Universal mind uploading, or universal uploading for short, is the concept, by no means original to me, that the technology of mind uploading will eventually become universally adopted by all who can afford it, similar to the adoption of modern agriculture, hygiene, or living in houses.
The Order of Cosmic Engineers are a group of transhumanists who are focused on “turning this universe into a ‘magical’ realm.” They focus on building their activity in online virtual reality worlds. They include IEET Board member Giulio Prisco and IEET advisor Martine Rothblatt. They have recently issued the “YES! to Transhumanism” statement which is a call to arms for defense of radical transhumanism against pressures to downplay the more challenging and futuristic aspects of the transhumanist perspective.
No, I’m not talking about Heat Death or another Ice Age. I’m talking about what could happen if mind uploading becomes universally or near-universally adopted and every mind is accelerated by a factor of several million or billion. Such an outcome seems inevitable if mind uploading is actually possible.
Would-be censors often justify themselves by claiming that certain kinds of material are harmful to children, and so must be kept out of public sight. It’s worth thinking about this before we simply accept it at face value.
Virtual Reality (VR) has advanced to incredible heights. For those who haven’t kept up with the gaming scene, the newest game renowned for impressive graphics is Fallout 3. Of course, graphics aren’t all that matters to gamers, which is why another one of the hottest games on the block right now is Spore, which looks very cartoonish.
The Future of Humanity Institute, founded and run by IEET founder and chair Nick Bostrom, has just published a roadmap of the scientific research and technological innovations required to eventually completely model the human brain in software.
The Metaverse Roadmap Overview, an exploration of imminent 3D technologies, posited a number of different scenarios of what a future “metaverse” could look like. The four scenarios—augmented reality, life-logging, virtual worlds, and mirror worlds—each offered a different manifestation of an immersive 3D world. Of the four, I suspect that augmented reality is most likely to be widespread soon; moreover, when it hits, it’s going to have a surprisingly big impact. Not just in terms of “making the invisible visible”—showing us flows and information that we otherwise wouldn’t recognize—but also in terms of the opposite: making the visible invisible.
The fourth of the six articles in the special anti-transhumanism issue of The Global Spiral (June 2008) is “Wrestling with Transhumanism” by well-known critic Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor of English and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
is a peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and edited by IEET Fellow Dr. Russell Blackford. The first two articles of Volume 17 have been published.
When I was twelve my Dad gave me a subscription to The Futurist. Mainstream futurology kind of paled for me next to the science fiction I was reading, but at least I knew early on that there were people trying to anticipate and prepare for a radically different future. Imagine my surprise thirty five years later, after a decade of bio-futurist work, to discover that in 1974, one year after I started reading The Futurist, a program for junior futurists was started which today includes more than 250,000 kids in grades 4-12 worldwide.
I have been reading posts in the blogosphere about the new system for integrated voice in Second Life. As I thought, comments are split in two main camps: those who think the new option is a good thing, and those who are afraid that it will change the nature of Second Life as they know it.
After months of work, the Metaverse Roadmap Overview is now available for download; get it here as a PDF. Written by Jerry Paffendorf, John Smart and me, the Overview is the end-result of the first Metaverse Roadmap project meeting, in May of 2006. It’s not simply a summary of the meeting, however—rather, it’s the first attempt to synthesize current and emerging social, economic and technological trends around virtual worlds, immersive networks, and ubiquitous information.
• Sim Eh?: Canada: The New World (aka, HistoriCanada) is exactly the kind of simulation-history mashup I’ve wanted to see for awhile. Sponsored by Canada’s National History Society and the Historica Society, HistoriCanada uses the Civilization III (with Conquest expansion) engine to play out the 16th-17th Century competition between the French, English, Ojibwe, Huron, Mohawk, Algonquin, Montagnais, Mi’kmaq, and Abenaki for the control of the Canadian territory.
On March 5th I was invited to discuss transhumanism with Dr. Brent Waters of Garrett Theological Seminary and the students and faculty of the East Texas Baptist University. I’d like to thank the very kind hospitality of ETBU. These are an edited version of the short prepared remarks from that morning (view video here) in which Dr. Waters and I were asked to address whether it was important to have a body to be human.
Second Life, the immensely popular 3-dimensional virtual world, is really starting to take on a life of its own. There are things going on in there that have undoubtedly gone beyond the wildest expectations of its developers.
The latest issue to grab my attention is the phenomenon of in-world terrorism and the rise of self-professed freedom fighters. These folks aren’t your run-of-the-mill hackers or griefers looking to cause mischief. Rather, these are ‘activists’ who are working subversively within Second Life (SL) to achieve political ends.
I’ve written about potential inhibitors to consciousness uploading in the past, but I believe I’ve come up with another possible problem for those wishing to live a purely digital life.
In addition to the IEET networks we’re building on LinkedIn and XING, some of us in the IEET have been exploring the social networking sites of Orkut and Facebook for the last couple of years. For instance there are the Radical Cyborgs groups on Orkut and Tribe.net that spun off of the Cyborg Democracy blog, the Technoliberation site and Technoliberation list.
Now on Facebook one of our interns Ben Hyink has started the Society for the Cyborg Revolution, “founded upon the premise that all forms of personhood, or beings with self- awareness, including humans, upgraded animals, cyborgs, intelligent robots, and post-humans, have a fundamental, democratic right to govern their own bodies. We advocate the right of all beings to have access to cognitive and physical enhancement, life-extension technologies and similar upgrades. Furthermore, we support the democratic use of stem-cell research, bio-technology, nano-technology and other promising lines of research to improve the quality of life for all.”
These aren’t IEET projects, and they are more playful than the staid thinktankery we’re pursuing at the IEET, but some of us are linked up through these groups and if you think they are fun I’d encourage you to add yourself.
There’s a story I’ve seen about a philosopher who bet an engineer that he could make a robot that the engineer couldn’t destroy. What the philosopher produced was a tiny little thing, covered in fur, that would squeak when touched—and when threatened, would roll onto its back and look at the attacker with its big, glistening eyes. When the engineer lifted his hammer to smash the robot, he found that he couldn’t. He paid the wager.
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