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.
October 27, 2009
Via Mind Hacks, psychologist Norbert Schwartz gives a revealing answer when asked what nagging things he still doesn’t understand about himself: I don’t understand … why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad – unless one...
October 22, 2009
I don’t often turn to French Marxists for wisdom about the world, but a passage in Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece called my attention to something Henri Lefebvre wrote about everydayness that is relevant to a theme introduced in an earlier post by Ari. In his 1947 book Critique of...
October 21, 2009
[NOTE: This post has been edited since it was first published. See the postscript below.] In a recent post, I discussed the combative rhetoric of transhumanists, and concluded that their resentment is directed not so much against critics, but against their own human nature. Given how widespread this resentment is, I think it would be...
October 19, 2009
There was a fascinating article on CNN last week about an experimental medical technique: She turns a dial, and the sealed enclosure starts to fill with poison gas — hydrogen sulfide. An ounce could kill dozens of people. The rat sniffs the air a few times, and within a minute, his naturally twitchy movements are almost still. On a...
October 14, 2009
In the previous post here on Futurisms, my co-blogger Charles T. Rubin argues that one can only have a libertarian stance towards transhumanism “if one believes that all ‘lifestyle’ choices are morally incommensurable, that the height of moral wisdom is ‘do your own thing’ (and for as long as possible).” This is certainly...
October 12, 2009
There are aspects of the arguments of advocates of human re-engineering that, for what it’s worth, I agree with. One is that nanotechnology, or more specifically molecular manufacturing, holds the potential (if it is possible at all) to alter a great many things that we currently take for granted about the shape of human life. It may...
October 9, 2009
Over at The Speculist, Phil Bowermaster has fired a volley across our bow. His post contains a few misrepresentations of The New Atlantis and our contributors. However, we think our body of work speaks for itself, and so rather than focusing on Mr. Bowermaster’s sarcastic remarks, I’d like to comment on the larger substantial...
October 8, 2009
From XKCD last week: This comic (aside from the nice dig at Linux) gets right at some of the core difficulties of treating the mind as a purely functional input/output device. Just imagine the huge technical challenge of connecting our nervous system to a relatively simple interface — USB. Not only do you have to treat the brain as a...
October 6, 2009
The impulse to redesign humanity is not new, and turns up in surprising places once you start paying attention to it. Consider the following passage from a very long speech given in 1891 by Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founder Frances Willard, one of the giants of turn-of-the-century progressivism: It may be that in some better...
October 6, 2009
The 2009 Singularity Summit wrapped up in New York City yesterday. The whole thing was something of a blur — two days of back-to-back talks, milling about with conferencegoers, and frenzied posting. As you can see here, the attendees were predominantly male, and almost exclusively nerds of various flavors: long-haired, disheveled...