We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction - Ross Andersen Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves. Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. Of course there are also existential risks that are not extinction risks.
The First Trillionaires Will Make Their Fortunes in Space | Think Tank What's the Big Idea? Just as explorers during the Age of Discovery established new trade routes in pursuit of resources such as gold, silver and spices, the future explorers of space will be chasing unimaginable riches. As Peter Diamandis told the International Space Development Conference, “There are twenty-trillion-dollar checks up there, waiting to be cashed!” Sure, this may sound a lot like the movie Avatar, in which the RDA Corporation mined the mineral unobtanium on the planet of Pandora. Peter Diamandis, who founded the non-profit X Prize Foundation to create a rewards incentive program to bring about "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity," believes the enormous financial opportunities in space will spur innovation. What's the significance? While the idea of mining space for resources is not a new one, we are closer than ever today to realizing that reality. Why Should I Care? Asteroids represent a dual threat and opportunity for humanity.
9 Ways Humanity Could Bring About Its Own Destruction It all started with David Chalmer's various thought experiments concerning qualia and something called philosophical zombies: A p-zombie is essentially a creature that in all ways appears to be conscious, but isn't really conscious. Chalmers proposed a thought experiment where the inputs an outputs of a growing number of neurons in a person's skull are gradually routed into a growing collection of artificial neurons. The person is given a switch that allows them a to switch back and forth between their natural neurons and the synthetic ones. The person can then try switching back and forth at any level of replacement. Chalmers asks will the person at any point notice any change in their experience of sensations as they keep pressing this switch? If this would happen, if a person's qualia change, then Chalmers says we've overlooked something and consciousness is not being copied or duplicated.
Can we change the future? A scientific view... I was reading this article from 1998 about quantum theory – I know it’s pretty old…, but there was something about it that struck me! It’s maybe also because I’m reading this book that contains a lot of prescience characteristics or just my open mind. So, I decided to put together all this scientific evidence with one scope – Can we change the future? Do we have an influence on our future? An extract from the article on ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 1998) “demonstrating how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed. To demonstrate this, the researchers built a tiny device measuring less than one micron in size, which had a barrier with two openings. Alain Aspect, a French physicist, in 1982 discovered that subatomic particles such as elections are able to automatically - instantaneously - simultaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. And then, come all the questions: Is our future written?
Designer Psychologies: Moving beyond neurotypicality Designer psychologies, or customized cognitive processing modalities, describes the potential for future individuals to selectively alter the specific and unique ways in which they take in, analyze and perceive the world. Cognitive modalities are the psychological frameworks that allow for person-to-person variances in subjectivity, including such things as emotional responses, social engagement, aesthetics and prioritization. The day is coming when we'll be able to decide for ourselves how it is exactly that we want to process our world. Most of us have the so-called neurotypical cognitive response. We know, however, mostly through our interactions with those outside of the cognitive norm, that neurotypicality is not the be-all and end-all of psychological experience. Indeed, autism is a great example of this. Society benefits from neurodiversity. From neurotypicality to neurodiversity Okay, so why do we need to reach outside the bounds of neurotypicality? The processing mind A. B. C.
Transhumanism: The Most Dangerous Idea? "What ideas, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?" That question was posed to eight prominent policy intellectuals by the editors of Foreign Policy in its September/October issue (not yet available online). One of the eight savants consulted was Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, author of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. His choice for the world's most dangerous idea? Transhumanism. In his Foreign Policy article, Fukuyama identifies transhumanism as "a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints." Human liberation from our biological constraints began when an ancestor first sharpened a stick and used it to kill an animal for food. What is a human capacity anyway? Our ancestors had no wings; now we fly.
Bostrom Responds to Fukuyama’s Assertion that Transhumanism is World’s Most Dangerous Idea Nick Bostrom (Sept 10, 2004) “What idea, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?” This was the question posed by the editors of Foreign Policy in the September/October issue to eight prominent policy intellectuals, among them Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. And Fukuyama’s answer? More accurately, transhumanists advocate increased funding for research to radically extend healthy lifespan and favor the development of medical and technological means to improve memory, concentration, and other human capacities. According to transhumanists, however, the choice whether to avail oneself of such enhancement options should generally reside with the individual. So why does Fukuyama nominate this transhumanist ideal, of working towards making enhancement options universally available, as the most dangerous idea in the world?
25 years later: Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" It has been 25 years since Donna Haraway published her seminal essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century."While largely intended as metaphorical discourse, a number of feminists and futurists, including myself, were inspired by a more literal and technoprogressive interpretation of Haraway's message. The piece was a major influence on my conception of postgenderist theory, inspiring such articles as "Overcoming Gender" and "Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary" (PDF) (the latter of which I co-authored with James Hughes). In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway issued a challenge to feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialism. From another angle, "A Cyborg Manifesto" can be interpreted as a critique of ecofeminism.
Transhumanism, medical technology and slippery slopes Most parents not quite ready to have 'designer babies' -- but demand exists A new study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center indicates that consumers are more interested in using genetic technologies to screen for life threatening diseases than in using the technologies to screen offspring for enhanced traits. Specifically, consumers appear ready to use biotechnologies to test for life altering and threatening medical conditions like mental retardation, blindness, deafness, cancer, heart disease, dwarfism and shortened lifespan from death by 5 years of age -- but what they're not interested in is prenatal genetic testing to screen for traits like tall stature, superior athletic ability and superior intelligence. "Our research has discovered that although the media portrays a desire for 'designer babies', this does not appear to be true among consumers of genetic testing services," said Feighanne Hathaway, a certified genetic counselor at the NYU Cancer Institute. Some demand is still demand Let's look at the results of this report a bit more closely.
Would it be boring if we could live forever? Okay, on the primary question raised by the article, would immortality be boring? If it becomes so, those people are free to die as they wish. Problem solved. But the part that really blows my gaskets, is this bit: "The bigger issue, however, is whether or not the threat of boredom is so severe that we should forgo the radical life extension project altogether." Not to go full-on libertarian here, but, who is "we", bub? Here's the thing: we can wax philosophical all we want, but life extension technology is coming, and it's not going to be stopped. And where, exactly, do you draw the line? Or perhaps we might say, well we will cure all those conditions we already know about, but decide that there is an ultimate point - the theoretically postulated cell death after a maximum number of divisions, for instance - that we aren't going to do anything about.