It’s a book that’s going to change the conversation about the future.

It starts well, with six short vignettes, “Six characters in search of a future”. Then it moves on, with the quality consistently high, to sections entitled “Chaos under heaven”, “New travellers”, and “Paradise found”. Paradise! Yes, that’s the future which is within our grasp. It’s a future in which, as Bastani says, people will “lead fuller, expanded lives, not diminished ones”:

Timothy Leary (1920-1996) marqua de son empreinte l’évolution du mouvement progressiste et techno optimiste des années 70 à 90. Cet article fait partie de la série “Histoire du transhumanisme”.

[Vidéos] Bébés génétiquement modifiés : comment gérer le risque ?

Chez de nombreuses familles d’êtres vivants, y compris l’être humain, ce qu’on appelle l’instinct de conservation de l’espèce consiste en général à donner la priorité aux nouvelles générations - notamment pour l’apport alimentaire ou la sécurité face à un danger. Aura-t-on la même attitude vis-à-vis d’une prochaine génération 100% artificielle ?

One of the key conceptual difficulties faced by those grappling with the resurgence of nationalism today is to hold fast to the recognition that this return of the nation state occurs in an already globalized world. In other words, this isn’t our grandparents’ nationalism we are confronting but something quite new, and forgetting that fact leads to all kinds of intellectual mistakes, most notably imagining that the ghosts of the likes of Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini have risen from the grave like Halloween ghouls.

Professor and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff recently penned an article that went viral, “Survival of the Richest.” It outlines how the super wealthy are preparing for doomsday. Here is a recap followed by a brief commentary.

David Wood, a man that helped revolutionize communication in the early days of the smart phone, now wants to make the government smarter too. The British transhumanist helped pioneer today’s smartphone industry when he co-founded mobile operating system developer Symbian in 1998, and now he’s calling for changes that would radically rethink how people and politicians interact.

IEET Fellow Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explains that smart city needs upgraded humans at the Global Solutions (GS) Taipei Workshop 2018. There, his transhumanist reflections get discussed intensely by world leading politicians, scholars, and policy makers. In the photo below, you find him standing in between Prof. Blair Sheppard from Duke University and Dr. Chen Mei-ling, the current Taiwanese Minister of the Development Council. Next to her is the former General Director of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy, who was a special guest at th...

Part of the problem with utopia is the question of where do you put it. After all, what any imaginary ideal society ultimately ends up being is its “own world turned upside down”, which means that the world, as it is, must not have a place for anything like a paradise on earth, otherwise an author would have had no reason to dream up a utopia in the first place.

Futurists tend to exaggerate, overestimating the change that’s heading our way. Most likely there will be no new species, no destructive post-human scenario, no sci-fi movie style acceleration of evolution. However, what we can say or even predict with certainty is that the way we interact with the world and with the machines of the future will change. Human beings will remain so, but their relationship with objects will be deeper, a kind technological intimacy