background preloader

Transhumanism

Facebook Twitter

Human Swarming and the future of Collective Intelligence. It all goes back to the birds and the bees.

Human Swarming and the future of Collective Intelligence

The fish too. Even slime-molds. Really, it goes to all social creatures that amplify their collective intelligence by forming real-time synchronous systems. We have many names for these natural assemblages, including flocks, schools, shoals, blooms, colonies, herds, and swarms. Whatever we call them, one thing is clear – millions of years of evolution produced these highly coordinated behaviors because of the survival benefits they provide to a great many species. For convenience I use the word “swarm” to refer to cohesive groupings of individual members, all working together as a unified dynamic system, their collective behavior tightly coordinated by real-time feedback loops. Certainly humans didn’t evolve the ability to swarm, for we lack the innate connections that other species use to establish feedback-loops among individual members. But what about humans? I founded Unanimous AI with these questions in mind.

Germ Line Engineering with CRISPR Leads to Designer Human Embryos. Editor’s note: Since this article was first published online, there have been significant policy developments as well as a first report of engineered human embryos, both initially described in the feature below.

Germ Line Engineering with CRISPR Leads to Designer Human Embryos

If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it. At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Transhumanism: the Ultimate Annihilator. In his February 18 essay appearing in The Guardian, ‘How I Became an Erratic Marxist’, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis cites his intermittent mentor, Karl Marx: “If the whole class of the wage-labourer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labour, ceases to be capital!”

Transhumanism: the Ultimate Annihilator

This smugly circular quote that fingers capital’s counterintuitive enslavement to labor is taken from the 1847 essay “Wage Labour and Capital”, a twenty-year precursor and prefiguring of Das Capital; it speaks to the awkward and venerable slow-dance between Labor and the Boss-man, specifically the latter’s unswerving determination to exploit surplus value until it ends in the annihilation of all parties. One wants to say, ‘silly communist, no capitalist is that stupid as to denude the market of consumers by annihilating them at their workstations. Transhumanism in India: Between faith and modernity. The World Transhumanist Association (WTA) has provided a formal definition of transhumanism: "The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

Transhumanism in India: Between faith and modernity

" In practice, transhumanists support the possibilities of improving (and engineering) of human beings that has become possible because of technologies such as gene therapy, nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Transhumanism Strategy. We’ve put together the survey on transhumanism strategy to reveal the inner discussion inside the transhumanist movement.

Transhumanism Strategy

Our goal is to inspire the people to act. We believe the greatest sin in our field is wishful thinking. It’s when a person is saying that it would be good to do something, like for instance, to shoot a viral video, but at the same time this person is not doing anything. His or hers advice has to be implemented in real life somehow on its own. Transhumanist Philosophy: Happiness vs. Life – Government Fishbowl. Transhumanism, literally meaning “beyond human,” is a philosophical, scientific, and technological expression of humanity taking control of its evolutionary destiny.

Transhumanist Philosophy: Happiness vs. Life – Government Fishbowl

What was once the purview of fiction, technology and science are making the impossible possible, and transhumanism’s advocates are taking stronger stands on its intellectual direction. CHECK OUT: Transhumanism: Morphological Freedom is Individual Liberty. Technoprogressive Declaration - Transvision 2014. Here at the Transvision 2014 in Paris we just concluded a meeting of the technoprogressive caucus to draft a statement of common principles.

Technoprogressive Declaration - Transvision 2014

Back to the future? Holograms, mind control, and robots predicted for offices in 2040. MYOB chief technology officer Simon Raik-Allen.

Back to the future? Holograms, mind control, and robots predicted for offices in 2040

Photo: Steven Wright A standard Australian office will feature holographs, robots, drones and mind control technology within the next 25 years, according to a report commissioned by software company MYOB. The report, which was prepared by the company's chief technology officer and released on Thursday, attempts to predict how technology will transform business operations in coming decades.

Simon Raik-Allen, who spent ten years working on artificial intelligence projects at university before working with start-ups in the Silicon Valley, said his predictions were reasonable despite being beyond some peoples' imagination. Encounters with the Posthuman - Issue 1: What Makes You So Special. On the second balmy day of the year in New York, Neil Harbisson, a Catalan artist, musician, and self-professed “cyborg,” walked into a café in the Nolita district of Manhattan.

Encounters with the Posthuman - Issue 1: What Makes You So Special

The actor Gabriel Byrne was sitting at a table in the corner. Harbisson approached. Live forever: Scientists say they’ll extend life ‘well beyond 120’ In Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley, hedge fund manager Joon Yun is doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

Live forever: Scientists say they’ll extend life ‘well beyond 120’

According to US social security data, he says, the probability of a 25-year-old dying before their 26th birthday is 0.1%. If we could keep that risk constant throughout life instead of it rising due to age-related disease, the average person would – statistically speaking – live 1,000 years. Why testosterone is the drug of the future. Update 3/12: Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration announced that all testosterone products must be labeled to include information about the possible increased risk of cardiovascular problems as a result of using the drug. The evidence is not overwhelmingly clear. Some studies have found the risk. Others have not. Today's Intriguing News About New Contraception Options. The Acceleration of Acceleration: How The Future Is Arriving Far Faster Than Expected. Without Technology, You’d be Dead in Days. Humans are far from the only species that uses technology. DNA Consumer Products: Not as Far Out as You Think. Transhumanism: Taking the Place of Our Creator.

Posted by Rebecca Taylor on Saturday Nov 24th, 2012 at 9:12 AM There is a dangerous philosophy emerging in our fast-paced, technology-driven world of which most people are totally unaware. And yet, when Francis Fukuyama, economist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was asked what idea posed the "greatest threat to the welfare of humanity," his answer was this philosophy. And yet I am positive most Catholics have never heard of it.

What is transhumanism, or, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human? Biology has a simple answer: If your DNA is consistent with Homo sapiens, you are human — but we all know that humanity is a lot more complex and nuanced than that. Other schools of science might classify humans by their sociological or psychological behavior, but again we know that actually being human is more than just the sum of our thoughts and actions.

Jose Cordeiro - The Future of Technology and the Technology of the Future. A fun introduction to exponential growth, the Singularity and future of technology from Jose Cordeiro. Ray Kurzweil introduces this inventive presentation. Like Kurzweil, Techno-Immortalist Peter Thiel Is Revealed To Be More Sad-Quack Than Sooper-Genius. Tech-Celebrity-CEO (hence skim and scam artist), Peter Thiel has attracted attention lately for telling a Bloomberg interviewer that he is taking human growth hormone to increase his lifespan. The Political Vacuity of Transhumanism. Blank. What are your opinions on transhumanism? : Cyberpunk. Investor Peter Thiel Planning to Live 120 Years. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is planning to reach 120 in age and is on a special diet to make it happen.

The 47-year-old investor, who co-founded PayPal and made an early bet on Facebook Inc, said he’s taking human growth hormone every day in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang. The Second Uncanny Valley. Transhumanism's promise of heaven. PostHuman: An Introduction to Transhumanism. Transhumanism knocking on your door. An Irreverent Guide To Transhumanism And The Singularity. Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology — The Message. The Biggest Worry About Transhumanism  A New Generation of Transhumanists Is Emerging  Transhumanism Grew Rapidly in 2014. Singularity.

The Transhumanist Bodhisattvas

The debate about transhumanism. Daedalus; or, Science and the Future.