Category Archives: Transhumanist

I take it back I take it all back.

The Beam teleconference robot is not the douchiest product of all time, as I so cynically claimed after seeing it in action during the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show. In fact, its amazing so amazing that its use by NSA whistleblower and eloquent fugitive badass Edward Snowden at this weeks TED Talks made me realize an idea that is both astonishing and, somehow, already a normal part of 21st century life: Thanks to technology, we are not longer merely humans at all. We are cyborgs. The line has been crossed.

Using Beams keyboard-powered interface, Snowden wheeled around the stage, giving himself a better look at the audience.

Beam, if you havent yet encountered it, is a remote presence system made by Suitable Technologies, and first launched in 2012. The $16,000 contraption has an iPad-like screen for a face, multiple Internet-connected cameras, and has wheels that allow users to pilot around a room (or, in Snowdens case, a conference center).

The company touts many uses for Beam eliminating the need for business executives to travel to international offices, allowing doctors to better treat quarantined patients, remote learning for university students all of which I dismissed as secondary to Beams eerie presence after experiencing it on the show floor of CES. In retrospect, I realize that I was simply being an unimaginative jerk.

The next time I came across a Beam was this week, while streaming TED Talks to my TV with Google Chromecast. (Highly recommended, FYI.) Thanks to the Beam, Snowden appeared on stage in Vancouver for a 35-minute interview with TED head Chris Anderson. Using Beams keyboard-powered interface, he wheeled around the stage, giving himself a better look at the audience. He shifted his digital gaze to have a quick chat with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web, who had a brief on-stage cameo. He wore, below his screen, a big name tag that read Edward Snowden, citizen.

Seeing as this is a TED, home of next-generation ideas and thinking, it is easy to take this futuristic scene for granted. But lets just pause for a moment to reflect on what took place: From a secret remote location in Russia, Snowden, one of the most sought-after fugitives from the U.S. government, gave an interview, chatted with the inventor of the Web, tooled around on a stage some 5,000 miles away, then mingled with the TED crowd, and even had his picture taken with Googles Larry Page.

That is goddamn incredible.

Without the Beam, most of that would have been impossible. Yes, he could have still done the interview part, like he did at SXSW. But he certainly couldnt have taken selfies with TED-goers. And, I imagine, it wouldnt have felt like he was really there. Even from my remote location (on my couch), Beam-Snowden seemed like a person, like a living being occupying space around other living beings. He wasnt just a face on a screen.

This idea that we are already cyborgs an interdependent mix of man and machine is not new. But it is part of our reality. Just snatch a smartphone away from a 16-year-old, and youll see that neither function well without the other. Nor is it novel that technology allows us to do things that were previously impossible thats the point. But Beam-Snowden is something different; he (it, whatever) existed in a place outside his body. He did, in fact, go to Canada.

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As Snowden roams free in robot form, our cyborg future has arrived

Scientists Building Transhumanist Tech to Force Prisoners To Stay Alive "Forever" As Punishment
Scientists Building Transhumanist Tech to Force Prisoners To Stay Alive "Forever" As Punishment. *SUBSCRIBE* for more great videos! Mark Dice is a media anal...

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Scientists Building Transhumanist Tech to Force Prisoners To Stay Alive "Forever" As Punishment - Video

DARPA,NATO,Nano transhumanist NOT your scientific PROJECT!

By: TheHighonYah

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DARPA,NATO,Nano transhumanist NOT your scientific PROJECT! - Video

Image: Mashable composite. iStock, perysty

By Rebecca Hiscott2014-03-16 16:25:56 UTC

When Gennady Stolyarov II was five years old, living in Belarus as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, he asked his mother what happens to people when they grow up.

"They go to school," she answered.

And then?

"They work and get married."

And then? And then?

Eventually, his mother ran out of answers. "And then they die," she said.

So begins Stolyarov's Death Is Wrong, a children's book that describes the author's struggle with the concept of death. The narrative refutes the notion that death is the inevitable conclusion of life. Stolyarov hopes it will teach children that bodily decline is, in fact, a state that can and must be overcome through technological progress.

Referring to his first encounter with the concept of death, Stolyarov tells Mashable, "I was bewildered. Why do innocent people who have done nothing wrong deserve the death penalty?"

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Children's Book Teaches Kids 'Death Is Wrong'

57764131 story Posted by samzenpus on Sunday March 16, 2014 @12:35PM from the do-you-want-to-live-forever? dept. destinyland writes "Hoping to inspire life-extending medical research, science fiction author Gennady Stolyarov has launched a campaign to give away 1,000 free copies of his transhumanist picture book for children, Death is Wrong. 'My greatest fear about the future is not of technology running out of control or posing existential risks to humankind,' he explains. 'Rather, my greatest fear is that, in the year 2045, I will be...wondering, "What happened to that Singularity we were promised by now...?"' Along with recent scientific discoveries, the book tells its young readers about long-lived plants and animals '"that point the way toward lengthening lifespans in humans,' in an attempt to avoid a future where children 'would pay no more attention to technological progress and life-extension possibilities than their predecessors did.'" You may like to read: Post

And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.

Working...

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Transhumanist Children's Book Argues, "Death Is Wrong"

THE RATIONAL ARGUMENTATOR Liberty or Death: Why Libertarians Should Proclaim That Death is Wrong

Do you wish to actually live in a free society, rather than just ponder what one would be like? For some, the desire to live in liberty is so strong that they would echo Patrick Henrys immortal words, Give me liberty or give me death! More than just those words should be immortal; in fact, you should be.

Without intending it, Patrick Henry communicated a truth that is becoming increasingly apparent in our era: we can one day be truly free if humans achieve indefinite life extension; without it, we will be both unfree and eventually dead. Within our lifetimes, we will either have liberty and no death, or death and no liberty. We cannot have both liberty and death.

Death is Wrong is my new childrens book on indefinite life extension, beautifully illustrated by my wife Wendy Stolyarov. Thebook is an educational primer which presents, in a concise, accessible manner the philosophical desirability and scientific feasibility of lifting the upper limit on human lifespans through the application of science and medical technology. We are currently in the midst of an Indiegogo fundraiser to spread this book to 1000 children, free of cost to them.

Death is Wrong does not take any political positions and does not advocate specifically for libertarianism, since we seek to focus on life extension in the book and to attract as universal a base of support as possible. It is certainly feasible to hold almost any political persuasion and to advocate the radical extension of human lifespans. Yet I, as a libertarian, see the defeat of senescence through medical progress to be an indispensable component to achieving liberty.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence proclaims that humans have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While the right to life is a negative rightthe right not to have others infringe on ones lifeit is nonetheless indisputable that the positive condition of life is the prerequisite for the exercise of any kind of liberty and the pursuit of any kind of happiness. If one is dead, there is nothingno choice, no growth, no self-actualizationand not even a memory of any past deed or previous fulfillment of ones goals. Without life, liberty is impossible, and yet biological decay propels us all toward the loss of the very potential for liberty. Death obliterates everything: our precious individual universes, full of sensations, insights, thoughts, and aspirations are forever snuffed out, deprived of the possibility of ever fulfilling any goal or actualizing any ideal.

In Liberty Through Long Lifewritten in April 2013I described the possibilities for improving the prospects of liberty just on the horizon, facilitated by accelerating technological progressfrom emerging methods of online education to cryptocurrencies to seasteading and space colonization. I explained that libertarians should want to live as long as possible in order to see and benefit from the fruits of these tremendous innovations.

Just two months after I wrote Liberty Through Long Life, most of us in the Western world found out just how unfree we truly were. Especially in the aftermath of Edward Snowdens revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency and its counterparts in many Western countries are spying indiscriminately on hundreds of millions of innocents, it has become apparent that the political struggle for liberty in todays climate has encountered barriers that appear, at present, virtually insurmountable. I am not referring to failure to achieve the libertarian political ideal or even a directional approach toward such an idealdespite the ardent, passionate, unquestionably dedicated work that activists for liberty have done during and between the past several election cycles. The situation today is worse than that.

Even abolishing the Orwellian spying apparatus and penalizing those officials who concealed and then endorsed it appears to be seen as out of the question by the political elite, no matter how great the pressure from the public and how completely useless the mass spying has turned out to be. More than ten months after Snowdens revelations, all of the powerful people who orchestrated the mass surveillance remain in their offices, and Snowden is a fugitive in Russia. Now it has even been disclosed that the NSA has devised programs to harvest data from private hard drives, webcams, and microphones by infecting personal computers with malware in mass.

Can we expect to see an end to what we would have, just one year ago, considered an unimaginably intimate surveillanceor, more likely, will the gatekeepers of the current political order assemble all of their power in the effort to perpetuate it? Achieving mere non-perversitynot to mention libertyas an immutable principle for contemporary Western political arrangements to follow, would appear to be a Herculean task.

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by Gennady Stolyarov II

Man Who Built Georgia Guidestones Calls for Transhumanist Merger of Man and Machine in Rare Book
Man Behind Georgia Guidestones Calls for Transhumanist Merger of Man and Machine in Rare Book. *SUBSCRIBE* for more great videos! Mark Dice is a media analys...

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Man Who Built Georgia Guidestones Calls for Transhumanist Merger of Man and Machine in Rare Book - Video

Moogfest will get a dose of the TV series Futurama during a panel titled The Math and Science of The Simpsons and Futurama.

Image: Futurama

By Brian Anthony Hernandez2014-02-25 10:02:20 -0500

Moogfest, a decade-old music festival named after Moog synthesizer creator Robert Moog, is continuing to expand far beyond its electronic-music roots.

For this year's shindig, attendees can jam out to headliners Pet Shop Boys, M.I.A. and Kraftwerk 3D at night but also enjoy a robust infusion of daytime programming to learn about new technologies, art, math, science and future concepts all timely topics that jibe with Moog's creative spirit. Moogfest takes place from April 23 to 27 in Asheville, N.C.

Among the sessions is "The Math and Science of The Simpsons and Futurama."

"Futurama and electronic music are both subjects where super nerdy and marginally cool meet," David X. Cohen, Futurama's executive producer, told Mashable. Though Cohen has an bachelor's degree in physics and a master's degree in computer science, he said his panel's goal is to entertain, but "if they get some education then that's an added bonus."

Moogfest organizers echo the extra-education sentiment, as they've strived to build a lineup of sessions, workshops and film screenings that will thrill just as much as the musicians.

"With his lifelong dedication to using technology to empower musicians, Robert Moog is a patron saint of the nerdy arts," said Google Doodle team leader Ryan Germick, who is part of the "Google and the Future of Audio" panel. "We couldn't be more pleased to honor his legacy and continue the kinds of conversations he started."

Below, you can find a full list of daytime programming, which Moogfest shared first with Mashable, along with a limited-time discounted ticket price ($99 for a 5-day pass instead of $299, until Feb. 26 at 10 a.m. ET) for our readers who use the code "MASHMF" when registering on Ticketmaster.

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No Ordinary Music Festival: Moogfest Ropes in Google, 'Futurama'

Can people really live forever? A children's book author has joined the growing chorus of transhumanist voices insisting that we soon may. That's right kids, you too could be immortal.

Gennady Stolyarov, author of Death Is Wrong wants children to learn that death won't be a given in the technological age. As a boy growing up in Minsk, the prospect of death confused him and it's plagued him ever since. Why does a good, productive, happy person have to die?

Stolyarov, a property and casualty actuary, launched an Indiegogo campaign last week called "Help Teach 1000 Kids Death Is Wrong," aimed at giving out free 1,000 free copies of the book to kids. The book, which was illustrated by his wife Wendy, was first published in November 2013.

Over the last decade, researchers like Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil have helped popularize the notion that technology will extend the human lifespan--possibly forever. According to Kurzweil, we will achieve indefinite longevity by 2030. Meanwhile, recent biomedical advances--like nerve-connected bionic arms and nanobots operating inside living cells--have made the concept sound less crazy.

Stolyarov's book interweaves his own life and his mental grapple with death, the history of long-living plants and animals--like the Methuselah Tree that has lived for thousands of years and the functionally immortal turritopsis nutricula jellyfish--and the techno-philosophical developments combating senescence today.

The language is just saccharine enough for children to dig into, but the portentous themes will strike deep, philosophical chords in adults. The overall message is positive: The way technology is headed, we should be able to continue discovering and doing the things we love indefinitely. The response, especially in transhumanist circles, has been positive. Stolyarov's most ruthless criticism is a two-star Amazon review for "an alleged insufficiency of narrative."

Not everyone can think in prescient terms about the future to consider what technology can accomplish down the road to live forever. We talked to Stolyarov about his fixation on death and immortality.

Are you afraid to die?

I don't see any shame in saying that I am. For me as a person who relies on reason and understanding and anticipation of the future, this is the only condition that's truly unknowable. If you cease existing, what's that really like? The answer is to say that it's like anything is a misuse of language because there's nothing that remains. Is fear the predominant motive for why I wrote this book? And there, the answer is no.

How has growing up in Belarus culturally affected the way you think about death?

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How Young Is Too Young To Learn About The Singularity?

03. Shocker_TV - Mormon Transhumanist Syndicate
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03. Shocker_TV - Mormon Transhumanist Syndicate - Video