Doug talks to KadmusArts about the relationship between online commerce and activity with the performing arts, including what his “screenagers” (kids who have never known a world without video games and the Internet) might be producing on stage in the years to come.

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Journalist Quinn Norton recently gave a talk at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress which took place in Berlin during the first week of January 2007. Her presentation was titled, “Body hacking - Functional body modification. You are the platform.”

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(Opened Jan 15, 2007; closed Jan 20, 2007) Classic bimodal result.

New poll (closes 2007-01-27): Should doctors in your country be imprisoned for telling pregnant women the sex of their fetus?

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The Swiss company Novartis is taking the Indian government to court over its legislation pertaining to generic drugs. Novartis wants to make it more difficult for Indian companies to produce generic drugs. MSF/Doctors without Borders is collecting signatures under a petition calling on Novartis to drop the case. The medical charity points out that ‘India is the pharmacy for the developing world.’

Further information about the background to the MSF campaign can be found here.

The petition is available here.

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The U. S. government has long understood that its military, hyperpowerful as it is, is woefully inadequate for present and future conflicts. Hence, in recent years, the U. S. Department of Defense has sought a radical transformation of its armed forces, with the overall aim of having an agile and technology-driven army that is better prepared for multiple, simultaneous wars than is the cumbersome leviathan of today.

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(The spiritual meta-site Beliefnet solicited this response to Nigel Cameron‘s assertions that nano-medical human enhancement would diminish our humanity. Thanks to Beliefnet for looking for both sides of the issues.)

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In reading various discussions in various places recently, it has become clear that there is (as I feared) a bit of, shall we say, animosity between something that calls itself “bioethics” and something that calls itself “disability rights”.  I am quite dismayed to see this, because I’ve been following a lot of the topics associated with these concepts and it did not really occur to me that there could be any contradiction or apparent rivalry between them.

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Hans Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, debunks a few myths about the “developing” world. (Recorded at TedTalks February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:35)

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Ever wonder what jobs will be like 40 years from now? Roma Luciw takes a stab at predicting future vocations in her article, Job prospects charting new territory.

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This past Sunday January 14 I interviewed Michael Anissimov, the fund raising director for the Lifeboat Foundation, a member of the World Transhumanist Association, and a founding director of the Immortality Institute. Michael is also a prolific blogger at Accelerating Future who writes and speaks about such topics as existential risks, the promise and peril of advanced AI, nanotechnology and transhumanism. In this epsidoe, I ask Michael about the Lifeboat Foundation, various risks facing the human species and some potential solutions.

Tags: michael anissimov, existential risks, lifeboat foundation, accelerating future, immortality institute, podcast, transhumanism.

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Cognitive enhancement aims at amplifying or extending the abilities of the mind through internal or external hardware or software. Up until recently only internal software in the form of trained efficient mental algorithms and the general enhancing effects of paperbased information management was available. As cognitive neuroscience has advanced the range of potential internal enhancement treatments have increased3, as well as the availability and power of external hardware/software support.

Download the PDF

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BBC Radio 4’s “Start the Week”, with Andrew Marr. Monday, January 15th, 2007.  One of the guests (starts at 31mins) is Bryan Appleyard, discussing his new book How to Live Forever - or Die Trying”>How to Live Forever - or Die Trying.

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(An edited version of this essay was published in the 50th anniversary issue of New Scientist magazine in December)

The Enlightenment idea that we can build a better future for ourselves is still young, and still lighting fires around the world. As Enlightenment ideas have spread since the seventeenth century they have ignited struggles for religious tolerance, freedom of scientific enquiry, democratic government and individual liberty. The battle for the Enlightenment, for progress itself, is still being fought, and now the battlefront has reached our gametes and neurons.

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In my recent series of posts in which I’ve attacked the idea that morality is objective, I have not sought to deny that morality of some kind is inevitable for human societies. I think it is . I also think that much of its actual content is inevitable for us ... i.e., for human beings or any species much like us. In a sense, then, we might want to say that some of the basic content of morality is objectively justified, after all, because we would not want to do without it.

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News from the IEET, and an essay on the Enlightenment roots of biofuturism, reflecting on essays by Denis Diderot, and the policy questions facing human enhancement.

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I have long been fascinated by old magazine articles and advertisements that describe the technology of the times or make speculations about the future.  As a teenager, I would spend hours hunting in my great-grandmother’s basement amidst musty boxes for the publications containing these treasures.

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Blog posts can be strange and unpredictable things. There are times when I pour a ton of energy and creativity into a post only to have it largely ignored. Other times I quickly and haphazardly put something together and it ends up attracting thousands of hits. Such was the case with my recent post, Must-know terms for today’s intelligentsia.

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I appreciate the work of the radical advocates for the “disabled” at Not Dead Yet, and I have learned quite a bit about morphological and lifeway diversity from their resources. (If you want to know the reasons why I scare-quote the term “disabled,” you can read my piece, Differently Enabled.)  I am appalled when such perspectives get dismissed as always-only “disability extremism” or what have you by their opponents, even when I disagree myself with the views being trivialized in this way.

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Fiction often reflects reality and nowhere is this more true than in Star Trek. The franchise is one giant phantasmagoric projection of human hopes and longings. It’s also a glimpse into a our societal norms and commonly held inhibitions, fears and inconsistencies.

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While I do firmly believe that existence is, in fact, pretty wonderful, I realize it is not wonderful for everyone, everywhere, all the time. This is obvious to anyone who so much as picks up a newspaper or walks out their front door.  And while some people may indeed be apathetic and complacent or defeatist about it, this is not true of everyone.  Hence, there are a lot of charitable and humanitarian groups in the world making a tremendous effort to improve living conditions for people all over the world.

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Its been a crazy ten days here at the IEET as our site traffic soared after the Ashley X story broke loose.

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1. A brief note about meeting with fellow life-extensionists and Methuselah Foundation folks last Saturday.

2. A discussion of personhood, and my interpretation of the idea that not all persons are human, and not all humans are persons. This particular area of discussion, at least for me, illustrates the lack of an Official Transhumanist Party Line—I am not as much of a utilitarian ethicist as some are (as in, I am less comfortable with euthanasia than some might be), and that’s okay, because we all have different minds and different perspectives when it comes to certain issues.

I think people need to keep asking the question, “How do you KNOW this person isn’t really self-aware?”—the ability to ask that question will definitely be relevant when looking to recognize all kinds of potential minds. It is sometimes difficult to even ask this question without getting weirdly simplistic responses from people, which I find puzzling. Self-awareness requires a brain (at least in humans) that is producing some kind of electrical activity and that hasn’t necrotized or been put through a blender, but beyond that, I don’t know that neuroscience has been able to really zero in on the “self-awareness module” quite yet.

I am not a fan of “ideologies” in general—rather, I prefer to analyze situations on a more individual basis, which results in my principles not necessarily being easy to predict if you only know one or two of my opinions.

I read something earlier this week that really resonated with me in this regard—basically, the idea that by subscribing too strongly to a pre-packaged ideology, you can actually cut yourself off from reality in some respects. Ideas are great, but ideologies too frequently fall into the category of “cognitive constraint”. And my brain doesn’t really seem wired for that kind of thing anyway; philosophy is my salad bar, not my TV dinner.

3. Some comments on the convergence between disability rights and ideas like cryonics and life extension in general—all these factors concern vulnerable populations, after all.

4. How cryonics might affect critical care decisions

5. Reading of an older entry that I think at least partially answers the question, “What’s so great about life, anyway?” in my case.

Also, I recently started a cafepress store. I’m just sharing this in case anyone is interested—I just did it for fun and am not making any money off it, but I plan to create some additional designs in the future that some of the readership here might like. Though I realize that “natural” is not synonymous with “good”, I do agree with the sentiment that “Technology is Natural”—so I put it on a t-shirt.

Finally, below is my Second Life avatar as of last night; I want those wings!

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IHEU- Appignani Humanist Center for Bioethics and
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

present

Human Rights for the 21st Century:
Rights of the Person to Technological Self-Determination

New York City
May 11-13, 2007

Cocktail Reception: Friday May 11, 6:00 – 9:00 pm (Location: TBD)

Conference: Saturday May 12 and Sunday May 13, 9:00 am – 3:45 pm

Location: 777 UN Plaza, 2nd Floor, New York City, NY 10017

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Damn, that iPhone is pretty.

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Jamais Cascio breaks down the ubiquitous cheeseburger to decode its environmental impacts, as well as the impact of America’s 3-burger-per-week habit on TreeHugger Radio.  Listen to the extended version.

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J. and George chat about the Ashley X case, and some of its implications from a transhumanist perspective.

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Ramez Naam and James Hughes are in this series, along with Steve Mann, Bill McKibben, Michael Chorost, and some other folks. Watch the initial episode:

Quicktime  -  Windows Media  -  Clips on Youtube

22nd Century: “World Wide Mind”  (Wed, Jan 17, 2007, 8pm EST) 22nd Century is an innovative new PBS series about technological advances taking place today that within our lifetimes will significantly change the way humans live and interact. Many scientists and futurists believe we are on the verge of a technological explosion so profound that life will become unrecognizable. In the next 100 years, we may experience as much technological change as has occurred over the course of human history. After all, during the past century we went from horse-drawn buggies to supersonic aircraft, and by most estimates the pace of change is accelerating.

Airing Wednesday, January 17, 2007, at 8:00 p.m. EST, this premier episode explores the concept of the “World Wide Mind,” an intriguing theory that posits that in the future miniature computer brain implants will allow our brains to be connected to other brains much the same way today’s computers are linked together via the World Wide Web. Science fantasy or futuristic nightmare?

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The Ashley Treatment, why the disabled will inherit the earth and whether there can be awareness in the vegetative state.

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Every day, elderly people die as a result of phenomena in their bodies that you rarely, if ever, see in younger people (and that are interpreted as definitive signs of disease when they are).

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Douglas Rushkoff talks to Brian Lehrer on WNYC at his book Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out (Collins Business, 2005), and about his gentrified Brooklyn living situation after getting mugged while taking out the trash.

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