Category Archives: Transhumanist

August 16, 2017 By Hal Ostrander and Daryl Smith

Watching my grandkids laugh, explore and have fun, I shake my head and wonder where this culture of ours will take them. Do we realize how fast the future is rushing to meet our posterity, and us? In the days ahead, the contours of civilization likely will radically alter, sacred and secular alike, and in ways staggering to think about.

Consider the past: In 1790, 90 percent of people worked on farms; 1870, 50 percent; today, less than 1 percent. In 1900, 90 percent of the population was rural; today 90 percent is urban. Folks worked 60 hours a week over six days with a life expectancy of 47 years. Three percent of homes had electricity, and 15 percent had flush toilets.

Only one in five households owned a horse, and an eighth-grade education was the norm with college graduates numbering a scant 7 percent. Halfway through 2017, its hard to fathom the scale of change weve undergone and harder still to grasp whats yet to take place.

Just look at computing

In 1965, Gordon Moore, Intels co-founder, predicted transistors on circuits would double roughly every two years. His estimate has held true, but he couldnt have foreseen 2017 as the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. Now we can contact anyone around the world instantly from our pockets!

Remarkably, smart phone circuitry is 150 million times more powerful than the computer NASA used to navigate Apollo 11 safely to the moon in July 1969. At the time, NASA computers stored only a megabyte of memory each, were car-sized, and cost $3.5 million apiece.

If the trend continues

Today theres no stopping things! Forgive the technicality, but the development of carbon-based transistors in hand with quantum/nano-biological computing will take whats listed below and advance things to ever higher levels:

If the trend continues, artificial intelligence (AI) could emerge exponentially, with no turning back! Processing power exceeding the human brain may suddenly slap an unsuspecting public in the face. The brightest minds in the industry are alleging that one day, hopefully soon, machines and robots will simulate human intelligence successfully, solving challenges previously reserved only for conscious thinking.

Weak and strong AI

There are three waves of weak AI. The first solves problems very fast and works very well in video games, Excel sheets, TurboTax, etc. The second is where machines seem to learn via millions of pieces of data Siri, Cortana, Watson, AlphaGo, Microsofts Tay, Twitter, Chatbox and self-driving cars. But none of these can explain the why of things.

Whether third-wave, weak AI is achievable is an open question. Because humans can abstract things based on small amounts of data, third-wave AI tries for the same, operating on minimal information.

The stuff of sci-fi for now, strong AI is what cognitive science is really striving for machines that function with human-like minds, crossing the threshold into self-awareness/consciousness. Eventually downloading human consciousness to a computer is part of the game plan as well.

Whos charting our future?

Some of the smartest and wealthiest people in Silicon Valley, the venture techno-capitalists, are teaming up to invest billions to make strong AI happen. Even Google and NASA are cooperating to this end.

Sanctioning the likes of Ray Kurzweils think-tank, Singularity University, and Zoltan Istvans Transhumanist Party, futurist investors are siding, paradoxically, with an inelegant duo a hyper-optimistic form of scientism (only science can get at truth) and a transhumanist vision striving to achieve omnipotence (as if achieving divinity).

One dissenting voice, Elon Musk, warns his colleagues optimism about AI isnt justified: If our intelligence is exceeded, its unlikely well remain in charge of the planet. Bill Gates himself comments about AI, I dont understand why some people are not concerned.

What is lacking

Coming too fast, Christians must begin thinking soundly about the implications of futurity ASAP! Most techno-futurists assume as true the rationale lying behind philosophical naturalism, which popularizes the universe as a closed system into which nothing god-like can intervene to impose its will.

In the beginning, only particles and impersonal laws of physics reigned, and human beings are just bio-chemical machines without souls. Put crassly, were meat machines. Christians, of course, recognize immediately how short-sighted this is.

It doesnt mean, however, believers wont be influenced or charmed by futurist agendas. Some will! While we know futurists lack an adequately Christian sense of reality, their impact on society may well create a sense of uneasiness about our next cultural steps as followers of Christ.

A google of questions

So, how far will God allow things to go? Theologizing about techno-futures is imperative if were to remain comprehensively Christian throughout. Responding to bizarre worlds in the making is paramount. The choices well make individually when faced with techno-options unavailable to earlier generations will be weighty. The church must push for answers to questions raised by the techno-future, however alarming:

Will Christians:

Brief conclusion

Answering questions related to future shock comes down to the worldview on the table, with profound implications about how individual lives and corporate society should conduct themselves considering the techno-futurist demands coming our way.

Too few Christians and church traditions ask the question, Just because we can, should we? The simple answer is no, but the issues require sophisticated reasoning. According to Scripture, what you see in the mirror is a uniquely ensouled eternal being, created in Gods image and likeness and more than sufficient for the purposes he grants us.

Hal Ostrander is online professor of religion and philosophy at Wayland Baptist University. Daryl Smith is former adjunct professor of religion at Dallas Baptist University and currently an information technology corporate manager.

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Analysis: Future Shock - Baptist Standard

Zoltan Istvan is launching his campaign to become Libertarian governor of the American state of California with two signature policies. First, hell eliminate poverty with a universal basic income that will guarantee US$5,000 per month for every Californian household for ever. (Hell do this without raising taxes, he promises.)

The next item in his in-tray is eliminating death. He intends to divert trillions of dollars into life-extending technologies robotic hearts, artificial exoskeletons, genetic editing, bionic limbs and so on in the hope that each Californian man, woman and AI (artificial intelligence) will eventually be able to upload their consciousness to the Cloud and experience digital eternity.

What we can experience as a human being is going to be dramatically different within two decades, Istvan says, when we meet at his home in Mill Valley, California. We have five senses now. We might have thousands in 30 or 40 years. We might have very different bodies, too.

I have friends who are about a year away from cutting off their arm and replacing it with a prosthetic version. And sure, pretty soon the robotic arm really will be better than a biological one. Lets say you work in construction and your buddy can lift a thousand times what you can. The question is: do you get it?

For most people, the answer to this question is likely to be, Erm, maybe Ill pass for the moment. But to a transhumanist such as Istvan, 44, the answer is, Hell, yes! A former National Geographic reporter and property speculator, Istvan combines the enthusiasm of a child whos read a lot of Marvel comics with a parodically presidential demeanour. Hes a blond-haired, blue-eyed father of two with an athletic build, a firm handshake and the sort of charisma that goes down well in TED talks.

Like most transhumanists (there are a lot of them in California), Istvan believes our species can, and indeed should, strive to transcend our biological limitations. And he has taken it upon himself to push this idea out of the Google Docs of a few Silicon Valley dreamers and into the American political mainstream.

Twenty-five years ago, hardly anybody was recycling, he explains. Now, environmentalism has conditioned an entire generation. Im trying to put transhumanism on a similar trajectory, so that in 10, 15 years, everybody is going to know what it means and think about it in a very positive way.

What were saying is that over the next 30 years, the complexity of human experience is going to become so amazing, you ought to at least see it

Zoltan Istvan

I meet Istvan at the home he shares with his wife, Lisa an obstetrician and gynaecologist with Planned Parenthood and their two daughters, six-year-old Eva, and Isla, who is three. I had been expecting a gadget-laden cyber-home; in fact, he resides in a 100-year-old loggers house built from Californian redwood, with a converted stable on the ground floor and plastic childrens toys in the yard. If it werent for the hyper-inflated prices in the Bay Area (Its sort of Facebook yuppie-ville around here, says Istvan) youd say it was a humble Californian homestead.

Still, there are a few details that give him away, such as the forbidding security warnings on his picket fence. During his unsuccessful bid for the presidency last year he stood as the Transhumanist Party candidate and scored zero per cent a section of the religious right identified him as the Antichrist. This, combined with Lisas work providing abortions, means they get a couple of death threats a week and have had to report to the FBI.

Christians in America have made transhumanism as popular as its become, says Istvan. They really need something that they can point their finger at that fulfils Revelations.

Istvan also has a West Wing box set on his mantelpiece and a small Meccano cyborg by the fireplace. Its named Jethro, after the protagonist of his self-published novel, The Transhumanist Wager (2013). And there is an old Samsung phone attached to the front door, which enables him to unlock the house using the microchip in his finger.

A lot of the Christians consider my chip a mark of the beast, he says. Im like, No! Its so I dont have to carry my keys when I go out jogging.

Istvan hopes to chip his daughters before long for security purposes and recently argued with his wife about whether it was even worth saving for a university fund for them, since by the time they reach university age, advances in artificial intelligence will mean they can just upload all the learning they need. Lisa won that argument. But hes inclined not to freeze his sperm and Lisas eggs, since if they decide to have a third child, 10 or 20 or 30 years hence, theyll be able to combine their DNA.

Even if theres a mischievous, fake-it-till-you-make-it quality to Istvan, theres also a core of seriousness. He is genuinely troubled that we are on the verge of a technological dystopia that the mass inequalities that helped fuel US President Donald Trumps rise will only worsen when the digital revolution really gets under way. And he despairs of the retrogressive bent of the current administration: Trump talks all the time about immigrants taking jobs. Bulls**t. Its technology thats taking jobs. We have about four million truck drivers who are about to lose their jobs to automation. This is why capitalism needs a basic income to survive.

And hes not wrong in identifying that emerging technologies such as AI and bio-enhancement will bring with them policy implications, and its probably a good idea to start talking about them now.

Stephen Hawkings question to China: will AI help or destroy the human race?

Certainly, life extension is a hot investment in Silicon Valley, whose elites have a hard time with the idea that their billions will not protect them from an earthly death. Google was an early investor in the secretive biotech start-up Calico, the California Life Company, which aims to devise interventions that slow ageing and counteract age-related diseases. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has invested millions in parabiosis: the process of curing ageing with transfusions of young peoples blood.

Another biotech firm, United Therapeutics, has unveiled plans to grow fresh organs from DNA. Clearly, it is possible, through technology, to make death optional, the firms founder, Martine Rothblatt, told a recent gathering of the National Academy of Medicine in Los Angeles.

In attendance were Google co-founder Sergey Brin, vegan pop star Moby and numerous venture capitalists. Istvan fears that unless we develop policies to regulate this transition, the Thiels of this world will soon be hoarding all the young blood for themselves.

Clearly, it is possible, through technology, to make death optional

Martine Rothblatt

Istvan was born in Oregon in 1973, the son of Hungarian immigrants who fled Stalins tanks in 1968. He had a comfortable middle-class upbringing his mother was a devout Catholic and sent him to Catholic school and an eye for a story. After graduating from Columbia University, he embarked on a solo round-the-world yachting expedition, during which, he says, he read 500 works of classic literature. He spent his early career reporting for the National Geographic channel from more than 100 countries, many of them conflict zones, claiming to have invented the extreme sport of volcano boarding along the way.

One of the things he shares in common with Americas current president is a fortune accrued from real estate. While he was making films overseas in the noughties, his expenses were minimal, so he was able to invest all of his pay cheques in property.

AlphaGos China showdown: Why its time to embrace artificial intelligence

So many people in America were doing this flipping thing at the time, explains Istvan. I realised very quickly, Wow! I could make enough money to retire. It was just quite easy and lucrative to do that.

At his peak, he had a portfolio of 19 fixer-upper houses, most of which he managed to sell before the crash of 2008. He now retains nine as holiday rentals and uses the proceeds to fund his political campaigns (he is reluctant to name his other backers). Still, he insists hes not part of the 1 per cent; the most extravagant item of furniture is a piano, and his groceries are much the same as you find in many liberal, middle-class Californian households.

Istvan cant think of any particular incident that prompted his interest in eternal life, other than perhaps a rejection of Catholicism.

Fifty per cent of me thinks after we die we get eaten by worms, and our body matter and brain return unconsciously to the cosmos [] The other half subscribes to the idea that we live in a holographic universe where other alien artificial intelligences have reached the singularity, he says, referring to the idea, advanced by Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, that pretty soon we will all merge with AI in one transcendental consciousness.

However, when Istvan first encountered transhumanism, at university via an article on cryonics (the practice of deep-freezing the recently dead in the hope that they can be revived at some point), he was sold. Within 90 seconds, I realised thats what I wanted to do in my life.

After a near-death experience in Vietnam he came close to stepping on a landmine Istvan decided to return to America and make good on this vow. I was nearing 30 and Id done some great work, but after all that time Id spent in conflict zones, seeing dead bodies, stuff like that, I thought it would be a good time to dedicate myself to conquering death.

He spent four years writing his novel, which he proudly claims was rejected by more than 600 agents and publishers. Its a dystopian story that imagines a Christian nation outlawing transhumanism, prompting all the billionaires to retreat to an offshore sea-stead where they can work on their advances undisturbed (Thiel has often threatened to do something similar).

Istvan continued to promote transhumanism by writing free columns for Huffington Post and Vice, chosen because they have strong Alexa rankings (ie, they show up high in Google search results).

I wrote something like 200 articles, putting transhumanism through the Google algorithm again and again, he says. I found it a very effective way to spread the message. I covered every angle that I could think of: disability and transhumanism; LGBT issues and transhumanism; transhumanist parenting.

Hes proud to say hes the only mainstream journalist who is so devoted to the cause. A lot of people write about transhumanism, but I think Im the only one who says, This is the best thing thats ever happened!

Why your biological age may hold the key to reversing the ageing process

Istvans presidential campaign was an attempt to take all of this up a level. It sounds as if he had a lot of fun. He toured Rust Belt car parks and Deep South mega-churches in a coffin-shaped immortality bus inspired by the one driven by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to promote LSD in the 1960s.

His platform Make America Immortal Again earned a fair amount of publicity, but Americans seemed ill-prepared for such concepts as the AI imperative (the idea that the first nation to create a true AI will basically win everything, so America had better be the first) and the singularity. At one point, he and his supporters were held at gunpoint by some Christians in Alabama.

The experience taught him a salutary lesson: unless you are a billionaire, it is simply impossible to make any kind of dent in the system. Hence his defection to the Libertarian Party, which vies with the Greens as the third party in American politics. Every town I go to, theres a Libertarian meet-up. With the Transhumanists, Id have to create the meet-up. So theres more to work with.

The Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, received 3.27 per cent of the votes last year, including half a million votes in California. About seven or eight million are likely to vote in the California governor race, in which context, half a million starts to become a lot of votes, Istvan explains.

His own politics are somewhere between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, he admits, and he has a hard time converting the right wing of his new party to causes such as basic income. (The general spirit of libertarian America is, Hands off!) But he believes transhumanism shares enough in common with libertarianism for the alliance to be viable; the core precepts of being able to do what you like as long as you dont harm anyone else are the same. And the gubernatorial campaign serves as a primary for the 2020 presidential election, when he believes the Libertarian candidate will have a feasible chance of participating in the television debates.

But whats wrong with death? Dont we need old people to die to make space for new people? And by extension, we need old ideas and old regimes to die, too. Imagine if William Randolph Hearst or Genghis Khan were still calling the shots now. And imagine if Mark Zuckerberg and Vladimir Putin were doing so in 200 years. Innovation would cease, the species would atrophy, everyone would get terribly bored. Isnt it the ultimate narcissism to want to live forever?

Istvan does concede that transhumanism is a very selfish philosophy. However, he has an answer for most of the other stuff.

Im a believer in overpopulation Ive been to Delhi and its overcrowded, he says. But if we did a better job of governing, the planet could hold 15 billion people comfortably. Its really a question of better rules and regulations.

And when discussing the desirability of eternal life, he turns into a sort of holiday rep for the future.

What were saying is that over the next 30 years, the complexity of human experience is going to become so amazing, you ought to at least see it, Istvan says. A lot of people find that a lot more compelling than, say, dying of leukaemia.

Still, it comes as little surprise that hes finding live for ever an easier sell than give money to poor people in 21st-century America.

I cant imagine basic income not becoming a platform in the 2020 election, he insists. And if not then, at some point, someone is going to run and win on it. The Republicans should like it because it streamlines government. The Democrats should like it because it helps poor people. Right now, Americans dont like it because it sounds like socialism. But it just needs a little reframing.

Basic-income experiments are already under way in parts of Canada, Finland and the Netherlands, but how would he fund such an idea in the US? He cant raise taxes libertarians hate that. And he doesnt want to alienate Silicon Valley.

If we did a better job of governing, the planet could hold 15 billion people comfortably

Zoltan Istvan

How do you tell the 1 per cent youre going to take all this money from them? It wouldnt work, he says. They control too many things. But Istvan has calculated that 45 per cent of California is government-controlled land that the state could monetise.

A lot of environmentalists are upset at me for that, saying, Woah, Zolt, you want to put a shopping mall in Yosemite? Well, the reality is that the poor people in America will never be able to afford to go to Yosemite. Im trying to be a diplomat here.

And he insists that if Americans miss those national parks when theyve been turned into luxury condos and Taco Bells, theyll be able to replenish them some day if they want.

Theres nanotechnology coming through that would enable us to do that, Istvan argues. We have GMOs [genetically modified organisms] that can regrow plants twice as quick. In 50 or 100 years, were not even going to be worried about natural resources.

Such is his wager that exponential technological growth is around the corner and we may as well hurry it along, because its our best chance of clearing up the mess weve made of things thus far.

The safety of genetically-modified crops is backed by science

Didnt the political developments of 2016 persuade him that progress can be slow and sometimes go backwards? Actually, Istvan argues that what were witnessing are the death throes of conservatism, Christianity, even capitalism.

Everyone says the current pope is the best one weve had for ages, that hes so progressive and whatever. Actually, Catholicism is dying, says Istvan. Nobodys giving it any money any more, so the pope had better moderate its message. As for capitalism, all of this nationalism and populism are just the dying moments.

Its a system that goes against the very core of humanitarian urges. And while its brought us many wonderful material gains, at some point we can say, Thats enough. In the transhumanist age, we will reach utopia. Crime drops to zero. Poverty will end. Violence will drop. At some point, we become a race of individuals who are pretty nice to each other.

But now weve talked for so long that Istvan needs to go and pick up his daughters from childcare. He insists that I join him. What do his family make of all of this?

My wife is a bit sceptical of a lot of my timelines, he says. Lisa comes from practical Wisconsin farming stock, and its a fair bet that her work with Planned Parenthood keeps her pretty grounded. They met on dating website match.com. Does she believe in all this stuff?

I dont want to say shes not a transhumanist, he says, but I dont think shed cryogenically freeze herself tomorrow. I would. Im like, If you see me dying of a heart attack, please put me in a refrigerator. She thinks thats weird.

We arrive at the community centre where Istvans daughters are being looked after. They come running out in summer dresses, sweet and sunny and happy to be alive. Both of them want to be doctors when they grow up, like their mum.

The Times/The Interview People

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Immortality: Silicon Valley's latest obsession ushers in the transhumanist era - South China Morning Post

Will you be chipped one day? Will you be forced, or strongly encouraged or incentivized, to have a microchip under your skin to make payment, identification and no doubt tracking all that much easier?

Three Square Market, a Wisconsin-based firm specializing in vending machines, recently offered its employees a chance to say goodbye to hard-to-remember log-in codes and the need for ID badges. Employees could sign up to have a dime-sized microchip implanted in their hands. Surprisingly, 50-some employees allowed a tattoo artist to insert the chips. The company hopes to generate enough buzz to sell consumers on one day opting for a wave of their chipped hands in front of its vending machines, instead of pulling out a credit card or using their smart phones.

Technology appears to be charting its course to land within us. This trajectory, I suppose, stands to reason. Tech continues to grow smarter and smaller.

I just want to say one word to you, one word plastics. Thats the advice the know-it-all businessman offers the title character of the 1967 classic The Graduate. Today I have one word for you: miniaturization.

From swarms of mosquito-sized killer drones to phones/augmented-reality tech/passports inside of us, mini could be the word that defines the future. Already in Sweden, according to USA Today, some 3,000 folks have microchips implanted that allow them to board the train with a swipe of their hands.

If you want to be chipped right now, you just need to go to Dangerous Things, a Seattle-based outfit. The company is big on transhumanism: the notion that through genetic and technological enhancement people will soon transcend what it means to be human. We will genetically engineer away disease. We will amp abilities and extend lifetimes to near immortality. We will be posthuman, even (in the words of some transhumanist theorists) homo deus. Ye will be as gods, I remember someone saying once.

There are some things, the company says on its web site (dangerousthings.com), we will likely never achieve through gene modification. The ability to store digital data in our bodies. The ability to compute data and perform cryptography in our bodies. The ability to transmit and receive digital data and talk directly to machines in their digital language.

The interconnected world of the Internet, in other words, will come to us to the point that we will become our phones and laptops. Truly we will live and move and have our being in the Web. We will swim within its currents.

Or drown.

Our bodies are our own, to do what we want with, the company continues on its web site, sounding the clarion call for bio-hacking. Sound familiar? That is the ideological tidal stream one of radical personal autonomy carrying us deeper into the 21st century and what may well be the abyss. This amounts (it is said smugly) to the right side of history. People are what they say they are and what they want to be, and will do what they want with themselves. And if anyone challenges these assertions, she is a bigot. And of course, Nazis were bigots; therefore, anyone who stands in the path of the declared right side of history is a Nazi. And you know what you do with Nazis, dont you?

The company invokes a familiar incantation to ward away any criticism: The socially acceptable of tomorrow is formed by boundaries pushed today, and were excited to be part of it. History, in this paradigm, advances by the knocking down of boundaries. What is socially acceptable in one time becomes regressive in the next, thanks to boundary-pushing radicals like Dangerous Things, and so the dialectical dance makes its way one transgression after another until we reach a utopia where money and sex and identity are as fluid and free as the waters of the ocean.

If this isnt the hijacking of Christian eschatology, that is, how the world will play itself until the end of times, and jury-rigged to disordered human desire bent on casting aside all restraints and becoming as gods onto themselves, Im not sure what it is. I do know it takes a society as wealthy as it is decadent to think history works that way, that progress is engendered by smashing one boundary after another and that, in this chaos, everything will come out swimmingly well.

Boundaries, like the guardrails on a road, can be there for a reason. The ones on roads can be replaced if they are knocked down. Its not so easy with the ones that maintain civilization.

For the ancient Greeks, those who, in their arrogance, confused themselves with the gods garnered the attention of Nemesis. Nemesis in Greek means to give what is due, for she is the agent of inescapable vengeance. By her hand many a civilization has been crippled, dispatched to the graveyard even. In our hubris, in our dreams of self-proclaimed godhood, I dont think a microchip in the hand will be much match for the sword Nemesis carries in hers.

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NEWMAN: A chip in the hand isn't worth much - Scottsbluff Star Herald

Transhumanists are curiosity addicts. If its new, different, untouched, or even despised, were probably interested in it. If it involves a revolution or a possible paradigm shift in human experience, you have our full attention. We are obsessed with the mysteries of existence, and we spend our time using the scientific method to explore anything we can find about the evolving universe and our tiny place in it.

Obsessive curiosity is a strange bedfellow. It stems from a profound sense of wanting something better in lifeof not being satisfied. It makes one search, ponder, and strive for just about everything and anything that might improve existence. In the 21st century, that leads one right into transhumanism. Thats where Ive landed right now: A journalist and activist in the transhumanist movement. Im also currently a Libertarian candidate for California Governor. I advocate for science and tech-themed policies that give everyone the opportunity to live indefinitely in perfect health and freedom.

Politics aside, transhumanism is the international movement of using science and technology to radically change the human being and experience. Its primary goal is to deliver and embrace a utopian techno-optimistic worlda world that consists of biohackers, cyborgists, roboticists, life extension advocates, cryonicists, Singularitarians, and other science-devoted people.

Transhumanism was formally started in 1980s by philosophers in California. For decades it remained low key, mostly discussed in science fiction novels and unknown academic conferences. Lately, however, transhumanism seems to be surging in popularity. What once was a smallish band of fringe people discussing how science and technology can solve all humanitys problems has now become a burgeoning social mission of millions around the planet.

At the recent FreedomFest, the worlds largest festival on liberty, transhumanism was a theme explored in numerous panels, including some I had the privilege of being on. Libertarian transhumanism is one of the fastest growing segments of the libertarian movement. A top priority for transhumanists is to have freedom from the government so radical science experiments and research can go on undisturbed and unregulated.

So why are so many people jumping on the transhumanist bandwagon? I think it has to do with the mishmash of tech inundating and dominating our daily lives. Everything from our smartphone addictions to flying at 30,000 feet in jet airplanes to Roombas freaking out our pets in our homes. Nothing is like it was for our forbearers. In fact, little is like it was even a generation ago. And the near future will be many times more dramatic: driverless cars, robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, and telepathy via mind-reading headsets. Each of these technologies is already here, and in some cases being marketed to billions of people. The world is shifting under our feetand libertarian transhumanism is a sure way to navigate the chaos to make sure we arrive at the best future possible.

My interest in transhumanism began over 20 years ago when I was a philosophy and religion student at Columbia University in New York City. We were assigned to read an article on life extension techniques and the strange field of cryonics, where human beings are frozen after theyve died in hopes of reviving them with better medicine in the future. While Id read about these ideas in science fiction before, I didnt realize an entire cottage industry and movement existed in America that is dedicated to warding off death with radical science. It was an epiphany for me, and I knew after finishing that article I was passionately committed to transhumanism and wanted to help it.

However, it wasnt until I was in the Demilitarized Zone of Vietnam, on assignment for National Geographic Channel as a journalist, that I came to dedicate my life to transhumanism. Walking in the jungle, my guide tackled me and I fell to the ground with my camera. A moment later he pointed at the half-hidden landmine I almost stepped on. Id been through dozens of dangerous experiences in the over 100 countries I visited during my twenties and early thirtieshunting down wildlife poachers with WildAid, volcano boarding in the South Pacific, and even facing a pirate attack off Yemen on my small sailboat where I hid my girlfriend in the bilge and begged masked men with AK47s not to shoot me. But this experience in Vietnam was the one that forced a U-turn in my life. Looking at the unexploded landmine, I felt like a philosophical explosive had gone off in my head. It was time to directly dedicate my skills and hours to overcoming biological human death.

I returned home to America immediately and plunged into the field of transhumanism, reading everything I could on the topic, talking with people about it, and preparing a plan to contribute to the movement. I also began by writing my libertarian-minded novel The Transhumanist Wager, which went on to become a bestseller in philosophy on Amazon and helped launched my career as a futurist. Of course, a bestseller in philosophy on Amazon doesnt mean very many sales (theres been about 50,000 downloads to date), but it did mean that transhumanism was starting to appear alongside the ideas of Plato, Marx, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Sam Harris, and other philosophers that inspired people to look outside their scope of experience into the unknown.

And transhumanism is the unknown. Bionic arms, brain implants ectogenesis, artificial intelligence, exoskeleton suits, designer babies, gene editing tech. These technologies are no longer part of some Star Trek sequel, but are already here or being worked on. They will change the world and how we see ourselves as human beings. The conundrum facing society is whether were ready for this. Transhumanists say yes. But America may not welcome that.

In fact, the civil rights battle of the century may be looming because of coming transhumanist tech. If conservatives think abortion rights are unethical, how will they feel about scientists who want to genetically combine the best aspects of species, including humans and animals together? And should people be able to marry their sexbots? Will transhumanist Christians try to convert artificial intelligence and lead us to something termed a Jesus Singularity? Should we allow scientists to reverse aging, something researchers have already had success with in mice? Finally, as we become more cyborg-like with artificial hips, cranial implants, and 3D-printed organs, should we rename the human species?

Whether people like it or not, transhumanism has arrived. Not only has it become a leading buzzword for a new generation pondering the significance of merging with machines, but transhumanist-themed columns are appearing in major media. Celebrity conspiracy theorists like Mark Dice and Alex Jones bash it regularly, and even mainstream media heavyweights like John Stossel, Joe Rogan, and Glenn Beck discuss it publicly. Then theres Google hiring famed inventor Ray Kurzweil as lead engineer to work on artificial intelligence, or J. Craig Ventures new San Diego-based genome sequencing start-up (co-founded with Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize Foundation and stem cell pioneer Robert Hariri) which already has 70 million dollars in financing.

Its not just companies either. Recently, the British Parliament approved a procedure to create babies with material from three different parents. Even President Obama, before he left office, jumped in the game by giving DARPA $70 million dollars to develop brain chip technology, part of Americas multi-billion dollar BRAIN Initiative. The future is coming fast, people around the world are realizing, and theres no denying that the transhumanist age fascinates tens of millions of people as they wonder where the species might go and what health benefits it might mean for society.

At the end of the day, transhumanism is still really focused on one thing: satisfying that essential addiction to curiosity. With science, technology, and a liberty-minded outlook as our tools, the species can seek out and even challenge the very nature of its being and place in the universe. That might mean the end of human death by mid-century if governments allow the science and medicine to develop. It will likely mean the transformation of the species from biological entities into something with much more tech built directly into it. Perhaps most important of all, it will mean we will have the chance to grow and evolve with our families, friends, and loved ones for as long as we like, regardless how weird or wild transhumanist existence becomes.

Zoltan Istvan is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for Governor in California.

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The Growing World of Libertarian Transhumanism | The American ... - The American Conservative

This Dark Matter review contains spoilers.

For longtime viewers of Dark Matter, the story that unfolds in Built, Not Born is one that had been anticipated for quite awhile, and the payoff is quite satisfying. Tying the Dwarf Star transhumanist efforts with Two (whom they know as Rebecca) together with the origins of the Android seems obvious in retrospect, but it was a great resolution to one of the most enduring mysteries of the series so far. Although the season-long arcs were again put on hold just like last week, the interlude was a welcome one, and if previous experience holds true, it may all just relate in the end anyway.

To start off, Threes reluctance to help Androids robot friends must be applauded for several reasons. First, it reflected what would otherwise have been an awkward pivot from seemingly more important matters, like following up on Sixs idea of taking sides in the corporate war. Second, it allowed Three to have an ironic and painful discussion with Sarah about machines not being alive. And third, his later apology to Android for his prejudicial attitude and tendency to speak without thinking gave her the smile-inducing line, Its one of the things I like about you.

Of course, Android borrowed that line from Six who reminds her, and simultaneously the audience, that despite what we learn of her origins in this episode, shes far from an imperfect imitation but rather her own being with unique variations. When Six says, Youre more than just a series of programmed responses. Youre an original. And thats what we love about you, he might as well be speaking on behalf of the viewer.

Thats especially true once we find out that her creator and the creator of Victor and the others looks just like the Android we know and love for a reason. Dr. Irena Shaw was not only a disgruntled Dwarf Star employee who felt the super-soldier program that designed Rebecca was inhumane; she also grew to love the woman she helped create (fans of Zoie Palmer in Lost Girl were likely all a-flutter). That love likely allowed her to see the potential in giving emotional, self-aware androids the one last ingredient they needed to make them people: free will. The mystery of Androids origin could not have been more poignant, a story filled with romance and tragedy.

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The part that Victor plays is also wonderfully nuanced, both in his helpfulness in unlocking some of Androids memories and in his secretive motivation for calling for help in the first place. The first red flag that Victor wasnt telling the whole truth should have been when Ruac, who had been shot in the head, was revived and shouted, It was wrong! Clearly he had objections to Victor killing Anyas former owner. Did he remove Ruacs emotion chip to force the required self-termination? It even throws into doubt whether Anyas suicide was preventable! Does Victor have justification for his actions, or is he going down a dark path?

This is especially troubling given that he now has a Sarah android at his side. It wasnt his idea to use Dr. Shaws technology this way, but he obviously sees it as an opportunity. And the Galactic Authority wouldnt pop away from the corporate war or the conflict between Zairon and Pyr for no reason. So what is it about Sarah having a human mind combined with a stronger superior physical construct that will further Victors cause, whatever it might be? A truly compelling new mystery!

It was also a nice touch to have Dr. Shaws caretaker, Chase, look exactly like Arrian, the diplomatic android who had a bit of a crush on the blonde Five in Dark Matters season 2 finale. Chases suggestion that Android could be tweaked elicits an enjoyable defensiveness in Five, who rightly says that she likes this version better. So do we, Five; so do we.

But what do we make of the memories Victor unlocked for Android? Seeing Portia excited about Emilys nano-virus that initially woke up Androids hidden subroutines is an interesting transition point from the emotional Rebecca to the malevolent outlaw she became in Portia Lin. And Android telling Ryo-of-yore, You and the rest of the crew are self-seeking, ethically deficient, and morally barren, yet youre incongruously kind to me, gives us insightful character moments, but will it mean something more down the road? Time will tell.

In the meantime, this episode of Dark Matter was another welcome distraction from the corporate war and Ryos villainy. With three episodes left, those elements are sure to return with a vengeance, but it will be interesting to see how the time travel story and the android history lesson will inform the impending finale. If they were simply character building and tying up of loose ends from earlier seasons, great; if they end up tying in to what happens next, even better. Either way, Dark Matter fans cant help but be pleased although theyd be even happier with a season 4 renewal.

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Dark Matter Season 3 Episode 10 Review: Built, Not Born - Den of Geek US

It would be tempting to fall into a pool of contemporary cliche when describing Generation Gone. It is a story that involves the military-industrial complex, tech geniuses mad with power, transhumanism, broken relationships, societal betrayal, and millennials looking for some measure of justice for the future taken from them. And it would be easy to pick a side and wash the other in judgemental aphorisms about generational misunderstandings and the world in which we live. I have the feeling, however, that this will not be an easy book to cram into a single box, if this debut issue is any indication.

There are pages of Generation Gone #1 where the art and the characters are allowed to just breathe. No dialogue, just portraits of a life stunted by unseen forces, whether that be the cancer striking at a loved one or a mad transhumanist waiting to pounce. In the hard-hitting first issue to this new series, storytellers Ale Kot and Andr Lima Arajo explore the existential crises that come with despair, over confidence, and the loneliness that their main characters feel even when surrounded by those they love.

While working for the secretive governmental organization, known as DARPA, developing the next super weapon of war, tech genius Akio presents his plan to change the human race by using code that, when read, will rewrite the very DNA of the reader, creating true super humans. His Project Utopia is discarded and later confiscated by General West, the seeming head of the program Akio was hired to create, Airstrip One. In his spare time, Akio has tracked three hackers who plan on infiltrating Bank of America to steal back, as Akio puts it to West, what his generation has stolen from them: a future.

The potential for cliche comes to its apex with the disaffected millennial hackers, Elena, Nick, and Baldwin. While their educational history is put into question by West upon learning Akio has tracked the trio, allowing them to hack into a fake DARPA server, it is not remarked upon how these three came by their skills. They come together as longtime friends and lovers, in Nick and Elenas case, each for a different reason, explored in those wordless pages. Elena wakes early, heading to her job as a waitress before going home to care for her cancer-stricken mother. Baldwin, an African-American man, sees the headlines of another black man shot out of unfounded fear. Nick, the narcissist of the group, heads home, walking past pictures of a soldier, perhaps his brother, whose room he passes on his way to a meticulous self-care ritual. Even in their relationships with each other, they are alone.

Our first introduction to Nick and Elena defines their relationship throughout the story. Elena is in love with Nick, but he is concerned with control, wanting to turn her off. Later he threatens to break up with her on the spot should she drop out of the scheme to rob their way out of their troubles. His self-centeredness hurts Elena, but he is her anchor. Whether he is mooring her in the tempest that is her life or dragging her down remains to be seen. Nicks reckless and selfish behavior comes to a head as he nearly costs the team their anonymity while hacking into Akios fake DARPA. He is all about the score, the self, the win. Once behind their computer screens, the three hackers are in their element, but Nick is sucked in by the power he commands literally at his fingertips.

Akio brings up the isolation of technology in his conversations with the essentially analog West, apologizing for ignoring the chain of command, blaming it sitting behind a computer screen. This exploration of the disconnect of technology with reality can be seen as a take on the disconnect we have with each other through social media or as the disconnect between soldiers and the weapons of war through the use of drones and other technology meant to strike from afar.

In the end, as was telegraphed, Akios code infiltrates the trio causing six full pages of Exorcist-level fluid loss. Before the three hackers begin to leak out of their eyeballs, however, the code mesmerizes them. They are pulled to their screens tightly, even when addressing each other, attempting to pull out of the operation. They simply cannot look away. It takes rewriting their genetic code to rip them bodily from their computers and from the malaise that brought them to this point. The desperation, the isolation, the nihilism of the new millennium.

In the end, Generation Gone sets a provocative table. It could have fallen into any number of cliched traps. Instead, it gives the characters a chance to break through the obvious and, for lack of a better word, soar.

Generation Gone #1 review: Patience is a virtue

Is it good?

In the end, Generation Gone sets a provocative table. It could have fallen into any number of cliched traps. Instead, it gives the characters a chance to break through the obvious and, for lack of a better word, soar.

Lets the art do the talking

Gives a generational malaise a purpose

Embraces transhumanism

Just the one "they're millennials" line. It's a really good book, y'all.

Ales KotAndre Limacomic booksGeneration GoneImagereview

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Generation Gone #1 review: Patience is a virtue - AiPT! Comics

On a recent evening at a start-up hub in Spitalfields, London, journalist and author Jamie Bartlett spoke to a small group of mostly under 40, mainly techie or creative professionals about his book Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World. The book, which Bartlett started to research in 2014, before Brexit and Trump, chronicles his time with a series of different radical groups, from the Psychedelic Society who advocate the careful use of psychedelics as a tool for awakening to the unity and interconnectedness of all things to Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the unabashedly far-right English Defence League, to the founder of Liberland, a libertarian nation on unclaimed land on the Serbian/Croatian border, to Zoltan Istvan, who ran as US transhumanist presidential candidate on a platform of putting an end to death. He campaigned by racing around America in a superannuated RV which hed modified to look like a giant coffin, dubbed the Immortality Bus. His efforts were in vain, and illegal, as it turned out: his campaign was in breach of the US Federal Electoral Commission rules.

Bartletts book has been damned with faint praise he has been called surprisingly naive about politics, and defining radical so broadly as to make the term meaningless. The general consensus goes that Bartletts journey through the farthest-flung fringes of politics and society is entertaining and impressively dispassionate, but not altogether successful in making a clear or convincing case for radicals or radicalism. But at the talk that night Bartlett challenged what he sees as the complacent acceptance and defense of our current political and governmental systems, institutions and ideas, of the kind of technocratic centrism that prevailed throughout the global North until very recently. Perhaps they need some radical rethinking. Many of the radicals Bartlett spent time with may be flawed, crazy or wrong literally, legally and morally but they can also hold up mirrors and magnifying glasses to political and social trends. And sometimes, they can prophesize them

Bartlett began the evening by saying, If democracy were a business, it would be bankrupt. A provocative statement, but one that he backs up. He pointed to research showing that only 30% of those born after 1980 believe that it is essential to live in a democracy. That rate drops steadily with age. A closer look at the research around peoples attitudes reveals widespread skepticism towards liberal institutions and a growing disaffection with political parties. Freedom Houses annual report for 2016 shows that as faith in democracy has declined so too have global freedoms 2016 marks the 11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. While a lot of attention has been given to violent polarization, populism and nationalism rising out of anger at demographic and economic changes, Bartlett suggests that perhaps comfort and complacency are culprits too, and he is not the only one: only last weekFinancial Times columnist Janan Ganesh took up a similar theme.

What are the fringe ideas of today that might become ideas of the future? We cannot, of course, say, but Bartletts point is we should be paying much closer attention to the crazed hinterlands of human thought. In 2015 transhumanist Zoltan Istvan was talking about using technology to fundamentally change what it is to be human to augment our fleshy bodies with steel and silicon. One of Istvans favored refrains is the transformative effect of artificial intelligence on the way that we work, and the way that we live. In the past six months, it has become near-impossible to read a newspaper or a magazine without stumbling across a take on how AI is set to change our economy. Istvans other hobby-horse is immortality, and using technology to drastically expand the human lifespan ultimately to the point where it increases so fast that time cant catch up with us and we reach a kind of escape velocity. Putting Istvans quasi-religious language aside, increases in life expectancy and in our expectations of medical care pose real challenges to which we will need to find practical and political solutions. Kooky as they may seem, fringe movements have ideas, and ideas that may prove proleptic or prophetic.

Perhaps we are too attached to our traditional ways of doing things our political institutions and our centuries-old processes. Technology and society have completely transformed in the past fifty years and the way we engage with politics through technology has changed beyond recognition in the past year alone, but as Bartlett pointed out, our formal politics has not changed in two hundred years: our parliamentary democracies, our two-party systems. Young people today are deeply disdainful of labels of personal style, of sexual identity, and of political leanings; the labels no longer seem to fit. Younger generations are not apolitical on the contrary and likely do not reject the tenets of democracy, but rather, the way it is framed. The core ideas institutionalized 200 years ago are not the wrong ones, but their implementation might benefit from an injection of radical thinking from those firmly outside the mainstream.

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Rethinking Radical Thoughts: How Transhumanists Can Fix Democracy - Raddington Report (blog)

First, "Doomfist" is a fantastic name.

Second, he's a truly fun offense character. With his massive, shiny arm, Doomfist may look like a tank, but he's actually designed to swoop in and assassinate enemies with powerful bursts of damage. The existing lineup of offense characters in Overwatch are gun- and sword-based, making Doomfist immediately unique. He has a projectile weapon in the hand cannon, but that's far from his main ability -- Doomfist is, unsurprisingly, all about punching.

And, boy, does it feel good to punch things as Doomfist. One of his abilities, Rocket Punch, is particularly satisfying to land. It essentially allows Doomfist to fly toward enemies and smack them backward, dealing extra damage if they crash into a wall. It's a charged ability, meaning the longer you hold down the appropriate button, the more damage it'll do -- however, after a few seconds at full power, the move is automatically triggered, sending Doomfist soaring in whichever direction he's facing.

Rocket Punch allows Doomfist to take enemies by surprise and pick off anyone who splits off from the team. But, since it has such a long attack runway, lining up the shot is a tricky prediction game that leaves Doomfist vulnerable for seconds at a time. Long enough to get sniped by Widowmaker, at least. Of course, that's exactly what makes the move so satisfying when it actually connects. Rocket Punch is powerful, but it takes skill to truly work.

His other abilities work well on their own or as a follow-up to Rocket Punch: Seismic Slam makes him leap forward (again, he's all about diving onto that back line) and pop nearby enemies toward him. It's a good idea to follow that with a Rising Uppercut, which throws Doomfist and his target high into the sky. Add in some shots from the hand cannon and that's a lethal combo for nearly every character.

Doomfist's ultimate ability, Meteor Strike, is a natural evolution of his collected abilities: He disappears into the sky and players control his landing point, ideally positioning it in the center of the enemy team. When Doomfist lands, he deals a ton of damage to anyone in his circle. And, yes, it feels awesome.

Overall, Doomfist is a welcome addition to the Overwatch roster. He adds a melee option to the offense lineup and his leaping moves ensure Winston won't get too lonely as he dives healers and damage dealers. At 25 characters, Overwatch is looking good.

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This is how Doomfist invades 'Overwatch' - Engadget

From left: Chris Conatser, Allison Page, Kevin Whittinghill, Zoltan Istvan and Allen Saakyan

Zoltan Istvan ran for President of the US as a "Transhumanist" with a campaign that called for massive government funding to eliminate human mortality. Donald Trump won with a much crazier campaign.

Earlier this week on the Eureka science show he talked about Transhumanism and his campaign to become California Governor in 2018.

Digital Transformation: A CXO's Guide

Reimagining business for the digital age is the number-one priority for many of today's top executives. We offer practical advice and examples of how to do it right.

The hosts Allen Saakyan and Kevin Whittinghill were joined by comedians Chris Conatser and Allison Page. The show uses comedy to educate its audience about important scientific issues.

No foodies...

You can tell by the expressions on their faces (photo above) that Istvan's description of Transhumanism and the chance to live hundreds of years wasn't very appealling. Especially the part when he said that we won't need sex or food in a future Transhumanist world.

Istvan looks like a TV presenter because he used to be one -- at National Geographic. And it was on assignment in Vietnam when he almost stepped on a landmine that he vowed to work on ending human mortality.

Excerpts from Istvan's talk:

- Initially we'll be able to extend our lifespans by 500 years or so. [Like Zeno's paradox we won't catch up with our mortality]

- Ageing will be treated and eliminated like any other chronic disease.

- Our organs will be replaced with fresh ones grown from our own cells so there is no rejection and no lifetime medications.

- Machines of various types and sizes will be embedded in our bodies to protect, heal and augment our senses.

- A bionic eye will replace one of our natural eyes and allow us to see beyond the tiny 1% of the light spectrum so that we can see things like carbon monoxide gas - useful for avoiding pollution.

- CRISPR will allow people to change their DNA to look like the people in the Star Wars bar scene - with tails and fur. [Costume shops - the disruption is coming.]

- Sex won't be anything like as we know it and might not even require other people.

- Eating and food won't be the same. Some Transhumanists want skin with chlorophyll. Lunchtime won't require a sandwich -- slip your shirt off and take a walk in the sun.

- Life extending technologies will come down in price and trickle down to the poorest of the poor.

I asked Istvan what will we be doing during our extra 500 years of life especially since our prime motivators of food and sex won't be present. He said this is the million dollar question, "We don't know."

I rephrased it and asked how will you spend the time? He said he would head back to school and pick up four doctorates and also learn how to play a bunch of musical instruments. That leaves 470 years to go...

Life is cheap...

As the last people were leaving the event a 42 year old man was shot dead outside the club. Transhumanism needs to address morality as well as mortality.

What an ironic commentary: we talk about the need for expensive transhumanist technologies to extend a person's life -- but a bullet bought for pennies has the final say. Stopping gun violence extends lives.

- - -

More info:

Zoltan Istvan

600 Miles in a Coffin-Shaped Bus, Campaigning Against Death Itself

Eureka show

Eureka Youtube channel

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Salvation in Transhumanism: Humanity merges with machines and lives for ever - ZDNet

JULY 17, 2017

From all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil Good Lord, deliver us.

Book of Common Prayer, 1928

NO MORE SEX! was the unexpected news that Londons Daily Herald brought its readers in February 1929. Those intrigued enough to continue reading found yet more startling information on WHAT HUMANS MAY BE LIKE ANOTHER DAY such as MEN WITH EARS UNDER LUNGS by the same scientifically pedigreed author. The source: John Desmond Bernal, a young Irishman whose daring new book, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, offered a PEEP INTO THE FUTURE.

A crystallographer and molecular biologist, Bernal was familiar to the denizens of Cambridge and Bloomsbury for his piercing eyes, rolling gait, and Marxist beliefs. He counted H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and C. P. Snow among his colleagues, and at least three Nobel Prize winners among his protges. As a scientific humanist, he believed that rational thought coupled with radical new technologies would enable modern society to confront the three enemies of the rational soul, as he called them.

First among these enemies was The World, by which he meant the limits of terrestrial resources and the sheer unpredictability of our planets environment. He proposed that people leave the planet, with its massive, unintelligent forces of nature, heat and cold, winds, rivers, matter and energy, and expand out into the cosmos, where they could establish permanent settlements with free communication and voluntary associations of interested persons. In this way, people would also free themselves from the shackles of earthly politics and societal mores.

But to thrive in these new environments, humans would have to overcome the limits of their bodies what he called The Flesh. For Bernal, this demanded radical surgery, the replacement of organs and tissues by mechanical substitutes, and the directed modification of humanitys genome. Eventually, these new and improved humans, if we could still call them that, would acquire a form of immortality, preserving their ideas and memories by capitalizing on the electronics and machines with which they were likely to be conjoined.

One problem remained, however. For all their technological wizardry, people were still, well, people. Could they overcome the obstacles placed before them by The Devil, Bernals third enemy? No matter how much science advanced, humanitys desires and fears [] imaginations and stupidities would likely remain a treacherous foe. To achieve their glorious future, people would have to transcend their greed, gullibility, and pretensions to godhood.

Bernals rough sketch resonated with an set of ideas circulating among British scientists in the 1920s. Just a few years earlier, Julian Huxley, a British evolutionary biologist whose brother Aldous would go on to author Brave New World, proposed the term transitional human to refer to a person who had deliberately modified and improved his or her own physical and biological architecture. In his 1927 book Religion Without Revelation, he imagined what would happen when humanity decided to transcend itself [] realizing new possibilities of and for [] human nature. By embracing the zestful but scientific exploration of possibilities, Huxley predicted humanity would finally be consciously fulfilling its real destiny. He termed this new secular faith in the future transhumanism.

Despite the tragic history of eugenics in the first half of the 20th century, the notion of an improved people and other such transhumanist ideas continued to percolate among futurists. Even before the cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard left the Earths atmosphere, medical researchers discussed avenues for altering human biology with chemicals and machines in order to enable long-term space travel, coining the word cyborg in the process. But this interest remained low-key until the late 1980s, when a small but creative cohort of future-leaning techno-hipsters in coastal California embraced transhumanisms flexible tenets. As cultural critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote in a classic 1995 essay critiquing the dot-com era, this Californian Ideology blended the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies with the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. The technology journalist Paulina Borsook characterized the ensuing attitude toward society and government as cyber-selfish.

From the Bay Area, for example, a slickly produced magazine called Mondo 2000 introduced readers to virtual reality, hacker culture, smart drugs, life extension, and nanotechnologies. Its debut issue derided the old future as being about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boring! With the Cold War ending and cyberspace beckoning, theres a new whiff of apocalypticism across the land. A general sense that we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species. But where Bernal and Huxley envisioned biological transformations that could potentially benefit society as a whole, this new cult of transhumanists, death defeaters, and allied techno-enthusiasts focused on the self: the perfection of body and mind as individual self-fulfillment. In California, the net and nanotechnology met Narcissus.

Mark OConnells open-minded new book To Be a Machine: Adventures Among the Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death offers an update on the desires, dreams, and delusions of late 20th- and early 21st-century technological optimists. With a practiced journalists sense of engagement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, OConnell describes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifters, and con artists orbiting techno-optimist communities over the past half century. Hoping to become rich, famous, and/or immortal, this population encompasses a seemingly dizzying array of types and propositions that can, Id argue, be cleaved into three basic camps.

First, there are the cooks. Their approach to increasing peoples life spans is based on chemistry, genetics, medicine, and other tools of biotechnology. Prominent among them today is English biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. Born in 1963, de Grey took a PhD in 2000 from Cambridge for research into how inhibiting damage to mitochondrial DNA could extend life spans. Three years later, he co-founded the Methuselah Foundation to shed light on the processes of aging and find ways to extend healthy life. Six years after that, he started the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence(SENS) Research Foundation. Based in Mountain View, California, a few miles from Googles HQ and Stanford University and adjacent to a Jehovahs Witnesses Hall, its fortunes were boosted by Silicon Valley investors and de Greys own multimillion dollar inheritance. Public appearances on shows like Good Morning America and popular books like his 2008 Ending Aging transformed de Grey into a highly visible spokesperson for the immortality movement, such as it is.

OConnell describes meeting de Grey at a bar in San Francisco, where the aging researcher the adjective works both ways was enjoying a breakfast beer. De Greys presentation of the current state of research into regenerative medicine was as much performative as it was perspicacious. For every day that I bring forward the defeat of aging, he claimed, Im saving a hundred thousand fucking lives! OConnell pushed de Grey on such statements, including whether it was possible for people to live a thousand years. Possible? Sure. But, the guru admitted, its very much dependent on the level of funding.

Ah, yes. The funding. A recent article in The New Yorker features a California living room, circa March 2017, teeming with celebrities, scientists, dot-com zillionaires, and venture capitalists. A tony Tupperware party for those anxious about aging, its attendees learn about and, more notably, market and sell their secrets of longevity. Sergey Brin, the fortysomething co-founder of Google and the 13th richest person on the planet, sadly acknowledges that, yes, he too is mortal, but at least hes planning to do something about it. In fact, Google has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the California Life Company (Calico) to combat aging. Even Town & Country is pushing the immortality movement right along with news of Pippa Middletons honeymoon and revelations about what your travel bag for the Hamptons says about you.

All this would be fine let the ber-rich pursue their batshit crazy schemes but, as OConnell suggests, these expensive, research-intensive solutions to the death problem may then crowd out other issues and approaches. We can already help people millions of them live longer and better lives. Its here! Hail the future! Ah forget about it. No one working on Silicon Valleys Sand Hill Road seems inclined to get super-stoked about pushing for universal health care, better public schools, sane gun laws, and a decent living wage. Why champion urban sanitation and clean drinking water when Bono and Leonardo DiCaprio are probably already on it? Todays transhumanism isnt about helping the masses. Its all about me the glorious, death-deferring me. And as my colleagues Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel have noted, the media isnt helping the situation either; its breathless coverage of high-profile, low-probability, pseudo-Ponzi schemes has downstream effects, encouraging young scientists and engineers to invest their energies in trying to solve the wrong problems. OConnells book places these quixotic efforts in context, offering much-needed critical analysis that never veers into condescension.

The cooks approach to augmenting humanity has found sympathetic communities in places far afield from Silicon Valley. One of OConnells best chapters is titled Biology and its Discontents. In it, he introduces us to a motley collection of practical transhumanists operating a small company called Grindhouse Wetware in Pittsburgh and describes these biohackers zeal for augmenting peoples bodies via implants. In 2013, as proof of concept, one of Grindhouses co-founders had a device implanted into his own body that wirelessly transmits biometric information to his smart phone. (One can only imagine the possibilities if it could be linked to Tinder.) However, as OConnell thoughtfully notes, biohackers enthusiasm for a techno-future where they possess the equivalent of superpowers is muted by something darker. Gesturing to his seemingly normal and well-functioning body, one such biohacker tells OConnell, Im trapped here. Transhumanism, at least in this version, appears less about liberation than self-annihilation. Like the ancient Gnostics, these people believe that our flesh is a prison trapping the soul our bodies, our burdens, as it were. But then, transhumanism has always had more than a whiff of eschatology about it.

This near-contempt for our mortal vessels takes us to a second faction lets call them the coders who are selling their own strategy for defeating or deferring death. Instead of augmenting the body with high-tech gadgets or through genetic and medical tweaks, they propose abandoning the Flesh altogether. The body as a machine to be maintained and augmented is old hat; they focus instead on the mind. Drawing on philosophical debates going back to Descartes, they imagine it as software a program or data file that can be copied indefinitely and remain useful, so long as an operating system exists to run it. Making a copy of a persons mind is the first step toward uploading it for storage and retrieval.

Accomplishing this feat, advocates say, will require a detailed understanding of what consciousness is and how it works, which, in turn, rests on a detailed physical understanding of the physical links and connections between neurons and other cells. Again, OConnell draws our attention to Silicon Valley, where small companies, some with transhumanists at their helm, are developing tools for more precise brain scans and mapping. Their agenda is of course predicated on the assumption that the essence of what makes you uniquely you can be reduced to physical terms: to bits and bytes of information.

Whether people are information, chemistry, or indeed spirit or soul has kept stoned undergraduates talking into the wee hours and philosophers employed, but theres now an undeniable commercial aspect to all of this. OConnell takes us on a detour into the world of robotics and autonomous vehicles, areas of research and development drawing vast sums of money and labor. We meet some of the real actors pulling the strings and bear witness to Silicon Valleys roots [] deep in the blood-rich soil of war. The technologies that companies like Google and Uber are developing for autonomous vehicles are dual-use and can readily be militarized. In fact, given the long history of funding by defense agencies like DARPA, we might as well speak of technologies like the autonomous vehicles prowling San Joses streets as civilianized.

Just as workers and labor unions are concerned about the effects of automation on jobs something OConnell addresses scenarios of mind-uploading easily invite questions of whether our machines will one day supplant us. In 1983, Omni published a short essay by SF writer Vernor Vinge describing a future in which technological change accelerates at an exponential rate. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, Vinge suggested, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. Sort of like when Trump was elected, but with robots.

Since Vinges essay appeared, people like Ray Kurzweil engineer, transhumanist, and, more recently, Google executive have made considerable money and headlines predicting how technological advances, especially in areas such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, will drive us to that world-altering moment when there is a rupture in the fabric of human history. In 2009, Kurzweil helped start the Singularity University, located just off interstate 101 in Mountain View. Students from around the world have competed for spots in the programs summer sessions while CEOs, inventors, and investors plunked down $12,000 or more for week-long executive programs on topics like exponential manufacturing and accelerating returns. What they would really benefit from, however, are a few classes at a local community college. In such places, they might learn that if your only model for how technologies develop over time is the cherry-picked exponentiality of examples tracking Moores Law, well, you probably should revise your business plan.

Meanwhile, celebrity technologists like Elon Musk have made headlines simply by expressing their fears about the growing power of artificial intelligence systems. In turn, celebrity interest has created a cottage industry of academic and nonprofit think tanks, many of them in California, devoted to studying existential risks. They are funded in part by technology companies and their executives. A cynic might be so bold as to suggest that the whole enterprise is a self-licking ice cream cone. A realist, at least one focused less on abstractions such as the future of humanity, might argue that the real problems Silicon Valley executives should address have less to do with tomorrows artificial intelligence than with the plain ol natural stupidity eroding and disrupting our civil society today.

The topic of stupidity, in all its many-splendored and undeniably human forms, leads us to the third community of people associated with this ideology. Meet the conned, who, alas, include the author of Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story. Alexandra Wolfe spins a tale of Silicon Valley absurdity masquerading as altruism, although shes unlikely to pitch it in these terms. Unfortunately, her book also peddles just about every possible stereotype cue the scrawny nerd with thick glasses, baggy jeans, and a T-shirt on page three who cant seem to get laid, and every other variant of the hoodie-clad technological disrupter, creatively destroying all in his path.

The conned in Wolfes superficial fly-through of Silicon Valley include select college-age recipients of fellowships. The deal is this: if accepted, you will receive $100,000. You will also agree to drop out of college for the length of the fellowship while you pursue your entrepreneurial dream. The pied piper peddling this bullshit is Peter Thiel, who announced the eponymous program in 2010. When George Packer profiled him in 2011, Thiel was just another dot-com tycoon professing a slew of contradictory ideas and beliefs. Packer provided an indelible image of Thiel the libertarian no rules! and yet a proponent of life extension live longer! blazing down a California highway in his Mercedes sans seat belt. Besides railing at the uselessness of a college education this from the man blessed with not one but two degrees from Stanford Thiel lambasted the political correctness he thought universities propagated. Such thoughts coming from a gay man whose rights are legally if thanklessly protected in the United States is an eccentricity Wolfe doesnt explore.

The cohort of those conned by Thiels munificence includes the young and oh-so-nave Jonathan Burnham. When we meet him, young Burnham has just received a Thiel fellowship. Asked How would you change the world? Burnham doesnt opt for curing malaria or improving inner cities. Nope. Not disruptive enough. He wants to mine asteroids. By the end of the book, Burnham has received a moon-sized helping of reality. As he told The New York Times, Its been really eye-opening for me to realize that just because you have a big idea doesnt mean thats all its going to take to make something happen. Isnt that the kind of advice that mentors what the Thiel program ostensibly provides are supposed to give their charges? Oh, right. Thats so quaint, so undisruptive.

Wolfe certainly benefited from access to a colorful class of characters, even if they are predominantly male and resolutely infantile. This said, a few women proto-entrepreneurs do appear in Valley of the Gods such as Laura Deming, who dropped out of MIT to pursue research on life extension but they are all too often characterized by what they wear rather than what they think. Wolfes reticence in offering critical analysis is a shame. Surely she could have said something about the deep structural and cultural biases women and people of color face in the tech world and STEM fields in general.

For example, not far away from where some of the Thiel Fellows lived and coded is there a difference? are the 27,000-plus undergraduates of San Jose State University. Many are first-generation college students for whom a college education offers a ladder to the middle class and a decent income. In contrast, Burnhams parents boast about how a Thiel Fellowship offered their kid a new kind of status symbol [] it said their son could get into Harvard but turned it down for something better. Its one thing to write about a group of young people who, after being accepted to Yale, Princeton, and MIT, decided not to attend. Thats their privilege. But when the message is that higher education is for chumps, worth neither time nor public investment well, thats a very different kind of privilege.

Adding insult to injury is Wolfes sometimes shaky understanding of how Silicon Valley got to be the valley of the gods. Even Thiel himself, in his 2016 address to the GOP convention, acknowledged the federal governments role in laying the foundations for the internet. (Uncle Sugar actually funded the engineers who built the infrastructure enabling Thiel to become fabulously wealthy, but, hey, lets not quibble.) Wolfe seems unaware or unwilling to address this inconvenient truth. Instead we get just-so history where Stanford academics and heroic businessmen not decades of massive Cold War defense spending created Silicon Valley. In this story, regulations and rules seem hardly to matter, which may explain why Santa Clara County has two dozen Superfund cleanup sites. And it may explain why, in Wolfes book, we get vignettes about a lobbyist who helped Uber shaft the employees who want to unionize while circumventing local regulations. Move fast and break things indeed!

One might dismiss both OConnell and Wolfes books for reporting about ideas, ideologies, and individuals who could easily be consigned to the margins. That would be a mistake. Peter Thiel matters. He has gone from being a billionaire with some odd ideas ignore, if you can, his interest in parabiosis (i.e., rejuvenation via blood transfusions from young people) to being a billionaire with influence in the White House. In addition, media attention and millions of dollars of private support from Silicon Valley moguls have nudged elements of the transhumanist movement closer to the mainstream. Like economic returns from Bay Area tech companies today, human enhancement technologies of the future will not be evenly distributed. If were now exercised over how the rich get privileged access to airline seats, imagine the reaction from le menu peuple when they see the callow Jared Kushners of tomorrow get brain upgrades while being infused with teenaged blood. Perhaps this explains why some of the United Statess wealthiest people are prepping for the day when the pitchforks come out a veritable bonfire of the vainglorious and they retreat to their converted ICBM silos and island compounds.

There are two futures, the future of desire, and the future of fate, J. D. Bernal said in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and mans reason has never learned to separate them. People use technologies to build the future. Visions of technological tomorrows proffered by cooks or coders matter. They matter a great deal. They are inherently political. And despite their pretentions to benefit humanity, they ignore vast swaths of the population. Not to take such visions seriously to treat them as no more than play or whimsy is to be conned.

W. Patrick McCray is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Certain passages in this essay have appeared before in The Visioneers and on the authors website.

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Silicon Valley's Bonfire of the Vainglorious - lareviewofbooks