Tagtranshumanism

Ronald Bailey’s Singularity Summit coverage

By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?

These were some of the questions pondered by the 600 or so technosavants meeting in the Palace of Fine Arts at the second annual Singularity Summit this past weekend. The meeting was convened by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Institute’s chief goal is to make sure that whatever smarter-than-human artificial intelligence is eventually spawned by exponentially accelerating information technology that it will be friendly to humans.

Full Story: Reason Magazine.

Buy The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Buy Bailey’s Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution .

Daniel Tammet, incredible depth of understanding and learning

A remarkable young man, exhibiting stunning mental abilities. Daniel Paul Tammet born 31 Jan 1979 claims to see colours and sparks, which he can somehow relate to words and numbers. Scientists consider him a gold mine to further investigation into the understanding of brain activity and potential. (Link to article continued.)

The future of media

I was trying to articulate some thoughts on these very concepts earlier this year. However, I didn’t do nearly as poignant job as the Casaleggio Associati. What I find interesting is how this renders our interest in the occult. If everyone is going to have access to the things we sometimes struggle to grasp in our studies these days. Perhaps we should just work diligently to make sure the road is paved for the revolution as predicted by this video (and the likes of others, just check out Ray Kurzweil or any number of Boing Boing posts).

Mac Tonnies on the singularity and life extention

Mac writes:

Personally, I’m evenly split between the sort of cosmic all-at-onceness Rucker espouses (even though I’ve never done LSD) and Kurzweil’s chomping-at-the-bit transhumanism. Like Rucker, I’m a little wary of “The Singularity Is Near.” Not because I fear I won’t enjoy it (I thought highly “The Age of Spiritual Machines”) but because I fear Kurzweil’s consummate punditry. It’s great fun to wonder what the postsingular future holds in store, but Kurzweil (and many others of the same general outlook) seem to have overlooked William Gibson’s observation that the future’s arrival is seldom evenly distributed.

Full Story: Posthuman Blues.

Gaians vs Transhumans: Or How to Survive the Crash

Regarding Gaians vs Transhumans, there is really is no conflict and I consider myself to be both. I see no reason why we as children of Gaia shouldn’t be able to survive, prosper and grow, while harmoniously restoring the biosphere to a pre-human paradise. If done right, nanotechnologies are the most environmentally friendly technology that could possibly exist. It is the perfect emulation of life in everyway, while also possessing an evolutionary unfoldment of ever- increasing intelligence. In no time at all, nanotechnology could reverse every “damaging” thing we’ve ever done, while simulataneously bootstrapping life and intelligence to the stars, which is by far holistically, cosmically and universally the most sustainable thing life could ever do. Life is about balance, beauty and harmony, but it is also about evolution, growth and awakening. Let a thousand worlds flourish!

Future Hi: Gaians vs Transhumans: Or How to Survive the Crash

Sauceruney on Transhumanism

Via a Key 23 post I’ve found an old article on Transhumanism by Sauceruney I forgot to read. Sauceruney connects the dots between AI, immortality, and your blogging and Amazon purchasing habits:

Immortality. It?s a key element in the periodic table of Transhumanism. The Internet can be seen as a limited means of reaching this goal, yet the alchemy required to turn it into virtual gold lies in the occulted regions of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Dumping your brain onto the Internet in textual form, you?re fashioning a crude personality construct. How accurate or tailored this online persona is to that which exists as flesh and bone, is up to you, the creator. Long after you?re dead and gone, if not sooner, your LiveJournal emoting, political screeds, MeFi and /. posts? even your drunken party pictures may lie dormant in a digital archive, awaiting the day it?s ultimately devoured by a growing AI that?s coming to grips with its own existence. The world?s leading governments and corporations may already have virtual personality constructs for some of you, awaiting the day when computers are inexpensive and powerful enough to model each and every person from birth to death, in an attempt to simulate reality in the achievement of elusive (inter)National Security objectives. In the charge to preserve the perceived systems of existence, our random and unpredictable humanity may be destroyed. This form of Transhumanism is an inevitable conclusion of sufficiently funded bureaucratic paranoia. It?s up to free-thinking individuals to ensure the system remains full of exploitable holes. What fun is immortality if you?re stuck in someone else?s idea of Heaven?

Foolish People: Better late than never at all…

Just Say Yes to Performance-enhancing Drugs

A column about performance-enhancing drugs on Better Humans:

While competitive chess players probably wouldn’t benefit from anabolic steroids, since most chess pieces aren’t that heavy, they can benefit from drugs that enhance cognitive performance. The list is broader than you think. While interviewing an ICF medical commission doctor a few years back, I learned that at least one chess competitor plays better drunk.

Better Humans: Just Say Yes to Performance-enhancing Drugs

Margin Walker debate on transhumanism

There’s a discussion about transhumanism going on Margin Walker right now.

Where do you stand? Imagine our world a few hundred years in the future. Are you more or less wired in? Would you become a holdout, a rebel in Zion as it were? What is your threshold for humanity? Do you define yourself by your physicality?

Margin Walker: More than human.

(comments disababled to encourage discussion at MW)

Cyborg Democracy

Hell yeah:

A collaborative blog for democratic transhumanists, nanosocialists, revolutionary singularitarians, non-anthropocentric personhood theorists, radical futurists, leftist extropians, bioutopians and biopunks, socialist-feminist cyborgs, transgenders, body modifiers, basic income advocates, world federalists, agents of the Culture and the Cassini Division, Viridians and technoGaians – transmitting a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future.

Cyborg Democracy blog

(via Three River Tech Review).

New life enhancement web zine from R.U Sirius

Neofiles is a new web zine by R.U. Sirius, sponsored by a supplement company called Life Enhancement:

The conception that human beings could radically alter their own situation the phenomenological world by understanding and using its gifts is at least as old as alchemy. Dreams that people may one day fly (done), project their voices and images over vast distances (done), go to the moon (done), and live for hundreds of years (working on it), occupied a psychological terrain on the borderline between science and magic for long centuries. By the late 20th Century it was clear that the radical expansion of possibilities was a science project.

Neofiles

(via Boing Boing).

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