cyborgs? - WAtoday

In a compelling webseries from 2012 entitled H+, we were introduced to a future world where much of the population has a hi-tech implant, allowing individuals a direct neural interface with the internet. As often is the case in science fiction, things don't turn out well for those technological pioneers. A virus infects the implant and chaos quickly descends on a human race that has become biologically fused with technology.

The series was an overt examination of a transhumanist future, with the title H+ being an appropriation of the common transhuman abbreviation. Five years after the series' birth, we live in a present even more entrenched on a path towards the realization of transhumanist ideals.

Early in February 2017, innovative billionaire Elon Musk reiterated an idea he had floated several times over the past year: Humans need to merge with machines. Musk sees a direct brain/computer interface as an absolute necessity, not only in order for us to evolve as a species, but as a way of keeping up with the machines we are creating. According to Musk, if we don't merge with the machines, we will become useless and irrelevant.

While Elon Musk does not self-identify as a "transhumanist," the idea of fusing man with machine is fundamental to this movement that arose over the course of the 20th century. And as we move into a tumultuous 21st century, transhumanism is quickly shifting from its sci-fi influenced philosophical and cultural niche into a more mainstream, and increasingly popular, movement.

Zoltan Istvan, a prominent futurist and transhumanist, is currently making a bold political run for the position of Governor of California. "We need leadership that is willing to use radical science, technology, and innovation what California is famous for to benefit us all," Istvan declared in a recent editorial published by Newsweek. "We need someone with the nerve to risk the tremendous possibilities to save the environment through bioengineering, to end cancer by seeking a vaccine or a gene-editing solution for it."

Simply put, transhumanism is a broad intellectual movement that advocates for the transformation of humanity through embracing technology. Thinkers in the field opine that our intellectual, physical and psychological capabilities can, and should, be enhanced by any and all available emerging technologies. From genetic modification to make us smarter and live longer, to enhancing our physical capabilities through bioengineering and mechanical implants, transhumanists see our future as one where we transcend our physical bodies with the aid of technology.

The term "transhuman" can be traced back several hundred years, but in terms of our current use we can look to 20th century biologist and eugenicist, Julian Huxley. Across a series of lectures and articles in the 1950s, Huxley advocated for a type of utopian futurism where humanity would evolve and transcend its present limitations.

"We need a name for this new belief," Huxley wrote in 1957. "Perhaps transhumanism will serve; man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing the new possibilities of and for his human nature."

Huxley's ideas were arguably inspired by influential speculative fiction of the mid-20th century from the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, and consequently his more specific transhumanist philosophies went on to influence a generation of cyberpunk authors in the 1980s. It was in this era that the first self-described transhumanists began appearing, having formal meetings around the University of California.

With the pace of technological advancement dramatically accelerating into the 21st century, transhumanist thinking began to manifest in more specific futurist visions. Cryonics and life extension technology was one focus of transhumanists, while others looked to body modification, gender transitioning and general biohacking as a way of transcending the limits of our physical bodies.

Plenty of criticisms have been lobbed at transhumanists over the years, with their extreme views of the technological future of humanity causing many to question whether this is a direct pathway to losing touch with what makes us essentially human. The fear that we will merge into some kind of inhuman, god-like, robot civilization quite fairly frightens and disturbs those with more traditional perspectives on humanity.

Science fiction classically reflects many fears of transhumanist futures, from Skynet taking over the world to a Gattaca-like future where genetic modification creates dystopian class separation. But prominent transhumanist critic Francis Fukuyama has soberly outlined the dangers of this modern movement in his book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.

Fukuyama comprehensively argues that the complexity of human beings cannot be so easily reduced into good and bad traits. If we were to try to eliminate traits we considered to be negative, be it through genetic modification or otherwise, we would be dangerously misunderstanding how we fundamentally function. "If we weren't violent and aggressive we wouldn't be able to defend ourselves; if we didn't have feelings of exclusivity, we wouldn't be loyal to those close to us; if we never felt jealousy, we would also never feel love," he writes.

Some of the more valid concerns about the dawning transhumanist future are the socioeconomic repercussions of such a speedy technological evolution. As the chasm between rich and poor grows in our current culture, one can't help but be concerned that future advancements could become disproportionately limited to those with the financial resources to afford them. If life extension technologies start to become feasible, and they are only available to the billionaire class, then we enter a scenario where the rich get richer and live longer, while the poor get poorer and die sooner.

Without exceptionally strong political reform maintaining democratic access to human enhancement technologies, it's easy to foresee the rise of a disturbing genetic class divide. As environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben writes: "If we can't afford the fifty cents a person it would take to buy bed nets to protect most of Africa from malaria, it is unlikely we will extend to anyone but the top tax bracket these latest forms of genetic technology."

The looming specter of eugenics hovers over a great deal of transhumanist thought. In the first half of the 20th century the term became disturbingly, but not unreasonably, associated with Nazi Germany. Sterilizing or euthanizing those who displayed characteristics that were deemed to be imperfect was ultimately outlawed as a form of genocide. But as the genome revolution struck later in the century a resurgence in the philosophical ideals of eugenics began to arise.

Transhumanist thought often parallels the ideals of eugenics, although most self-identifying transhumanists separate themselves from that stigmatized field, preferring terms like reprogenetics and germinal choice. The difference between the negative outcomes of eugenics and the more positive, transhumanist notion of reprogenetics seems to be one of consent. In a 21st century world of selective genetic modification, all is good as long as all parents equally have the choice to genetically modify their child, and are not forced by governments who are trying to forcefully manage the genetic pool.

Prominent transhumanist advocate Nick Bostrom, labeled by The New Yorker as the leading transhumanist philosopher of today, argues that critics of the movement always focus on the potential risks or negative outcomes without balancing the possible positive futures. He advocates that the mere potential of a negative future outcome is not enough to stifle technological momentum.

Bostrom lucidly makes his point in an essay examining the transhumanist perspectives on human genetic modifications. "Good consequences no less than bad ones are possible," he writes. "In the absence of sound arguments for the view that the negative consequences would predominate, such speculations provide no reason against moving forward with the technology."

At first glance it would seem like the transhumanism movement would be synonymous with atheism. In 2002 the Vatican released an expansive statement exploring the intersection of technology and religion. The statement warned that changing a human's genetic identity was a "radically immoral" action. The old adage of the scientist playing God certainly raises its head frequently in criticisms of transhumanism. Zoltan Istvan even penned an op-ed entitled "I'm an Atheist, Therefore I'm a Transhumanist" in which he, rather weakly, attempted to blend the two movements.

But there are some compelling intersections between religion and transhumanism that point to the possibility that the two sides are not as mutually exclusive as one would think. A poll by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, founded by Nick Bostrom, discovered that only half of the transhumanists it surveyed identified as either atheist or agnostic.

Lincoln Cannon, founder of both the Mormon Transhumanist Association and the Christian Transhumanist Association (the very existence of these entities says something), has been advocating for a modern form of post secular religion based on both scientific belief and religious faith. Cannon sees transhumanism as a movement that allows for humanity to evolve into what he labels "superhumans."

In his treatise titled, "The New God Argument," Cannon envisions a creator God akin to our superhuman future potential. He posits an evolutionary cycle where we were created by a superhuman God, before then evolving into becoming our own superhuman Gods, from which we will create new life that will worship us as Gods and continue the cycle anew.

The New God Argument presents a fascinating case for an evolution of religious thought, but it also pushes transhumanism into the realms of spirituality in ways that are bound to make many of the movement's advocates uncomfortable. Another more extreme religious offshoot of transhumanism is Terasem, a self-described "transreligion."

Terasem recalls a 1990s-styled new-age sentiment with its four core beliefs: life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, and love is essential. Founded by millionaire entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, Terasem functions as both a spiritual transhumanist movement and a charitable organization that invests into technological research. The movement is especially focused on cryonic technology and researching ways to preserve human consciousness through downloading one's thoughts and memories into either a mainframe or an independent social robot.

At the turn of the century, a transhumanist community began to form that fused the ethos of computer hacking with a body modification movement determined to create do-it-yourself cybernetic devices. These "Grinders" embraced cyborg technologies that could be directly integrated into their organic bodies.

Biohacking can take the form of pharmaceutical enhancements that hack one's body chemistry, to implanting electronics into the body such as magnets or RFID and NFC tags. These transhumanist grinders sit at the furthermost borders of the movement, experimenting on their own bodies with occasionally quite extreme DIY surgical procedures.

Lepht Anonym is a Berlin-based biohacker who advocates cybernetics for the masses. Lepht (who identifies as genderless) has performed numerous body modifications over the past decade, including implanting neodymium metal discs under fingertips to enable the physical sensing of electromagnetic fields, and several internal compass implants designed to give a physical awareness of north and south magnetic poles.

But the biohacking movement is moving in from the fringe, with several tech start-ups arising over the past few years with an interest in developing a commercial body modification economy. Grindhouse Wetware, based on Pittsburgh, has been prominent in creating technology that augments the human body.

The company's most prominent device is called the Northstar, which is an implant that it is hoped will have Bluetooth capabilities allowing the user to control their devices with simple hand movements. The first iteration of the device simply had an aesthetic function with LED lights under the user's skin that mimic a form of bioluminescence. Future uses for the Northstar could see it interfacing with your smartphone, tracking biometric data, such as blood sugar, or acting as a controller for a variety of devices connected to the internet of things.

Transhumanism is moving inexorably into the mainstream as technological advances accelerate. Proponents advocate we dive head first into this brave new cybernetic world, while traditionalists grow increasingly nervous.

Regardless of one's personal view there is undoubtedly an enormous number of people lining up to have that first brain/computer interface implanted into their head, or to genetically cue a set of specific characteristics for their baby. We live in exciting times that's for sure ... now excuse me while I re-watch Gattaca and hope it doesn't turn into a documentary-like premonition of our future.

See the article here:
Welcome to the era of transhumanism - New Atlas

Ben Goertzel: Some people are gravely worried about the uncertainty and the negative potential associated with transhuman, superhuman AGI. And indeed we are stepping into a great unknown realm.

Its almost like a Rorschach type of thing really. I mean we fundamentally dont know what a superhuman AI is going to do and thats the truth of it, right. And then if you tend to be an optimist you will focus on the good possibilities. If you tend to be a worried person whos pessimistic youll focus on the bad possibilities. If you tend to be a Hollywood movie maker you focus on scary possibilities maybe with a happy ending because thats what sells movies. We dont know whats going to happen.

I do think however this is the situation humanity has been in for a very long time. When the cavemen stepped out of their caves and began agriculture we really had no idea that was going to lead to cities and space flight and so forth. And when the first early humans created language to carry out simple communication about the moose they had just killed over there they did not envision Facebook, differential calculus and MC Hammer and all the rest, right. I mean theres so much that has come about out of early inventions which humans couldnt have ever foreseen. And I think were just in the same situation. I mean the invention of language or civilization could have led to everyones death, right. And in a way it still could. And the creation of superhuman AI it could kill everyone and I dont want it to. Almost none of us do.

Of course the way we got to this point as a species and a culture has been to keep doing amazing new things that we didnt fully understand. And thats what were going to keep on doing. Nick Bostroms book was influential but I felt that in some ways it was a bit deceptive the way he phrased things. If you read his precise philosophical arguments which are very logically drawn what Bostrom says in his book, Superintelligence, is that we cannot rule out the possibility that a superintelligence will do some very bad things. And thats true. On the other hand some of the associated rhetoric makes it sound like its very likely a superintelligence will do these bad things. And if you follow his philosophical arguments closely he doesnt show that. What he just shows is that you cant rule it out and we dont know whats going on.

I dont think Nick Bostrom or anyone else is going to stop the human race from developing advanced AI because its a source of tremendous intellectual curiosity but also of tremendous economic advantage. So if lets say President Trump decided to ban artificial intelligence research I dont think hes going to but suppose he did. China will keep doing artificial intelligence research. If U.S. and China ban it, you know, Africa will do it. Everywhere around the world has AI textbooks and computers. And everyone now knows you can make peoples lives better and make money from developing more advanced AI. So theres no possibility in practice to halt AI development. What we can do is try to direct it in the most beneficial direction according to our best judgment. And thats part of what leads me to pursue AGI via an open source project such as OpenCog. I respect very much what Google, Baidu, Facebook, Microsoft and these other big companies are doing in AI. Theres many good people there doing good research and with good hearted motivations. But I guess Im enough of an old leftist raised by socialists and I sort of Im skeptical that a company whose main motive is to maximize shareholder value is really going to do the best thing for the human race if they create a human level AI.

I mean they might. On the other hand theres a lot of other motivations there and a public company in the end has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. All in all I think the odds are better if AI is developed in a way that is owned by the whole human race and can be developed by all of humanity for its own good. And open source software is sort of the closest approximation that we have to that now. So our aspiration is to grow OpenCog into sort of the Linux of AGI and have people all around the world developing it to serve their own local needs and putting their own values and understanding into it as it becomes more and more intelligent.

Certainly this doesnt give us any guarantee. We can observe things like Linux has fewer bugs than Windows or OSX and its open source. So more eyeballs on something sometimes can make it more reliable. But theres no solid guarantee that making an AGI open source will make the singularity come out well. But my gut feel is that theres enough hard problems with creating a superhuman AI and having it respect human values and have a relationship of empathy with people as it grows. Theres enough problems there without the young AGI getting wrapped up in competition of country versus country and company versus company and internal politics within companies or militaries. I feel like we dont want to add these problems of sort of human slash primate social status competition dynamics. We dont want to add those problems into the challenges that are faced in AGI development.

Read more from the original source:
It's Already Too Late to Stop the Singularity - Big Think