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 9, 2009
Our recent post about libertarian enhancement has received some pushback. For example, commenter Kurt9 says he believes that “the highest moral value in the universe is to pursue one’s own happiness and love of life.” (He says that anyone who disagrees with him is engaging in “sophistry for totalitarianism” — his attempt at...
November 6, 2009
Wired Science has a story by Brandon Keim featuring the work of University of Chicago geoscientist Patrick McGuire. McGuire is working on “wearable AI systems and digital eyes that see what human eyes can’t.” So equipped, “space explorers of the future could be not just astronauts, but ‘cyborg astrobiologists.’” That phrase...
November 3, 2009
Three items today relevant to recent posts. First, following up on our series of posts on lifelogging, CNN has a very cursory but still-worth-excerpting article called “Do digital diaries mess up your brain?“: But recording everything you do takes people out of the “here and now,” psychologists say. Constant...
November 2, 2009
Apropos the recent pair of posts here on lifelogging, I might recommend for further reading Christine Rosen’s essay on multitasking from The New Atlantis last year, and Walter Kirn’s 2007 essay on that subject in The Atlantic. From Kirn’s piece: Productive? Efficient? More like running up and down a beach repairing a...
November 1, 2009
Various people I know across the pro/anti-transhumanism spectrum have been looking for a while for good but concise introductory material to give to people who don’t know about the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near is probably now the standard introductory text, but not all people want to read a book that is...
October 31, 2009
Forget performance enhancement, optical implants, and all the other “upgrades” that the coming decades of progress towards the Singularity are supposed to bring. What about the distant (or at least remote) future, after we’ve transcended? Many transhumanists believe that our destiny is to continue expanding outward from...
October 30, 2009
On a somewhat related note, enjoy this Volstein from the cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker:
October 30, 2009
CNN recently ran an article about Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell’s efforts to record every aspect of his life (which they credulously dub “converting his brain into ‘e-memory'”). And over at the Singularity Hub, Keith Kleiner notes an advance in the technology: Lifelogging – recording every single minute of...
October 30, 2009
In its 2003 report Beyond Therapy (discussed in a symposium in the Winter 2004 New Atlantis), the President’s Council on Bioethics concludes that “the more fundamental ethical questions about taking biotechnology ‘beyond therapy’ concern not equality of access, but the goodness or badness of the things being...
October 28, 2009
When you’re reading some rapturous talk about the glorious future in which enhancement will allow us to bend the world to our will, it often seems like a remote (if not necessarily distant) fantasyland, something to be contemplated through ideals. It’s easy to forget that many of the most anticipated enhancements are already...