In the latest installment of our new (semi)regular segment, Wow! Really?, we examine little-known or unexpected facts about Hungary and Hungarian culture. Today, we turn to a Hungarian-American who wants to fundamentally change the nature of humanity.

Zoltn Istvn, a Hungarian-American journalist entrepreneur, and candidate in last years US presidential election, is one of the leading voices in the world of Transhumanism, a movement whose core belief is that, through the extensive use of technology and scientific advancement, humans will eventually be able to live forever.

Speaking to The Atlantic, Istvn likewise described how he came to embrace the tenants of transhumanism. The former journalist came to this realization in 2003, when, while working for National Geographic in Vietnam, he nearly activated a landmine. This experience led him to quit journalism and become a full-time advocate for transhumanism: I thought, death is horrible,How can we get around it?

Likewise, Istvn is extremely enthusiastic about the integration of technology and the human body. He has a chip implanted in his hand that opens his front door at a wave, and would like to replace his limbs with bionics so he can throw perfectly in water polo. He sees such physical integration of humans and machines as a key part of the future, and told the Atlantic that he would be surprised if we dont start merging our children with machines in the near future.

Istvn has appeared at events all over the world promoting his vision of a future that many would consider to be something straight out of science fiction; last summer, he took part in the Brain Bar Budapest festival, a gathering of world class scientists and thinkers held in June in the Hungarian capital. You can view his Brain Bar discussion below:

Upon launching his 2016 presidential campaign, Istvn took Transhumanism on the road, driving around the US spreading his message in his signature Immortality Bus, a campaign bus that had been modified to look like a coffin. While traveling as the self-described science candidate, he received plenty of criticism for the atheistic nature of his views, particularly in more religious areas of the country. By his own admission, however, Istvns goal in running was never to win, but rather to increase the visibility of, and drum up support for, the idea of transhumanism.

And the idea itself is catching on, particularly in Silicon Valley, where it would seem that dreams of immortality are dancing in tech barons heads. Nor was the 2016 election Zoltans last foray into politics; earlier this month, the journalist-entrepreneur-transhumanism evangelist announced his intention to run for Governor of California as a Libertarian.

If all this wasnt enough, Zoltn Istvn is also the self-proclaimed inventor of an entirely new extreme sport: Volcano Boarding.

Wow!.Really?

Via BBC, the Atlantic, the Guardian, zoltanistvan.com, and Newsweek

Images via memory-alpha.wikia.com, zoltanistvan.com, the BBC,

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Wow! Really? The Hungarian-American Transhumanist Who Wants to Become a CyborgAnd Live Forever - Hungary Today

The world is getting hotter, as the scientists predicted. Not a week seems to go by without some new temperature record being set or some new sign emerging that the climate and other natural systems are changing more rapidly than they should be. The strong correlation between our excessive burning of fossil fuels and global warming is becoming a more compelling argument every day. Despite this, however, arguments over anthropogenic climate change and what to do about it continue with seemingly little progress being made in some countries.

The current national governments in the USA and Australia, for example, are making the case for increasing fossil fuel consumption and creating and developing new sources. They are at the same time actively obstructing action to address climate change. They are doing this on several fronts; the science is un-proven, it is not politically expedient, any action will retard economic growth and the latest, lack of base-load power will compromise energy security.

I argue, however, that the argument is not primarily about science, politics, the economy or energy security, but whether we are mature enough to deal with it. This is a deep philosophical argument, thousands of years old, over what we understand to be the best trajectory of development for human beings.

One side of the argument sees our best trajectory to be transcendence of nature. This has long been a position of several religious traditions but is now also represented by the secular philosophy of transhumanism. The other sees our best trajectory to be an eventual re-connection with nature. This is also a position held by some religious traditions and is also represented by several secular, holistic philosophies. Which side prevails in this age old debate will largely determine our future.

The fact that we have an anthropogenic warming problem at all indicates that it is the transhumanist position which is currently prevailing and has been for some time. In its current manifestation, this position represents the dream of what philosopher Isiah Berlin called negative freedom; freedom from all constraints as opposed to positive freedom, or freedom to, which recognizes constraints as the condition for freedom.

Transhumanism is generally regarded as a fringe philosophy promoted by extremists such as Max More and Ray Kurzweil. They predict and welcome a future technological singularity in which our machines will become self-conscious and in doing so, exceed our own intelligence. This will necessitate us fusing with our machines in order to survive, becoming omnipotent, immortal cyborgs in the process (if the machines let us).

It is this wet dream which inspired the controversial novel, The Transhumanist Wager, written by self-declared transhumanist, Zoltan Istvan. In this story, the protagonist, transhumanist philosopher, Jethro Knights, goes about creating his own omnipotence at the expense of anyone who chooses to obstruct him. The novel has been described as a modern version of Atlas Shrugged, the infamous novel written by the philosopher of selfishness, Ayn Rand.

For Jethro Knights, the height of human development is total self-interest and the ability to use any means which will ensure ones own autonomy and immortality. Any concern for others, including other species and future generations, is considered irrational. Knights, a scientific materialist and crude utilitarian sees nature, purely as a resource to be utilized to provide for his needs. In this, he and transhumanism in general, continues the destructive utilitarian tradition of 16th Century philosopher, Francis Bacon.

To regard transhumanists as a lunatic fringe would be a serious mistake. Thinkers such as Katherine Hayles, Philip Mirowski and Australian philosopher, Arran Gare, reveal transhumanism to be the dominant philosophy of our time with links to computer science, scientific management, neo-liberalism, supply-side economics and anti-democratic corporatocracies. It is transhumanist philosophy which is driving the human quest for omnipotence, through for example, the generation of high energy demanding abstract electronic virtual worlds created at the expense of natural systems, such as climate systems.

The problem with transhumanisms ideal development goal, however, is that it is a form of retarded development. It aspires to the ego-centric cognitive level of a three or four year old child and remains there (what psychologists term the pre-operational stage). Rather than a new utopia, it is creating an all too familiar dystopia run by self-centered and self-deluded brats. This has been revealed by a long history of developmental psychology examining stages of moral and consciousness development.

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Perhaps the best synopsis and synthesis of this history is provided by the enigmatic philosopher and psychologist, Ken Wilber. He links the perennial philosophies associated with the axial period to the more modern theories of those such as Kohlberg, Loevinger, Maslow, Piaget, Gilligan and Habermas, as well as modern neuroscience. What emerges is a convergent story of what constitutes a good human development process. This is one which involves the integration and transcendence of ego-centrism and the continual de-centering of the self. It involves an expansion of consciousness over time to include larger wholes, from understanding your immediate primary relationships to understanding yourself as one with the universe.

A key component of this story is our relationship with technologies, particularly information technologies. At an early age human beings enter the semiotic realm of information technologies augmenting our abilities to think abstractly and synchronically. This is a condition for the development of our self-consciousness, but one which also has an alienating effect separating us from our worlds and each other. Much of our lives are then spent trying to understand this alienation and the nature of our relationships with everything.

In the holistic process tradition I represent, which has similarities to Buddhist views such as Wilbers, maturity comes through the ability to re-connect. It is the ability to create a coherent narrative out of the fragments of a life and create a sense of wholeness. It is coming to understand that the feelings of separateness we suffer are abstract and that we always were, and are, connected with everything and everyone. One does not transcend nature; one transcends the abstractions which alienate us from it.

Human-generated climate change, therefore, is not the product of super beings but of under-developed ones, also known as transhumanists. The obstructions to effectively dealing with it are being produced by ego-centric three-year-olds living small and fragmented lives and throwing tantrums whenever adults try to impose constraints on their bad behavior. As I said, it is the dream of negative freedom; freedom from constraints such as responsibility for anything other than yourself. But as some of our more mature philosophers have understood as well as any responsible parent, there can be no freedom without suitable constraints, such as a narrow global temperature range suitable for life.

Humanity, therefore, has a choice: do we end our lives as we live them, alienated and dissatisfied, using the resentment this creates to destroy all life in our self-interest, or, do we seek to re-connect to feel at home in our world and universe? Those few mature people left in our society have come to understand their co-dependent nature and the natural limits to human progress. They have learned that what gives life meaning does not generate much greenhouse gas. Our experiment with giving power to children is failing. In order to avoid the worst of climate change, we must put our trust again in the wisdom that only comes with maturity and re-connection.

Featured image by Karlostachys Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Are We Mature Enough to Deal with Climate Change? - Yahoo News

So, you dont want to die? I asked Zoltan Istvan, then the Transhumanist candidate for president, as we sat in the lobby of the University of Baltimore one day last fall.

No, he said, assuredly. Never.

Istvan, an atheist who physically resembles the pure-hearted hero of a Soviet childrens book, explained that his life is awesome. In the future, it will grow awesomer still, and he wants to be the one to decide when it ends. Defying aging was the point of his presidential campaign, the slogan of which could have been Make Death Optional for Once. To (literally) drive the point home, he circled the nation in the Immortality Bus, a brown bus spray-painted to look like a coffin.

He knew hed lose, of course, but he wanted his candidacy to promote the cause of transhumanismthe idea that technology will allow humans to break free of their physical and mental limitations. His platform included, in part, declaring aging a disease. He implanted a chip in his hand so he could wave himself through his front door, and he wants to get his kids chipped, too. Hed be surprised, he told me, if soon we dont start merging our children with machines. Hed like to replace his limbs with bionics so he can throw perfectly in water polo. Most of all, he wants to stick around for a couple centuries to see it all happen, perhaps joining a band or becoming a professional surfer, a long white beard trailing in his wake.

Istvan made his fortunes in the real-estate business, but in 2003, he was working as a reporter for National Geographic in Vietnam when he almost tripped a landmine. The experience shook him so badly he quit journalism and devoted his life to transhumanism. I thought, death is horrible, he told me. How can we get around it?

But his central goalpushing the human lifespan far beyond the record 122 years and possibly into eternityis one shared by many futurists in Silicon Valley and beyond. Investor Peter Thiel, who sees death as the great enemy of man, is writing checks to researchers like Cynthia Kenyon, who doubled the life-spans of worms through gene-hacking, as the Washington Post reported last April. Oracle founder Larry Ellison has thrown hundreds of millions toward anti-aging research, according to Inc magazine, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the Google subsidiary Calico specifically with the goal of curing death. Under President Donald Trump, the quest for immortality might pick up steam: Among the candidates he is reportedly considering to head the Food and Drug Administration is Jim ONeill, who sits on the board of the anti-aging SENS Research Foundation.

Some life-extension endeavors are already here. Several companies already offer cryogenic freezing to people who wish to have their dead bodies cooled with liquid nitrogen and stored for centuries, with the hope that new medical technologies will by then be available to re-animate them. A British teenager who sued for the right to be cryogenically frozen after her death from cancer in October now floats in frosty slumber in a Michigan cryostat facility.

Meanwhile, scientists in California are expected to launch a clinical trial in which participants will have their blood cleaned of age-related proteins, the Guardian reported, with the goal of helping them live longer and healthier lives. A drug called rapamycin, which extended the lives of mice by a quarter, is also being tested. The thinking is, if we figure out what chemical event signals to the body that its time to wrap things up, said Sheldon Solomon, a psychology professor at Skidmore College, you could be at a certain age for a long time.

The billionaire technologists obsession with living forever can approach a sort of parody. Oracles Ellison once said, Death makes me very angry"suggesting this pillar of nature is just another consumer pain-point to be relieved with an app.

But lets assume, for the sake of argument, that it can be. Lets say human lives will soon get radically longeror even become unending. The billionaires will get their way, and death will become optional.

If we really are on the doorstep of radical longevity, its worth considering how it will change human society. With no deadline, will we still be motivated to finish things? (As a writer, I assure you this is difficult.) Or will we while away our endless days, amusing ourselves towell, the Process Formerly Known as Deathwhile we overpopulate the planet? Will Earth become a paradise of eternally youthful artists, or a hellish, depleted nursing home? The answers depend on, well, ones opinion about the meaning of life.

I didnt realize how much mainstream support there was for eternal life until I had dinner with a friend who, its worth noting, is even more traditional than I amhes not even on Twitter.

I interviewed this guy who wants to live forever, I said. Isnt that wild?

What do you mean? my friend asked. You dont want to live forever?

If he never died, he explained, he could finally pursue all the hobbies and dreams hes never had time for. Even alternate careers, like architecture. (Hes a lawyer.) Hes never quite understood calculus, but with all the time in the world, he could master it. He would take a sabbatical every four years to travel the world.

Ill admit, his passion for a long life of solving integrals and kayaking through rainforests did drag me closer to the immortality corner. Even if I extended my life by just a few years, I could finally get to the bottom of my Netflix and Pocket queues.

And I had been silently dismissing life-extension enthusiasts spiels about seeing their great-great-grandkids grow up, since I dont have kids and probably never will.

Butbutif I was certain I could stay sharp and energetic well into my 90s, maybe my stance on motherhood would change. I wouldnt worry so much about kids cutting into my productivity if my ability to produce was limitless. Sure, Id probably have a few sleepless nights and groggy days in the early years. (Unless, of course, Silicon Valley really gets cracking on those robot wet-nurses.) But once Olga Jr. was out of the house and working as a Martian News correspondent or whatever, I could more than make up for lost time.

This feeling of abundant possibility is one of the chief motivations of the pro-longevity crowd. Projects and ambitions like mastering every musical instrument in the orchestra, writing a book in each of all the major languages, planting a new garden and seeing it mature, teaching ones great-great-grandchildren how to fish, traveling to Alpha Centauri, or just seeing history unfold over a few hundred years are not realistic: there is simply not enough time to achieve them given current life expectancy, wrote Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher and grand-daddy of life-extension (so to speak), with fellow philosopher Rebecca Roache in 2008. But, they continue, if we could reasonably expect from an early age to live indefinitely, we could embark on projects designed to keep us occupied for hundreds or thousands of years.

Among the many downsides of dying is the prospect of never reaching ones full potential. Right now, Im projected to die when Im about 82. But what if it takes me until I'm 209 to write the great American blog post?

Still, a common fear about life in our brave, new undying world is that it will just be really boring, says S. Matthew Liao, director of the Center for Bioethics at New York University. Life, Liao explained, is like a partyit has a start and end time. We get excited because the partys going on for an hour, and we dont want to miss it. We try to make the most of it while were there.

But imagine theres a party that doesnt end, he continued. It would be bad, because youd think, I could go there tomorrow, or a month from now. Theres no urgency to go to the party anymore.

The Epicureans of ancient Greece thought about it similarly, Solomon said. They saw life as a feast: If you were at a meal, youd be satiated, then stuffed, then repulsed, he said. Part of what makes each of us uniquely valuable is the great story. We have a plot, and ultimately it concludes.

Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, explains that people make sense of their lives through narrative arcs. Without an ending, there cant be a story. How would we process life events differently, given infinite do-overs? For example, because we have a vague sense that people are supposed to die at roughly 80, we now grieve people who die at 20 more than those who die at 78. But if people began living to 500, that might change, McAdams pointed out. There might be far more tragedy in the world if were mourning the loss of every 90-year-old the way we now would a child. Were just so much trained by evolution and culture to know that our life is going to be relatively short and constrained, he said, and to be somewhat cautious so we dont screw it all up. (Of course, if technology also makes us smarter as it makes us live longer, who knows what types of new arcs well construct for ourselves.)

Bostrom dismisses the thought that theres something about impending death that adds meaning or motivation to our days. It often seems the young are most energetically pursuing different kinds of activities, and the closer you get to death, the more people lean back, he told me. Partly its due to their reduced energy and health.

Which, of course, he hopes we can fix.

Once living longer becomes possible, who will get to do it? Istvan believes life-extension technology should be available to everyone, not just the wealthy. He supports a universal health-care system with life extension as one of its core benefits. (Health-care costs wouldnt spiral out of control, he and some others think, because the longer-living humans would also be healthier. Istvan plans to pay for this universal Zoltancare by selling government land in the western United States.)

Others believe that soon after life-extending technology becomes available, the price will drop rapidly and it will become attainable by mostjust as occurred with personal computers.

But the worry in the short-term, is what happens? The rich could get richer and the poor could get poorer, Liao said. Because the rich could afford to extend their lives first, and life-extenders could amass more resources over the course of their long lives, income inequality could grow even more profound.

Then again, thats how things work now. If someone comes up with a new cancer drug, we dont say lets not use it until every person has access to it, Bostrom told me. By that logic, we should stop kidney transplants.

Even if eternal life gets equitably distributed, theres still the problem of what to do with all the excess centenarians running around. Eventually, were going to run out of room here on Earth. One solution would be to dramatically curtail reproduction, focusing instead on the health and longevity of those already here. As the philosopher Jan Narveson put it, we are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people. That might mean, though, that you wont have a great-great-great-grandkid to attend the dance-recitals of.

There is a chance that worrying less about death might short-circuit our naturally tribalist natures, easing resource-allocation issues in the process. Solomon, the Skidmore psychologist, researches terror management theory, which suggests the knowledge of our eventual demise makes people psychologically retrench. Being reminded of death causes study subjects to adhere more firmly to their existing worldview, mistrust outsiders more, and even to, ahem, support charismatic leaders who may not be very qualified. So in some ways, eliminating the prospect of death might make us want to ratify all the climate treaties and equitably divvy up the worlds food supply.

... That is, of course, unless immortality has the opposite effect, making us paranoid that well die too soon for no reason. After all, even if we can eliminate aging, we cant eliminate chance. Lets say you expected to live to 5,000 and your heads being frozen, theres a power outage, and it turns into a pile of mush, Solomon said. We might become even more hyper-vigilant.

Liao and others think one answer to the overcrowding problem might be interstellar space travelwhich, they assume, will be invented by then. When Earth turns into an overpopulated dump, Liao says, the immortal can just hop between planets.

I told him an eternity spent on Venus among youthful billionaires does not appeal to me.

What if all your friends go to Venus? he asked. He offered an earthly comparison: Youll be here while everyones in Brooklyn?

(Everyones already in Brooklyn, though, and Im still here in Northern Virginia.)

Space travel is also how Liao envisions us overcoming the boredom problem. Right now, the journey between solar systems is too long for a human to accomplish in a normal lifespan, but with life extension, that wont be a concern anymore. We wont run out of things to do, the thinking goes, because there will always be another planet to explore. Well all cheerfully grow old aboard our interstellar minivan.

And in general, Liao explained, humans engage in lots of pleasures that arent repetitive, like forming new relationships, making music, learning things, and experiencing natural wonders.

If thats what human existence is about, and you can continue to do that, why not be able to live longer? he asked me.

I guess I do like hiking, I said.

You might even enjoy hiking on Mars, he said.

Eh, dont push it.

* * *

The somber side to the debate is whether life extension will cause us to lose our appreciation for natural human vulnerability. In other words, society might begin to preference those who have swallowed anti-aging drugs, making un-enhanced humans a sort of rotting underclass.

Parents who have babies with mild disabilities might be blamed for not doing Gattaca, as Liao puts it. (Istvans platform reads, Develop science and technology to be able to eliminate all disabilities in humans who have them.) Well have to wrestle with whether those who dont take fountain-of-youth pills should be charged more for health insurance. Worse yet, by jetting off to a new planet, the enhanced and immortal could abandon Earth to mere mortals, the cruelest and most extreme form of segregation.

Life-extensionists zeal for perfect cells does, to some, sound like an invective against uniqueness. Thats what Melinda Hall, a philosophy professor at Stetson University and author of a recent book about transhumanism, takes issue with. People with disability are saying, this is a primary part of my identity, she told me, so when youre saying you want to get rid of disability, it sounds genocidal.

Istvan dismisses disability-rights advocates as a fringe minority, saying I would bet my arm that the great majority of disabled people will be very happy when transhumanist technology gives them the opportunity to fulfill their potential. (Betting your arm is, of course, no biggie when you can just get a bionic one.)

In general, Hall said, the transhumanists have the wrong idea about the problems facing humanity. People are going to be starving and dying, but were going to build a colony on Mars? she said, Thats going to cost billions of dollars, and I think that should be spent somewhere else.

Of course, that wont stop the billionaires from following their dreams. Perhaps our best hope is that on the path to immortality, theyll discover something useful to broader swathes of society. Metformin, an old diabetes drug recently shown to extend the life of animals, is now being tested as an anti-aging pill. If it really does allow people to stay healthy in old age, some would regard it a public health revolutioneven if it fails to help Peter Thiel meet his cyborg-descendants in 2450.

In that way, todays life extensionists might follow the proud tradition of other explorers who shot for another galaxy and ended up straddling the moon. The alchemists write about trying to find elixirs of gold and immortality. They never find that, but they discovered chemistry, Solomon said. Ponce de Leon never found the fountain of youth, but he found Florida.

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Zoltan Istvan, Nick Bostrom, and the Anti-Aging Quest - The Atlantic - The Atlantic

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We must all become cyborgs if we are to survive the inevitable robot uprising. That's the message from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who wants to send the human race to Mars. At the World Government Summit in Dubai, Musk argued that to avoid becoming redundant in the face of artificial intelligence we must merge with machines to enhance our own intellect. The merging of humans and machines is happening now

"Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk said at a Tesla launch in Dubai, according to a report in CNBC. "It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output."

Transhumanism, the enhancement of humanitys capabilities through science and technology, is already a living reality for many people, to varying degrees. Documentary-maker Rob Spence replaced one of his own eyes with a video camera in 2008; amputees are using prosthetics connected to their own nerves and controlled using electrical signals from the brain; implants are helping tetraplegics regain independence through the BrainGate project. At the lo-fi end of the spectrum, aspiring cyborgs have been implanting magnets under their skin for years. In the February issue of WIRED, former director of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arati Prabhakar, wrote: From my perspective, which embraces a wide swathe of research disciplines, it seems clear that we humans are on a path to a more symbiotic union with our machines.

But the theory isn't new. In March 2013, Zoltan Istvan published a novel called The Transhumanist Wager. The book asks a simple question: how far would you go to fight an anti-science world in order to live indefinitely through transhumanism? Protagonist Jethro Knights would start a world war - and does so in the book. It is seen, by some, as a political manifesto and 18 months after publishing it, Istvan announced he was running for the US presidency.

"Transhumanism will lead humanity forward to understand what seems like a simple truth: that the spectre of ageing and death are unwanted, and we should strive to control and eliminate them," Istvan said last year. "Today, the idea of conquering death with science is still seen as strange. So is the idea of merging with machines - one of transhumanists' most important long-term goals. But once bionic eyes are better than human eyes - something that will likely happen within the next decade or so - the elective upgrades will start. So will using robots for household chores and getting chip implants (I have one in my hand). So will CRISPR genetic editing create a new age of curing of disease and enhancing our physical form."

These separate, yet parallel, views suggest Musks claims are not particularly far-fetched. For many people, phones, tablets and laptops are near to hand through most of the day - the Tesla boss simply believes we will need to integrate that processing power, rather than keep it exterior. The resulting potential of this would be extraordinary. At the Dubai Summit, Musk compared our current communication capability (typing) of 10 bits per second, to that of a computers, at a trillion bits per second.

"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem."

Justin Sullivan/Getty

According to the CNBC report, Musk went on to call the future of AI, at a time when it eventually outsmarts humanity, as dangerous. The founder is part of the Future of Life Institute, a group of academics, activists, scientists and technologists that have tasked themselves with safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future. In 2015 the group, which includes Stephen Hawking and Morgan Freeman, warned that a global robotic arms race would be "virtually inevitable" unless a ban were to be imposed on autonomous weapons. Meet Earth's Guardians, the real-world X-men and women saving us from existential threats

Musks seemingly pessimistic outlook is not at odds with the optimism of his own work, but a reasoned prediction of what could come to be if human oversight is not at the heart of artificial intelligence progress. His latest statement seems to imply that to keep on top of that role, we will need to become the machine. He is not alone in his concerns, either. At WIRED2016, pioneer in deep learning neural networks Jrgen Schmidhuber warned that robots will eventually colonise our galaxy

Despite being at the launch of his own semi-autonomous car brand, Musks statements were designed to encourage society to ensure tech like his does not put everyone out of a job, predicting that 12-15 per cent of the global workforce will be unemployed 20 years from now as a result of AI. Autonomous cars will be spearheading that change. It was a kind of, sorry, not sorry, statement from the billionaire.

There are many people whose jobs are to drive. In fact, I think it might be the single largest employer of people...driving in various forms. So we need to figure out new roles for what do those people do, but it will be very disruptive and very quick."

Originally posted here:

Why Elon Musk's transhumanism claims may not be that far-fetched - Wired.co.uk

Few people want to die. Nevertheless, like taxes and The Big Bang Theory reruns, death is an inevitability of the modern human condition. Its the status quo. And tech-sector eccentrics adore little more than disrupting the status quo, which is why Slate books columnist Mark OConnell zagged from a dingy warehouse full of surly biohackers in Pittsburgh to various Bay Area dive bars to a tour bus shaped like a coffin, surveying Americas subcultures devoted to living forever. The result is To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, a travelogue through the well-funded fringe communities seeking to live forever.

OConnells book is skeptical but not cynical, and it functions as a witty overview of transhumanism, a movement defined by the desire to use technology to enhance and eventually transcend the mortal body, as well as a meditation on how people deal with death. Last summer, I attended an immortality conference, and my experience there made To Be a Machine mandatory reading.

Many of the same people I saw at the conference showed up as subjects of OConnells book, including excessively bearded scientist Aubrey de Grey, who has proclaimed that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old is alive today. Theres also hardbody transhumanist Max More, who sells the chance to live forever as the CEO of the Arizona-based cryonics company Alcor, which charges people to freeze their bodies and brains, with the assumption that science will figure out a way to revive them later.

I called up OConnell, who lives in Dublin, to learn more about what happened on his raucous reporting journey for To Be a Machine. This interview has been edited and condensed.

One of the reasons I loved your book is that it uses philosophy, literature, and mythology to illustrate the ideas that transhumanists and life extensionists have. Even though they can seem like new-fangled science-fiction, theyre really manifestations of the old human desire to live forever. I know you have a background in writing about literature, so Im curious what sparked your interest to go on this journey of writing about transhumanism and life-extension movements, specifically?

I was intrigued by this stuff for a really long time before it occurred to me that I might be able to write a book about it. I used to work for a magazine in Ireland, years ago, after I left college. I stumbled across transhumanism on some website and I wrote a short piece about it. I went back and read it while I was writing the book, and its a frivolous, crappy pieceyou know the pieces you wrote years ago and youre kind of ashamed ofbut it never went away, I was always thinking about the topic.

I dont want to say Im preoccupied with death, but, like everyone else, I think about it a lot. I think about how weird it is that were alive and dying, and we all know this is happening to us, and we dont ignore it, but we sublimate it in various ways. I like literature that approaches that. Not only does transhumanism come from the same place as religion, but a lot of art comes from the same place as well. Its this sense that this is unacceptable; its a bullshit situation that we have to die.

I think whats weird and interesting and crazy about transhumanism is that, while I dont want to characterize it as very American, it has this American, can-do, capitalist attitude, where you roll up your sleeves and you attack the problem and throw money at it and think, We can do this thing. [The book] rolled together all these things I was fascinated with anyways, like salesmanship. Theres a lot of really great, eccentric salesmen in the movement. Ive always been drawn to people who are great at selling stuff. And I think the salesmanship aesthetic is very American, and Im interested in that aspect of American culture. It was a way to write about America that wasnt just European guy goes to America and just walks around in wide-eyed bafflement at American culture, but a way that was more oblique and specific than that.

I attended an immortality conference last year, and I found it upsetting how much of the immortality movement that I saw on that weekend was focused around buying products and services. I saw people who seemed like true believers, but at the same time they were also selling stuff. It made me concerned that it was just a big grift. I was wondering, since you met with a lot of the same people, like [transhumanist presidential candidate] Zoltan Istvan and Max More, what you think of their motivations. Do you think most of them are true believers?

There were moments where I felt it was just a sales pitch, a grift. But I think the true salesman is someone who is not a grifter. They believe absolutely in what theyre selling. I dont think, on any level, for any of those people, its just snake oil. I think it goes much deeper than that, and in a very personal way theyre obsessed with these technologies and possibilities. In a way they are unable to see the extent to which it looks like a bunch of baloney to most people. But it is fascinating how smoothly this stuff segues into money-making.

Peter Thiel is not a huge figure in my book. I never met with him, and hes mostly lurking in the background throughout the book, but in almost all of the major technologies that I looked into, his money was there, or thereabouts. I think he sees a way to make massive amounts of money with all of these technologies. Whether hes right or not, I have no idea. Its definitely that, but its also a true belief that this is a way to address the problems of the human condition. And I think thats the truth for most of these people. Ive never met anyone who was at once such an amazing salesman and someone who clearly believes absolutely in everything hes selling as Aubrey de Grey. So, yeah, I think the two things arent mutually exclusive.

Aubrey de Grey ended up moving from London to Silicon Valley because it was a better culture fit for his life-extension project. A lot of time in the book is spent in Silicon Valley, and it seems like a hub for transhumanism and the life-extension movement. I think that follows from the overall Silicon Valley culture of techno-utopianism. Did your feelings about Silicon Valleys culture change over the course of this book? Did you become more of a believer or more of a skeptic as you were researching?

Im not sure Id be comfortable saying it went in either direction completely. I went into it definitely very skeptical. But I also really did not want to go in with a skeptical attitude and come out having my skepticism confirmed. I wanted to emerge slightly different from the experience of reporting and writing the book than I went in. I dont know if that actually happened. Id love to be converted to radical techno-optimism, but it was never going to happen. Im not wired that way, to use a slightly transhumanist-sounding term. But I wanted to at least be open to the possibility. While my attitude never really changed, I became more open to people who have those attitudes. I could see what it meant to them, whereas before I would have just seen a bunch of rubes or grifters or wide-eyed, nave optimists. In every case I saw something much more complex than that, much more human and sophisticated and messy.

I both loved and was afraid of your discussion of artificial intelligence, where you go over how some of the figures in the book believe that AI is a potential key to immortality, since it could possibly allow people to upload their consciousness. But then you talk to other people who believe that AI could destroy humanity, because the artificial intelligence would end up killing humans as part of its programming imperative. And those are such different, extreme conclusions of what AI can do.

You get people who believe both at the same time. Which is not completely irrational. But you get people who think that AI could or very likely will destroy us all. Most of them believe if that doesnt happen, well be setwell be uploaded to the cloud and be powerful and intelligent and itll be great. We just have to forestall the annihilation issue.

Thats a really strong example of where I would be speaking to people who were incredibly rational, and in most cases were so far ahead of my intelligence that I could barely keep up, but at the same time I was thinking, This is crazy, and these people are nuts. As a journalist, its kind of uncomfortable to be the dumbest person in the room, but there were so many situations when I was writing that book where I felt like a bit of a dud. I probably shouldve done a crash course in basic coding or formal logic before I embarked on the book. Didnt happen.

In the chapter The Wanderlodge of Eternal Life you describe riding around in a coffin-shaped tour bus with Zoltan Istvan, who is this transhumanist figurehead. You also describe Roen Horn, Zoltans sidekick, who is saving himself for a sex bot. He doesnt eat or drink that much, and I was honestly not sure if he was going to be OK based on your depiction of him. Im wondering if you kept in touch.

Were friends on Facebook, and Ive talked to him since. That chapter was excerpted on The New York Times Magazine [February 9], so I know he read that. Youre always wary of how people will react to their depictions, and people might read about Roen in the book and in the excerpt and think, Wow, this guy is off the charts completely. So I wondered if he was going to see a distorted version of himself in that depiction. You try not to do that, but its impossible not to reflect people in different ways than they see themselves. But he was fine with it! He thought it was good promotion for his eternal life racket. Hes still doing what he was doing when I hung out with him. Hes still doing the Eternal Life Fan Club and hes living with his parents.

He subsequently, and this shouldnt have surprised me at all, but he became a really vocal Trump supporter at a certain point after the election, after the coffin-bus episode. Hes a very eccentric guy who knows what his motivations were, but at some point he started to see Trump as the vehicle who will deliver eternal life. I think hes still there; Im not sure. He seems to have adopted his philosophy to the current political climate.

Maybe hes taking his cues from Peter Thiel.

Who knows, if youre susceptible to the sales pitch of eternal life, you might certainly be open to the pitch of making America great again.

Whats your relationship like with the other people you wrote about in the book? Was Zoltan happy with his depiction in the New York Times Magazine excerpt?

Yes, Zoltan was super happy; he was delighted. Hes obviously a guy who likes to promote himself in whatever way he can. You try to represent someone as accurately as you can, and there are certain comic elements to Zoltan as a person that you cant ignore. There was always the possibility that hed be uncomfortable with it, but he was thrilled. So thats good. Im not sure what his next move is, I think hes doing quite well [from the] self-promotion that hes getting from the tour, so hell continue to capitalize on that. There may be more political gambits.

As far as the other people I wrote about, I havent really been in touch with them since stopping reporting beyond checking up on things here and there. I dont really do that. Its not like I spent all that much time with them. I wasnt living with any particular person for a long period of time. Id hope that theyre not going to be disgusted about it, or sue me or my publishers, but you never know. People have different reactions to things.

I want to talk about the grinder community [a group of people who want to augment their bodies with technology to live extended or infinite lives as cyborgs]. When you went to Pittsburgh to meet biohackers, I thought it was interesting that the grinder subculture seems a lot grittier and DIY-focused and much less into the idea of courting corporate interests and Peter Thiel than, say, the artificial intelligence research community. Do you have any theories on why the grinders are less interested in going corporate, why theyre rougher around the edges?

Grinders are inherently quite extreme people. Theyre dedicated, and they were much different from the other transhumanists Id met. Most of the people I spent time with were very scientific people, and they had much more in common with any other kind of scientist than with the grinders. Theyre an anomaly within transhumanism. They dont have that much connection to the overall movement; theyre not really that big a part of the community. They do call themselves transhumanists, but theyre sort of punk. What theyre doing is literally and physically so extreme. They get a kick out of that in the same way extreme body-piercing people would. So theres a visceral element to it thats absent from transhumanism more generally. The DIY element attracts a particular kind of person, and the personalities were completely different. I guess most transhumanists are fascinated by the idea of grinders and becoming cyborgs but they dont want to do the disgusting stuff, where you put a giant whatever under your skin. I regretted not getting to see implants being done. That wouldve been a thing I missed out on in the book, but Im kind of glad I didnt as well. Im sort of squeamish.

I was going to ask, what would it take for you to get technology implanted in your body?

I did think about it. At a certain point I thought it might be a good thing for the book, if I had that kind of extreme, edgy experience. But I dont think I cared about the book that much, to be honest.

I dont think you needed to get cut open for it. Ive seen photographs of [book subject Tim Cannons body-monitoring] implant and they still haunt my dreams.

It was enough for me, in terms of extreme experiences, to see video of Tim getting the implant done. I mean, people have done it. In a way its an obvious thing for a writer to do, and I think a guy who wrote for Vice did that, and a German magazine. So I didnt go down that road, nor would I have, probably. I wouldve come up with some medical excuse.

On the other end of the spectrum of people you interviewed, you went to a religious service for a group called Terasem. They dont do anything to their bodies, but they believe in the spiritual side of transhumanism. Im not sure where the meeting was happening. Was it in a church? How parallel was it to a traditional mosque or church or temple experience?

It was in a room in a veterans hall in Piedmont, California, which is where a transhumanist conference I was at was happening. Id been at the thing all day, and although this part comes late in the book, it was the first bit of reporting I did. So, it was my first experience with actual transhumanism. Itd been a really long day, and the conference was mostly quite boring, as conferences tend to be, and it was 9 oclock and I was thinking about getting out of there when the organizer told me that the Terasem thing was happening. We were in this makeshift room, and it was nothing like an actual religious meeting Ive ever been to, but my experience with religion is exclusively Catholicism and the Church of Ireland, where its grandiose. I imagine it might have something in common with Protestant church meetings, maybe Quakerism, in an odd way. It was one of the weirdest experiences I had writing the book. And it was the first thing that I did.

Did anyone else you talked to while reporting ever bring Terasem up? Did it seem like something most transhumanists even knew about? I went to its website and it hadnt been updated recently. The only updates from 2016 were posts that say Hacked By GeNErAL.

That was one of the things I noticed early on, that transhumanists are a group that is so deeply embedded in the culture of technology and futurism, but their websites are universally shitty and bad. The web design looks like it was made in the late 1990s and left to fester. It is surprisingly low-tech. But yeah, its very niche, even within the overall niche of transhumanism its a tiny niche. The conference [about religion and transhumanism] I went to was very badly attended, because while the overlap between transhumanism and religion does exist, within the movement its taboo. They in no way want to be connected to religion, they dont want to be seen as a cult at all, so things like Terasem are sort of noncanonical, if you know what I mean.

At the same time, Terasem comes from the writings and philosophies of [biotechnology CEO and Sirius XM founder] Martine Rothblatt, who is a significant figure in transhumanism. Shes a very wealthy woman who funds a lot of transhumanist endeavors, so its not completely obscure. People are curious about it, but its so obviously out there, even within the context of transhumanism. I could never get a grip on what it was, and I think my complete bafflement is obvious in the book. I had no idea what was happening in that meeting, and I dont think anyone else does either. I dont even think the guy who was holding the meeting knew what was happening. And its so full of obvious nonsense language, with no reference to anything in the world, that it was almost like a parody of religion in a way that was completely sincere.

Im curious how involved Martine is now in Terasem. Did you try to talk to her?

I reached out a couple times but never heard anything back. There was a big profile in New York magazine around the same time I started writing, and it was amazing. But I didnt get to meet her, and its a shame, but at the same time she didnt quite fit into any of the major things I was hoping to look at in the book. There were a couple people I tried to talk to who just werent into it, like Peter Thiel. You can imagine the channels you have to go [through] to get to him. I didnt hear back from him at all. [Ray] Kurzweil wasnt into talking either. Fair enough! I was always more interested in talking to the less-prominent people anyways.

I was also wondering if you had any luck talking to anyone who worked for Googles life-extension wing, Calico. Ive tried many times to get them to talk to me and have never had success.

Nor did I, so its not just you. It seems like a closed shop. They have no need to talk to the press. I guess they will at some point, when they have something to sell, but thats probably very far off. There was some writing around the margins, because Calico is the most interesting thing happening in that area. It sucks not to be able to write about that in a direct way. But I wouldve been getting their media pitch anyways, and thats not interesting.

Id always rather talk to regular employees instead of the press people. Its the only way to get information.

I guess I couldve gotten a car and driven up there and broken the door down. Maybe a better journalist would go do that, but I never got to that.

I think that would have been a really quick way to get arrested.

But it might have been interesting for the book!

Originally posted here:

Mark O'Connell's Journey Among the Immortalists - The Ringer (blog)

"We need leadership that is willing to use radical science, technology, and innovationwhat California is famous for--to benefit us all," he wrote in a Newsweek article. "We need someone with the nerve to risk the tremendous possibilities to save the environment through bioengineering, to end cancer by seeking a vaccine or a gene-editing solution for it, to embrace startups that will take California from the world's 7th largest economy to maybe even the largest economy--bigger than the rest of America altogether."

When we spoke to him in November, Istvan made it clear that he would be looking at the Libertarian Party if he were to run for president again. Not only does he identify as libertarian, he also saw the benefit of working with a more established political party, instead of starting one from the ground up.

"The most important thing I learned from my presidential campaign is that this is a team sport," Istvan said in an email. "Without the proper managers, volunteers, spokespeople, and supporters, it's really impossible to make a dent in an election. That's part of the reason I joined the Libertarian Party for my governor run. They have tens of thousands of active supporters in California alone, so my election begins with real resources and infrastructure to draw upon. That's a large difference from my Presidential campaign, where we essentially were shoe-stringing it the whole time."

While Istvan says he considered running for local positions around the Bay Area, he described the competition as "fierce." He believes there's a better shot at snagging Republican and disgruntled Democrat votes by running against California Governor Gavin Newsom, who's already declared that he's running in the next gubernatorial election.

Istvan also sees the need for a pro-science and technology candidate today, especially given the Trump campaign's disdain for science. "This idea that we should drop environmental science, or be cautious on genetic engineering, or focus on the revitalization of nuclear weaponry is something I disagree with," he said. "I believe we should bet the farm on various radical technologies: artificial intelligence, gene therapies, 3D printed organs, driverless cars, drones, robots, stem cell tech, exoskeleton tech, virtual reality, brain wave neural prosthetics, to name a few. This is the way to grow an economy--with much creative innovation, what California is famous for."

Of course, just because Istvan wants to run doesn't mean he'll actually score the Libertarian Party nomination. His announcement, at this point, is basically just a statement of intent.

See more here:

Transhumanist politician wants to run for governor of California - Engadget

Though Blade Runner is coming back this fall, Ghost in the Shell will give it a run for its cyberpunk money. As the Major (Scarlett Johansson) regains her quasi-human memories, her story doesnt just dabble in cyberpunk, it revels in it.

The arresting new trailer for Ghost in the Shell makes previous cyborg or transhumanist cyberpunk movies like The Matrix seem quaint. Literally everyone in in this trailer sports some kind of biohacking or cyborg accoutrements. But Scarlett Johanssons the Major mashes up visual cyberpunk cues with a convincing and totally immersive aesthetic. Its not just that the new Ghost in the Shell trailer looks cool; its that it looks believable.

Giving audiences the most extensive visual details yet, the trailer also introduces what will probably be the films primary baddie: the mysterious Kuze. In the narrative of previous iterations of Ghost in the Shell (a manga and an anime movie), the Majors human consciousness is put inside of robot body, making her a spiritual cyborg. In the new film, Kuze is seemingly at the center of the conspiracy surrounding her complex origin.

Ghost in the Shell opens on March 31.

Photos via Paramount/Dreamworks

View original post here:

Stunning Transhumanism Dominates New 'Ghost in the Shell' Trailer - Inverse

For the latest in the newish series, Small Studio Snapshots, Nicholas Korody chatted with Los Angeles-based studio MILLINS. Daniel Elmorefelt "these guys sound legit in their intentions and I'm looking forward to seeing what they produce in the future...The rest of the article is uncommonly decipherable for architects".

Plus, Stefano Colombo,Luca MarulloandEugenio Cosentino went "Looking for a picture that represents something related to the internet and ending up thinking about the desert."Max Headroom, F.AIA got excited "the phrase 'last existing encrypted space is genius on many many levels. exciting work!"

News In an interview with NPRs MarketPlace Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, explained how computers are superior (in some things) to human designers.JamesJoist got serious

"Spoken like true transhumanist scum; I often think AutoCAD was one of the worst things to happen to architecture. As you might expect the overall reception was poor."

Reacting to the all-female lineup for the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture's Spring '17 lecture series, b3tadine[sutures] quipped "Now I understand why SCI-Arc couldn't get any women to lecture, there aren't any left. Is SCI-Arc being run by former Jay Leno bookers?"

Steven Holl Architects released plansfor a, pair of white concrete buildings, new Cultural and Health Center in Shanghai.

With I am sure tongue firmly in cheek, archanonymous offered up Mr. Holl some advice "i love your work but if you don't do an emergency shelter and social housing in the next 5 years you're never going to get that Pritzker."tduds chimed in "Really, though, this is beautiful. Holl was a tough sell for me when I was younger but he's really won me over lately."

The AIA's Equity in Architecture Commission Releases Report, with its eleven priority recommendations for action, is required reading.

Mayfair House in London, UK by Squire and Partnersand Charles Street Car Park in Sheffield, UK by Allies and Morrison, are just two of the great projects from the latest Ten Top Images on Archinect's "Fancy Facades" Pinterest Board.

Firms/Work Updates Farzam Kharvaristarted Radio Architecture a new blog, and introduced himself.

Meanwhile, over at his blog Elemental Urbanism, James Pereirawrote about MaMuCre. Which led Max Headroom, F.AIAto note "David Ruy once said in my grad class Algorithms are recipes. The cooking analogy is great, always thought that was the best analogy and real portrayal of detailing in architecture."

For anyone looking for a new job and wanting to live in New Orleans,Eskew+Dumez+Rippleis looking to hire a Sustainability Enabler. Or the City and County of San Francisco needs an Urban Designer/Architect.

Anton Romashovbegan sharing photos of architecture (both modern and ancient) in Peru.

School/Blogs

Due to an unexpected surge in applications, the Free School of Architecture (FSA) will significantly increase its inaugural class size for 2017.

For a theory course at UIC, Jamie Evelyn Goldsboroughand her fellow students are researching an architectural typology that has been disrupted / effected by American capitalism. She selected Motels / Hotels. The project is heavily rooted in Eisenman's Frankfurt Rebstock Competition project of "the Fold." Jamie also posted a process drawing.

For those interested in a job in academia, University of Kentucky is accepting applications for either an Associate or Full Professor in Interior Design. Or an Associate or Full Professor, Director of Design Technology, with a focus on "developing, implementing and conducting courses that integrate technology within the curriculum."

UCLAAUD6 put out the call for POOL Issue No.2., submissions of communicative media surrounding the authorities that prescribe, the bodies that obey, and the administrators who implement rules. The deadline is February 20, 2017.

Discussions/Threads

johnshoe was looking for thoughts on the use of anADA Cheat Sheet. The earliest commenters recommended just learning ANSI A117.1 "Learn the code as it's written. You'll be more valuable to your firm, the profession, and the general public."senjohnblutarsky reminded folks of the Adobe "search function". As tintt sees it "Construction documents are supposed to be clear and concise and not have redundancies or conflicting information."

mbcube2 is in need of some career advice.Josh Mingsinitial response "I never would have taken such a pay cut. Volunteer is on point."gruen thought the story sounded familiar "Oh, is NBBJ still up to their old tricks? LOL, legendary."Contrary to manyshellarchitect counseled sticking it out "Having the local manager on your side is a great ally...I have a hard time believing that people would be purposely deceitful (wishful thinking?)...More likely the decision makers have changed."

Finally, daerquestioned how to structurally support his staircase, for a school project. Andrew.Circle expanded upon earlier suggestions from archanonymous and Non Sequitur. He also called attention to a deficient for the US guardrail, in the rendering. mightyaa answered the original question simply "Basic Physics" Later randomised posted an example from japan of a gorgeous staircase. (yet tduds nightmare) without a railing.

Additionally

ICYMI, back in November of last year, Keefer Dunn dove "into the failed thinking about the ways in which architecture creates change in order to unpack some of the lessons valuable to architects who are becoming activists and wondering what to do now."

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Editor's Picks #463 - Archinect

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Rich Lee wants to give you an orgasma cyborgasm.

For years, Lee has been beset by a dream of becoming a human vibrator, a bionic man endowed with an implant designed explicitly to bring pleasure to the opposite sex. By upgrading his parts down under to include a tiny vibrating device implanted just below the skin, he hopes to also upgrade his status from average Utah dad to that of a cyborg-era Cassanova. Turn it on, and the device will give his male appendage machine-powered capabilities that rival some of the worlds most popular sex toys, at least in theory. He calls itwait for itthe Lovetron 9000. And he doesnt just envision this cybersexual future for himself. He wants to sell it to you, too.

Lee is a grinder, a member of a niche community of biohackers pushing the limits of what it means to be human by augmenting their bodies with all sorts of synthetic parts. He has tiny magnets implanted into his ear that function as built-in earbuds and other magnets in his finger just for fun. He has an implant to sense his temperature and another outfitted with near-field communication technology that he uses in conjunction with a text-to-speech app to make his phone read aloud bits of text.

In his most recent experiment, Lee installed tubes of energy-absorbing non-Newtonian foam under the skin of his leg to act as a sort of built-in shin guard. It was a disaster. After flying to California to have two friends with day jobs in the ER install the long, thin tubes of armor on both shins, his legs swelled up so much that his stitches burst, exposing the implant. Every time he stood up, his body was hit with a rush of sharp, tingling pain. One night, in a feat of grisly bravery, he braced for the worst and just yanked the implants out himself.

Still, he was not deterred. Some might view Lees body modification avocation as self-mutilation, but he sees it as self-improvement.

Someday Id like to live in a world where everything youre dealt is changeable, fluid, Lee told me. My conception of an ideal self is something like a Mr. Potato Head, where I can just swap in and out different prosthetics for different senses and abilities.

The LoveTron 9000 is Lees riskiest and most ambitious project yet.

Documenting his modifications on YouTube has turned Lee into celebrity of sorts within the grinder community. Even among those that count having bits of electronics implanted in their body as fun, Lees excursions veer toward the extreme. But he is betting that wont be the case forever. He foresees a world not too far in the future where the average person has implants that do everything from unlock their front door to, yes, improve their sex life.

I met Lee last month at the second annual Body Hacking Con in Austin, where hundreds had gathered to see early visions of this future on display. On the runway, models showed off new fashions meant to bestow new senses, among them direction and echolocation. In the exhibition hall, multiple booths offered to implants magnets and RFID chips on the spot. One booth offered high-tech manicures that embedded LED lights and NFC chips into sparkly acrylic nails. A fellow cyborg, the Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence, gave a presentation on his quest to transform himself into Eyeborg after losing an eye in a hunting accident and replacing it with an analog camera.

None of the wearables or implants on display, though, went quite as far as Lees vision for a cybernetic penis.

Next year, Lee hopes the Lovetron 9000 might have its own booth at the conference, too. He plans to market the implant to kink-friendly consumers in hopes that it might become the next it sex toy, selling it via the Lovetron website directly to consumers who can then have the device implanted by a piercer or body modification artist from off his companys pre-approved list. The procedure is relatively non-invasive, as far as implants go, and will likely skirt regulatory approval thanks to a lack of laws that anticipated anyone might ever want to implant electronics below their skin for kicks.

As planned, the Lovetron 9000 will consist of a thumb-sized haptic device to be implanted just below the skin of the pubis, in the fatty skin just above the penis. After shaving, disinfecting and numbing the area with local anesthetic, a piercer would make an inch-and-a-half-long incision, creating a tiny pocket to slide the device into before stitching it all up. The Lovetron will consist of a motor, battery and a switch that allows the wearer to turn it off and on with magnetic force. Switch it on, and it will send a wave of vibration down the shaft of the penis. Lee doesnt have any formal medical training, but a biotech company is assisting him in the design of the device. After two weeks of healing, Lee said, the device will be ready for recreation. A partner, he shyly pointed out, might also enjoy grinding directly atop it.

To Lee, the vibrating penis implant is an obvious and necessary expression of the blurring lines between man and machine.

It was just low-hanging fruit, he said.

If theres anyone in the world who might seem like an obvious booster for a kinky cyborg sex revolution, it isnt Rich Lee. With a bushy beard, nerd glasses and a penchant for plaid, his look is more Seattle coffee snob than extreme body modification enthusiast. Lee is a divorced dad of two young kids, and lives in southwestern Utah where he manages a warehouse for a packaging sales firm. When I asked him to draw me a sketch of his implant, afterward he was so embarrassed by the appearance of a penis on my notebook pages that he quickly disguised his handiwork as a goofy looking face with a long skinny nose.

Lee got into the grinder scene back in 2008, long before there was a conference devoted to it. He grew up religious, feeling like there was little sense in considering the future since the Rapture was imminent.

While I was interested in space travel and extreme technological advancement, it seemed frivolous in light of the approaching apocalypse, he said. So later in life I masturbated my way out of church and eventually found atheism. I replaced God and heaven with science and transhumanism.

Years later, he was leafing through a stack of old magazines recently left behind by his grandmother. He was struck by the headlinesdecades old news stories proclaiming that a world free of death and disease was just around the corner. Obviously, neither of those promises had ever been fulfilled.

I started to panic, he said. Once again I had taken a passive role in a future which someone else promised me and that I had zero guarantees of realizing.

He decided to take matters into his own hands.

I started plotting ways to become the immortal mutant cyborg I always wished I was, he said.

On the internet, he found the blog of a well-known early biohacker, Lepht Anonym. Anonym presented an approachable vision for transhumanism, achievable with little more than some homemade cybernetics and a basic understanding of human biology. One of Anonyms hacks was a finger magnet, an implant first pioneered by Steve Haworth, the Godfather of body hacking. As soon as he read about the implant, Lee made an appointment and drove 400 miles to Arizona get his first implant from the Godfather himself.

From there, his experiments grew bolder, with varying degrees of success.

In 2013, his earbud implants became his first undertaking to go viral. The idea was to create implants that would give him the ability to listen to music in a room full of people, on the sly. Haworth implanted two small magnets under the skin of Lees tragus, the small inner flap of his ear. Lee could wear a loose magnetic coil around his neck, hidden under his collar, and it would create a magnetic field that caused the implants to vibrate and produce sound. His plans for the device were ambitious. I can see myself using it with the GPS on my smartphone to navigate city streets on foot, he wrote at the time.

In practice, though, its capabilities have been underwhelming. The audio quality is not quite good enough to be audible in a room full of people. But Lee says he does still use the implants regularly, to listen to music and the news to unwind at the end of the day, headphone free.

His modifications often come with a sense of humor. His NFC chip was once programmed to make his phone say self destruct sequence initiated. Detonation in 10...9...8... any time he waved the finger with the implant under his phone. (It was a neat party trick, he recalled.)

Two years ago, Lee nearly electrocuted himself in the bath while trying to come up with a mechanism to defeat hypothermia. He filled a bathtub with ice, then strapped an electric heating pad around his arm and got in. His question was whether a heating device implanted in one part of the body, like the arm, might be able to heat the bodys blood up sufficiently enough to stave off hypothermia as it circulated through the body. As he sat shivering and taking notes in the ice-filled tub, he noticed that the heating pad had sunk below the water, plug and all. He has yet to repeat that experiment, though fellow grinders revere it as the ultimate tale of grinder grit.

For the LoveTron 9000,Lee is working with a vaguely transhumanist company named Ascendance Biomedical to develop a prototype. Lee expects it to be ready for implant in three to four months. Hes even received a small investment from the company to help develop the custom micro electronics necessary to get a strong enough motor to sufficiently power the device while also keeping it small enough to implant without being too cumbersome or noticeable. He is currently seeking beta testers, though his first test subject, of course, will be himself.

Lee insists all this is safethe device will come hermetically sealed and he is relying on medical consultation to work out the details of the procedure. But medical professionals are wary of this growing set of DIY surgeons.

Without even getting into the ethics of whether or not this type of body modification should even be attempted, I think any licensed surgeon would recommend against these kinds of do-it-yourself surgeries, said Michael Terry, a professor in the plastic surgery department at University of California, San Francisco. Without a trained surgeon or sterile operating room, Terry said there is a much higher risk of infection, uncontrolled bleeding or nerve damage. In addition, he said, its hard to tell how the body might react to the implants themselves.

These are just a few of the many reasons why there is such a complicated credentialing procedure for surgery centers, and why it takes years of research and clinical studies to obtain approval for any implanted medical device, Terry said.

Lee, though, is not the only one banking on the economic potential of implantables. For years, startups like Grindhouse Wetware and Dangerous Things have sold implantables and the kits to implant them with to a growing community of grinders across the U.S. and Europe. The demographics of that community may not surprise you: its largely young, white nerds, the same groups of people who populated early hacker collectives and internet message boards.

But some see that starting to change.

In the beginning all the questions I got were technical, said Amal Graafstra, the founder of the Seattle-based Dangerous Things, as horde of conference goers swarmed him to watch a demonstration of him unlocking a door lock with his hand. Now its like, what can I do with this? The general public is interested.

Moon Ribas, a performance artist and cyborg activist who has a chip implant that allows her to feel seismic activity, recently co-founded Cyborg Nest, a company designed to bring whimsical implants to the masses. Their first product is an implant that allows the wearer to sense north by vibrating every time their body faces magnetic north. Rather than being embedded below the skin, it sits just on top, held in place with four piercings. Since launching in December, the North Sense has sold about 250 units. Ribas said that she was surprised to discover that the buyers were not all grinder types. One set of parents, she said, even bought the implants for them and their kids.

Lee is trying to curb his expectationshe doesnt exactly expect vibrating pelvis implants to go flying off the virtual shelves.

I think it will take a while to catch on, he admitted.

Still, he anticipates enough people will be interested to make for a viable business.

I plan on selling 100,000 in the next five years, he said.

At a hotel room meeting of some of the communitys most prominent grinders, they discussed how to deal with the eventual regulatory scrutiny that growing public interestand concernmight invite. Regulations for implants typically only apply when the implant is considered a medical device, but the magnets and RFID chips body hackers gravitate toward for now dont fall into that category. But the community is quickly moving beyond those boundariesone company said it was planning to have an implant that interfaces directly with the bodys nervous system ready within a year.

Lee and his fellow grinders are ready to move forward whether the world is ready for them or not.

Genetic modification is the moral and ethical thing to do, Graafstra argued during a talk on the ethics of biohacking. The ethical thing is to advance human society.

Its clear, though, that the rest of the world is not quite there yet.

Lee has experienced this firsthand. This fall, Lees ex-wife petitioned for custody of their two children, arguing that his hobby is a disturbing and dangerous one that makes him a worse parent. I stopped sharing joint physical custody, the motion read, because Rich has chosen to expose our children to his disturbing behavior of do-it-yourself surgeries and bio-hacking. Until a court date later this year, Lee has been stripped of shared custody.

The custody battle, though, has so far not impeded his plans for the Lovetron. For Lee, implanting vibrating cybernetics in his nether regions isnt just about being the guy at the party with the most interesting hobby. Its destiny, the obvious path of human evolution, low-hanging fruit.

On the last morning of the conference, I sat in a hotel room where five or six grinders were crashing, as a revered (and anonymous) DIY surgeon worked to extract a poorly implanted magnet out of a mans finger. The man sat stoically, looking in the opposite direction as his surgeon anesthetized him, then pulled back a flap of skin and began digging around in his finger for the magnet. Thirty minutes of digging elapsed, and still the rogue magnet had not been found. The room sat in near silence, following an earlier scolding.

Fuck man, the DIY surgeon said, pacing back and forth, then taking a hit from a vape.

The magnet, it turned out, had slid into a pocket of skin near that mans tendon, deep in his finger. A stronger magnet had been necessary to pull the magnet out. The culprit of this conundrum was only slightly larger than a broken tip of pencil lead. After a bad implant at a piercing salon in Portland, the magnet had been causing him discomfort for over a year. Undaunted, he got two more chips implanted while at the conference.

Anything you implant will eventually have to come out, Lee told me. We implant them with that in mind.

Maybe, in that case, we are not quite ready to embrace our inevitable cyborg future after all.

Original post:

Meet the Body Hacker Trying to Become a Human Vibrator - Gizmodo - Gizmodo

Image Credits: Vertigo

In the 1990s,Warren EllisandDarick Robertson foresaw a future of twisted behavior, renegade politics, and uncontrollable technology inTransmetropolitan. Wererevisiting the series book by book, because in a time of unrest anduncertainty we could all usesome Filthy Assistance.

In book two, Lust For Life, the world is brought into sharper relief as the new and the old crash into each other repeatedly, leaving our characters dealing with the fallout. Spider Jerusalem also confronts assassins putting a hit on his life as part of a convoluted scheme tied up in a messy divorce in a storyline that may go a bit too far

In the second volume of Transmetropolitanthe world and our narrator and guide to it come into focus more clearly.

Three one-shot stories open the volume, which was written by Ellis, with pencils by Darick Robertson, inks by Rodney Ramos, colors by Nathan Eyring, and letters by Clem Robbins. In the first, Channons boyfriend is leaving her, joining a transhumanist movement where he is literally going to be uploaded to the cloud. (If Dropbox formed a human face and created flowers, I might be more forgiving of those times theres a data breach that leaks all its files to the world.)

Neural uploading nicknamed braintaping in the cyberpunk fiction I read growing up, back when magnetic tapes existed and the occasional dinosaur roamed the Earth is a long-speculated end goal for transhumanist perspectives on the human race, a cure for death itself. Heaven on Earth. Except that in Transmetropolitan, anyone selling you on Heaven is either lying to you or to themselves.

One of Channons boyfriends first acts as a foglet is to get intimate with another foglet, right in front of Channon, andthe story ends with Spider in the unique position of running out to comfort Channon. All this brings into sharp relief one of the running themes of Transmetropolitan: that better cars and better computers didnt make us better people, and the worst frailties of the human condition are frailties of compassion and the heart.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the second story, arguably the best story in all of Transmetropolitan, and certainly my favorite. Spooling out of a single panel of shell-shocked street people in the first issue, this story takes the promise of the post-death future and reaches back into the past, to tempt us with it; you too, can be immortal, since in the future death will have been conquered.

But none of us float alone in a void; all of us are shaped by the forces around us. (This life extension service is specifically only available in first-world countries; like William Gibson said, the future is here, but unevenly distributed, and the fly in the ointment of transhumanism is that one-third of the world still lacks electricity.) We have family; we have friends; we have a society we understand, jobs we know how to do, favorite hobbies, favorite keepsakes, wedding bands and knickknacks, and our favorite coffee mugs.

For Mary, the subject of the story that Spider tells the reader, all of this is stripped away as she is reborn in a future that doesnt preserve any of that (or it does see the next story but again, the future is distributed unevenly). She is even stripped of most of her voice there is only the bare snippet of a conversation with a faceless man, the rest conveyed via Spiders writing, which forces us to look at her at a remove, and to empathize with her anyways.

She is shoved out into the world without all of the context that makes her her, and she is lost without it, realizing just how small in the face of the towering forces of society we all are, buoyed along by an ocean we cant tame and a wind we cant predict. The future is a place where death has been beaten back, making life so cheap that any excuse not to care about it is one that societys taken.

The last of the three one-shot stories is about the future reaching back into the past via different means, sending people back to live out the ultimate in LARPing, fully stepping into a long-decayed culture. That no-one thinks to match up the Revivals of the previous story with one of the cultural preserves from this story, where they might live in comfort, is a testament to how much the City suffers from institutional failure; an obvious solution forgotten because, again, not enough people care.

One of the preserves is less a preserve of times long past and more a quarantine zone where legal regulations of technology are relaxed, and it sets up years in advance Spiders tragic ailment, a testament to the power that playing the long game can bear out, much as it did with Preacher. Robertson and Nathan Eyring are the stars of this one shot, illustrating a variety of cultural periods and a realm of future-tech beyond the neon-cyberpunk aesthetic of the City proper.

The final story in the book, clocking in at multiple chapters, is an extended shaggy dog story with a literal shaggy dog (okay, a sentient shorthaired pitbull who also is a cop, because comics are great). Spider is deprived of his legal protections and attacked in his home

and the artful cussing and choreography of, say, Preacher is a million miles away. The fight is bloody and horrifying, making Spider sick, and robbing him of his gift with words.

It also does some notable worldbuilding, based around Ellis and Robertsons conception of the future as monocultural in many ways, down to the French language being eradicated in the name of the cultural supremacy of English, showing us a world where colonialism marches on in search of new targets to eradicate. It also gives us naked newscasters, which became a reality one year later. (Okay, so that wasnt a difficult one to predict.)

It also features an extremely sketchy plot point, in the form of Indira Ataturk, the woman on the inside who helped orchestrate an assassination attempt on Spider as part of the longest, messiest divorce in history. In The Words medieval-style interrogation room, she confesses that due to at best criminal negligence and at worst deliberate action, going on assignment with Spider exposed her to the electronic equivalent of an aphrodisiac, and she was filmed having sex with an entire room.

While underage.

This feels like it crosses a line, since shes made out to be a villain of a sort, but her motivation is honestly 100% justifiable. Spider is meant to be a good journalist, but this is the action of a bad one; hes supposed to be a charming bastard, our bastard, but this just makes him into a bastard. It barely comes up again, other than a running gag about how Spider treats his assistants, and I have to ask if the creators decided this was best swept under the rug.

Of course, nothing stays buried under the rug forever, especially in politics, and in the next volumeSpider confronts the journalists natural enemy: politicians. Well see you all next time, two weeks into the future.

If you would like to support good journalism which never stops being necessary in any era these organizations can always use your help:

Next: Five Comics To Read To Prepare You For Trump's America

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Filthy Assistance: Revisiting 'Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life' - ComicsAlliance

ExtremeTech has never been particularly interested inpolitics. That being said, as the focus of politics and politicians inexorably shifts towards technology, we might just jump in the water for a dip.

Many might imagine that concerns of a more socio-political nature like who is able to accrue what particular powers or possessions, and from whom would persist independently of technological influence. Others, like the Transhumanist Party founderZoltan Istvan, might offer that socio-political issues already are, at heart, technological issues. Now seizing the day, and a rapidly expanding number of like-minded transhumanists, Istvanhas announced that he will be a contender in the 2016 US presidential race.

If you havent heard of transhumanism, or youre not quite sure what it means, I suggest you read our introductory story about transhumanism before diving into the rest of this story. In short, though, transhumanism (sometimes referred to as H+) is about improving or transforming the human condition through technology. Brain implants, genetic engineering, bionic limbs, indefinite life extension these are all examples of the topics (and elective surgeries) that a transhumanist would be interested in.

In his recentbook The Tranhumanist WagerIstvan outlines three laws:

If energetically adopted, these deceptively simple maxims ultimately compel the individual to pursue a technologically enhanced and extended life. Zoltan and other supporters of transhumanism have come to see the choice to accept or reject these principles as something far more fundamental than the choice between liberal or conservative principles. In other words, it is a more compact predictor, a simpler explanation of your worldview, motivations, and actions than any current party provides.

It is for these reasons that Zoltan has founded the Transhumanist Party and is now taking this first major step to grow it. At this point in the game, the next major step getting access to all the state ballots could prove challenging. With these ideas in mind, we present an interview with (possibly) the next US president: Zoltan Istvan.

Zoltan Istvan

Why did you decide to run for the US presidency?

Zoltan Istvan The most important goal of the Transhumanist Party and my 2016 presidential campaign is to spread awareness of transhumanism and to address the issue that society will be greatly changed by radical science and technology in the next 5-15 years. Most people are unaware how significant these changes could be. For example, we might all be getting brain implants soon, or using driverless cars, or having personal drones follow us around and do our shopping for us. Things like anonymity in the social media age, gender roles, exoskeleton suits for unfit people, ectogenesis, and the promise of immersive virtual reality could significantly change the way society views itself. Transhumanism seeks to address these issues with forward-thinking ideas, safeguards, and policies. It aims to be a bridge to a scientific and tech-dominated future, regardless what the species may eventually become.

While the Transhumanist Party has almost no chance of winning this election, its goal is to get on as many state ballots as possible, so people will see its promise and recognize what it stands for. By doing so, well let citizens know an exciting political movement is afoot that focuses on using technology and science to enhance the human species. And maybe sometime in the future, many people will want to join it. Furthermore, Im hopeful other political parties will take notice of transhumanism and incorporate its ideas into their own philosophies.

On a final note, its my hope that others will start to run for various political offices, both locally and nationally, under the Transhumanist Party banner. This way we can show the country that future politics should be far more science and technology inspired. This would be a great step for the direction of the America.

Next page: On transhumanism and religion

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An interview with Zoltan Istvan, leader of the Transhumanist ...

Man vs. machine, cryonics, mind uploading...a science fiction book that's Amazon's #1 book under the category Philosophy is The Transhumanist Wager. Istvan says religious people are challenged by transhumanists."-Fox News Channel

"An Ayn Rand-esque manifesto." -The New Yorker

"The biggest novel on the transhumanist scene is Istvan's. 'The Transhumanist Wager' reads like Dan Brown's undergradudate thesis -- a rollicking plot setting out futurist thought, manifesto style." -The Spectator

"This book is an edgy riveting masterpiece that will long linger with anyone who reads it."-Serious Wonder

"Protagonist Jethro Knights may become one of the grand characters of modern fiction." -Psychology Today

"The Transhumanist Wager tells the story of Jethro Knights, a philosopher who rails against democratic politics and becomes a revolutionary that seizes control of the world in order to enforce a global authoritarian transhuman regime."-BBC

"Istvan, a prominent transhumanist writer...enlightens me. In The Transhumanist Wager, transhumanists manage to launch the third world war."-The Telegraph

"Many sayThe Transhumanist Wageris the newAtlas Shrugged."-Marin Magazine

"It's a page turner. Istvan knows how to tell a compelling story." -io9 / Gizmodo

"IenjoyedThe Transhumanist Wager...an adventurous suspense-filled semi-sci-fi about sailing, love, and life extension." -The Huffington Post

"About a man's quest to live forever using science, medicine, and technology."Popular Science

Thrilling...an important literary work that everyone should read."-Guardian Liberty Voice

"Bestselling The Transhumanist Wager& famous transhumanist Zoltan Istvan...a new philosophy, a new psychology, a new metaphysics...the concept of people taking a Transhumanist Wager is making a strong impact." -RT Television

"Transhumanism is snowballing into an international movement. The current wave of debate surrounding the concept began withThe Transhumanist Wager."-Breitbart

"It's set in a dystopian near-future America in which transhumanists are on the verge of huge technological breakthroughs but are under attack from conservative politicians and radical Christian fundamentalist terrorists."-Vox

"A gripping story...it's my new favorite novel."-Brighter Brains

"Istvan demonstrates great adeptness at crafting complex characters."-San Francisco Book Review

"The story is brilliant. It will challenge your thinking." -33voices

"Fascinating. It'smaking waves."-Good Day Sacramento, CBS TV

"A controversial thriller. As a leading transhumanist, Zoltan presents his reasons for being in favor of humanity merging with machine."-Red Ice Creations

"Istvan's novel has the potential to become a cult book. I hope it will be widely read and discussed." -Kurzweil AI

"A philosophical manifesto...the world becomes ruled by scientists." -Vice (Italy)

"Strongly libertarian...a radical version of transhumanism."-Patheos

"The action sequences in the book are top notch."-New York Journal of Books

"Controversial...a philosopher brings transhumanism to the world."-Wired (Germany)

"The Transhumanist Wagerpromises to become a cult classic among futurists."-SASM Institute

Read more:

The Transhumanist Wager - amazon.com

What is the Mormon Transhumanist Association?

The Mormon Transhumanist Association is the worlds largest advocacy network for ethical use of technology and religion to expand human abilities, as outlined in the Transhumanist Declaration and the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation. Although we are neither a religious organization nor affiliated with any religious organization, we support our members in their personal religious affiliations, Mormon or otherwise, and encourage them to adapt Transhumanism to their unique situations.

Increasingly, persons are recognizing parallels and complements between Mormon and Transhumanist views. On the one hand, Mormonism is a religion of the Judeo-Christian tradition that advocates immersive discipleship of Jesus Christ that leads to creative and compassionate works. On the other hand, Transhumanism is a mostly secular ideology that advocates ethical use of technology to expand human abilities. However, Mormonism and Transhumanism advocate remarkably similar views of human nature and potential: material beings organized according to natural laws, rapidly advancing knowledge and power, imminent fundamental changes to anatomy and environment, and eventual transcendence of present limitations. Resources available through this site provide details on the relation between Mormon and Transhumanist views.

Transfigurism is religious Transhumanism, exemplified by syncretization of Mormonism and Transhumanism. The term transfigurism denotes advocacy for change in form, and alludes to sacred stories from many religious traditions, such as the Universal Form of Krishna in Hinduism, the Radiant Face of Moses in Judaism, the Wakening of Gautama Buddha in Buddhism, the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ in Christianity, and the Translation of the Three Nephites in Mormonism. Transfigurism also alludes to prophecies, such as the Rapture in Christianity and the Day of Transfiguration in Mormonism.

The 14 founding members of the Mormon Transhumanist Association began organizing on 3 March 2006 and adopted a constitution on 13 May 2006. We incorporated in Utah of the United States on 4 August 2006, and received 501c3 nonprofit status in the United States, effective the same date. We affiliated with Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association) on 6 July 2006 and renewed our affiliation on 2 October 2010.

As of September 2015, the Mormon Transhumanist Association consisted of 549 members, with approximately 24% living in Utah and 65% living in the United States. According to a survey in 2014, 62% of our members were also members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the largest Mormon denomination) and 59% identified as theists. On social politics, 53% identified as progressive, 20% as conservative, and 18% as moderate. On economic politics, 32% identified as moderate, 32% as progressive, and 29% as conservative. All members of the association support the Transhumanist Declaration and the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation.

The association requires that all members support the Transhumanist Declaration and the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation. Support does not entail a specific interpretation or perfect agreement with these statements. A person may be a member of the association in good standing while sincerely holding to an interpretation of the statements that differs from that of another member, or while not fully agreeing or even constructively disagreeing with parts of these statements, so long as that person supports the Declaration and Affirmation on the whole. For example, the gospel of Jesus Christ is defined in the Affirmation as to trust in, change toward, and fully immerse our bodies and minds in the role of Christ, to become compassionate creators. Support for this statement may not require belief in or specific beliefs about the existence of God. Interpretation of the Declaration and Affirmation is ultimately the responsibility of each member. The association does not sanction a specific interpretation, and it does not expect perfect agreement.

The Mormon Transhumanist Association shares media, news, and opinions about the intersection of Mormonism with science and technology and Transhumanism with religion and spirituality. We engage as a community in discussions and conferences about prophetic vision, scientific discovery, technological innovation, as well as opportunities and risks in our rapidly changing world. We also act with common purpose on team projects to cure disease, and extend and enhance life.

Help the Mormon Transhumanist Association promote radical flourishing in compassion and creation through technology and religion. Join the association and engage in online or offline discussions. Link your website to ours. Start a blog on religion, science, spirituality or technology, and tell us about it. Attend a conference. Participate in a team project. Donate to the cause. Thank you!

You may contact us by email:

admin@transfigurism.org

You may also contact us by mail:

Mormon Transhumanist Association 21 Quiet Meadow Lane Mapleton UT 84664 USA

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About | Mormon Transhumanist Association

In his Global Spiral paper, Of Which Humans Are We Post? Don Ihde wonders whether all this bother about the concepts of human, transhuman, and posthuman arose with Foucault. The answer is no, they did not. Much earlier thinkers raised these questions in one form or another. Foucaults discussion in the Order of Things appeared only in 1973. Even if we limit ourselves to modern discussions of these concepts, Foucault is almost irrelevant. This is certainly true of the kinds of thinkers with whom Ihde concerns himself. The only people he actually names are Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and Ray Kurzweil, but Ihde is clearly commenting on the general thrust of modern transhumanist thought.

Our modern biologically and genetically-defined sub-species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has been around for 100,000 to 200,000 years. Theres some plausibility in Ihdes suggestion that the modern concept of human formed only in the last 3 or 4 centuries: the Cartesian-Lockean human. The emphasis on the rational capacities of human beings, however, lies further back with Plato and Aristotle (in their two quite differing ways). Aristotle didnt have the Lockean notion of individual rights, but they werent a big stretch from the Great Greeks view of the individual good as personal flourishing through the development of potentialdevelopment that would need a protected space. The Cartesian-Lockean human was crucially followed by the Darwinian and Freudian human, which took human beings out from the center of creation and some distance away from the transparently rational human of the old philosophers. Even so, I heartily agree that reassessing our interpretation of the human is timely and important.

The biologists conception of what it is to be a member of the human species so far remains useful: Our species is a group of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups.1 Although useful, that species-based definition and the related genetically-delimited identification of human is becoming increasingly inadequate as our further evolution depends more on the scientific and technological products of our minds. The transhumans or posthumans we may become as individuals (if we live long enough) or as a species may quite possibly share our current DNA, but implants, regenerative medicine, medical nanotechnology, neural-computer interfaces, and other technologies and cultural practices are likely to gradually render our chromosomes almost vestigial components of our individual and species identity.

While I agree with Ihde on the need for (further) discussion of the concepts and significance of human, transhuman, and posthuman, I find many of his comments to be directed at transhumanists who barely exist (if at all). I resonate with the project of understanding potentially obfuscating idols such as Bacon described. But Ihdes discussion of his own four idols seems to be more of a straw man than an accurate critique of contemporary transhumanist views. I find this to be true especially of his Idol of Paradise and Idol of Prediction. The other two idolsof Intelligent Design and the Cyborg contain relatively little critical commentary, and so I find less in them to object to.

True Transhumanism

A few years ago, I received a telephone call from researchers from the Oxford English Dictionary who were looking into the possibility of adding transhumanism to that authoritative bible of word usage. That addition has just now happeneda little behind the widespread adoption of the term around the world. Although Dante and Huxley used the term earlier, I first (and independently) coined the modern sense of the term around two decades ago in my essay Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy. My currently preferred definition, shared by other transhumanists is as follows:

Since I will argue that most of Ihdes critical comments and Idols succeed in damaging only views that few or no transhumanists actually hold, it makes sense for me to establish my knowledge of those views. Apart from first defining and explaining the philosophical framework of transhumanism, I wrote the Principles of Extropy and co-founded Extropy Institute to explore it and to spur the development of a movement (for want of a better term) based on transhumanism. That movement has grown from numerous sources in addition to my own work and become a global philosophy attracting a remarkable amount of commentary, both pro and con. In some minds (certainly in that of Francis Fukuyama) it has become the most dangerous idea in the world.

Ihdes own four idols of thought refer more to straw positions than to real views held by most contemporary transhumanists. That doesnt mean that he went astray in choosing Francis Bacon and his four idols from his 1620 work Novum Organum2 as an inspiration. Around the same time that I defined transhumanism I also suggested that transhumanists consider dropping the Western traditional but terribly outdated Christian calendar for a new one in which year zero would be the year in which Novum Organum was published (so that we would now be entering 389 PNO, or Post Novum Organum, rather than 2009). Despite Aristotles remarkable work on the foundations of logic and his unprecedented study On the Parts of Animals, Bacons work first set out the essence of the scientific method. That conceptual framework is, of course, utterly central to the goals of transhumanismas well as the key to seeing where Ihdes Idols (especially that of Paradise) fail accurately to get to grips with real, existing transhumanist thought.

Bacons own four idols still have much to recommend them. His Idols of the Tribe and of the Cave could plausibly be seen as the core of important ideas from todays cognitive and social psychology. These idols could comfortably encompass the work on biases and heuristics by Kahneman and Tversky and other psychologists and behavioral finance and economics researchers. The Idols of the Cave are deceptive thoughts that arise within the mind of the individual. These deceptive thoughts come in many differing forms. In the case of Don Ihdes comments on transhumanist thinking, we might define a sub-species of Bacons Idol and call it the Idol of Non-Situated Criticism. (A close cousin of The Idol of the Straw Man.)

Many of Ihdes comments sound quite sensible and reasonable, but to whom do they apply? The only transhumanists Ihde mentions (without actually referencing any specific works of theirs) are Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and Ray Kurzweil. In The Idol of Prediction, Ihde says In the same narratives concerning the human, the posthuman and the transhuman but never tells us just which narratives hes talking about. The lack of referents will leave most readers with a distorted view of true transhumanism. There are silly transhumanists of course, just as silly thinkers can be found in any other school of thought. I take my job here to be distinguishing the various forms of transhumanism held by most transhumanists from the easy but caricatured target created by Ihde (and many other critics).

Critics misconceptions are legion, but here I will focus on those found in Ihdes paper. I declare that:

From Utopia to Extropia

According to Ihde, technofantasy hype is the current code for magic. As an example, he picks on the poor, foolish fellow (Lewis L. Strauss) who fantasized that nuclear fission would provide a limitless supply of energy too cheap to meter. Technofantasy is magical thinking because magic produces outcomes that are completely free of trade-offs and unclear and unintended consequences. Magical technologies simply make it so. In these technofantasies, only the paradisical [sic] results are desired. It might have been better if Ihde had talked of divine thinking rather than magical thinking since, in a great many fables and other stories, the use of magic does bring unintended consequences (perhaps most famously in the various genie-in-a-bottle tales). Still, the point is clear. But does it apply to actual transhumanist thinkers? After all, Ihdes well-worn example is not from a transhumanist, but from an excessively enthusiastic promoter of nuclear fission as an energy source.

It is easy to throw around a term like technofantasy, but exactly is it? What appears to be fantasy, what appears to be a magical technology, depends on the time frame you adopt. Clearly many of todays technologies would appear magical to people from a few centuries ago. That point was stated memorably in Arthur C. Clarkes Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.3 Take someone from, lets say, the 15th century, and expose them to air travel, television, or Google and they would probably ask what powerful demon or mage created them.

Of course there is such a thing as technofantasy: its imaginary technology that ignores the laws of physics as we currently understand them. Any remarkable technology, so long as it is not physically impossible, cannot reasonably be described as magical thinking. Projecting technological developments within the limits of science is projection or exploratory engineering, not fantasya distinction crucial to separating the genres of hard science fiction from soft SF and outright fantasy. Seamless and magical operation remains a worthy goal for real technologies, however difficult it may be to achieve (as in transparent computing). Hence the ring of truth from Gehms Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

Although seamless and reliable technologies deserve a place as a goal for transhumanists, the ideas of perfection and paradise do not. We find those concepts in religious thinking but not in transhumanism. There are one or two possible exceptions: Some Singularitarians may be more prone to a kind of magical thinking in the sense that they see the arrival of greater than human intelligence almost instantly transforming the world beyond recognition. But even they are acutely aware of the dangers of super-intelligent AI. In contrast to Ihdes straw man characterization, most transhumanistsand certainly those who resonate with the transhumanist philosophy of extropydo not see utopia or perfection as even a goal, let alone an expected future posthuman world. Rather, transhumanism, like Enlightenment humanism, is a meliorist view. Transhumanists reject all forms of apologismthe view that it is wrong for humans to attempt to alter the conditions of life for the better.

The Idol of Paradise and the idea of a Platonically perfect, static utopia, is so antithetical to true transhumanism that I coined the term extropia to label a conceptual alternative. Transhumanists seek neither utopia nor dystopia. They seek perpetual progressa never-ending movement toward the ever-distant goal of extropia. One of the Principles of Extropy (the first systematic formulation of transhumanist philosophy that I wrote two decades ago) is Perpetual Progress. This states that transhumanists seek continual improvement in ourselves, our cultures, and our environments. We seek to improve ourselves physically, intellectually, and psychologically. We value the perpetual pursuit of knowledge and understanding. This principle captures the way transhumanists challenge traditional assertions that we should leave human nature fundamentally unchanged in order to conform to Gods will or to what is considered natural.

Transhumanists go beyond most of our traditional humanist predecessors in proposing fundamental alterations in human nature in pursuit of these improvements. We question traditional, biological, genetic, and intellectual constraints on our progress and possibility. The unique conceptual abilities of our species give us the opportunity to advance natures evolution to new peaks. Rather than accepting the undesirable aspects of the human condition, transhumanists of all stripes challenge natural and traditional limitations on our possibilities. We champion the use of science and technology to eradicate constraints on lifespan, intelligence, personal vitality, and freedom.

Or, as I put it in a Letter to Mother Nature: We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution. We do not do this lightly, carelessly, or disrespectfully, but cautiously, intelligently, and in pursuit of excellence. We intend to make you proud of us. Over the coming decades we will pursue a series of changes to our own constitution

Ihdes positioning of transhumanist thinking as paradisiacal is particularly odd and frustrating given the rather heavy emphasis on risks in modern transhumanist writing. Personally, I think that emphasis has gone too far. Reading Ihde and many other transhumanist-unfriendly critics, you get the impression that transhumanists are careening into a fantastically imagined future, worshipping before the idols of Technology and Progress while giving the finger to caution, risk, trade-offs, and side-effects. These critics cannot have actually read much transhumanist writingcertainly not anything written in the last decade. If they had, they would have immediately run into innumerable papers on and discussions of advanced artificial intelligence, of runaway nanotechnology, of existential risk. They would have come across risk-focused worries by organizations such as the Foresight Institute and the Council on Responsible Nanotechnology. They would have come across my own Proactionary Principle, with its explicit and thorough consideration of risks, side-effects and remote, unforeseen outcomes, and the need to use the best available methods for making decisions and forecasts about technological outcomes.

Intelligent Design and Intelligent Technology

In what seems to me like something of a tangent to his discussion of magical thinking, Ihde says that Desire-fantasy, with respect to technologies, harbor an internal contradiction. He sees a contradiction in wanting to have a technological enhancement and in having that enhancement become (a part of) us. On one hand, if we define the terms just right, it has to be a contradiction to simultaneously have an enhancement and to be enhanced.

But there is no contradiction in the idea that a technology can develop so that it enhances us and eventually becomes part of us. I explored this idea in detail in my doctoral dissertation, The Diachronic Self: Identity, Continuity, Transformation.4 If we absorb a technology, integrating it into ourselves, we can both have and be the technology in the relevant senses. This is much like taking a vaccine nowits an externally devised technology that alters our immune system, but it alters and becomes part of us. Or consider how an externally developed technology like gene therapy or artificial neurons can become integrated into who we are.

Ihde refers to the Idol of Intelligent Design as a kind of arrogance connected to an overestimation of our own design abilities, also embedded in these discussions. Again, he provides no referents for these discussions. He contrasts this idol with a human-material or human-technology set of interactions which through experience and over time yield to emergent trajectories with often unexpected results. This idol is indeed a problem. But Ihdes discussion implies that its a problem among transhumanist thinkers. Given the absence of actual examples, its hard to evaluate this implicit claim. His loaded term arrogance doesnt help. When does confidence become arrogance? Were the Wright brothers arrogant in their belief that they could achieve flight?

What really distinguishes transhumanist views of technology is expressed by what I called Intelligent Technology in the Philosophy of Extropy. I declared that Technology is a natural extension and expression of human intellect and will, of creativity, curiosity, and imagination. I expressed the transhumanist project of encouraging the development of ever more flexible, smart, responsive technology. I spoke for practically all transhumanists in suggesting that We will co-evolve with the products of our minds, integrating with them, finally integrating our intelligent technology into ourselves in a posthuman synthesis, amplifying our abilities and extending our freedom. As bold and unapologetic a statement as this is (befitting a transhumanist declaration) it says nothing about expecting perfectly reliable technologies that have no unintended consequences or outcomes that may trouble us.

Along with an overall (practical or active) optimism regarding technology, theres a strong strain among transhumanists (and especially in the Principles of Extropy) of critical rationalism and spontaneous order. Its true that older technophilesespecially those who might reasonably be labeled technocratshave sought to impose on society a technologically mediated vision of a better future. Transhumanists have far more often challenged this approachwhat Hayek called constructivist rationalism, preferring a self-critical rationalism (or pancritical rationalism5). Critical rationalism distinguishes us from Bacon who, like Descartes, believed that the path to genuine knowledge lay in first making a comprehensive survey of what is reliably known rather than merely believed.

Adding to the limits to confidence imposed by critical rationalism as opposed to constructivist rationalism, many transhumanists show a great appreciation for spontaneous order and its attendant unintended consequences, as outlined in my Order Without Orderers.6 Outcomes of people using technologies will never be quite as we might expect. Technology-in-use can differ drastically from technology-as-designed. When particle physicists starting using Tim Berners Lees hypertextual Web at the start of the 1990s, they had no idea what would quickly develop out of it. But these unexpected outcomes and spontaneous developments dont mean that we should stop trying to design better technologies and to improve our abilities at foreseeing ways in which they could go wrong.

The Body in Transhumanism

Ihde is right that the cyborg can be an idol. In his discussion of this idol, however, he never explicitly suggests that transhumanists idolize the cyborg. Thats just as well, since transhumanists generally look down on the Cyborg concept as primitive and unhelpful. It is the critics who try to force the square peg of transhumanist views of the body into the round hole of the cyborg. This most often takes the form of accusing us of seeking to mechanize the human body, or of fearing, hating, or despising our fleshiness, the fallacies of which I discussed in Beyond the Machine: Technology and Posthuman Freedom.7 A classic example of this straw man construction can be found in Erik Davis Techgnosis. Thankfully, Ihde does not repeat this error.

True transhumanism doesnt find the biological human body disgusting or frightening. It does find it to be a marvelous yet flawed piece of engineering, as expressed in Primo Posthuman.8 It could hardly be otherwise, given that it was designed by a blind watchmaker, as Richard Dawkins put it. True transhumanism does seek to enable each of us to alter and improve (by our own standards) the human body. It champions what I called morphological freedom in my 1993 paper, Technological Self-Transformation.

The Role of Forecasting

Idolatrous technofantasies arise again, according to Ihde In the same narratives concerning the human, the posthuman and the transhuman. Which narratives are these? Again, we are left without a referent. The point of his discussion of prediction is to repeat his point about unintended consequences and difficulties in knowing how technologies will turn out. In this section, Ihde does finally mention two people who might be called transhumanistsHans Moravec and Ray Kurzweilalthough Kurzweil definitely resists the label. Ihde calls them worshippers of the idol of prediction and asks if they have any credibility. Instead of addressing that, he makes some comments on unintended consequences that might arise from downloading the human mind into a computer.

Both Moravecs and Kurzweils forecasts of specific technological trends have turned out rather well so far. Of course it is easy to find lists of predictions from earlier forecasters that now, with hindsight, sound silly, and Ihde treats us to a few of them. Even there, and even with the assumption that accurate predicting is what matters in the whole transhuman/posthuman discussion, he fails to make a strong case for the futility or foolishness of predicting. He mentions an in-depth survey of predicted technologies from 1890 to 1940, noting that less than one-third of the 1500 predictions worked out well. He adds: Chiding me for pointing this out in Nature and claiming these are pretty good odds, my response is that 50% odds are normal for a penny toss, and these are less than that!?

The critics who chided Ihde for this are perfectly justified. He just digs himself deeper into the hole of error by bringing up the coin toss analogy. A coin has two sides, yielding two possibilities, so that the chance of a random prediction coming true is 50%. But technologies can develop in innumerable possible ways, not only because of future discoveries about that technology, but because of interactions with other technologies and because how technologies turn out usually depends heavily on how they are used. This error is especially odd considering how frequently Ihde flogs the dead horse of trade-offs and unintended consequences.

More importantly for these discussions of the transhuman and posthuman, it seems to me that Ihde doesnt understand futurology or forecasting. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to make impossibly accurate pinpoint predictions. Its to forecast possible futures so that we can prepare as well as possible for the upsides and downsidesso we can try to anticipate and improve on some of the trade-offs and side-effects and develop resilient responses, policies, and organizations. Rather than throwing up our hands in the face of an uncertain future, transhumanists and other futurists seek to better understand our options.

Ultimate skepticism concerning forecasting is not tenable, otherwise no one would ever venture to cross the road or save any money. Should we look at the uncertainty inherent in the future as an impenetrable black box? No. We need to distinguish different levels of uncertainty and then use the best available tools while developing better ones to make sense of possible outcomes. At the lowest level of uncertainty, there is only one possible outcome. In those situations, businesses use tools such as net present value.

Raise the level of uncertainty a bit and youre in a situation where there are several distinct possible futures, one of which will occur. In these situations, you can make good use of tools such as scenario planning, game theory, and decision-tree real-options valuation. At a higher level of uncertainty, we face a range of futures and must use additional tools such as system dynamics models. When uncertainty is at its highest and the range of possible outcomes is unbounded, we can only look to analogies and reference cases and try to devise resilient strategies and designs.9

Transhumanists are far from being dummies when it comes to looking ahead. But its true that many transhumanists are far from perfect in their approach to forecasting and foresight. My biggest complaint with many of my colleagues is that their vision is overly technocentric. Rather than The Idol of Prediction, a better critical construct would have been The Idol of Technocentrism. Not surprisingly, many transhumanists have a heavily technical background, especially in the computer and information sciences and the physical sciences. With my own background in economics, politics, philosophy, and psychology, I see a paucity of the social sciences among even sophisticated seers such as Ray Kurzweil, which I debated with him in 2002.10

None of Ihdes Idols apply to true transhumanism. But they do add up to a simple message: Peoples actions have unintended consequences, people are clueless about possible futures, and it is arrogant and hubristic to pursue fundamental improvements to the human condition. This ultimately pessimistic and existentially conservative message does indeed conflict directly with true transhumanism. Transhumanists do in fact understand unintended consequences and limits to our understanding, but they continue to strive for fundamental advances. I am wary of all isms, but these kinds of critiques of transhumanism spur me to renew my identification with that label even as I engage more deeply in cleaning up such misconceptions.

Endnotes

8. Vita-More. 1997, 2004.

10. Kurzweil and More, 2002.

Bibliography

Bacon, Francis, 1620, Novum Organum.

Clarke, Arthur C., Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination in Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973).

Courtney, Hugh, 2001, 20/20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World. Harvard Business School Press.

Davis, Erik, 2005, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information. Five Star.

Ihde, Don, 2008, Of Which Human Are We Post? The Global Spiral.

Kurzweil, Ray, 2006, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Penguin.

Kurzweil, Ray and Max More, 2002, Max More and Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity. KurzweilAI.net. <http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0408.html?m=1>

Mayr, Ernst: 1963, 1970, Population, Species, and Evolution. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

More, Max, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1998, Principles of Extropy

1990, 1994, 1996, Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy. Extropy #6.

1991, Order Without Orderers, Extropy #7.

1993, Technological Self-Transformation: Expanding Personal Extropy. Extropy #10, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 15-24.

1994a, On Becoming Posthuman. Free Inquiry.

1994b, Pancritical Rationalism: An Extropic Metacontext for Memetic Progress.

1995, The Diachronic Self: Identity, Continuity, Transformation. <http://www.maxmore.com/disscont.htm>

1997, Beyond the Machine: Technology and Posthuman Freedom. Paper in proceedings of Ars Electronica. (FleshFactor: Informationmaschine Mensch), Ars Electronica Center, Springer, Wien, New York, 1997.

1998, Virtue and Virtuality (Von erweiterten Sinnen zu Erfahrungsmaschinen) in Der Sinn der Sinne (Kunst und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Gottingen.)

1999, Letter to Mother Nature (part of The Ultrahuman Revolution: Amendments to the Human Constitution.) Biotech Futures Conference, U.C. Berkeley.

2004a, The Proactionary Principle. <http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.htm>

2004b, Superlongevity without Overpopulation, chapter in The Scientific Conquest of Death. (Immortality Institute.)

2005, How to Choose a Forecasting Method, ManyWorlds. <http://contribute.manyworlds.net/301/content/Models/CO1118051055599.pdf>

Vita-More, 1997. Primo Posthuman future Body Prototype http://www.natasha.cc/primo.htm and http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0405.html

Vita-More, 2004. The New [human] Genre Primo Posthuman. Delivered at Ciber@RT Conference, Bilbao, Spain April, 2004,

Read more here:

H+: True Transhumanism - Essentials | Metanexus

By Joseph Jankowski

The U.S. Navy has held meetings with American presidential hopeful and TranshumanistZoltan Istvan to discuss thepossibility of implanting humans with microchips fitted with global positioning (GPS) technology, reports The Sun.

AccordingtoVice Admiral Wisecup, who has retired from full-time service to work in a Navy department called the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, the meeting broadened our understanding of the merger of humans and machines.

A bunch of navy officers came to my house and one of the main topics was this chip implant strategy, Transhumanist and Futurist Istvan said.

Zoltan Istvan is currently running for president of the United States as a part of the Transhumanist Party.

The Transhumanist Party aims to uphold the energy and political might of millions of transhumanist advocates out there who desire to use science and technology to significantly improve their lives.

Istvan told The Sun that the Navy is worried that soldiers could enter service with chips already implanted into them and is struggling to create policy around this issue.

You can imagine how challenging that would be if someone had a non-authorized chip implant on a nuclear base, so policy has to be created and created soon, says Istvan.

I helped the US Navy do some policy work on this issue.

The presidential candidate believes that within 10 to 15 years, artificial intelligence will advance to the point of solving all of civilizations most vexing problems, including death, and he has even traveled around America in an immortality bus mocked up like a coffin to promote his ideas.

According to Istvan, themilitary has already experimented with chipping soldiers so they can be tracked.

Its crazy to me that we dont develop it and use it in ourselves (humans) more, and especially in our children, says the Transhumanist.

Istvan believes that GPS microchipping could be beneficial to parents who want to be able to keep track of their children and could have allowed investigators to find the body of Lane Graves, who was killed in an alligator attack, in just a matter of minutes.

As a father of a twoand five-year-old, Im a big believer in the future that all children will get chipped, perhaps like all children get vaccines in the US, Istvan told The Sun.

Joseph Jankowski is a contributor for Planet Free Will.com. His works have been published by recognizable alternative news sites like GlobalResearch.ca, ActivistPost.com, Mintpressnews.com andZeroHedge.com.

FollowPlanet Free Will onTwitter@twitter.com/PlanetFreeWill

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U.S. Navy Held Meetings With Transhumanist to Discuss ...

ETHICS & POLICY

Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development Suns are illuminating and heating empty rooms, unused energy is being flushed down black holes, and our great common endowment of negentropy is being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale. These are resources that an advanced civilization could have used to create value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives... [Utilitas, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2003): 308-314] [translation: Russian] [html] [pdf]

Human Enhancement Original essays by various prominent moral philosophers on the ethics of human enhancement. [Eds. Nick Bostrom & Julian Savulescu (Oxford University Press, 2009)].

Enhancement Ethics: The State of the Debate The introductory chapter from the book (w/ Julian Savulescu): 1-22 [pdf]

TRANSHUMANISM

Transhumanist Values Wonderful ways of being may be located in the "posthuman realm", but we can't reach them. If we enhance ourselves using technology, however, we can go out there and realize these values. This paper sketches a transhumanist axiology. [Ethical Issues for the 21st Century, ed. Frederick Adams, Philosophical Documentation Center Press, 2003; reprinted in Review of Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 4, May (2005)] [translations: Polish, Portugese] [html] [pdf]

RISK & THE FUTURE

Global Catastrophic Risks Twenty-six leading experts look at the gravest risks facing humanity in the 21st century, including natural catastrophes, nuclear war, terrorism, global warming, biological weapons, totalitarianism, advanced nanotechnology, general artificial intelligence, and social collapse. The book also addresses over-arching issuespolicy responses and methods for predicting and managing catastrophes. Foreword by Lord Martin Rees. [Eds. Nick Bostrom & Milan Cirkovic (Oxford University Press, 2008)]. Introduction chapter free here [pdf]

TECHNOLOGY ISSUES

THE NEW BOOK

"I highly recommend this book."Bill Gates

"terribly important ... groundbreaking" "extraordinary sagacity and clarity, enabling him to combine his wide-ranging knowledge over an impressively broad spectrum of disciplinesengineering, natural sciences, medicine, social sciences and philosophyinto a comprehensible whole" "If this book gets the reception that it deserves, it may turn out the most important alarm bell since Rachel Carson's Silent Springfrom 1962, or ever."Olle Haggstrom, Professor of Mathematical Statistics

"Nick Bostrom makes a persuasive case that the future impact of AI is perhaps the most important issue the human race has ever faced. ... It marks the beginning of a new era."Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkley

"Those disposed to dismiss an 'AI takeover' as science fiction may think again after reading this original and well-argued book." Martin Rees, Past President, Royal Society

"Worth reading.... We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes"Elon Musk

"There is no doubting the force of [Bostrom's] arguments ... the problem is a research challenge worthy of the next generation's best mathematical talent. Human civilisation is at stake." Financial Times

"This superb analysis by one of the world's clearest thinkers tackles one of humanity's greatest challenges: if future superhuman artificial intelligence becomes the biggest event in human history, then how can we ensure that it doesn't become the last?" Professor Max Tegmark, MIT

"a damn hard read" The Telegraph

ANTHROPICS & PROBABILITY

Cars In the Other Lane Really Do Go Faster When driving on the motorway, have you ever wondered about (and cursed!) the fact that cars in the other lane seem to be getting ahead faster than you? One might be tempted to account for this by invoking Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will", discovered by Edward A. Murphy, Jr, in 1949). But there is an alternative explanation, based on observational selection effects... [PLUS, No. 17 (2001)]

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

DECISION THEORY

BIO

Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009), and the academic book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014), which became a New York Times bestseller. He is best known for his work in five areas: (i) existential risk; (ii) the simulation argument; (iii) anthropics (developing the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects); (iv) impacts of future technology, especially machine intelligence; and (v) implications of consequentialism for global strategy.

He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award (one person selected annually worldwide from the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other humanities, and the natural sciences). He has been listed on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice; and he was included on Prospect magazines World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15 from all fields and the highest-ranked analytic philosopher. His writings have been translated into 24 languages. There have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works.

BACKGROUND

I was born in Helsingborg, Sweden, and grew up by the seashore. I was bored in school. At age fifteen or sixteen I had an intellectual awakening, and feeling that I had wasted the first one and a half decades of my life, I resolved to focus on what was important. Since I did not know what was important, and I did not know how to find out, I decided to start by trying to place myself in a better position to find out. So I began a project of intellectual self-development, which I pursued with great intensity for the next one and a half decades.

As an undergraduate, I studied many subjects in parallel, and I gather that my performance set a national record. I was once expelled for studying too much, after the head of Ume University psychology department discovered that I was concurrently following several other full-time programs of study (physics, philosophy, and mathematical logic), which he believed to be psychologically impossible.

For my postgraduate work, I went to London, where I studied physics and neuroscience at King's College, and obtained a PhD from the London School of Economics. For a while I did a little bit stand-up comedy on the vibrant London pub and theatre circuit.

During those years, I co-founded, with David Pearce, the World Transhumanist Association, a nonprofit grassroots organization. Later, I was involved in founding the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit virtual think tank. The objective was to stimulate wider discussion about the implications of future technologies, in particular technologies that might lead to human enhancement. (These organizations have since developed on their own trajectories, and it is very much not the case that I agree with everything said by those who flock under the transhumanist flag.)

Since 2006, I've been the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. This unique multidisciplinary research aims to enable a select set of intellects to apply careful thinking to big-picture question for humanity and global priorities. The Institute belongs to the Faculty of Philosophy and the Oxford Martin School. Since 2015, I also direct the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center.

I am in a very fortunate position. I have no teaching duties. I am supported by a staff of assistants and brilliant research fellows. There are virtually no restrictions on what I can work on. I must try very hard to be worthy of this privilege and to cast some light on matters that matter.

CONTACT

For administrative matters, scheduling, and invitations, please contact my assistant, Kyle Scott:

Email: fhipa[atsign]philosophy[dot]ox[dot]ac[dot]uk Phone: +44 (0)1865 286800

If you need to contact me directly (I regret I am unable to respond to all emails): nick[atsign]nickbostrom[dot]com.

VIRTUAL ESTATE

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.ukFuture of Humanity Institute

http://www.anthropic-principle.comPapers on observational selection effects

http://www.simulation-argument.comDevoted to the question, "Are you living in a computer simulation?"

http://www.existential-risk.orgHuman extinction scenarios and related concerns

On the bank at the end Of what was there before us Gazing over to the other side On what we can become Veiled in the mist of nave speculation We are busy here preparing Rafts to carry us across Before the light goes out leaving us In the eternal night of could-have-been

CRUCIAL CONSIDERATIONS

A thread that runs through my work is a concern with "crucial considerations". A crucial consideration is an idea or argument that might plausibly reveal the need for not just some minor course adjustment in our practical endeavours but a major change of direction or priority.

If we have overlooked even just one such consideration, then all our best efforts might be for naughtor less. When headed the wrong way, the last thing needed is progress. It is therefore important to pursue such lines of inquiry as might disclose an unnoticed crucial consideration.

Some of the relevant inquiries are about moral philosophy and values. Others have to do with rationality and reasoning under uncertainty. Still others pertain to specific issues and possibilities, such as existential risks, the simulation hypothesis, human enhancement, infinite utilities, anthropic reasoning, information hazards, the future of machine intelligence, or the singularity hypothesis.

High-leverage questions associated with crucial considerations deserve to be investigated. My research interests are quite wide-ranging; yet they all stem from the quest to understand the big picture for humanity, so that we can more wisely choose what to aim for and what to do. Embarking on this quest has seemed the best way to try to make a positive contribution to the world.

SOME VIDEOS AND LECTURES

SOME ADDITONAL (OLD, COBWEBBED) PAPERS

On this page.

INTERVIEWS

POLICY

MISCELLANEOUS

The rest is here:

Nick Bostrom's Home Page

Gennady Stolyarov II

The Transhumanist Party is pleased to announce the revitalization of an ongoing official activism project one that all members, irrespective of geographical location, can easily join. This is a project that utilizes our favored approach of direct, individually attainable action toward the creation of a brighter future.

You can personally help advance the fight against a multitude of diseases such as Alzheimers Disease, Parkinsons Disease, and many cancers.

The Longevity Meme Folding@home team a group of volunteers who donate their computing power to perform protein-folding simulations that could one day result in cures for major diseases and the lengthening of human lifespans has been operating for years, contributing otherwise idle computer resources to actual meaningful biological research.

To take part in this effort, just download the client for the Folding@home project at http://folding.stanford.edu/. Then join The Longevity Meme team here, and your computer will do the rest over time. I have personally been engaged in this effort for over six years.

If you would like a digital reward for contributing to this project, I am able to give five levels of digital Open Badges via Credly. Here is a page describing the various tiers of badges.Once you have reached the requisite number of Folding@home points to claim each badge, just contact me via e-mailhere with a message that includes your user name and an e-mail address.

The Transhumanist Party supports Lifespan.io and CellAge in their work towards groundbreaking scientific life-extension research. Finding a way to repair age-related damage to senescent cells would be a fundamental breakthrough for transhumanism, and we offer our best wishes and support for those striving towards these new technologies.

From Lifespan.io and CellAge:

Our society has never aged more rapidly one of the most visible symptoms of the changing demographics is the exponential increase in the incidence of age-related diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and osteoarthritis. Not only does aging have a negative effect on the quality of life among the elderly but it also causes a significant financial strain on both private and public sectors. As the proportion of older people is increasing so is health care spending. According to a WHO analysis, the annual number of new cancer cases is projected to rise to 17 million by 2020, and reach 27 million by 2030. Similar trends are clearly visible in other age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease. Few effective treatments addressing these challenges are currently available and most of them focus on a single disease rather than adopting a more holistic approach to aging.

Recently a new approach which has the potential of significantly alleviating these problems has been validated by a number of in vivo and in vitro studies. It has been demonstrated that senescent cells (cells which have ceased to replicate due to stress or replicative capacity exhaustion) are linked to many age-related diseases. Furthermore, removing senescent cells from mice has been recently shown to drastically increase mouse healthspan (a period of life free of serious diseases).

Here at CellAge we are working hard to help translate these findings into humans!

CellAge, together with a leading synthetic biology partner, Synpromics, are poised to develop a technology allowing for the identification and removal of harmful senescent cells. Our breakthrough technology will benefit both the scientific community and the general public.

In short, CellAge is going to develop synthetic promoters which are specific to senescent cells, as promoters that are currently being used to track senescent cells are simply not good enough to be used in therapies. The most prominently used p16 gene promoter has a number of limitations, for example. First, it is involved in cell cycle regulation, which poses a danger in targeting cells which are not diving but not senescent either, such as quiescent stem cells. Second, organism-wide administration of gene therapy might at present be too dangerous. This means senescent cells only in specific organs might need to be targeted and p16 promoter does not provide this level of specificity. Third, the p16 promoter is not active in all senescent cells. Thus, after therapies utilizing this promoter, a proportion of senescent cells would still remain. Moreover, the p16 promoter is relatively large (2.1kb), making it difficult to incorporate in present gene therapy vehicles. Lastly, to achieve the intended therapeutic effect the strength of p16 promoter to drive therapeutic effect might not be high enough.

CellAge will be constructing a synthetic promoter which has a potential to overcome all of the mentioned limitations. A number of gene therapy companies, including uniQure, AGTC and Avalanche Biotech have successfully targeted other types of cells using this technology. With your help, we will be able to use same technology to develop tools and therapies for accurate senescent cell targeting.

Gennady Stolyarov II

The United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) has taken notice of the Transhumanist Party on its website, where it republished an article originally written by Dylan Love of NBC News. This November 18, 2016, article is titled The Next Global Race Aims to Perfect Artificial Intelligence and highlights Zoltan Istvans discussion of possibilities for the future of artificial intelligence, as well as concerns about geopolitical competition over AI development.

An excerpt from the article shows how the Transhumanist Party has contributed to discussion of this issue in a manner that the UN has deemed noteworthy:

Zoltan Istvan is founder of the Transhumanist Party, a legally recognized and PR-minded political effort that calls attention to what tomorrows mainstreaming of todays rapidly developing technology could mean for human life.

Istvan campaigned for the U.S. presidency in 2016 on the platform of harnessing existing technologies to maximize both the quality and duration of ones life. Though his theoretical thinking may seem to border on the fantastic, Istvan has enough street cred at the intersection of politics and technology that he has consulted with the U.S. Navy on the geopolitical implications of artificial intelligence. He readily identifies it as nothing less than a national security concern.

The Transhumanist Party encourages a diversity of perspectives from its members regarding the future potential, promise, and risks of artificial intelligence. In accord with its stepwise shift to a more participatory and member-driven governance model, the Transhumanist Party will soon be hosting discussion panels on a wide array of emerging technologies and their political and societal implications. Artificial intelligence will be among the first areas of technology discussed.

Gennady Stolyarov II

The following is the draft sample ballot generated thus far as a compilation of the suggestions provided during the 30-day exposure period for the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. The exposure period will continue until 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on December 25, 2016,and comments will continue to be solicited until that time, with any further reasonable suggestions incorporated into the draft sample ballot until the end of the exposure period.

The draft sample ballot is a work in progress and will be revised on this page as further input is received. The purpose of releasing the sample ballot at this time is to provide insight into the structure of the voting and the options that have already been generated, so as to enable any interested members of the Transhumanist Party to read and understand the available options and propose further refinements and alternatives.

After the exposure period, a 7-day electronic voting period will occur from 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on December 25, 2016, to 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on January 1, 2017. Instructions for electronic voting will be sent to members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party via e-mail. All individuals who are members of the U.S. Transhumanist Partyas of the end of the exposure periodand who have expressed agreement with its threeCore Idealswill be eligible to vote thereafter.

Electronic voting will be conducted by a ranked-preference method on individual articles where more options are possible than would be accommodated by a simple Yes or No vote. Members should keep in mind that the ranked-preference method eliminates the incentives for strategic voting so members are encouraged to vote for the options that reflect their individual preferences as closely as possible, without regard for how other members might vote.

NOTE: The titles of the questions and potential Articles are descriptive and informational only and will not appear in the final adopted Transhumanist Bill of Rights. They are intended as concise guides to the subject matter of the questions and potential Articles. Likewise, the numbers or letters assigned to Articles within this ballot will not reflect the numbering in the final adopted Transhumanist Bill of Rights, which will depend on which Articles are selected by the membership. For purposes of convenient distinction, the original Articles developed by Zoltan Istvan are assigned Arabic numerals (1 through 6), while the new Articles proposed by the membership are assigned Latin letters (A through R, thus far).

NOTE II:The inclusion of any proposals on this ballot doesnot indicate any manner of endorsement for those proposals by the U.S. Transhumanist Party at this time except to place those proposals before the members to determine the will of the members with regard to whether or not the Transhumanist Bill of Rights should incorporate any given proposal.

Rank-order the Preamble Options that you support. Choose 1 for your most highly favored option, 2 for your second-most highly favored option, etc. If you choose Abstain, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

Preamble Option 1 [Original Text by Zoltan Istvan]. Whereas science and technology are now radically changing human beings and may also create future forms of advanced sapient and sentient life, transhumanists establish this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS to help guide and enact sensible policies in the pursuit of life, liberty, security of person, and happiness.

Preamble Option 2. Transhumanist evolution is underway and establishes life principles that allow a sentient entity to alter, augment, and perform self-improvement efforts utilizing science and technology to achieve supreme intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. This TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS extends sentient rights to enhanced neo-humans, cybernetic, transgenic, anthropomorphic, and avatar beings. The TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS provides a sentient entity the right to procreate, clone, and form, the right to expand and extend life beyond biological fundamental boundaries, and to live life without illness, aging, and catastrophic loss of self in pursuit of immortality. This TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS provides principles for intellectual and inclusive policies for all sentient entities in pursuit of life, liberty, eternal existence, and freedom to be different.

The TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS is not static. As the collective of sentient entities continues to unravel the mysteries of the Universe and discover more facts, the TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS will change. We (sentient entities) must be malleable, inclusive, and understanding in thought and spirit at the same pace as society evolves. We must continue to aspire, gain knowledge, and improve life.

Preamble Option 3. Transhumanist evolution is underway and establishes life principles that allow a sentient entity to alter, augment, and perform self-improvement efforts utilizing science and technology to achieve supreme intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities; to provide a sentient entity the rights to procreate, clone, and adapt form; to expand and extend life beyond present-day boundaries; and to live life without illness and loss of self in pursuit of immortality. We organize to provide principles for intellectual and inclusive policies for all sentient entities in pursuit of life, liberty, and eternal existence. This TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS extends sentient rights to all humans, cyborgs, transgenic, anthropomorphic, avatar, and yet-to-be-identified beings as defined herein.

The TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS is not static. As the collective of sentient entities continues to unravel the mysteries of the Universe and discover more facts, the TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS will change. We (sentient entities) must be malleable, inclusive, and understanding in thought and spirit at the same pace as society evolves. We must continue to aspire, gain knowledge, and improve life.

Preamble Option 4 [Usable if Option II(e) or Option II(f) below is adopted as well]. Transhumanist evolution is underway and establishes life principles that allow a sentient entity to alter, augment, and perform self-improvement efforts utilizing science and technology to achieve greaterintellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. This TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS extends sentient rights to enhanced neo-humans, cybernetic, transgenic, anthropomorphic, and avatar beings as well as any other being that demonstrates meta-cognition and self-directed awareness, which is capable of simultaneously modeling itself and its relation to the external reality, and whose cognitive processes can be described as lucid (characterized by continuous integration of information at Level 5 or a higher level as defined herein). The TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS provides a sentient entity the right to procreate, clone, and form, the right to expand and extend life beyond unenhanced biological fundamental boundaries, and to live life without illness, aging, and catastrophic loss of self in pursuit of immortality. This TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS provides principles for intellectual and inclusive policies for all sentient entities in pursuit of life, liberty, eternal existence, and self-actualization.

The TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS is not static. As the collective of sentient entities continues to unravel the mysteries of the Universe and discover more facts, the TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS will change. We (sentient entities) must be malleable, inclusive, and understanding in thought and spirit at the same pace as society evolves as we push mankind forward. We must continue to aspire, gain knowledge, and improve life.

Abstain.

Version 1 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights uses the enumeration of human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms in each Article to refer to the entities encompassed by that Article. It has been suggested, instead, that a more concise term might be used in the Preamble to encompass all of the above-enumerated entities and perhaps others.

Such phrasing would be of the following form:

As used in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS, the term [CHOSEN TERM] includes human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms.

Shall the Preamble be amended to include the above-quoted statement and, in all Articles, replace the enumeration of human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms withthe term selected as [CHOSEN TERM]?

Rank-order your preference for whether to use such a more concise all-encompassing term and, if so, what that term might be. Choose 1 for your most highly favored option, 2 for your second-most highly favored option, etc. If you choose Abstain, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

Option II(a). Keep the enumeration of human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms in each article.

Option II(b). Use thought-capable individuals as the chosen term.

Option II(c). Use advanced sapient life forms as the chosen term and remove that term from the longer descriptive listing. If this option is chosen, advanced sapient life forms will be defined to mean human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other beings of comparable cognitive capability.

Option II(d). Use sentient entities as the chosen term.

Option II(e).Use sentient entities as the chosen term, with a hierarchical definition of sentience as described below:

Sentient entities are defined by information-processing capacity such that this term should not apply to non-self-aware lifeforms, like plants and slime molds. Biological processing substrates are referred to as using an analogue intelligence, whereas purely electronic processing substrates are referred to as digital intelligence (instead of sentient artificial intelligences), and processing substrates that utilize quantum effects would be considered quantum intelligence.

Sentience is ranked as Level 5 information integration according to the following criteria:

Option II(f).Use sentient entities as the chosen term, with a further clarification that sentient entities include all entities exhibiting Level 5 information integration, or lucidity meaning that any such entity is meta-aware aware of ones own awareness, aware of abstractions, aware of ones self, and therefore able to actively analyze each of these phenomena.

Abstain.

Shall the definition of beings to whom the Transhumanist Bill of Rights applies include a specific mention of Gods and Archangels? Select one of the following options?

Yes.

No.

Abstain.

Shall the definition of beings to whom the Transhumanist Bill of Rights applies include a specific mention of genetically modified humans? Select one of the following options.

Yes.

No.

Abstain.

Shall the definition of beings to whom the Transhumanist Bill of Rights applies include a specific mention of intellectually enhanced, previously non-sapient animals? Select one of the following options.

Yes.

No.

Abstain.

Shall the definition of beings to whom the Transhumanist Bill of Rights applies include a specific mention of any species of plant or animal which has been enhanced to possess the capacity for intelligent thought? Select one of the following options.

Yes.

No.

Abstain.

Rank-order the Article 1 Options that you support. Choose 1 for your most highly favored option, 2 for your second-most highly favored option, etc. You may include the option for No Article of this sort in your rank-ordering, and it does not need to be your most favored option if you do so. (For instance, some voters might favor some options but think that no language is preferable to some of the other options.)

If you choose Abstain, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

Option 1-1 [Original Text by Zoltan Istvan]. Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms are entitled to universal rights of ending involuntary suffering, making personhood improvements, and achieving an indefinite lifespan via science and technology.

Option 1-2. Any sentient entity is entitled to enhance bodily and sensory capabilities, expand life, live free, and achieve eternal existence without suffering by utilizing science and technology.

Option 1-3.All human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms have the right to pursue transcendence of physical and mental limitations.

Option 1-4. Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms are entitled to universal rights of ending involuntary suffering, making personhood improvements, and achieving an indefinite lifespan via science and technology, as well as any other behaviors constituting life enhancement.

Option 1-NO. No Article of this sort.

Abstain.

Rank-order the Article 2 Options that you support. Choose 1 for your most highly favored option, 2 for your second-most highly favored option, etc. You may include the option for No Article of this sort in your rank-ordering, and it does not need to be your most favored option if you do so. (For instance, some voters might favor some options but think that no language is preferable to some of the other options.)

If you choose Abstain, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

Option 2-1 [Original Text by Zoltan Istvan]. Under penalty of law, no cultural, ethnic, or religious perspectives influencing government policy can impede life-extension science, the health of the public, or the possible maximum amount of life hours citizens possess.

Option 2-2. Under penalty of law, no cultural, ethnic, or religious perspectives influencing government policy can impede life-extension science, the health of the public, body modification, morphological enhancement, or the possible maximum amount of life hours citizens possess.

Option 2-3. Legal safeguards should be established to protect individual free choice in pursuing peaceful, consensual life-extension science, health improvements, body modification, and morphological enhancement. While all individuals should be free to formulate their independent opinions regarding the aforementioned pursuits, no hostile cultural, ethnic, or religious perspectives should be entitled to apply the force of law to erode the safeguards protecting peaceful, voluntary measures intended to maximize the number of life hours citizens possess.

Option 2-4. Legal safeguards should be established to protect individual free choice in pursuing peaceful, consensual life-extension science, health improvements, body modification, and morphological enhancement. While all individuals should be free to formulate their independent opinions regarding the aforementioned pursuits, no intolerant cultural, ethnic, or religious perspectives should be entitled to apply the force of law to erode the safeguards protecting peaceful, voluntary measures intended to maximize the number of life hours citizens possess.

Option 2-5. No government or irrational group should be permitted to systematically deny any person or persons access to a life-enhancing technology or the freedom to pursue scientific and technological avenues for their betterment.

Option 2-6. No government or irrational group should be permitted to systematically deny any sapient beingaccess to a life-enhancing technology or the freedom to pursue scientific and technological avenues for their betterment or self-actualization.

Option 2-7. No government or private entity should be permitted to systematically deny any person or persons access to a life-enhancing technology or the freedom to pursue scientific and technological avenues for their betterment.

Option 2-8. Under penalty of law, no cultural, ethnic, or religious perspectives influencing government policy can impede efforts at transcending physical and mental limitations, improving the health of the public, or the possible maximum amount of life hours citizens possess.

Option 2-NO. No Article of this sort.

Abstain.

Rank-order the Article 3 Options that you support. Choose 1 for your most highly favored option, 2 for your second-most highly favored option, etc. You may include the option for No Article of this sort in your rank-ordering, and it does not need to be your most favored option if you do so. (For instance, some voters might favor some options but think that no language is preferable to some of the other options.)

If you choose Abstain, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

Option 3-1 [Original Text by Zoltan Istvan].Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms agree to uphold morphological freedomthe right to do with ones physical attributes or intelligence (dead, alive, conscious, or unconscious) whatever one wants so long as it doesnt hurt anyone else.

Option 3-2. Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms agree to uphold morphological freedomthe right to do with ones physical attributes or intelligence (dead, alive, conscious, or unconscious) whatever one wants so long as it does not harm others.

Option 3-3. Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms agree to uphold morphological freedomthe right to do with ones physical attributes or intelligence whatever one wants so long as it does not harm others.

Option 3-4. Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms agree to uphold morphological freedomthe right to do with ones physical attributes or intelligence whatever one wants so long as it does not harm others. This right includes the prerogative for a sentient intelligence to set forth in advance provisions for how to handle its physical manifestation, should that intelligence enter into a vegetative, unconscious, or similarly inactive state, notwithstanding any legal definition of death.

Option 3-5. Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms agree to uphold morphological freedomthe right to do with ones physical attributes or intelligence whatever one wants so long as it does not harm others. This right includes the prerogative for a sentient intelligence to set forth in advance provisions for how to handle its physical manifestation, should that intelligence enter into a vegetative, unconscious, or similarly inactive state, notwithstanding any legal definition of death. For instance, a cryonics patient has the right to determine in advance that the patients body shall be cryopreserved and kept under specified conditions, in spite of any legal definition of death that might apply to that patient under cryopreservation.

Option 3-NO. No Article of this sort.

Abstain.

If Article 3 on morphological freedom is adopted, shall one of the followingsentences be appended after the base text of the article?

Choose 1 for your most highly favored option, 2 for your second-most highly favored option, etc. You may include the option Do not add anysentence of this sort in your rank-ordering, and it does not need to be your most favored option if you do so. (For instance, some voters might favor some options but think that no language is preferable to some of the other options.)

Read the original here:

U.S. Transhumanist Party PUTTING SCIENCE, HEALTH ...

Put simply Transhumanism is the belief that technology can allow us to improve, enhance and overcome the limits of our biology. More specifically, transhumanists such as Max More, Natasha Vita-More and Ray Kurzweil believe that by merging man and machine via biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, and artificial intelligence, one day science will yield humans that have increased cognitive abilities, are physically stronger, emotionally more stable and have indefinite life-spans. This path, they say, will eventually lead to "posthuman" intelligent (augmented) beings far superior to man - a near embodiment of god.

Transhumanism 101 with Natasha Vita-More

Transhumanism is both misunderstood and feared. Ignorant people with an ideological agenda have gone as far as labeling it "the most dangerous idea." I thought that it is time to bring some basic intellectual clarity on the topic and who is better prepared to help us do that but "the first female philosopher of transhumanism"!?

Max More - The Singularity and Transhumanism

Some of the main issues here are:

Can humanity continue to survive and prosper by embracing technology or will technology eventually bring forth the end of the human race altogether?

Will humanity get polarized into neo-luddite technophobes (such as Samuel Butler and Ted Kaczynski) or transhumanist technophiles (such as Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Nick Bostrom)?

Does that mean that wide spread global conflict may be impossible to avoid?

Is transhumanism turning into a new "religion" for certain scientists? (with "prophets" such as Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge) Or, is it a viable scientific hypothesis?

Who will be the dominant species?

What is the essence of being human?

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Transhumanism and the Technological Singularity

The Transhumanist candidate for President knows that he isnt going to win in 2016, or at least hes pretty sure. The party was only founded six months ago, so winning the top office in the land isnt necessarily the goal at this point. CCN spoke to Zoltan Istvan, a Californian who once sailed the open seas for seven years, via Skype one night recently. We talked about Bitcoin, politics, and, most interestingly, Transhumanism, or, according to Wikipedia:

an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

Zoltan Istvan started out as a philosophy major. Hes been a freelance journalist for years, writing for such publications as Vice. He is the author of the novel The Transhumanist Wager. About Bitcoin, he says:

Basically, Id say most Transhumanists support cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and new technologies that are coming that way. At the same time, Id say most of the Transhumanist emphasis is actually on the human body. On how to make it better so that we might not in the future make such [political] errors. [] A lot of Transhumanists are very interested in virtual currencies. []

I feel like encryption and ideas that resemble that with computers and technology, thats never going to go away. The further we get into the technological world, the more were going to need to protect ourselves, so that you cant falsify information [referring to the anti-counterfeit nature of Bitcoin], you cant just have hackers come in and take away your existence. We live in a world thats increasingly dominated by 1s and 0s and it requires a lot of security. So certainly I think thats one of the elements that, I think, Bitcoiners share with Transhumanists and people of that nature that are very interested in protecting the things that matter to them.

Many Transhumanists, including Istvan, support a future where robotic labor is the main source of production. Humankind has invented most of the solutions needed to eliminate human labor, they say, but has yet to fully take advantage of it, for economic reasons. Transhumanists propose that a Universal Basic Income is one possible solution to this.

A radical restructuring of the way things are taxed, and the things that are taxed, would lead to a situation where every person in a given economy would be afforded a monthly salary that would cover their basic needs and wants. This would not be akin to communism, as people would still be free to start businesses. The resources that belong to all people, such as air, water, and land, however, would be taxed such that everyone who owns them would be provided for. Income tax would become a thing of the past.

I think right now its not too early to discuss it, but its certainly too early to implement it, because, you know, robots are not taking all the jobs right now. Theyre taking some. But not nearly as much as theyre probably going to take in lets say ten years time. But that said, its a very important conversation to have. I think one of the main problems with futurist issues and technology and politics is that people always address everything too late. If we have designer babies here today, we should have been discussing this five years ago and implementing actual national policy. Instead, they havent even discussed national policy on this, except for a total moratorium or just, you know, not enough. And the point of the story is that we need to address these things ahead of time. And that takes courage, it takes know-how of the experts, and it just takes people kind of standing up and saying yes, politics is thorny and so is law, but lets get down to it and say, what is it that people feel comfortable doing.

And I think the same thing applies to Universal Basic Income. I think most reasonable people agree that youre going to need something like that if you are taking away all the jobs. Because without it, its a matter of basically becoming a dystopian society where the rich become richer and the poor become far, far poorer. [] I think it could come to a point where its so ludicrous that the poor literally say, hey, its worth revolting. Its worth fighting, rather than just saying, this is our piece in life.

The Transhumanist party is working on accepting Bitcoin donations for their political campaigns. Their primary purpose in politics is to advance technologies that will in the near term benefits humans. Things like the elimination of deadly diseases such as cancer are chief on their agenda. Most of their views are in line with libertarian social philosophies, although they do believe in utilizing the government to promote progress. Currently, theyre looking for a Bitcoin expert to help them develop digital currency policy as well as a system for making the most of their Bitcoin donations. For more information, visit their website.

Read the rest here:

The Transhumanist Party Supports Bitcoin: Zoltan Istvan ...

Its a wild request to ask a nation to consider electing you as their president, especially when youre a transhumanistsomeone who advocates for using science and technology to radically change and improve the human species. But Im doing it.

Last October, I declared my 2016 US candidacy under the newly formed Transhumanist Party, which I founded, and promised my community of techno-optimists Id do everything I could to use my campaign as a way to speed up the arrival of robotic hearts, brain implants, artificial limbs, exoskeleton suits, and indefinite lifespansall of which are just a small part of the radical science transhumanists aim to make a standard part of peoples lives.

The Transhumanist Party may seem fringe to some, but its not. Its mainly made up of scientists, engineers, futurists, and people who love technology. And while we dont have a formal paying membership process, my officers and I estimatebased on social media, event turnouts, and donationswe now have about 25,000 supporters in the US. We also have approximately 40 volunteers and more signing up every week. Globally, there are now almost 25 Transhumanist Parties on five different continents, each with its own rules that it determines best within its national framework.

My presidential campaign has been nothing short of a whirlwind. Take this morning for example. I woke up to my iPad beeping relentlessly with inbound messagesdozens of emails, Facebook posts, and tweets asking my policies on everything from artificial wombs, to a proposed moratorium on AI research, to the Baltimore riots. After brewing coffee, I answered as many requests as I could.

Later, I began the tedious business of negotiating a reality TV contract on my campaign. After taking my 4-year-old daughter to preschool, I returned to my desk and typed up a blog post supporting Chinese scientists editing the genome, then put together my slideshow for an upcoming speech in Vancouver, then worked with a designer on the Transhumanist Partys latest bumper sticker. Finally, I spent a half-hour checking out bus companies for my campaigns summer bus tour, scheduled to start this July on the West Coast.

By noon I was almost caught up on most urgent campaign matters and starting to look forward to my mid-day jog when the flow was broken by one my communications managers asking how I planned to answer inquiring press on 3D-printed guns. This is a sticky issue.

Generally, transhumanists love anything 3D-printedespecially when it concerns human organs and bionicsbut the question at hand was whether manufacturing a lethal weapon is going too far, especially when anyone could do it by buying a 3D-printer off Ebay for a under $2000?

Guns play an integral part in thousands of accidental deaths, murders, and armed robberies every year in America, so the ability to quickly, cheaply, and anonymously make them in your home or even in your car is highly contentious. I generally advocate for giving people nearly all liberties, but I had no idea how to answer this question, and neither did any of my staff. An advisor said we should check out what the US Constitutions Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) said about 3D-printers. We laughed, thinking it ridiculous to try governing a country with a 226-year old document in the transhumanist age.

People ask me all the timesince they know Im not going to win the presidency (third party candidates never win)if Im enjoying the campaign. Ive never thought about it like that.

See the original post:

Why Im Running for President As the Transhumanist Candidate