Its apoco-raining this weekend in San Francisco, proving that the transhumanists neither see the future clear enough to choose a nice weekend nor have magical evil powers over the natural world. But they do put on incredibly fascinating parties at wild warehouse-cum-commune spaces full of smart technophiles. We had to drag ourselves back in to the conference this morning so we wouldn’t miss Andrea Kuscewski, David Pearce, Ben Goertzel, Jamais Cascio, Ramez Naam and the others folks speaking today.
Will the future provide us with a genetically preprogrammed blissful paradise, or a global catastrophe? Will there be cessation of all suffering, or annihilation of all sentient life?
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How recursively self-improving organic robots will modify their own
source code and bootstrap our way to full-spectrum superintelligence.
The IEET is pleased to announce the appointment of Nikki Olson as an IEET Affiliate Scholar and veteran transhumanist thinker David Pearce as an IEET Fellow.
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“He that slayeth an ox is as he that slayeth a man” (Isaiah 66:3)
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To end the suffering caused by animal predators, should the “serial killers” be rendered extinct, or just “reprogrammed”?
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Suffocation induces a sense of extreme panic. It’s a comparatively rare experience in contemporary human life, although panic disorder, an anxiety disorder characterized by recurring severe panic attacks, is extremely unpleasant and quite common. Whatever its cause, the experience of suffocation is horrific. One’s lungs feel as though they will burst at any second. There is a loss of control of bodily functions. There is no psychological “coping mechanism”, just an all-consuming fear, as witnessed by the traumatic effects of the waterboarding torture practised by the CIA; the entangled piles of bodies of victims in the Nazi gas chambers frantically clawing over each other to gasp in the last traces of breathable air; and the death-agonies of millions of herbivores every day in the wild.
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And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the
calf and the young lion and the yearling together and a little child shall lead them.”
Isaiah 11:6
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Reality is big. So our optimism must be confined to sentient beings in our forward light-cone. But I tentatively predict that the last experience below “hedonic zero” will be a precisely dateable event several hundred years hence. Here are five grounds for cautious optimism:
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