What we call modern “civilization” is seven billion people coexisting—often grumpily—on a resource-shrinking planet. The future often seems dystopian: will we poison ourselves, blow each other up, starve pathetically, die of thirst, bake to extinction via solar radiation, be annihilated by epidemics, or simply slaughter ourselves door-to-door, like Rwandans or Bosnians, for imbecilic racial or ideological reasons?
By increasing the rational faculties of animals, and by giving them the tools to better manage themselves and their environment, they stand to gain everything that we have come to value as a species.
Intelligence is being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it—then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It’s about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place.
Designer psychologies, or customized cognitive processing modalities, describes the potential for future individuals to selectively alter the specific and unique ways in which they take in, analyze and perceive the world. Cognitive modalities are the psychological frameworks that allow for person-to-person variances in subjectivity, including such things as emotional responses, social engagement, aesthetics and prioritization. The day is coming when we’ll be able to decide for ourselves how it is exactly that we want to process our world.
A fundamental principle of bioethics requires the consent of a patient to any medical procedure performed upon them. A new patient will exist the moment a conscious mindclone arises in some academic’s laboratory or hacker’s garage. At that moment, ethical rules will be challenged, for the mindclone has not consented to the work being done on eir mind. Does this situation create a catch-22 ethical embargo against developing cyber-consciousness?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner‘s dead-tree forebear) opens with Deckard arguing with his wife about whether or not to alter her crummy attitude with the “mood organ.” She could, if she so desired, dial her mood so that she was happy and content.
1987 was the first year in which one billion people boarded airline flights. In that year the world’s population hit 5 billion, meaning approximately 20% of all people experienced a fantastic luxury not available to history’s wealthiest monarchs. By 2005 two billion people were boarding airliners each year, and the world’s population had grown to 6.5 billion. In the short span of years between 1987 and 2005, airline flight grew from being a right of 20% to a right of 31% of humanity, from barely a fifth to almost a third. Even assuming more frequent flights by the wealthier, this is startling evidence of the democratization of technology.
Teleportation, cloaks of invisibility, smell-o-vision, 3D printing, and even holograms, were all ideas first imagined in science fiction—and now are real products and technologies in various stages of development by scientists. While this is common in fields like experimental physics, it isn’t as often that cognitive neuroscience and applied psychology score insights from this fantasy genre.
Virtually all talk of cognitive enhancement focuses exclusively on the enhancement of individual intelligence. But what about enhancing group intelligence?
I enjoyed this book, and I recommend it highly. Though it contains much technical material, from neuroscience as well as philosophy, Harris makes it all accessible.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. David Eagleman has accepted an appointment as Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies for 2011.
It is natural to feel that software development will never get things right. We all feel frustrated by software that doesn’t work as it should. People in industry are constantly bemoaning the lateness and incompleteness of software projects. But the facts are better than they seem, and are improving rapidly.
What are the current unresolved issues in transhumanist thought? Which of these issues are peculiar to transhumanist philosophy and the transhumanist movement, and which are more actually general problems of Enlightenment thought? Which of these are simply inevitable differences of opinion among the more or less like-minded, and which need decisive resolution to avoid tragic errors of the past?
In the final stretch of this exciting conference on “Transforming Humanity” we start with an excellent overview of the enhancement debate by Ronald Lindsay the new director of the Center for Inquiry, a lawyer and bioethicist, and author of Future Bioethics.
After the exciting bath of left vitriol directed at enhancement and explicitly at my efforts to articulate a technoprogressive approach to enhancement, we turn to a friendly set of papers on neuroethics and biopolitics. (Live-blogging this weekend from the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. You can follow George Dvorsky’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments.)
We’re now in the first afternoon of the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Today George Dvorsky and I are live-blogging from the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. We’re in the Biomedical Research building with about fifty people in attendance. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Sexual images trigger chemical reactions in your brain, which in turn compel us to act in specific ways, or be drawn to certain things, or motivated to engage in particular behaviors.
Two-thirds of those responding to a recently concluded poll of IEET readers say that human morality is not fixed, that it can be improved “” and that we see it happening all the time.
Four Loko is in the news! For a caffeinated malt liquor drink that comes in an assortment of barely palatable flavors, it sure is generating a lot of controversy.
In science fiction, when humanity is faced with existential crises, we turn to great minds attached to great hearts. While we aren’t under alien attack or facing sentient machines, our world has its own share of problems. Human cognitive enhancement might just be the solution from which all other solutions are born; or maybe it brings too many risks of its own.
In the USA, the decades-long “war on drugs” has, according to most, been an abject failure. In Portugal, meanwhile, drug decriminalization has, according to some, been a resounding success. Is there a lesson to be learned?
This week saw the return of Caprica. In its world with technology not too far beyond our own, Caprica jumped right back into action with a premiere remarkably relevant to transhumanism. While Sister Clarice seeks to attract followers to her religion with an artificial heaven, Daniel Graystone wants to win back his company with software to remove the pain of a loved one’s death.
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