The monoculture of machine-inspired innovation means that we have effectively been building our cities for
machines, not humans.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

In a recent IEET poll, 50% of responders claimed that if they had the ability to function optimally without sleep, they would abandon repose altogether.

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The demand is rising for enhancement technologies. A recent article at Forbes argues the market is ripe for a means of cognitive augmentation, hypothesizing “IQ” as the next trillion dollar business. And culturally, more are becoming comfortable with the idea of using technology to improve their mood, physiological well-being, creativity, and performance.

University of Texas at Dallas researchers have designed an imager chip that could one day turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.

IEET Managing Director Hank Pellissier was notified that he will be soon be given a $3,000 grant from Terasem Movement, Inc. for an “immortality project.” Volunteers Needed!

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Traditional-Religious Transhumanists like “Pastor” Alex McGilvery and Lincoln Cannon have articulated their views extensively at IEET in recent months, in essays followed by contentious debates. McGilvery and Cannon believe there’s easy compatibility between their creeds and H+. I welcome them, happily, because I want H+ to be a “Big Tent” with acceptance for everybody. That said, I fervently disagree with their theistic opinions. Wildly, totally, absolutely, passionately, face-squinched-up-in-an-angry-scowl Disagree.

Archaeologists recently found a 2,700-year-old pot stash, so we know humans have been smoking weed for thousands of years. But it was only about 20 years ago that neuroscientists began to understand how it affects our brains.

Although many today might find the idea of romance with a machine repulsive, experts predict that as the technology advances and robots become more human-like, we will view our silicon creations in a much friendlier light.

What if your child’s school explained that in addition to offering classes on a wide range of academic topics designed to support your child’s intellectual development, they also promoted an enrichment activity which involved, among other things, banging your child’s head against a wall? Would you turn tail and run the other direction? 

IEET Director and Board Member George Dvorsky is offering an online four-week seminar on transhumanism at The Center for Free Inquiry, teaching alongside John Shook, CFI director of education and AHA education coordinator. The course will run from May 1 to May 31.

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While taking the train from Hong Kong to Shenzhen last night, I started chatting with Ruiting Lian about seasteading, and before long I came up with what may possibly be the wackiest workable business model ever: a seastead focused on creating and experimenting with psychedelics, with a dual business model of psychedelic tourism, and patenting of newly discovered psychedelic-related psychotherapeutics.

Novel techniques in 3D printing technology simplify the production of drugs, enabling home design and synthesis of pharmaceuticals.

Not all religions are created equal. In past articles I have argued that religion can be a powerful force for the transformation of humans, both individually and collectively. This is not to say that religion is necessarily and always a tool for the improvement of the human species. Religion in many times and places has been anything but helpful. For example; the Roman Catholic Church in the medieval period deliberately suppressed new knowledge, oddly enough, in favour of pagan Greek philosophers. 

The potentially dangerous activities of a new local church in the Cross River-Akwa Ibom states axis of the country should be of concern to all people of conscience in Nigeria and beyond. This church, which habitually starts the themes of its crusade with “My Father! My Father!!...” appears to be on a fast track to causing a new wave of witchcraft-related abuse, torture and killings in the region.

News that some scientists were recommending that sugar be treated like a controlled substance had my two children jumping off the walls.

In this article, I give a real-life case study (in which I was an attorney of record) where human machine mergers bring up several legal and ethical issues, including disability rights. I review some of the literature on this and discuss different practical ways practicing attorneys may approach the issues. The names have been changed to protect the privacy of the parties.

I am currently having fun building my very own morality profile…

Rape has been violating women (and occasionally men) since the dawn of humanity. Even before that, evolutionarily. Our Great Ape relations – chimpanzees and gorillas - are rapists, and approximately 33%-50% of orangutans are the result of rape. Gang rape, war rape, prison rape, date rape, serial rape, spousal rape, incestuous rape… hundreds of millions of people have been terrified, humiliated, injured and scarred. Rape has to be halted, but how?

Biological anthropology professor at Rutgers University, Helen Fisher, who has written five books on the future of human sex, love, and relationships, says that marriage has changed more in the last 100 years than the previous 10,000, and it could change more in the next 20 years than the past 100.