Category Archives: Transhumanist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sydney Chandler will lead a new Alien TV series for FX. (Invision/AP/Fox)

Seemingly not content with scaring us in the darkness of a cinema, one of the most chilling science fiction franchises is heading for the small screen in the upcoming Alien TV series.

Thats not to say that the Xenomorph that gooey horror icon which was first introduced in Ridley Scotts 1979 sci-fi masterpiece Alien isnt still going to be hiding in your local multiplex. A brand new Alien movie is also currently in the works under the directorial eye of 2013's Evil Dead filmmaker Fede lvarez.

Currently titled Alien: Romulus, itll star a host of newcomers led by Mare of East Town actress Cailee Spaeny and will be produced by franchise starter Scott.

Read more: Alien: Romulus: Release date, cast, plot of Fede lvarezs Alien movie

That's scheduled for release on 16 August, 2024 but while we wait for it to arrive, news has started to trickle in regarding the upcoming Alien TV series thats also in the works.

Read on to get up to speed on everything we know about it so far, including its plot, cast, release date and more.

We know that the upcoming Alien TV series is currently in production and when its finished, itll debut on FX, with a UK-based distributor yet to be confirmed, although FX shows such as The Bear generally air on Disney+ here.

Also unconfirmed is the shows official air date. However, as its production gets underway (after the SAG/WGA-AFTRA strike ends), we should hopefully get a clearer idea of when to expect this new franchise addition.

Led by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, the new Alien TV series will reportedly take place before the events of Sigourney Weavers encounters with Xenomorphs in the primary Alien franchise which began with Scotts Alien in '79 and lasted until Jean-Pierre Jeunets Alien: Ressurection in 1997.

We also know that the show will stay local, becoming the first Alien story to take place right here on Earth albeit 70 years into the future.

Story continues

Speaking to Esquire, Hawley spilled a few more details about what he has in store with his new Alien series by saying: Its set on Earth of the future. At this moment, I describe that as Edison versus Westinghouse versus Tesla.

"Someones going to monopolise electricity. We just dont know which one it is.

"In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligence, he added, referencing the company that frequently represents the big human baddie in most Alien movies. But what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way?

With cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads? Which of those technologies is going to win? Its ultimately a classic science fiction question: does humanity deserve to survive?

FX chairman John Landgraf echoed these statements whilst also hitting home that the series wont cross paths with Lt. Ripley. Alien takes place before Ripley. Its the first story that takes place in the Alien franchise on Earth, he told Deadline.

So, it takes place on our planet. Right near the end of this century, were in so 70-odd years from now. Ripley wont be a part of it or any of the other characters of Alien other than the alien itself.

While remaining tight-lipped on any other juicy details, Landgraf did promise big surprises for long-time fans of the Alien franchise.

Back in May 2023, it was revealed that Sydney Chandler, star of Danny Boyles FX show Pistol, will lead the Alien TV series in an as-yet-unconfirmed role. Chandler has also appeared in Olivia Wildes Dont Worry Darling and will feature in AppleTV+s upcoming Sugar series starring Colin Farrell.

For a long while, Chandler was the only cast member confirmed to star in the show until Alex Lawther and Samuel Blenkin were announced in late July 2023.

Both have appeared in episodes of Black Mirror, with Lawther also making waves via his appearance in The End of the F***ing World and Blenkin appearing in the most recent slew of episodes of Charlie Brookers dystopian anthology series.

Read more: Alien 3: Ralph Brown shares chaotic experience on David Finchers troubled sequel

Unlike Chandler, both of these characters have names, with Lawther set to play a young soldier named CJ and Blenkin starring as a CEO named Boy Kavalier. How exactly each of them will fit into the wider story of the show remains to be seen.

The duo were joined by a handful of other cast member confirmations, including The Babadook star Essie Davis as a character named Dame Silvia and The White Tiger actor Adarsh Gourav appearing as Slightly.

The series is currently in production in Thailand, despite the ongoing SAG/WGA-AFTRA strike currently impacting shoots worldwide. To get around this, the show is reportedly capturing sequences that do not involve SAG actors.

Unfortunately not. With the show only recently entering production, it might be a while before we see any footage from FXs Alien TV series.

The Alien TV series is coming soon to FX.

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Alien TV series: Plot, cast, release date and everything we know - Yahoo Lifestyle UK

Above: The Ecstasy of Saint Francis of Assisi by Bartolom Esteban Murillo (16171682)

This series of articles is the product of one interest and one concern. My interest, as a student of philosophy, is to serve a wider Catholic audience by demystifying philosophical schools and isms that are relevant to modern Catholic history. Phenomenology, for instance, in the minds of many traditionally-minded Catholics, tends to conjure up suspicious associations with modernist trends. Nevertheless, phenomenology deserves to be understood, considering its influence on Dietrich von Hildebrand, William Marra and other of Traditionalisms founders.

My second motivation for writingmy concernis that Catholics are often tempted by a simplistic narrative that the Second Vatican Council was a totally unaccountable break from what preceded, as if Pope Johns legendary Un concilio! had been a purely spontaneous (and malign) inspiration. On the contrary, both the council, and the progressivism that profited from the councils ambiguity, were anticipated by years of ecclesial and intellectual controversy. (Consider, for example, that in 1933 Dom Martin Michler celebrated a versus populum dialogue Mass for students in Brazil.) My hope is to deepen the Traditionalist understanding of our own position by situating the council in its historical-philosophical context.

Interpreting history through philosophical trends can be a vanity project. It is tempting to want to play Hercule Poirot, re-assembling history as an inevitable causal chain of ideas and events. In truth, bad ideas require bad hands to yield bad fruit, and good ideas are never good enough to thwart sin. Nevertheless, while we acknowledge human moral agency, neither can we deny the instrumental role of ideas. Sinners require instruments; and philosophy, like language or technology, is a powerful instrument for good or ill.

My first discussions will focus on voluntarism, nominalism, and the 16th century Thomistic renaissance. These will involve two historic points of departure: the mid-to-late 13th century and the mid-to-late 16th.

St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure both died in 1274. Duns Scotus was active in the latter half of that century, and William of Ockham, the protg of nominalism, was born in 1287. Typically conceived as the golden age of Catholic consensus, the 13th century actually witnessed considerable tensions in thought.

The 16th century, in turn, was a frenetic period of Catholic intellectual developments, of heresy and ecclesial politics. In key respects, it represented the practical applicationcultural, political and scientificof 13th century academic debates. Spains University of Salamanca led a Thomistic revival, beginning in 1524 under the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria. Scholars of the Salamanca School developed Aquinas natural law theory into political theories of international law, spurred by heated debates about Spains colonial empire. In 1517 Martin Luther published his 95 Theses, prompting Pope Paul III to convene the Council of Trent in 1545.

With this historical context in mind, lets turn to voluntarism, beginning in 1209, with the origin of a new religious order: the Franciscans.

St. Francis exhorted his brothers to love God with a full heart and a full soul, with full mind and full courage, with full understanding and full strength, with full effort and full affection, with full emotion, full desire and will.[1] St. Francis modeled a spirituality of affection, of action and preaching by action, emphasizing practical testimony over theoretical discourse. These spiritual emphases suggested an understanding of charity as passionate and aesthetic. As such, it shared characteristics with Plato and St. Augustine. Plato had characterized Beauty, and human love for the beautiful, as a source of spiritual ascent. St. Augustine specified that the object of Platos ascent is a personal God, a God Who is not only worthy of our love, but Who loves us personally and individually. Plato and Augustine capture a tension within the spiritual life, between asceticismfreeing oneself from appetitesand embracing the motivation of a passionate moral hunger that engages the whole person, body and soul. Our desire for God is appetitive, engaging the Will. Our hearts are restless until they rest in You. The Franciscans, especially when compared with their mendicant confreres, the Dominicans, seemed to emphasize our appetitive relation to God. In view of this, writes Fr. Clement ODonnell, we can understand a certain emphasis on will and its place in life, which is common to Franciscans.[2]

Around 1220 the Franciscans entered the prestigious University of Paris, and their spiritual concerns shaped academia. The practical emphasis on knowledge over desire, on active choice over passive comprehension, influenced philosophy. Gods Beauty, His personal Fatherhood, the objects of our longing and the saints pursuit, was distinguishable from God as the object of systematic study and logical proofs. This distinction accentuated an age-old tension within philosophy itself. On the one hand, philosophy seeks scientific understanding, because the structure and contents of the world are unchanging. Just as the natural sciences can assume that all trees possess a common structure, and that gravity will not vanish tomorrow, so philosophy can assume that objects possess fundamental, unvarying natures, and tries to uncover these. On the other hand, philosophy (unlike natural science) is a moralethical discourse, a practical process of self-examination for the purpose of living well. We act unpredictably, because we have freedom and may or may not embrace our God-given nature. Moreover, individuals differ in many legitimate ways, which makes it difficult to specify what actions are appropriate in all situations. Aristotle begins his Nicomachean Ethics by cautioning that ethics is an imprecise discipline, because it requires experience and prudence. (Ethics, he tells us, is not for young men!) St. Augustine was very concerned with this slippery dimension of philosophy. As ODonnell observes, for the Augustinian philosophy is not so much a theory of being, as it is a quest for the good[, or] a theory of interpretation and action.[3]

Since St. Augustine, philosophical psychology had developed a theory distinguishing between Reason and Will. Reason is the faculty of reaching into physical experience and grasping the structures of created things. These structures include the goodness that God first perceived in His own creation. Whether we love it or not, we can comprehend the goodness of created things. Will, on the other hand, is the faculty of desiring goodness; of choosing to pursue it and to conform our lives to it. This involves more than dispassionate judgment. It involves affections. Will is affective. Reason and Will, respectively, mirror philosophys two faces, scientific and affective. In the 1200s, philosophers like Philip the Chancellor, Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus (the last three, Franciscans) argued in favor of Will as more properly free than Reason. This implied that Will was in some sense more authentically human than Reason. Will, as the seat of freedom, was (they argued) the source of authentic charity, moral agency, and sanctity.

Lets consider this last point more in depth. Reason can function poorly, but it cannot create its own reality. It is always beholden to what truly exists. Reasons ideal achievement, then, is perfect mental conformity to the way things are. If somebody is unreasonable or wrongsay, in evaluating a crime scene or observing a natural phenomenonthen we treat this as a technical error. We correct him, and we assume (other things being equal) that he will embrace correction. Human Will is different. If someone fails to desire the good, we attempt to persuade him otherwise, but we grant him a certain privilege of error. Will is less obviously determined by reality. In other words, reality does not have the same claim to conformity from the Will as it does to conformity from Reason. Will appears more intimately connected with what distinguish us from the rest of physical creation: our freedom, autonomy, and independence.

For example, following Colleen McCluskeys analysis, Philip the Chancellor (b. 1160) held that freedom is a function of the will primarily, and intellect only secondarily.[4] St. Bonaventure was concerned with finding theoretical justifications for the Bibles privileging charity over knowledge (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:2). Citing Jacques Maritain, ODonnell observes that contemplation can never supersede charity. Since the seat of this charity is the human will, it seems to follow, as St. Bonaventure concludes, that the will is the more noble faculty of man.[5]

Voluntarism is a kind of emphasis: an emphasis on the Will as the primary seat or source of human nobility. This involved, among other things, attempts to stake out the independence of Will from Reasonfor example, by accounting for freedom exclusively in terms of Will. Evoking St. Anselm, Philip emphasizes that Anselm defined freedom as a power for doing what one wants, and [not] a power for doing what one judges or reasons.[6] In the 1200s, this trend was accompanied by a shift in language. The problem of liberum arbitrium, free decision, became the problem of voluntas libera, or free will.[7] Another historical point is worth considering. In 1277 the bishop of Paris, tienne Tempier, condemned a number of philosophical positions, including that the Will is not free but obligated to obey the conclusions of Reason.[8] Citing Bonnie Kent, McCluskey suggests that the condemnation had a pendulum effect, implicitly endorsing any philosophical theories promoting the Wills freedom and independence. Importantly, this included the accusation that Aquinas conception of the will as responsive to the judgments of intellect [or Reason] commits him to a denial of [free will].[9]

The future of voluntarism was not predetermined by its core emphases. Many of the 13th century Catholic voluntarists, advocating the Wills superior dignity, its freedom and its autonomy, nevertheless retained the traditional framework of understanding Will and Reason as intimately interconnected. Though an appetite, Will relies on Reason to present it with objects, with its food. This position is a far cry from Martin Luthers voluntarism, which establishes an antagonism between Reason and Will. Thus, the lineage of voluntarism from the 13th to the 16th century involves key continuities but also key breaks.

Voluntarism is dangerous because it easily becomes bedfellows with the doctrine that man is essentially self-creating. This doctrine was characteristic of Renaissance humanismas Professor Thomas Stark has observed in his analyses of Giovanni Pico della Mirandolas famous Oration on the Dignity of Man.[10] Della Mirandola considers man a creature of indeterminate image,[11] unfettered by the laws that restrict other creatures. Eulogizing Adam, as the archetypal man, he writes:

[Y]ou, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature.[12]

This theory of human identity rejects Aristotles argument that our species is distinguished by the desire to know. If human beings were self-definingif we legislated our own structure, purpose, and valuesthen truth, goodness, and beauty would cease being objects of Reason. They would exist, not actually, as things to be known, but potentially, as things to be created from nothing. Reason, traditionally understood, is a process of conforming to the true and the good. If the true and the good were created by us, Reason would have no role left to play. It would have nothing to grasp, nothing with a fixed nature independent of our whim. Or rather, the only noble use of Reason in such a world would be technological: one of reshaping our physical environment to accommodate our own fancy. It is easy to see how, in such a post-humanist (or trans-humanist) world, only Will remains. Nevertheless, such a Will would not be what the medievals conceived, an appetite for the good. The post-humanist Will can only be understood as sheer, undirected, libertarian power; action for actions sake. Needless to say, Will in this sense is logically impossible. However much we abuse our nature, we can never extricate ourselves entirely from Gods created order. Under the influence of radical voluntarism, human beings see themselves only in the light of their powerlessness, and fall, inevitably, into despair.

Sources

Clement ODonnell, O.F.M. Conv., Voluntarism in Franciscan Philosophy, Franciscan Studies 2, December 1942: 397-410.

Colleen McCluskey, The Roots of Ethical Voluntarism, Vivarium 39, 2001: 185-208.

The Unconfirmed First Rule of St Francis (1209/10-1221).

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. by A. Robert Caponigri., intr. by Russell Kirk, (Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company, 1956).

Recommended Reading:

Carl E. Olson, Whats in a Name?

[1] The Unconfirmed First Rule of St Francis (1209/10-1221), 23.

[2] Clement ODonnell, O.F.M. Conv., Voluntarism in Franciscan Philosophy, Franciscan Studies 2, December 1942, 398.

[3] ibid. 397.

[4] Colleen McCluskey, The Roots of Ethical Voluntarism, Vivarium 39, 2001, 193.

[5] ODonnell 403.

[6] McCluskey 194.

[7] McCluskey 186.

[8] Cf. ibid. 189-190.

[9] ibid. 190.

[10] Dr. Stark repeated this point in a lecture for the 2023 summer conference hosted by The Roman Forum.

[11] Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. by A. Robert Caponigri, intr. by Russell Kirk, (Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company, 1956), 6.

[12] ibid. 7.

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Traditional Perspectives on Philosophy - pt. 1: Voluntarism - OnePeterFive

In an over two-hour hearing, House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security members heard testimony regarding the truth of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) visiting Earth. Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett said the hearing was the first of many to come.

Were done with the cover-ups, he said.

Not wanting to be left out, crypto enthusiasts are talking up UFO-themed and alien-themed meme coins to try and take advantage of the renewed hype around alien visitors. But the tenor of the meeting was decidedly serious.

Experts called to testify included executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace Ryan Graves, who has spoken out about what is officially called an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon or UAP.

When asked what makes him believe these UAPs were not American-made, Graves, a former Navy fighter pilot, pointed to their ability to withstand high winds.

"Some of the behaviors we saw in our working area, we would see these objects being at 0.0 Mach, that's zero airspeed," Graves said. "These objects stayed completely stationary in category four hurricane winds," he said, adding that the objects would then accelerate to supersonic speeds, noting the erratic flight path.

Joining Graves was retired Navy Commander David Fravor, who shot the infamous 2004 video of a UAP off the coast of California, and David Grusch, a former Pentagon task force member on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon and self-described whistleblower who has accused the U.S. government of a UFO cover-up.

When asked what astonished him the most about the flight capabilities of the unknown objects, dubbed "Tic Tacs, Fravor said it was their performance.

"It's far beyond the material science that we currently possess," Fravor said, adding that he was unaware of any human-made vehicles with the same capabilities.

We were initially denied access to images, radar, and conversation with all members of the flight crew, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted about one of the alleged encounters.

Though Grusch said much of what knows of the event had to be held back due to being classified, he said the U.S. government's first recorded visit by "non-humans" occurred in the 1930s.

"Biologics came with these recoveries," Grusch said during the hearing, adding that the recovered biologics were not human. "That was the assestment of people with direct knowledge of the program."

But while skeptics and degens laugh, Graves said the unidentified flying objects posed a serious national security threat.

"If UAPs are foreign drones, its an urgent national security problem; if its something else, its a issue for science," he said. "In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety, and the American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies."

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Accusations of a Government Cover-Up Dominate Congressional UFO Hearing - Decrypt

Elon Musk has brought on Dan Hendrycks, the director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, as an advisor to his new startup, xAI. Hendrycks organization sponsored a Statement on AI Risk in May, signed by various AI experts, including CEOs of prominent AI research labs like OpenAI and DeepMind. The nonprofit receives most of its funding from Open Philanthropy, a nonprofit organization run by Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. The Effective Altruism (EA) movement, to which the organization belongs, focuses on using evidence and reason to benefit humanity. EA proponents believe that preventing catastrophic scenarios caused by AI systems is essential.

Musks appointment of Hendrycks signals that well-funded AI research labs, including OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI, are bringing the ideas of existential risk (x-risk) associated with AI systems to the publics attention. Although some AI researchers argue that the focus on x-risk is unnecessary, Musks choice to involve Hendrycks highlights the importance of these concerns.

AI experts like Sara Hooker, head of Cohere for AI, have criticized the attention given to x-risk, considering it a fringe topic. Mark Riedl, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, suggests that focusing on existential threats alone undermines the broader discussion surrounding AIs positive and negative impacts. And Kyunghyun Cho, a researcher and professor at NYU, expresses disappointment in the emphasis on existential risk, believing it distracts from the real issues AI poses today.

Other experts have expressed concerns about the AI research labs ties to the EA community and movements such as longtermism and transhumanism. They argue that Silicon Valleys involvement in these movements may stem from a savior complex and the desire to control the narrative around AGI and existential risk.

The tech quartet consisting of xAI, OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic has varying positions on AGI and x-risk. xAI aims to engineer an AGI that can understand the universe. Elon Musk, who founded OpenAI and developed xAI, left OpenAI due to concerns about its approach to AGI safety. He believes that a smarter AGI, driven by curiosity and truth-seeking, is less likely to pose a threat to humanity.

Musk finds alignment with the EA philosophy, particularly the writings of EA originator William MacAskill. Hendrycks involvement emphasizes the influence of the EA movement on the AGI and x-risk landscape.

Overall, Musks appointment of Hendrycks underscores the growing attention given to existential risks associated with AI systems and highlights the significance of addressing these concerns for the future of AI development.

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Elon Musk Appoints Dan Hendrycks as Advisor to xAI Startup - Fagen wasanni

Cosmism intersects philosophy, technology, and the cosmos, evolving in part from the theories of 19th-century Russian futurist Nikolai Fedorov (18291903). Cosmism's ideas are vast, spanning biopolitics, space exploration, and utopianism.

Artist and curator Anton Vidokle will explore Cosmism and the cosmos as chief curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale (9 November 202331 March 2024) at the Power Station of Art. The biennial's title, Cosmos Cinema, is broader, accommodating all kinds of creation inspired by the night skies, but Vidokle cites a particular encounter for sparking his fascination with space and its power to broaden our thinking and our ambitions.

Power Station of Art (PSA) on the bank of Huangpu River, Shanghai. Photo: PSA.

Vidokle was introduced to Cosmism in 2012 through conversations with Ilya Kabakov and Boris Groys, who incidentally co-curated the 9th Shanghai Biennale that same year. This led to an enduring research project into post-Soviet cosmist legacies, and in 2019, Vidokle co-founded with Arseny Zhilyaev the Institute of the Cosmos, an online publication and open archive dedicated to Cosmism.

In his own artistic practice, Vidokle works in film and has to date produced seven short films emerging from his research into cosmist figures including Fedorov, Vasily Chekrygin, and Valerian Muraviov. He has presented in major international exhibitions including documenta 13 (2012), Gwangju Biennale (2016), and the Yokohama Triennale (2020).

Anton Vidokle, This is Cosmos (2014) (still) From the series 'Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism' (20142017). HD video, colour, sound. 96 min. Courtesy the artist.

Born in Moscow in 1965, Vidokle emigrated to the United States in 1981, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1999 he founded e-flux, a platform for arts listings, publishing, and curation. In 2015, Vidokle co-edited the e-flux publishing project SUPERCOMMUNITY for the 56th Venice Biennale. Vidokle is currently based in Berlin and New York, where he directs the programme at e-flux space.

For his curatorial team for the Shanghai Biennale, Vidokle has enlisted e-flux associate director Hallie Ayres, associate curator of film and video Lukas Brasiskis, colleagues who share his research interests and are involved with the Institute of the Cosmos. They are joined by researcher and educator Zairong Xiang, who was co-curator of the 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial, and publications editor Ben Eastham, who is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism.

In this interview, Vidokle speaks to Sam Gaskin on the origins of his interest in Cosmism, its relation to cinema, and the importance of thinking beyond the planetary in the contemporary age.

MouSen+MSG, The Great Chain of Being - Planet Trilogy (2016). Experimental theatre space, videos, sound, objects, and bees. Exhibition view: Why Not Ask Again, Again?, 11th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (11 November 201612 March 2017). Courtesy PSA.

AVAbout a dozen years ago the philosopher and theorist Boris Groys told me a strange story about an unusual intellectual movement whose members tried to amend the constitution of the Soviet Union to include universal rights to rejuvenation, immortality, and interplanetary travel.

He also told me how, after the October Revolution in Russia, a special institute was set up to study the possibility of immortality, and artists at the time made models for orbiting cemeteries in which the bodies of the dead would be preserved in zero gravity until a technology to resurrect them could be developed. This sounded so much like the plot of a sci-fi film that I thought he had surely made it up. But a few months later, the artist Ilya Kabakov told me similar stories, which made me very curious.

Anton Vidokle, 'Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism' (20142017) (still). HD video, colour, sound. 96 min. Courtesy the artist.

When I started looking, I came across the writings of Nikolai Fedorov, the founder of an intellectual tradition that later came to be known as Cosmism. His project centred around three tasks: technological immortality, the material resurrection of everyone who has ever lived, and travel through the cosmos.

Fedorov's thinking demanded a radical restructuring of society and its institutions to make such a project possible, as well as a total transformation or evolution of the human subject and our relations to each other. He insisted on a collaboration between science, philosophy, art, and social organisation as equal partners in what he called the "Common Task" of humanity. This common task was for Fedorov a true work of art, which he defined as the production and preservation of life. His thinking illustrates how reflections on humanity's place in the cosmos can prompt us to reconsider and reimagine the way that we live on earth.

Exhibition view: Group Exhibition, Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin (1 September3 October 2017). Photo: Laura Fiorio/HKW.

In recent years we have become accustomed to exhibitions positioning human beings within the complex systems that shape our lives on earth. But there have been relatively few exhibitions that extend this understanding of humanity's implication in systems beyond the terrestrial sphereto consider how we are connected not only to life on this earth, but to the cosmos.

While there are not many contemporary artists who work with the ideas of Cosmism per se, there are many amazing artists making work about the cosmos and the close relationship between life on earth and outer space. There has not been a large-scale, international exhibition mapping such works historically or with respect to contemporary art, so it is exciting to have an opportunity to do this in Shanghai.

Han Zijian, Pointing at the Moon (2012). Installation. Exhibition view: Reactivation, 9th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (1 October 201231 March 2013). Courtesy PSA.

AVIt is worth reiterating that to reflect on the cosmos is not only to fixate on rockets or black holes or science fiction, but to engage with the myriad ways in which thinking about the cosmos continues to structure our terrestrial life: from medicine, where the human body can be construed as a kind of an inner cosmos as in certain traditional medicines, to economics, urban planning or agriculture, which are often organised according to complex cosmological designs. Take, for example, the biodynamic cultivation of plants, or the influence of Feng Shui on architecture and city planning.

We understand intuitively that our lives are connected to cosmic eventsjust think of the millions of people who every morning read horoscopes for advice on how to conduct the day ahead according to the movement of the planets.

Reproduction of Suzhou Star Chart (1193) by Huang Shang, etched in stone by Wang Zhiyuan (1247). Photo: Public Domain.

Esoteric and mystical thinking will be one facet of this exhibition, but the ecological dimension is also important. We might think of our relationship with the cosmos as being one way: the stars determine our fates; the debris from some distant explosion might one day arrive and extinguish much life on earth, as it has done before.

But in the past six decades of space exploration, we have released a multitude of living organisms and species into the solar system. We are changing the solar system, both intentionally and accidentally, and some works in the Biennale will draw parallels with the consequences of humanity's expansion on Earth.

One can say that cosmos is a kind of a proto-cinema, or that cinema has always existed in a sense: even before the technology of the moving image was invented.

The impact of the sun on life on Earth is the subject of several projects, as is the degree to which our perception of time is shaped by our planet's orbit around it. A number of works engage with the origin of religions, ancestor worship, and belief systems in contemplation of the cosmos. Another important subject is sky and star mapping, as an overlooked aspect of cartographies related to Indigenous cosmologies.

Death, resurrection, and the desire for eternal life are also an important part of this conversation, as well as the various futurismslike Afrofuturism, for instancethat reimagine life on earth by imagining new relations to the cosmos. We are interested in the presence and influence of cosmos on Earth.

The Comet Book (Comets and their General and Particular Meanings, According to Ptolome, Albumasar, Haly, Aliquind and other Astrologers) (1587). Northeastern France/Flanders. Photo: Kassel University Library, Public Domain.

As the exhibition title suggests, the show also relates to cinema, which serves as an analogue for our experience of the cosmos and one means of constructing our relationship to it. From very early in its history, cinema has attempted to represent travel in the cosmos and life on other planets.

At the same time, the medium of cinema itselfflickers of light in a dark space, out of which the mind constructs meaningis similar to how the cosmos appears to us when we look at the night sky. In this way one can say that cosmos is a kind of a proto-cinema, or that cinema has always existed in a sense: even before the technology of the moving image was invented.

Films direct the audience's attention, create room for imagination, and communicate new meanings to their viewers, who later project these ideas back onto the world.

Cinema also has an important historical role in Shanghai because it was a very early site for the production and presentation of film. The first film screening took place in Shanghai as early as 1896, only a year after the invention of this medium. By 1908 the first movie theatre opened, and soon there were more than 60 cinemas, film production studios, publicationsan entire film industry. The legacy of this can still be felt.

As a filmmaker myself, it makes sense to adapt certain filmmaking techniquessuch as montage, narrative, scenographyto structure and organise the logic and display of the show. The modern apparatus of cinema is designed to create new realities. Films direct the audience's attention, create room for imagination, and communicate new meanings to their viewers, who later project these ideas back onto the world. We hope that this will produce an intellectually immersive, psychological space and experience for the audience.

Anton Vidokle, 'Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism' (20142017). HD video, colour, sound. 96 min. Exhibition view: Space Oddity, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe (7 March20 June 2021). Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.

Anton Vidokle, This is Cosmos (2014) (still) From the series 'Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism' (20142017). HD video, colour, sound. 96 min. Courtesy the artist.

AVCosmism itself is very far removed from transhumanism or the billionaire follies that aim to exploit the natural resources of space for profit or establish colonies for a wealthy minority. It was a utopian movement predicated on the absolute equality of all human beings, including those who have died. It was from this commitment that all its proposals sprang.

Besides that, to attend to the cosmos is not to ignore the plight of the planet. We have learned in recent years that ignoring distant parts of the system is no way to protect those parts of it that we inhabit. For instance, to dismiss the destruction of a rainforest on another continent as irrelevant to the circumstance in which I live is both irresponsible and counterproductive. This might be one of the key proposals of the exhibitionthat we widen our perspectives if we are to better address the challenges facing our species, not narrow them.

To consider our place in the cosmos is not an alternative to thinking about issues such as climate change, income inequality, and so onit is a way of framing them.

This is not an either/or situation. As the works in the show will demonstrate, to consider our place in the cosmos is not an alternative to thinking about issues such as climate change, income inequality, and so onit is a way of framing them. From a cosmic, planetary perspective, these are challenges that we share, that extend across borders, and that must be addressed collectively.

In saying that, concerning significant topics for art and artistsand this is also a place from which I myself speakwe are not social workers tasked with fixing the world's problems, or journalists obliged to cover current events. That would be a very narrow, instrumental understanding of art and artists. But artists can provide new ways of seeing the world around us.

Pablo Vargas Lugo, Eclipses for Shanghai (2018). HD video of performance with sound. 15 min. Exhibition view: Proregress, 12th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (10 November 201810 March 2019). Courtesy PSA.

AVIt would be a tragedy if we could not conceive of the cosmos as anything other than the arena for government space programs or an opportunity for capitalist entrepreneurship. One might as well reduce the earth's oceans to shipping routes or its forests to the provision of timber. It is an astonishingly rich and varied physical and imaginative space, and human history has in large part been defined by the way that individuals in different cultures have looked to the shared space of the sky and imagined themselves into it, not apart from it.

We must be careful not to "estrange" ourselves from the cosmosto treat Earth and our species as somehow exceptional to the wider space that we inhabit.

This exhibition is by no means about the conquest of space or private and government space programmes. We are looking at works by artists who reflect on the myriad connections between life on Earth and the cosmos. These connections are sometimes direct; at other times they are more subtle, showing how different understandings of humanity's position in the cosmos have shaped different cultures and the everyday lives of individuals, throughout history. Artists have been doing this in one way or another since the beginning of societies, and continue to work with this subject today in all parts of the world.

Marjolijn Dijkman, Lunar Station (2015). Steel pendulum, sand, table, video, and found objects. Exhibition view: Why Not Ask Again, Again?, 11th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (11 November 201612 March 2017). Courtesy PSA.

AVThe obstruction of the night sky by pollution is not a phenomenon limited to China, as the inhabitant of any large metropolis will know. The question might illustrate some of the concerns that underpin the exhibition. To identify the issue with China risks downplaying the infinitely wider systems that create itthe shift by Western Europe and the U.S. of its industrial production; the changing weather patterns that pay no attention to national borders, as residents of New York recently kept inside by the smoke from wildfires in Canada can attest.

Leandro Katz, The Sky Fell Twice (2018). Photographic installation, 128 panels. 28.5 18.5 cm each. Exhibition view: Proregress, 12th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (10 November 201810 March 2019). Courtesy PSA.

But perhaps terms like astral-poverty or astral-estrangement do offer a useful way of reflecting on these broader issues. It has become very familiar in the art world to hear of the nature-culture divide and the hugely damaging consequences of separating ourselves, as human beings, from the natural world of which we are a part.

In a similar vein, we must be careful not to "estrange" ourselves from the cosmosto treat Earth and our species as somehow exceptional to the wider space that we inhabit. This exhibition encourages every individual, irrespective of local circumstances, to think of themselves as a part of that cosmos, not separate from it.

Of course, we hope that this exhibition will not stand alonethat it might encourage others to engage with these themes and to develop them in their own way, that it might offer a way of thinking about our present and future situation that can be applied in different contexts. Cosmism is an incredibly rich subject, and this exhibition hopes to open a door into it. [O]

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Anton Vidokle on the Cinema of the Stars - Ocula Magazine

Original illustration by Jade Armstrong

Most of us never considered the prosperity would ever end. Rei Saito

Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over. Hayao Miyazaki

It is a curious affair when we pass the date of an imagined future from a renowned work of science fiction. Usually, our current world is lagging far behind the scientific and technological forecasting of speculative worlds. Take Ridley Scotts Bladerunner (1985) and its film noir depiction of a sprawling Los Angeles in the year 2019. Huge advertisements are seen as flying cars zip around the gargantuan cityscape, modelled after the sketches of the futurist Italian architect Antonio SantElia. Scotts choice to draw from the Italian futurists as well as Fritz Langs depiction of a hyper-capitalist dystopia in Metropolis (1927) help to realize his techno-pessimist portrayal of the future.

While these projections are often comically divorced from our extant technological capabilities, they still help to sketch a sort of imagined trajectory of possibilityfeeding escapist urges. Its no surprise, then, that many science fiction films were made in the 1980s, a tumultuous decade that saw huge inflation and two recessions in just three years. However, one country seemed to survive this economic blow relatively well: Japan. This resilience would prove to be impermanent as the bubble economy burst at the end of the decade. One animated sci-fi film from this era stands as a tall monument to this turbulent period in Japans recent history; a film that had projected a future from the very apogee of Japans roaring 1980s, Akira (1988), set in 2019.

The Japanese miracle began at the end of the Second World War with US interests playing a heavy role in rebuilding the country following the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Americans took former Japanese colonial officers who were found guilty of war crimes and elevated them to top positions in the post-war government. Old imperial companies were restricted or retooled for other purposes. By the 1980s Japan was the darling of the West, built up from its paper and wood imperial past to become the industrial behemoth of Asia. Japanamericana is the term given to the aspects of American culture taken and elevated by Japanese production methods. This applies to a vast slew of Japanese-made goods like denim and vinyl records, both prized for their quality among their respective global consumer subcultures. Indeed, the material circumstances of Japans boomtimes have their cultural expressions as well.

The importation of American films led to Japanese audiences being exposed to American New Wave, or Hollywood Renaissance, cinema. Japanese directors would find a home in the genres preoccupation with youth culture, disillusionment in a changing society, and anti-heroes. In the post-war period, Japanese cinema was revitalized. The countrys economy soared thanks to cheap credit, real estate over-speculation, and loose monetary policies. Per capita GDP at the peak of the bubble was higher than in the US. For the movie business, this meant ever larger budgets. While many cite Akira as having a massive 1.1 billion yen budget as evidence of it being the most expensive anime movie of its time, the truth is that it was not as singular as some would believe. Akiras actual production cost was around 800 million yen, some 300 million over the initial budget. This cost was comparable to other animated films of the time like Hayao Miyazakis Kikis Delivery Service (1989) which was also made for around 800 million yen. The 1.1 billion yen figure accounts for Akiras exceptionally large marketing budget of 400 million yen.

The sheer scale of Akiras production was at once a watershed moment for the Japanese animation industry and a glaring sign of Japans inflated and fragile economy. By the late-1980s, the Japanese studio system had collapsed. According to cultural writer Inuhiko Yomata, In 1961, this system had six studios that could make 520 films, but 25 years later in 1986, only three studios produced a mere 24 films. Akiras production occurred in the wake of this sea change. A new production arrangement was necessary.

The Akira Committee was the name given to the group of companies that collaborated to make the film. It included the publishing company Kodansha, radio and television firm Manich Broadcasting System, toy maker and distributor Bandai, advertising agency Hakuhodo, film production company Toho, Laserdisc, and the massive Sumitomo Corporation. Sumitomo, in particular, is deserving of closer inspection as Japans oldest zaibatsu, or financial clique. Its history goes far back into the Edo period when it had a prominent role in building infrastructure for the Japanese imperial war machine around Osakas harbours. These companies alone could not have produced Akira at the scale necessary to give Katsuhiro Otomos 2,000-page manga the film adaptation it deserved.

Akira was made at the tail-end of a dying studio system, and at the apogee of Japans asset bubble, which began its slow burst in 1989. The scale of Akiras story makes it even more remarkable that such a film was able to see the light of day given the floundering of Japans economy at the close of the decade.

For the uninitiated, Akira is set during the leadup to the 2020 Neo-Tokyo Olympics in a city beset by anti-government protests and growing unrest as it attempts to recover from a nuclear explosion 31 years prior. The film follows Shtar Kaneda, the leader of a vigilante biker gang, and his crew as they encounter a corrupt government and Japanese military forcesall against the backdrop of a massive, futuristic city. When one of Kanedas fellow bikers, the outcast Tetsuo, acquires telekinetic abilities after being kidnapped and experimented on, Kaneda joins the anti-government resistance through Kei, an activist and saboteur. They must save Tetsuo, whose powers grow until his health (and even the megacity itself) is in danger.

Demonstrators in Akira. Image courtesy of Toho.

Akira is considered one of the seminal films of the cyberpunk genre. With that comes all the usual themes of techno-pessimism, corruption, and transhumanism.

Present within Akiras Neo-Tokyo is a wild mix of strikes, protests, and even acts of terrorism (funded and led by a member of parliament). The citys unrest shares many parallels with Japans protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the demonstrators in Akira don helmets that are evocative of the garb of Japanese student movements like the Zengakuren, also known as the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations. This movement, along with other revolutionary formations of the era like the Sanrizuka struggle, saw massive civilian participation in the tens of thousands. The Anpo protests of the 1960s mobilized hundreds of thousands in the streets. Many of these movements formed in opposition to Japans subordination to US military interests, corruption within the countrys universities, and the expansion of airports without consent from local farmers. Moreover, this raucous period in Japanese history was a crucible for many of the countrys young artists who participated in the struggles.

Zengakuren in Tokyo, September 30, 1971. Photo by Rian Dundon.

The shining city of Neo-Tokyo depicted in Akira is an allegory for Japans economic growing pains. While money flows into a relentlessly expanding megacity, the underlying problems of Japans revolutionary period could not be washed away by cheap cash and hasty development. One of Akiras antagonists, Mr. Nezu, professes a desire to clean the city for good: This city is already saturated, its become an overripe fruit thats begun to stink.

The grotesque consequences of this period of rapid industriousness is perhaps best encapsulated not by the city itself but by the way in which Tetsuos hunger for more telekinetic powers disfigures him into a mess of flesh and steel; his human form can no longer contain his ever-increasing desire for power. In one scene of classic Japanese body horror, Tetsuo cries out after losing control of his awesome powers: My body isnt doing what I tell it to, its acting on its own!

Media scholar and Tufts University professor of Japanese literature and culture, Susan J. Napier, offers additional insight into the character. His character evokes a less obvious but deeply significant side of Japanese national self-representation, that of the lonely outcast, she writes. Tetsuos fatal lust for power can be read as a metaphor for Japans ascension into the international community. Ultimately, Neo-Tokyo is once again destroyed as Tetsuo fails to contain his immense strength. Mirroring his hideous distension, Japanese stock prices and real estate speculation in the late-1980s also became dangerously inflated. Between 1956 and 1986, the price of land increased by as much as 5,000 percent, meaning the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth as much as the entire US state of California. The extremes of this bubble economy influenced the ambitiousness behind Akiras production, which took a toll on many workers who made the film a reality.

Indeed, even by todays standards, the scale of Akiras production is astonishing. Almost all of its 160,000 frames are hand drawn. Rather than the standard 35mm size film used to capture the animation, animators and producers opted for 70mm filmthree times the size. The larger film stock allowed for much more detail and richer definition, which in turn made animators work much longer on individual cells than usual. In 2021, an animators hidden complaint was discovered in one of the films scenes. The side of an electronic monitoring device shows a sign that reads: Why do we have to fill in this far? Knock it off! Enough!

An animator left a hidden message on the side of a console in Akira. Why do we have to fill in this far! Knock it off! Enough! it reads. Image courtesy of Toho.

Kuni Tomita, one of 60 key animators who worked on the film, detailed the stress she experienced in an interview with the Japan Times. They wanted me to work solely on Akira, but I told them I couldnt do that because you couldnt make money on Akira, she said. I couldnt survive!

Despite its massive budget, Akiras animators dealt with low pay and grueling working hours. According to the same interview, Keyframe animators are paid by shot or sequence, and the time involved in drawing the films incredibly detailed frames meant that Akira ultimately paid less than other projects. This parallels the increasing control production companies held over projects compared to the diminishing influence of unionized entertainment workers.

The animation industry, as well as workers in related digital industries, are underrepresented by unions, in part due to the same reason why Tomita still holds pride of place for her low-waged role in the production of Akira. It was a chance to work on a dream project, and it looked good on a rsum.

In 1989, the year after Akira was released, the Bank of Japan decided to raise interest rates, precipitating a massive crash in both stocks and property. Thirty-five years on, the film should be remembered for its cultural influence but also as a landmark product that was a result of decades of American-led development. Akiras story is one that extrapolated the whiplash-inducing growth of Japans industry following the Second World War while still retaining much of its corrupt, imperial tendencies.

Sonically, the films soundtrack is yet another representation of Japans economic and social turbulence. The collective asked to score the film, Geinoh Yamashirogumi, used a wide mix of techniques and instrumentation that can be considered a fusion of the past and the contemporary. They interpolate the spiritual theatre of Japanese noh, contemporary synthesizers, Indonesian gamelan percussion, European classical, and progressive rock. The result is almost alien, a score that borrows from such a variety of epochs and places that it produces something so incredibly singular in its effect on the viewer (and listener). The soundtrack could also be interpreted as a synthesis of a romanticized cultural past, invoked to but the brakes on a future hurtling toward oblivion. This is what the protagonists of Akiras Neo-Tokyo were fighting about, and the themes the films creators conjured and thought to be so vital. Vitally, after 35 years Akiras concerns and questions remain incredibly relevant.

In contrast, the genre most closely associated with Japans economic boom and nascent leisure class, city pop, paints an entirely different picture. Tropical motifs in the style of Miami Vice were heavy across the genre as Japans citizens enjoyed increased buying power and access to cheap equatorial vacations. This is recognizable in the aesthetics of Masayoshi Takanaka, an influential guitarist, composer, and producer in the city pop genre who has experienced a resurgenceand reappraisalin the last few years as the musics stars are slowly discovered here in the West by netizens online.

Covert art for All of Me by Masoyashi Takanaka. Image courtesy of Kitty Records.

Takanakas work features many depictions of the newfound leisure of Japans boom times: the beaches of Brazil, skydiving over the Seychelles, and even a guitar fashioned out of a surfboard. The genre has been enjoying an upsurge on Internet forums as old vinyl albums are rediscovered in dusty basements and boutique record stores. A vintage, colourful optimism seems to have been unearthed. Yet, the fate of the lost generation that grew up in the economic ice age following Japans economic downturn makes the cheery music all the more tragic.

Although he was strangely prophetic considering Japans successful bid to host the 2020 Games and the widespread protests against it, Otomo ultimately missed the mark with his depiction of 2019 in Akira. Though in reality, for better or for worse, no future is certain, and no path is set. No party, in every sense of the word, lasts forever.

Kalden Dhatsenpa is a Tibetan writer and photographer based in Tioti:ke, or Mooniyang, or Montral, and a member of the Canadian Dimension editorial board. He is a regular on the film and tv review video show The Breaks, and a former federal candidate for the NDP in LongueuilCharles-Lemoyne.

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The day the bubble burst: Akira and Japan's economic 'miracle' - Canadian Dimension

Ex-Google engineer says humans will achieve immortality in 7 years; here's how netizens reacted  Business Today

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Ex-Google engineer says humans will achieve immortality in 7 years; here's how netizens reacted - Business Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Super-intelligence and eternal life: transhumanism's faithful follow it ...