More than half of those who responded to a recently concluded poll of IEET readers expect to be alive in the year 2100, aided by one or more forms of advanced technology.

Recently I was contacted by a reporter for a major newspaper and asked to answer a few questions about “future trends in emerging technologies.” Here is what I said.

Given the current state of technology, reproductive cloning is not a safe and effective means of human reproduction. Cloning reduces genetic diversity, is beneficial neither for the child nor the parent, and without restrictions could create many legal and social problems.

Keith Kloor’s recent blogged description of my “Climate Skeptics and Deniers” article from Skeptic magazine (based on this earlier blog article I wrote) drew hundreds of comments.

The FAB Congress in Singapore looks at the global aging population and feminization of it, which includes issues of migrant women elder care workers in a global economy, notions of ecological citizenship and human and nonhuman interdependency.

Since I’ve just been named an Affiliate Scholar here at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, I thought I’d think about where I fit within the Humanist/Transhumanist matrix.

We are going to burn all of the oil and coal we have, because their benefits as energy sources are concrete, immediate, and local, while their costs are gradual, delayed, and global.

If you could live in a world that was just the way you wanted it to be, with specifications you’d chosen, customized and personalized to meet your every need and fulfill your fondest desires, would you spend all your time there? Or would you prefer to stay here, in the real world?

If sex makes you smarter via changes in synaptic strength following the act, can you get the same benefit from virtual sex, as long as your brain is convinced it is real at the time?

A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age, by Ben Goertzel, published by Humanity+ Press, is now available on Amazon.

The Twilight series of books and movies is the latest stage, and perhaps the culmination, of a daring philosophical exploration that began in its most public aspect with Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Given the complexity of the world today, plus the risks associated with current and emerging technologies, it behooves everyone on all sides of the biopolitical spectrum to be open to opposing points of view.

Knowing where Neanderthals fit into the evolution of Homo sapiens is essential to understanding the development of the human mind.

Cosmetic plastic surgery (CPS) gets a bad rep for the obvious reasons. It brings to mind superficial wealthy women living in glamorous places and spending someone else’s money on self-beautification. In a way it seems to be cheating—reversing the normal Darwinian structure of survival based on genetic fitness. However, cosmetic plastic surgery is an inevitable and expected outcome given psychology, natural selection, and changes in technology.