Technoprogressive analyses and campaigns take on wide-ranging (and not necessarily comfortably compatible) forms, but they all assume two definitive ideas about progress.

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The “Good Ancestor Principle” is based on a challenge posed by Jonas Salk:

...the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?” Given the rapidly changing discoveries and conditions of the times, this opens up a crucial conversation – just what will it take for our descendants to look back at our decisions today and judge us good ancestors?

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I’ve written about potential inhibitors to consciousness uploading in the past, but I believe I’ve come up with another possible problem for those wishing to live a purely digital life.

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Would-be professional techno-prognosticators, when they want to think out loud about “the future,” seem to me to turn more often to discussions of concerns about human survival than to concerns about human self-creation, so too to the demands of security over the demands of democracy, as well as to the urgencies of threat over the possibilities of hope.

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Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is available, in its entirety, online, at both the Internet Archive and Google Video.

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The IEET would like to welcome our latest contributor, Michael Anissimov, author of the popular Accelerating Future blog.

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IEET Director Mark Walker has an interesting article responding to an article published by Peter Singer in the 1990s, in which Singer considers the possibility of an anti-aging drug, and concludes that, on the scenario presented: “we should recommend against any further development of the anti-aging drug.”

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George discusses why Jehovah Witnesses’ babies need to be protected from their parents’ ideas about blood, ethical eats, and how everyone in the future will be able to play the guitar like Eddie Van Halen.

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Video of Zack Lynch’s 30 minute talk “Perception Shifting in a Neurosociety - Ethical and Societal Implications” given at a conference on the Geoethical Implications of Neuronanotechnology hosted by the Terasem Movement at Martine Rothblatt‘s Vermont retreat. The slides for the talk can be downloaded here.

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I am an atheist myself and have been for nearly a quarter of a century now, at any rate since my first year of college, when I thought it through and determined I was quite content to do without god (“a-theist”) as a personal preoccupation—especially among so many others I was discovering at the time.

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Today when we listen to conservative ethicists, whether they be bioethicists, infoethicists, nanoethicists, neuroethicists, roboethicists or technoethicists, one would think that ethics can be reduced to a taboo.

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The IEET would like to re-introduce one of our contributors, Vladimir De Thézier.

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There is a high-profile case currently making news in Canada involving a Jehovah’s Witnesses family whose three infants were seized by the government of British Columbia so that they could be given potentially life saving blood transfusions.

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In addition to the IEET networks we’re building on LinkedIn and XING, some of us in the IEET have been exploring the social networking sites of Orkut and Facebook for the last couple of years. For instance there are the Radical Cyborgs groups on Orkut and Tribe.net that spun off of the Cyborg Democracy blog, the Technoliberation site and Technoliberation list.

Now on Facebook one of our interns Ben Hyink has started the Society for the Cyborg Revolution, “founded upon the premise that all forms of personhood, or beings with self- awareness, including humans, upgraded animals, cyborgs, intelligent robots, and post-humans, have a fundamental, democratic right to govern their own bodies. We advocate the right of all beings to have access to cognitive and physical enhancement, life-extension technologies and similar upgrades. Furthermore, we support the democratic use of stem-cell research, bio-technology, nano-technology and other promising lines of research to improve the quality of life for all.”

These aren’t IEET projects, and they are more playful than the staid thinktankery we’re pursuing at the IEET, but some of us are linked up through these groups and if you think they are fun I’d encourage you to add yourself.

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I’d say this is a three-way split between 30% who think utopianism is a force for good, 30% who think it is a force for evil, and 30% who think it can be both. Then there are 6% who think its just harmless irrational weak-mindedness, and 3% who think its a podcast from the Eschaton.

New poll: “Self-willed machine minds…” (choose all that apply)

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Over at the Huffington Post, R.J. Eskow blogged earlier this week about enhancement technologies and transhumanism, commenting specifically on my piece about Fenton and Fukuyama from last weekend.

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Conventional futurist wisdom suggests that if our atmosphere should completely go to pot—which it certainly appears to be doing—humans could still eek out an existence living in self-sustaining biospheres. This would hardly represent a desirable outcome, but hey, it would certainly beat extinction. Moreover, a successful biosphere would prove to be an important step in the direction of space colonization, terraforming and remedial ecology.

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George reads his must know essay, Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual.

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Last year, ex-marine Claudia Mitchell, who lost her left arm in a motorcycle accident when she was 24 years old, became the world’s second recipient of a “bionic arm” after she had a pioneering surgical procedure performed on her by surgeons at the   Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

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Der Gedanke der Aufklärung, dass wir uns eine bessere Zukunft erschaffen können, ist noch jung und hat noch immer überall auf der Welt zündende Wirkung.  Die Anfänge der Aufklärung liegen im 17. Jahrhundert. Seither haben ihre Ideen immer wieder Kämpfe um religiöse Toleranz, Freiheit der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Demokratie und persönliche Freiheit ausgelöst. Noch heute wird um Aufklärung und Fortschritt gerungen, und das Schlachtfeld hat mittlerweile sogar unsere Keimzellen und Neuronen erreicht.

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Lennard Davis is a professor of English and disability studies at Univ of Illinois at Chicago and the author of several books on the politics of literature and of disability, including Enforcing Normalcy and Bending over Backwards.

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The Sentient Developments blog of IEET’s George Dvorsky has been nominated for several Blogisattva awards, honoring “excellence in English-language Buddhist blogging during calendar year 2006.” There are 115 nominees in 21 categories. Sentient Developments is up for 4 awards including Best Blog of the Year.

Other awards that SentDev is up for include Best Achievement in Skilled Writing, Best Achievement Blogging on Matters Philosophical or Scientific, Best Achievement in Wonderful, Remarkable, Elegant Design.

The winners will be announced on February 15, 2007.

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Things are moving fast three weeks after the release of the Second Life client as open source code.

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Over the past month, I’ve become obsessed with reading about limb lengthening surgery.

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I’m currently reading Beyond Bioethics, the extensive report on proposed regulation of reproductive technologies, prepared by Francis Fukuyama and Franco Furger and published late last year. I lost patience on about page 64, when I reached its exposition of the moral principles on which it relies. Really, this is all nonsense.

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Mark Plus offers a timely reality check regarding the progress (or lack thereof) of longevity medicine and cryonics over the past few decades.  Those of us who are seriously committed to helping make healthy life extension a reality must not ever lose sight of the fact that we aren’t the first folks to approach the subject.  The linked essay by the recently-late Robert Anton Wilson contains quite a few statements that sound suspiciously like some of the more optimistic assertions being made about the state of longevity science today.

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IEET Treasurer Giulio Prisco reports on his public debate on transhumanism at the University of Lausanne, January 24, 2007, before an audience of 300.

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I sat down with my son recently to watch an old sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. This film is drenched in the 1950’s weltanschauung, but it has truly withstood the test of time. I was amazed at how relevant this movie remains to this day nearly 60 years after its release.

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An Ravelingien reports on the conference ‘Double standards. Towards an integration of evolutionary and neurological perspectives on human morality.’ (Ghent University, 21-22 Oct. 2006)

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Denise Caruso’s new column at the New York Times kicks off with an essay on patents in the world of biotechnology. Most of the piece looks at how to build an intellectual property regime for biotechnology that serves the interests of society, not just a handful of companies. She cites a troubling, if not surprising, statistic: more than 20% of the human genome has already been patented, mostly by corporate biotech.

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