A documentary on transhumanism was shown on Italian television on November 15th, titled Nascita del super-uomo (Birth of the Superhuman). It was produced by Rai TV.

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A documentary on transhumanism was shown on Italian television on November 15th, titled Nascita del super-uomo (Birth of the Superhuman). It was produced by Rai TV.

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Well, that didn’t take long.

Back in September, I pointed to news that the sleeping drug zolpidem (sold in the US as Ambien) could awaken patients in persistent vegetative states about 2/3s of the time; that post led to ensuing discussions of the ethical and legal issues that could emerge from this discovery (see here and here). The first of what may end up being many legal battles over the use or non-use of this treatment has now taken place in the UK. Perhaps surprisingly, the position taken by the family of the patient was to reject the use of zolpidem, and to allow their relative—who had suffered serious brain trauma—to die in peace. The doctors, conversely, wanted to try the drug, and the high court agreed with the doctors.

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Executive Director James Hughes was interviewed for an article in the McGill Daily on the use of neurochemicals to enhance marital bonding and fidelity.

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Two related quotes from previous Open the Future posts:

When you are able to manipulate atoms as easily as you do bits, the rules of the bit world apply.

The rules we come up with to grapple with virtual objects of real value will haunt us for decades to come, if we’re not careful.

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The Center for Inquiry, affiliated with the Council for Secular Humanism, has organized this petition in defense of secular and scientific public policy.

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In my current article in JME, some of which has previously appeared on the Betterhumans website, I examine the theory of background conditions - the idea that all human cultures assume the existence of basic conditions in the background of human life that are beyond our choice, though they form the context for our choices.

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Vertigo has finally seen the light. No, not that light, but the obvious power of the Internet to share and, ultimately, promote comics work.

So they’ve created a page where users can download complete versions of the first issues (mostly sold out) of the latest and greatest comics on their roster.

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The Terasem Foundation, founded by IEET Advisor Martine Rothblatt, has published its latest edition of The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness. An abbreviated version of George Dvorsky’s animal uplift paper, published as the IEET white paper “All Together Now,” is featured in this edition.

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Since 1956 New Scientist has been keeping its readers up to date with the latest science and technology news from around the world. In this week’s 50th anniversary issue, available as a digital download, New Scientist decided to tackle eight of the deepest challenges faced by science - from reality and consciousness, to free will and death, in The Big Questions special features, with “the help of some of the leading lights in science.” In this essay James Hughes addresses What Comes After Homo sapiens?

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The following is the text of the talk I gave this morning at the International Association for Public Participation conference in Montreal, Canada. Where useful or necessary, I’ve added the relevant slide images.

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In my travels around the country and around the world, you’d be surprised how many people ask, “Is there such a thing as irresponsible nanotechnology?”

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One of the cases I make in my animal uplift paper, “All Together Now,” is that biological uplift is related to the phenomenon of cultural uplift. I use the example of the colonization of the Americas to show how technologically disparate cultures have fared during these types of interactions. I basically argue that the resultant benefits of technological and social advancements have far outweighed the negative aspects of culture clashes.

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Fresco is the visionary behind the post-technocratic utopianism of the Venus Project. He is profiled in a new film Future by Design. Also an essay by Jamais Cascio on the ethical responsibilities of futurists, and a note from Dr. J. on the IEET and prospects for technoprogressivism.
Watch the Future by Design Trailer here

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Now that the Hindenburg that is the Republican party is quickly collapsing, a number of Americans are hopeful that their troops can be recalled from Iraq.

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KQED Forum host Dave Iverson talks with IEET Fellow Douglas Rushkoff about how and why businesses should return to encouraging internal innovation.

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Will our grandchildren be robotic?

Before a live studio audience at BBC’s Freethinking Festival IEET chair Nick Bostrom defended transhumanism and human enhancement in dialogue with Adam Montandon from the HMC MediaLab in Plymouth, Dr Fiona Coyle, and philosopher Dylan Evans.
You can also listen online until November 12. In the end the studio audience votes a majority for transhumanism.

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Bioethicists who work in health care are frequently called upon to make difficult decisions in often less than desirable situations. Thankfully, the steady introduction of new technologies provide ethicists, health practitioners and families with a variety of options. The trick these days is to choose the most desirable course of action. But the fact that most new technologies and the manner in which they are applied often appear shocking and radical at the outset makes ethical decisions even more difficult.

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I don’t mean just the basics of being an ethical human being, or even the particular ethical guidelines one might see for any kind of professional—disclosure of conflicts of interest, for example, or honesty in transactions. I mean the ethical conventions that would be essentially unique to futurists. What kinds of rules should apply to those of us who make a living (or a life’s goal) out of thinking about what may come?

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IEET intern An Ravelingingien completed and defended her doctoral dissertation in June.

Download An’s dissertation here.

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Wright is the author of New Pilgrim Chronicles, a travelogue and speculative fiction about the Free State Project, in which libertarians are moving to New Hampshire to influence state policy. Wright talks about religion, the peace movement, local self-reliance and transhumanism.

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Topics include information-processing in general, bioinformatics, critical thinking, “mining” useful information from “weird” sources (something I would like to do a whole episode on at some point since I didn’t even scratch the surface here of what I really mean by that), and other assorted bits of rambling. I also discuss the difference between empathy and reciprocity, something that the media tends to be very lax in distinguishing properly. This confusion between empathy and reciprocity often results in potentially dangerous misconceptions, such as people thinking that autism somehow has something to do with sociopathy (it doesn’t).

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There is a principle known as procreative beneficence, which states that parents are somehow obliged to select, of all potential children, those most likely to lead the best lives based on available and relevant information.  This philosophy has been argued for in some transhumanist dialogues, however, I see it as somewhat short-sighted and in tremendous need of better explanation and refinement.  Procreative beneficence, if it is applied at all, ought to be restricted to cases in which there is a clear and obvious danger to the viability of the child or the mother.

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Abstract: A unifying framework for the description and analysis of focused cognitive processes is presented, based on the system-theoretic notions of forward and backward synthesis.  Forward synthesis iteratively creates combinations, seeded from an initial focus-set of mental items; backward synthesis takes a set of mental items and tries to create them iteratively via forward-synthesis.  The utility of a dynamic involving alternating forward and backward synthesis is discussed.  The phenomenal self and the shifting focus of attention, two critical aspects of cognitive systems, are hypothesized to emerge as strange attractors of this alternating dynamic.  In a companion paper, this framework is used to provide a systematic typology for the various cognitive agents in the Novamente AI system, including probabilistic inference, evolutionary learning, attention allocation, credit assignment, concept creation and others. 

(Link)

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Here’s a question to muse about while awaiting the results of Tuesday’s election in the US: what happens after the United States is no longer the dominant global power

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Sir Martin Rees, Royal Society professor of astronomy at Cambridge University, agrees that it is now possible to conceive of computers so powerful that future societies may use them to build an entire virtual universe. In fact, like Nick Bostrom (who penned the first academic treatise on the subject), Rees wonders if we ourselves aren’t the inhabitants of such a simulation.

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(The full version of this article was published in volume 17 issue 1 of The Journal of Evolution and Technology. A different version entitled “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity” was published in International Sociology, 2007, 22: 161-164.)

Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton’s work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton’s main intellectual activity.

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Back in my hippie days, I enjoyed the music and the message of a song called “Power,” written and performed by John Hall, former lead singer of the group Orleans.

Just give me the warm power of the sun

Give me the steady flow of a waterfall

Give me the spirit of living things as they return to clay

Just give me the restless power of the wind

Give me the comforting glow of a wood fire

But won’t you take all your atomic poison power away

That was an anti-nuke anthem and a lovely tune. Looking back, though, this song reveals some of the naivete of the time. Sure, it feels good to be against ‘atomic poison power’, but take a look at the alternatives…

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If you want to understand how something works you should model it the best way you can.

This is precisely what IBM and the Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) are trying to do with the brain.

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Forrest Ackerman’s 1964 essay on the film history and future of robots. A reading of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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