One of IEET’s projects is Cyborg Buddha, which explores the role neurotechnology will have on spirituality, happiness, and alternate states of mind. In this interview, Warrior pick Dr. Hughes’ brain on how technology can be used to engineer virtue – something all religions throughout time have stressed is the key to a good life. They also get into technology allowing us to upload our minds computers, a possibility available sooner than most realize.

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There are many dystopian theories about Artificial Intelligence taking over the world, as many cultural narratives portray - from Terminator and The Matrix.

Andrew Newberg, director of research at Jefferson Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine, explains the five steps along the path to enlightenment.

In the Cyborg Buddha book, IEET Executive Director James Hughes borrows from his personal experience of studying Buddhism for several decades, briefly being a buddhist monk, and later living as a secular buddhist in USA. James attempts to distil key human virtues, and argues for the possibility of human moral enhancement in the future.

Listen to the podcast HERE

Woody Evans has published an article on Posthuman rights in the Spanish journal, Teknokultura. Below is the abstract of the paper. You can click on the journal title to find the full article online.

Harris Wiseman gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and is author of the book The Myth of the Moral Brain – The Limits of Moral Enhancement, published by MIT Press.

I emailed him the interview questions below:

It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google’s AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That fateful day when machines finally become smarter than humans has never appeared closer—yet we seem no closer in grasping the implications of this epochal event.

IEET Advisory Board Member Nicole Sallak Anderson is interviewed on Transhumanism, by Sean McGuire in Montreal, Canada

To start, I need to be specific about what Buddhism means in this context.

I suggest there is no such thing as ‘Buddhism’, but rather ‘Buddhisms’. There is little in common with Buddhism as taught in the Theravada (the earliest Buddhist teachings as based on those of Siddhartha Gautama - ‘the Buddha’), Zen, or the Tibetan tantric traditions. Although they all maintain the base of their teachings on the realisation of the Buddha, the methods they employ vary widely.

Marshall Brain (1961 – ) is an author, public speaker, and entrepreneur. He earned an MS in computer science from North Carolina State University where he taught for many years, and is the founder of the website HowStuffWorks, which was sold in 2007 to Discovery Communications for $250,000,000.