After several years of using the terms ‘transhumanism’ and ‘posthumanism’, I have decided that their points of difference and contention are too much to bear. This past May at the Humanity+ conference in New York, I decided I was no longer going to sit on the sidelines and hope that the terms would work themselves out. I wanted to understand what was going on.
One third of those responding to a recent IEET reader poll expressed confidence that emerging technologies “will transform the world, leading to a fabulous future.” But a slightly higher number of respondents believe that some form of “progressive global governance” will be necessary to manage and regulate our technologies and the companies that create them, so that we can avoid various kinds of disaster.
What both critics and cheerleaders of technological evolution usually miss is that emerging technologies will, as always, make us who we are—make us more human.
The nerd echo chamber is reverberating this week with the furious debate over Charlie Stross’ doubts about the possibility of an artificial “human-level intelligence” explosion – also known as the Singularity.
Wendell Wallach, a lecturer and consultant at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics—and recently appointed as an IEET Fellow—has emerged as one of the leading voices on technology and ethics.
The American Food and Drug Administration has required the Genetics and IVF Center in Fairfax, Virginia, to stop offering MicroSort for family balancing. Currently, the procedure is available only for “couples attempting to prevent sex-linked or sex-limited disease.”
Anytime some preposterous technology is injected into a narrative either as a McGuffin or a deus ex machina, that damned quotation from Clarke gets trotted out as the defense.
In identical polls conducted simultaneously during April 2011, readers at the two sites gave different answers regarding the potentially most powerful emerging technologies.
Human psychology being what it is, even the smartest scientists must be open to accountability and criticism. For the rest of us, it’s even more essential.
The future of humanity involves a complex combination of technological, psychological, and social factors – and one of the difficulties we face in comprehending and crafting this future is that not many people or organizations are adept at handling all of these aspects.
Over at New Scientist, they’ve chosen five emerging technologies that may have a big impact on the future of humanity during the next 30 years and have asked their readers to choose which will be the most significant of all. I’d like to find out how our readers’ opinions would compare with theirs.
“Envisioning technology” is a work in progress, researched and designed by technologist Michell Zappa. IEET Fellow Ramez Naam offers his opinions on the effort: where it seems accurate, where it might not be, and what it all means.
(Co-authored with IEET Fellow Ben Goertzel) There is currently no good reason to believe that once a human-level AGI capable of understanding its own design is achieved, an intelligence explosion will fail to ensue. A thousand years of new science and technology could arrive in one year. An intelligence explosion of such magnitude would bring us into a domain that our current science, technology and conceptual framework are not equipped to deal with; so prediction beyond this stage is best done once the intelligence explosion has already progressed significantly.
If humanity could capture 1/10 of 1% of the solar energy striking the earth, we would have access to 6X as much energy as we consume in all forms today, with almost no greenhouse gas emissions.
It turns out that the Lifeboat Foundation (and this is a direct quote from its founder, Eric Klien) is “a Trojan Horse” that is (here I interpret the rest of what Klien says) designed to hoodwink the people recruited to be its members.
Every year, more people are coming out and saying they do not have a belief in God. What does this mean for those who say they are “spiritual but not religious”?
In the past few days, I’ve received two different pings from my Respected Elders asking about games as a mechanism for articulating disruptive scenarios.
As it did last year, the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos has left me with a daunting task - how do I summarize the highlights of the meeting in a single, short post?
How does a democratic society both nurtureandregulate fast-evolving technologies poised to radically alter life? How can we find a balance between those two imperatives?
Asked when, if ever, a robot would deserve ‘human’ rights, respondents to a recently concluded poll of our readers showed dissatisfaction with the range of answers we offered. Almost 22% gave their own answers, and another 10% said they weren’t sure.
Sascha Vongehr is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University. This is his first article for the IEET.
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