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.
April 24, 2013
Our own Ari Schulman recently reviewed Ray Kurzweil’s latest book How to Create a Mind for The American Conservative. Ari’s review challenges both Kurzweil’s ideas and his aspirations, which are, as is quite often the case in transhumanist fantasies, rather base — virtual sex and so on. Here Ari criticizes Kurzweil’s...
April 23, 2013
Readers with iDevices might be interested to know that the originally serialized novel/app The Silent History is available free today and tomorrow in complete form from the App Store. While some of its more avant garde locational and social aspirations did not end up impressing me very much, the basic story itself, tracking over many...
January 17, 2013
If, as some transhumanists would have it, it is true that anyone with glasses, a hearing aid or a pacemaker should regard himself as a cyborg, then it is worth heeding this fable from Aesop, as translated in the Penguin edition by Olivia and Robert Temple: Fable 139 – The Horse, the Ox, the Dog and the Man When Zeus made man, he...
December 18, 2012
The National Intelligence Council has just published one of its periodic forays into thinking about the future: Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. As even the title suggests, the report is full of carefully qualified projections and scenarios, often noting the ambiguity of technological development—the truism that the same...
November 7, 2012
Chris Kim @ NYT America’s Grey Lady, the New York Times, has long been willing to take transhumanist topics seriously, perhaps in some hope that she too will be somehow rejuvenated. Indeed, a recent piece by David Ewing Duncan on human enhancement has something of the aura of a second childhood about it, with its relatively breathless...
November 6, 2012
October 16, 2012
While I think the stakes for the upcoming election are pretty high, the past months of media coverage have only increased my conviction that there is something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of “the news.” I don’t follow “media studies” much, so the observation that follows may in some circles be a commonplace. But...
August 21, 2012
I have to say it was a surprise a few days back to find a link on Drudge for an article that Julian Savulescu has published in Reader’s Digest, of all places. It’s the UK edition, mind you, but all signs on their website point to it being as impeccably middlebrow as its U.S. counterpart. And Savulescu’s piece advocating the moral...
August 20, 2012
Also, in case you missed them, The New Atlantis has published a number of articles in recent issues that may be of interest to readers of this blog: What Is the Body Worth? – by yours truly, on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, various factual errors therein, and the bad case for human tissue markets Love,...
August 20, 2012
Gentle reader, we’d like to share with you a few recent items of interest by contributors to The New Atlantis: • Robert Zubrin on antihumanism and transhumanism (discussing his new book, Merchants of Despair, from New Atlantis Books) • Alan Jacobs on the hivemind Singularity: “What if the price exacted by the Singularity is...