"Transhumanism is more than just an abstract belief that we are about to transcend our biological limitations by means of technology; it is also an attempt to re-evaluate the entire human predicament as traditionally conceived." Nick Bostrom, "What is Transhumanism" (1998)
IEET Fellow Doug Rushkoff is posting brief videos and MP3s encapsulating key concepts from his Life Inc for de-corporatizing our lives, abandoning the speculative economy, and rebuilding both commerce and community from the bottom up.
(IEET intern Edward Miller is guest blogging at Sentient Developments this month.) There is a long list of crises that we need to face and I won’t waste time boring you by listing them. As our brightest minds admit they were wrong, I hope that I can say, without qualification, that big changes in our thinking are required. Unfortunately, we haven’t made that “Change” even though we now have some new faces in power, and a bunch of old faces out of business or in prison.
Imagine these hypothetical situations; you are injured and lying on the battlefield or are involved in a serious automobile accident and require a blood transfusion. What are the medical treatment options in these scenarios?
Space travel is very cheap. There’s no friction in the vacuum of space, so once you get something to move, it just keeps moving without spending any energy. The problem lies in getting things away from the gravity well of a planet.
Transhumanism’s niche (some would say “cult”) status causes those of us who support it to answer a lot of the same questions over and over. Those questions were asked in droves on Marginal Revolutionin response to my three-landmarks of transhumanism effort. I’m going to do my best to answer them here. Cowen himself actually asked one I hadn’t heard before, so I’m going to let that one ruminate the longest. Let’s start with the classic: aging.
[Contains spoilers] True Blood is a fascinating HBO series about vampires living with humans, now in its second season. It follows Sookie Stackhouse, a human that has fallen in love with the vampire Bill Compton. While the vampires’ fight for marriage rights and the intense religious opposition reflects the gay rights struggle, True Blood’s depiction of an ageless species with several enhanced powers also provides an exploration of how society might deal with transhumans, and perhaps more importantly how society views such possibilities.
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