The history of our belief in progress is a complicated one. This belief first arose during the eighteenth century Enlightenment and became a central feature of the Western worldview until circa the mid-twentieth century, when the first anthropogenic “existential risk” was introduced. Although progressionism suffered a serious blow with the inauguration of the Atomic Age, a renewed belief in the goodness and historical reality of techno-progress has reemerged within the transhumanist movement.
By an overwhelming majority, respondents to a recently concluded poll said they expect the pace of development in emerging technologies to remain swift over the next two decades, but they are divided over how strong the opposition will be to human enhancements.
Early last month, the now-famous paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield that supposedly linked vaccines to the onset of autism, was formally retracted by the Lancet, the journal that published it back in 1998. This was a monumental decision, considering it was the conclusions drawn from this paper that launched the firestorm of debate around the safety of vaccines, and likely the cause of the current vaccine crisis.
After a yearlong hiatus, I thought it was about time that I got back on the nano-horse and giddy-upped into some new thoughts and understandings regarding that tiny little thing we call “nanotechnology.”
A lot of things keep me up at night – everything from the trivial (“did I remember to brush my teeth?”) to the to the profound (“does it matter?”). But recently, I’ve been plagued more than usual in the wee small hours by the challenge of developing sustainable and resilient technologies.
A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.
I have proposed that a scenario of slower-than-disruptive tech development over the next 15-20 years combined with weak or reduced opposition to human enhancement could result in “increasing irrelevance” for transhumanists. But what exactly does that mean?
Earthquakes, global warming, patent lawsuits… it’s all a bit much, sometimes. Even a sober-minded “moral guide to the future” needs a break. So today, we talk about fashion.
Transhumanism spans a huge swath of intellectual territory, straddling bioethics, philosophy, science fiction, engineering, and computer science. Throw in conspiracy theories and cyberpunk nihilism and you have all the ingredients for Deus Ex.
Sitting here in Denver Airport, I think I have finally lost my faith in technology innovation. And the reason? That fiendish creation of the Gates empire, Microsoft Word.
The express aim of enhancement technologies is to overcome our biological limitations: cognitive, emotional and healthspan-related. But what is almost always tacit in discussions of human enhancement is the issue of what exactly constitutes a biological limitation.
I was asked the question, “What can we expect to see from science in the next decade?” My answer comes from the perspective of a social scientist, as I research social problems from the influence of cognitive neuroscience.
Say that I knew that medicine had advanced to the point where I could reasonably expect to live to be 350 years old, with the first two decades, of course, going to maturation, and the last two decades resembling our current aging process. What would I do with all of that time?
Dr. Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, has accepted an appointment as Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies for 2010.
Scientist, best-selling author, and pundit David Brin has accepted an appointment as Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies for 2010.
For past 100 years—from the tail end of the industrial revolution, through the chemicals revolution and into the digital revolution—we have been passive observers of our effects on the planet. Over the next 100 years, we will need to take an active role in managing these effects if we are to avoid potentially catastrophic impacts on large numbers of the world’s population.
In the next 24 hours, more than 150,000 individual humans will become extinct. Over the past three decades, upwards of 1.6 billion people have disappeared from the Earth forever.
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