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 10, 2010
[NOTE: From time to time, we invite guest contributors to Futurisms. This post is from Mark A. Gubrud, who has written widely on new and emerging technologies — including especially their implications for war, peace, and international security.] * * * This weekend, a philosophy professor will step up to the podium at Harvard...
June 10, 2010
In my last post, I noted the problems with Michael Anissimov’s attempt to defend “morphological freedom” as following from the civil rights movement. I described the way racism has been historically combated by appealing to what we have in common. This is an inherent problem with comparing “species-ism” to racism, because...
June 10, 2010
Our last post, simply a picture of a joyous Audrey Hepburn leaping in the air with the title “Does Anybody Seriously Think We Can Do Better than This?,” provoked a long comment thread. Michael Anissimov posted a comment (and then reposted it on his own blog with a short response to it): Our evaluations of “goodness” are not...
May 24, 2010
(Hat tip: NYT slideshow accompanying this article.)
May 20, 2010
Folks, our blogging platform appears to be having a system-wide problem that’s preventing us from approving comments. Any comments made before this problem is fixed might or might not end up disappearing permanently. We’ll let you know when it’s resolved. UPDATE: Things seem to be up and running again; comment away!
May 19, 2010
Nick Carr, talking about our collective move to Internet immersion, makes some excellent points about the way we talk about technological change, the first of them similar to a point I made recently about how the ways we talk about the real and potential social impacts of new technologies allow us to distance ourselves from thinking they...
May 18, 2010
In late April, blogger Michael Anissimov claimed that we are all transhumanists now, in part because At their base, the world’s major two largest religions — Christianity and Islam — are transhumanistic. After all, they promise transcension from death and the concerns of the flesh, and being upgraded to that archetypical transhuman...
May 18, 2010
Transhumanists have a label — “the argument from incredulity” — for one kind of criticism of their visions and predictions: The instinctual but largely un-evidenced assertion that transhumanist claims are simply too fantastical and difficult to fathom and so must be false. While there’s plenty of reason, empirical and...
May 17, 2010
While we were busy with a few other projects recently, we failed to note that Kyle Munkittrick of the Pop Transhumanism blog had a follow-up post in our exchange about the morality of cloning. It’s a disappointing response. He ignores some of our major arguments, he misrepresents others, and he repeats some of his own points that were...
May 16, 2010
Micah Mattix noted last week at First Things the twentieth anniversary of the death of Walker Percy. Percy sought to answer that pressing question of modern life: “How, indeed, is one to live in this peculiar time and history and on ordinary Wednesday afternoons?” It is a question left glaringly unanswered by science, and...