A blog focusing on some of the most prominent “-isms” surrounding humanity’s technological future: extropianism, transhumanism, posthumanism, the mouth-filling Singularitarianism, and others in that constellation.
June 22, 2011
You might have seen this video in the last month or so:In case you don’t make it through the video, the guy also talks about making recordings of celebrities’, um, kissing patterns on the devices, and the likelihood that people would pay for those recordings so they could, um, make out with their favorite celebrities.My first...
June 21, 2011
For addition to the annals of dazzlingly weird and unself-aware bioethical writing: IEET last month put up a blog post by Nikki Olson and Hank Pellissier (a.k.a. “Hank Hyena”) entitled “Artificial Wombs Will Spawn New Freedoms.” Olson and Pellissier try to make a case, on several grounds, for growing human babies in artificial...
June 20, 2011
Self-proclaimed futurologist Ian Pearson has produced a report for Travelodge, the British hotel chain, about the future of sleep and hotel rooms: The 2030 Future of Sleep Report. Despite the date referenced in the title, the report actually speaks consistently about what to expect by 2035. You’d think that one of the first lessons for...
May 17, 2011
While the Singularity Hub normally sticks to reporting on emerging technologies, their primary writer, Aaron Saenz, recently posted a more philosophical venture that ties nicely into the faux-caution trope of transhumanist discourse that was raised in our last post on Futurisms. Mr. Saenz is (understandably) skeptical about efforts being...
May 10, 2011
In my last post on ironic transhumanist tech failures, there was one great example I forgot to mention. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for the IEET blog, you may have noticed that most of their posts go up on the feed multiple times: my best guess is that, due to careless coding in their system (or a bad design idea that was never...
May 9, 2011
Despite some promising early results, and finishing in 30th place in the online public poll, it looks like Ray Kurzweil did not, after all, make the Time 100 most influential people in the world, which was ultimately selected by the editors to highlight the most influential “artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of...
April 26, 2011
Every organization experiences technical difficulties now and then; that’s just a fact of technology. But there is always a delicious irony when it happens to transhumanists, those starry-eyed prognosticators of unfathomable technical power and absolute technical mastery. This week’s serving of ironic technical failure comes...
March 11, 2011
Scientific American reports that a project known as Robot Companions, “which will develop soft-bodied ‛perceptive’ robots as companions for the lonely,” has been selected as a finalist for an EU competition that will award one billion Euros (1.4 billion US dollars) over ten years to two huge flagship projects that will apply...
February 25, 2011
I have to admit that the cover of this month’s Atlantic, proclaiming “Why Machines Will Never Beat the Human Mind,” left me rather uninterested in reading the article, as claims to have made such a proof almost never hold up. And, indeed, to the extent that the article implies that it has provided a case against artificial general...
February 23, 2011
Kyle Munkittrick, the transhumanist blogger with whom we have tussled before, has a newish perch over on one of Discover magazine’s blogs. In a post today, Munkittrick tries to zing Peter Lawler, a contributing editor to The New Atlantis. For now I won’t comment on the substance of Munkittrick’s post; I just want to focus on a...