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.
February 26, 2010
I recently mentioned Ed Regis’s lively Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition in a couple of posts here on Futurisms, and I thought I’d mention one final item from the book — a very minor one. One of the people Regis profiles is Dave Criswell, who as a child became enamored of a vision of civilization in space. By the...
February 18, 2010
In response to the previous post here, asking what humanity might be like today if transhumanists had remade man in the 1950s, Michael Anissimov asks, “if we modified ourselves into this based on the ideology of the 50s, couldn’t we just then change it again if we didn’t like it?” This comment merits some attention...
February 17, 2010
Think for a moment of the common critiques of 1950s American culture — of the era’s conformism and repressiveness, its denial of brewing social discontent, its spiritual emptiness and shallow view of human good, and the gosh-golly attitude toward social life that led one astute commentator to dub it “the sunny synthetic fifties.”...
February 16, 2010
Anyone who believes in the science of man-made global warming must admit the important lesson it reveals: humans can easily alter complex systems not of their own cohesive design but cannot easily predict or control them. Let’s call this (just for kicks) the Malcolm Principle. Our knowledge is little but our power is great, and so we...
February 6, 2010
David Foster Wallace → Russell Crowe? The gentle Facebooking reader will likely have noticed the news-feed trend of last week. No, it’s not posting the color of your bra in ostensible support of breast-cancer awareness (older readers will remember that one). I first noticed it myself when the faces on my news feed seemed both more...
February 6, 2010
Posting has been light lately because we’ve been busy working on several projects, but we’re kicking things back into gear now. Picking up on my last post, I want to comment on another passage from Ed Regis’s Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition. Regis explains how Hans Moravec imagined bringing back to life people who...
January 24, 2010
About a month ago, before the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Feynman’s “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” talk, I re-read Ed Regis’s 1995 book Nano, still the only good narrative history of the origins of the idea of nanotechnology. Yesterday, I read for the first time Regis’s previous book: Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman...
January 15, 2010
A few days ago here on Futurisms, commenter Kurt9 made an interesting point: “The idea that our cutting-edge science, particularly radical life extension, is incompatible with current social regimes comes from you guys, not from us transhumanists.” In one sense his statement is not true at all; plainly, for all he might disagree with...
January 8, 2010
Following up on my post from a few days ago about the golden jubilee of Richard Feynman’s “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture, I have a short piece in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal saying a bit more about the lecture’s importance to nanotechnology. In the piece, I outline the differences between...
January 4, 2010
In light of our lengthy recent discussion about the desire of some transhumanists to eliminate predation in the wild, I’d just like to note a mildly amusing juxtaposition. The cover article in the latest issue of National Geographic is on “Merging Man and Machine.” It focuses on several developments in bionics (although for...