Extremism normalized. Remember when, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act was controversial, held up as the symbolic face of Bush/Cheney radicalism and widely lamented as a threat to core American liberties and restraints on federal surveillance and detention powers?
Yet now, the Patriot Act is quietly renewed every four years by overwhelming majorities in both parties (despite substantial evidence of serious abuse), and almost nobody is bothered by it any longer. That’s how extremist powers become normalized: they just become such a fixture in our political culture that we are trained to take them for granted, to view the warped as normal. Here are several examples from the last couple of days illustrating that same dynamic; none seems overwhelmingly significant on its own, but that’s the point: Equally remarkable is this Op-Ed from The Los Angeles Times over the weekend, condemning President Obama’s kill lists and secret assassinations: Why do they hate us?
Bjarke Ingels: Hedonistic sustainability. Search Tech: Google Is Like a 'Mental Prosthetic' The prevalence of online search engines and the ease with which information can be looked up on the Internet may be changing the way our brains work, according to recent research.
Knowing that information can be accessed later changes the way our brains remember it. Instead of having a dumbing-down effect on overall cognition, though, it may actually be helpful. ManageEngine OpManager, a powerful NMS for monitoring your network, physical & virtual (VMware/ HyperV) servers, apps & other IT devices. Deploy and start monitoring in less than an hour. Trusted by over a million admins worldwide. The way search engines like Google make it almost effortless to find the answers to any question with a few taps of the fingertips could be changing the way our memory works, according to a study published recently in the research journal Science. The study was conducted in four experiments. Volunteers, all college students, were asked to answer a series of questions or perform cognitive tasks. Beyond Reddit. Transhumanism in the real world : Transhuman.
The Human Future Remains Unchosen: An Exegesis of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Progress is not guaranteed. Be it moral, technological, scientific, or social, there is no reason to assume human civilization marches forever forward in step with time. Understood this way, we can realize that progress is a choice and something we as a species will to happen through the concatenation of our decisions. Or we can fail to choose, fail to act, and yet, that failure is itself a choice and an action from which consequences follow. There is a reason From Chance to Choice is one of the most essential texts on the bioethics of enhancement – it implies that our continued evolution will hinge upon our decision as to whether or not we want the ability to choose our evolutionary path. We must choose to have a choice. To be specific, our current generation faces the very real possibility of being asked to decide if human enhancement via technological augmentation and genetic engineering is something we want to pursue.
DX:HR is that rare video game that offers genuine choice. When Will We Be Transhuman? Seven Conditions for Attaining Transhumanism. The future is impossible to predict.
But that’s not going to stop people from trying. We can at least pretend to know where it is we want humanity to go. We hope that laws we craft, the technologies we invent, our social habits and our ways of thinking are small forces that, when combined over time, move our species towards a better existence. The question is, How will we know if we are making progress? As a movement philosophy, transhumanism and its proponents argue for a future of ageless bodies, transcendent experiences, and extraordinary minds. But how will we able to tell when the pieces finally do fall into place?
Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of the human body become prolific.Our social understanding of aging loses the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease.Rights discourse would shift from who we include among humans (i.e. should homosexual have marriage rights?) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.