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.
November 17, 2010
The second panel at today’s conference was called “Happily Ever After? What it Means for Society to Drastically Prolong Life.” The first speaker was Ted Fishman, author of the concisely-titled book Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How it Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent,...
November 16, 2010
The first panel today is on the science of life extension, with a typically crisis-laden title, “The War on Dying, the Battle Against Aging.” (And a heated exchange ensues toward the end of the panel — don’t flip that dial.) The first two speakers, Cynthia Kenyon of UCSF (revealingly profiled here) and Ana Maria...
November 16, 2010
Today I’m at a conference in Washington, DC, called “Never Say Die: A Future Tense Event,” held at the New America Foundation (NAF) and hosted by NAF and Arizona State University, with Slate as a media partner. (The link above has a live feed of the conference.) Among the speakers and panelists scheduled today are...
November 2, 2010
Back in the eighteenth century, there was a good deal of interest in creating automata, and, like today, it signaled a shifting understanding of the human. Two major tech blogs have recently featured a couple of such projects coming out of Japan. I know between little and nothing about the technical strengths and weaknesses of these...
September 23, 2010
I’m a little surprised that in their big-tent quest for legitimacy, transhumanists have not claimed Aristotle as one of their own. Towards the end of his Nichomachean Ethics he writes (in Joe Sachs’s translation): “But one should not follow those who advise us to think human thoughts, since we are human, and mortal thoughts, since...
September 8, 2010
Largely adopting the same tone of shocked superiority, both Gizmodo and Boing Boing have featured the following picture of a Victorian/Edwardian-era prosthetic arm: A century or so is not so long even in the scheme of human history, and in that short space of time there have surely been huge changes in design ability and sensibility...
August 9, 2010
David Gelernter has written a characteristically thought-provoking essay about what guidance might be gleaned from Judaism for how human beings ought to treat “sophisticated anthropoid robots” with artificial intelligence powerful enough to allow them to respond to the world in a manner that makes them seem exactly like us. Taking...
August 3, 2010
Mark Walker recently wrote an interesting piece over at The Global Spiral suggesting that when it comes to preventing the extinction of civilization, transhumanism is the best of the bad options we have. He frames the problem in a familiar way: the democratization of existential risks. As things are going now, more and more people will...
July 30, 2010
An article from Reuters on the predictive power of brain scans contains this unintentional gem of a quote: “We are trying to figure out whether there is hidden wisdom that the brain contains.” Some sobering news for proponents of the view that parents should have the right to engineer their children as they please: The...
July 27, 2010
Over at Boing Boing, Lisa Katayama reports on the latest neuroscience on romantic breakups. I’m not going to comment on the report itself, but rather her take on it: I think most of us have experienced this feeling at one point in our lives, but it’s interesting to know it can be backed up by science. How interesting that anyone...