Does Transhumanism, as a social movement, have the power to transform human society? Is technology shaping us or we it?

Readers of this blog know that I’ve started to develop a bit of a fascination with psychopathy. It all got started after attending the Moral Brain Moral Brain conference at NYU last April. The more I look into this subject, the more I understand why so many neuroscientists are making such a big fuss about it.

Imagine going to the grocery store in 25 years in your sleek new auto-drive car: You hop in, voice the destination and off you go. The quiet, electric-powered vehicle drops you off at the supermarket entrance, then auto-parks itself while you shop. As you exit the store, your car drives to the entrance, picks you up and returns home. You marvel at this incredible car that can also run errands without you on board.

The currents of the internet work in odd ways; this past week the theme seems to be robot sex. Since I have had it on the brain, I figure I will contribute to the trendiness and throw my own 2c in.

Immaculate doll-face, globulous breasts, teeny waist, slender limbs, vacant ice-blue eyes, long platinum hair - Valeria Lukyanova of Odessa, Ukraine, has re-designed her physical form to resemble Barbie, the plastic Mattel toy. Is the result “beautiful”? Critics screech that she’s “creepy” and “lifeless” with an “uncanny valley” absence of sexuality, but… let’s not kid ourselves here.

The Brain Preservation Foundation is an interesting enterprise co-developed by John Smart (Acceleration Studies Foundation) that’s offering a prize for researchers who manage to preserve animal brains in ways that would be suitable for humans and that keep intact the web of physical connections - or the connectome - that some believe to contain all of the information in both memory and thoughts. Brain preservation aims at locking in these connections against post-mortem decay.

In Western cultures, nature is a cosmological, primal ordering force and a terrestrial condition that exists in the absence of human beings. Both meanings are freely implied in everyday conversation. We distinguish ourselves from the natural world by manipulating our environment through technology. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly proposes that technology behaves as a form of meta-nature, which has greater potential for cultural change than the evolutionary powers of the organic world alone.

paolo scaruffi is the author of The Nature of Consciousness: The Structure of Life and the Meaning of Matter, and A Brief History of Knowledge.

Will “the self” survive because it can provide people with a greater sense of happiness? Or is it - perhaps along with the constructs “Free Will” and “Determinism” - doomed to the dustbin of history? Should cyborgs, avatars, and a rewired human brain be developed with a stronger or weaker sense of self? An interview with Dr. Garret Merriam, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern Indiana.

34.8% of IEET poll responders selected “Cryonics and Resurrection” in a recent survey that inquired about life-after-death preferences. 27.7% selected, instead, the category, “Uploaded in a Non-Biological Medium,” and 24.1% chose “Either is Fine.”

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From the looks of things, it appears to be conservative journalists.

Your relationship is on the rocks. Begrudgingly, you and your significant other visit a marriage counselor in the hopes that there’s still something left to salvage in your relationship. You both spill your guts and admit that the love is gone. The counselor listens attentively, nodding her head every now and then in complete understanding. At the end of the session she offers the two of you some practical words of advice and sees you on your way. Oh, but before you leave she fills out a prescription for the two of you. Your marriage, it would seem, has been placed on meds.

Today I want to talk about three broad categories: Synthetic or engineered medical research or treatments, biological (DNA) research and procedures, and various transplants that have been performed or are being researched.

Transhumanism is a big, complicated, sprawling idea. The central concept – that humans can be made better with technology – touches on a lot of hopes and fears about the future of humanity. Though I’m always going on about how great human enhancement could be, I’ve got my fair share of fears myself. But my fears are probably way different than many of your fears. But how in the world can we represent those concerns? As it turns out, I’ve found a pretty good set of archetypes that represent our hopes and fears: Marvel Comic’s Avengers.

As we trek into the future, with electronic systems and robots assuming human jobs - will politicians, judges and police one day see their duties taken over by automation?

Did you hear?  There’s now cold, hard research confirming what the Dilbert set have long known: meetings make you stupid. What’s more, being ranked or assigned a status within a group can have a particularly pernicious effect on our grey matter.  A new study—led by a team of researchers at California Institute of Technology with four other institutions—found that IQs can drop precipitously in group settings. 

How recursively self-improving organic robots will modify their own 
source code and bootstrap our way to full-spectrum superintelligence.

Recently, a Sri Lankan woman was arrested by Saudi authorities for witchcraft.  A man accused this woman of casting a spell on a 13 year old girl during a family shopping trip. He complained to the police that the girl ‘started acting in an abnormal way’ after a close contact with the woman in a shopping mall in the port city of Jeddah. According to news reports, the accused woman is currently in police custody in Saudi Arabia. If pressure is not brought on Saudi authorities to spare the life of this ‘innocent’ woman, she may be executed by beheading any moment from now.

There is more and more, and often positive, coverage of mind uploading and cybernetic immortality in the press, and it appears that leaving biology behind and becoming cyber angels is an idea whose time has come.

Do you want to live forever?  Many people - perhaps the majority - Do Not. People who want to die on the current schedule, like sheep led to slaughter at culling time, offer several reasons for their capitulation. One reason is their fear that Eternal Life Might Be Boring. These “Deathists” worry that existence without Abysmal Oblivion lurking ahead, terrifying us into alertness… would render us comatose with ennui.

TopTenz.net selected IEET as #1 non-profit in the category, “Straight Outta Science Fiction.” The website touts IEET as the best organization to fund if you want to “fight Terminators by making yourself into an immortal cyborg…”  NPOs trailing IEET include the Mormon Transhumanist Association (#5), Humanity+ (#6), and the Singularity Institute (#8).

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Obayashi Corp has announced it will construct a space elevator capable of shuttling passengers 36,000 kilometers above the Earth by 2050.

All buildings today have something in common: They are made using Victorian technologies. This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers. All this effort results in an inert object, which means there is a one–way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. This is not sustainable.

The claim that robots are taking our jobs has become so commonplace of late that it’s a bit of a cliché. Nonetheless, it has a strong element of truth to it. Not only are machines taking “blue collar” factory jobs—a process that’s been underway for years, and no longer much of a surprise except when a company like Foxconn announces it’s going to bring in a million robots (which are less likely to commit suicide, apparently)—but now mechanized/digital systems are quickly working their way up the employment value chain.

Since the arrival of the internet innumerable lists have been made of the greatest science fiction films of all time, and reading them has provided a pretty good indication of how diverse and multi-faceted the genre is. As countdowns like these will always be essentially personal and subjective assessments on form, theme, cinematic style and general aesthetic appreciation, it’s an almost foregone conclusion that drawing up such lists entails waiting for the wave of criticism, scorn, refutations, approval and ambivalence which inevitably follow. Well I happily cry ‘bring it on!’

Answer: probably not; it seems destined for obsolescence

Why doesn’t everyone get excited about transhumanism? Why aren’t all people fascinated by augmented and virtual reality, radical life-extension, brain-uploading, and The Singularity? This essay is the first in a series of articles, entitled “The Casual Transhuman” - it will examine h+ topics from the layman’s perspective and give suggestions on how transhumanists can spread their ideas without looking like crackpots to the world-at-large.

There’s an ongoing debate among neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and even philosophers as to whether or not we could ever construct or reverse engineer the human brain. Some suggest it’s not possible, others argue about the best way to do it, and still others have already begun working on it.

Are humans becoming obsolete in the workforce? Many experts believe the answer is yes. The amazing win for IBM’s Watson computer over humans on the quiz show Jeopardy, proved that automated systems are getting closer to reaching human intelligence levels.

How many times have parents worried that something deeply wrong was going on in their child’s school, but didn’t have the intel to know for sure? Last week’s story of a father who slipped an audio recorder into the pocket of his son, then posted excerpts of the recordings of the classroom on YouTube, has – for better or for worse – given parents everywhere a new strategy for finding out exactly what is happening at their child’s school.