Category Archives: Transhumanist

Marjan Moghaddam, Glitch Goddess Intervention at Frieze NY, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

By SOPHIE BARON, December 2021

2021 was the year that saw Digital Art, NFTs, Virtual and Metaverse exhibitions finally take a seat at the table in the contemporary art market. With record sales of Digital Art at Sothebys, the corporate rebranding of Facebook into Meta, and NFTs promising the kind of excitement that Internet 1.0 once ushered in, the pandemic helped accelerate yet another fundamental cultural shift in our time. It is thus appropriate for a career-length lookback at one of digital arts pioneers and continuously prolific creators; an artist whose body of work spans almost 4 decades, who has consistently been on the avant-garde of technological progress and development: Marjan Moghaddam.

Born in Iran, Moghaddam arrived In New York City during 1979 as a political refugee fleeing from the brutal theocratic regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a regime that forced Iran, which had been a quickly-modernising society, back into virtually the Middle Ages, and imposed one of the harshest systems of gender apartheid in the world. It was the disturbing experience of living through her countrys revolution, Moghaddam has repeatedly stated, that inspired her commitment to social and technical progress, and thus, her interest in computers and the creative potentials they offer. This commitment to progress is also what motivated her to keep up with each and every new breakthrough in the field of computer science, and to constantly advance her art-making by utilising these new tools, which she also teaches as a tenured Full Professor of Digital Art and XR at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University.

Marjan Moghaddam with Shot in Iran and David & Gloiath (2021) at Mainline Art Center.

Marjan was the only female digital artist featured between NFT giants Beeple and XCopy in the BBC Click documentary Art Goes Digital, earlier this year. Having entered the NFT space with strong sales into top collections in 2020, she also exhibited widely in important metaverse shows in Cryptovoxels and Decentraland throughout the year, culminating with a solo show at MOCDA (Museum of Contemporary Digital Art) during the Summer, which closed earlier this fall. Entitled Digital Embodiments and Interventions: The Sculptural World of Marjan Moghaddam, the retrospective was hosted by MOCDA in Decentraland, a blockchain-based virtual reality space, and was curated by the London-based new media art expert Filippo Lorenzin. A walk through of the exhibition with Marjan and the curator from MOCDA and Decentraland University can be seen on You Tube.

Stretching across three vast, themed rooms in MOCDAs architecturally designed virtual museum in Decentraland, the first thing I noticed about the exhibit was Lorenzins focus on one key theme that has been prevalent in almost all of Moghaddams work from the very beginning, her adamant feminism, expressed not only in exaltations of the feminine form, but also in how modern technology gives women, and all people for that matter, the ability to modify and change their forms to whatever suits their individual desires. The concept of body fluidity, which is at the heart of everything from gender performance notions of feminism to transgender studies, transhumanism, and posthumanism, is an important example of why Moghaddams work is so relevant in todays social climate, and it shows how ahead of her time she was when she first began conceptualising fluidity in the 1980s. She has literally defined this contemporary state as identity through her unmatched style of figuration and animation in 3D CG and digital art.

Marjan & Fillipo Speaking in Room 1 with PMS and her 1996 Avatar and Fractals.

The first room comprises ten pieces: one sculpture, and nine video installations, all of which are interactive. The sculpture, called Spharen Wanderer, has a matching video installation; both, from 2015, are meditations on Being in the 21st century, inspired by the Spharen (Spheres) trilogy of books by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, a major influence on the artist. Other installations included David and Goliath (2012), one of Moghaddams most well-known recent works, a universal reflection upon oppression and resistance in Capitalism and art; Shot in Iran (2012), my personal favourite by this artist, a digital print in which Moghaddam bares her soul as she recounts the true experiences of violence she faced during the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution; and Shooting Venus (2014), an expertly crafted, multi-layered, complex series of images evoking the oppression of women in the east and west, with the video displaying derogatory phrases about women in English, Persian and Arabic.

Scab, an early landmark, and influential animation employing Motion Capture of improvised Performance and the artists signature abstracted #digitalbodies takes centre stage in this room. Seen by millions around the world as part of Siggraphs theatrical program of Computer Animation back in 2009, the animated painting explores PTSD. Also, of note is one of Moghaddams earlier works, PMS (1989), a mish-mash of arcade-game style colours, experimental noises, and imagery that, in dealing with the burden imposed upon the feminine body by society, plays with the deconstruction and the reconstructing of it in bizarre and shocking forms that nevertheless do give the viewer a sense of awe and sympathy for both the artists message and how she has chosen to express it. This piece was the only computer art project shown at the helms Degenerate Art show in the East Village of that era.

Moghaddams widely exhibited Posthumanist series from the 1990s, Adorations, which paired 3dCG bald humanoids textured with fractals, and posed in Madonna and child compositions with technological extensions of the body, is represented with Adoration of Gas Tank (2000). Another seminal 1990s piece is her 3d CG Avatar with Projected Fractals (1995) from her Chaoscape series, which was exhibited in various forms from early immersive virtual reality installations to Internet art and 3d animations as GIF sponsored by Prodigy Inc. in 1996 on DOTCOM Gallery and International Forum for the Digital Arts, the first NYC-based commercial art gallery located entirely on the Internet (this project can be seen on the DOTCOM site on the Web Archive).

Marjan Moghaddam, Glitch Goddess, Art Basel, 2018 Arthack. Courtesy of the artist.

The second room is Merged Identities featuring an installation of Marjans Feminist viral hit The #GlitchGoddess, glitches existing conventions of depicting women with a singular form by morphing from heavy, slender, pregnant, buff, to stylized and abstract. Marjan pioneered her #arthacks as a conceptual Net Art project in 2016, by hacking her #digitalbodies and critical discourse transgressively into found and shot exhibition footage online. In doing this, Moghaddam is performing a digital version of the feminist interventions of the 1960s, such as the women burning their braziers at the Miss America pageant in 1968. This is most explicit, to me, in Glitched Goddess at Milan Fashion Week with J Lo (2019), where their very presence is a rebuke to the negative standards of feminine beauty that the fashion industry promotes. In Glitched Goddesses at Frieze NY (2019), we see the same dichotomy again, this time directed at how women have been represented throughout the history of art with voiceovers from Barbara Krueger and Sister Wendy. In Dinosaurs of Art at Art Basel Miami (2019), we get a slightly different critique. Here, the goddesses themselves are epitomes of creativity, opposed against the consumer capitalist nothingness that is often major art fairs, made most notable in Miami that year by the submission of a banana as a work of art. The audio of Greta Thunberg speaking about climate change superimposed onto the video heightens the critique of how the art world, when it is only a means of capitalist exchange, helps in the destruction of the planet. In the centre of the room, however, we have another Glitched Goddess, from 2018, in red, white and black, as an animated sculpture, derived from her #GlitchGoddess of Art Basel Miami with Picasso and Wood (2018) that went viral over social media and received millions of views, set to a voiceover of women artists complaining about inequality in the art world. In this image, the viewer seems to be invited to be at peace with and proud of ones own body, to ignore the standards of the art and fashion worlds critiqued in the videos.

Marjan Moghaddam, GG Blesses J Lo 1. Courtesy of the artist.

The last room is Interventions, containing five of Moghaddams famous #arthacks as well as two of what she calls her chronometric sculptures; constructed forms that are both computer animation and sculpture (The Glitched Goddesses, who first appeared as #arthacks are also chronometric sculptures.) For the art fair hacks, the artist creates the works over a span of two to three days, and as a result the topics and themes are often raw and instantly relevant. Her Non-Binary Nude Glitch #arthack at the landmark Survey of the Nude at Gagosian Gallery (2016) is both an intervention and an art historic correction for an exhibition that omitted a digital and a non-binary nude. The Frieze London 2019 #arthack features the Glitch Goddesses resisting a body covering in the form of a shroud, in a nod to the #anticomulsaryhijab movement of Iranian feminists, against a backdrop of Barbara Kruegers My Body is a Battleground, successfully uniting western and eastern feminism as a unified resistance, set to the sounds of art historian Emily Jones explaining picture making from the 1980s. Several of Marjans Other NFTs with her #digitalbodies and signature figurative styles as NFTs derived from her #arthacks are also exhibited in this room such asLordess with Red and Teale Voxelized GAN Painting.

Marjan Moghaddam, Frieze London, 2019 Arthack. Courtesy of the artist.

The overall theme of the #arthacks is socio-political, a commentary and critique of our late-capitalist contemporary art scene. In works like Glitched Odalisque at the Whitney Museum (2017) or Glitched Odalisque at Frieze London (2019), the viewer is contrasted with the new vs the old, the organically creative contraposed to the commercial product. By making art hacks, digital artists do not need to create a Salon des Refuses to display their work, instead they can invade the biggest and priciest spaces of the art business. Elevating Internet meme culture to the level of important cultural critical discourse, the #arthacks have become a popular, widely respected new genre widely covered by the international press. The most widely known of Moghaddams #arthacks is Baiser at Mary Boone with Gan Collage Paintings which went viral in 2018 and continues to garner viral metrics even now, the version shown here is a 2021 NFT adaptation which sold into one of the biggest collections of NFT art collections on Superrare. Marjan considers Baiser as one of her best works in the unrivalled style of 3d CG figuration and animation that she has singlehandedly pioneered.

Marjan Moghaddams work is the work of an incredibly skilled technician and craftsperson working with a heightened sense of aesthetics and the mind of an existentialist philosopher. As such, understanding her work is often not easy, and requires multiple and prolonged viewings. Yet, as evidenced by all the comments that she receives on her work on social media, there is a sophisticated and global new audience for digital art that has not only found their way to her work on the Net but is additionally actively engaged with its profound discourse. The time spent on gazing at her creations, however, is time well spent, time that perhaps will leave the viewers mind a little more aware of the world and people around them. Perhaps one of the first major retrospectives of a prolific digital artists work in the metaverse, this exhibition successfully delivers a museum-grade landmark survey of important works from the last 4 decades by an important artist in this field; proving that digital art has now fully matured, and that the metaverse and its flagship museum is a valid and viable new experience for viewing art. Filippo Lorenzins impeccable curation and MOCDAs architecturally designed virtual exhibition space, add to what is indeed one of the most significant early digital art museum retrospectives of the Metaverse.

Room 3 Non Binary Nude Glitch Sculpture.

In addition to the MOCDA retrospective, the works of Marjan Moghaddam are appearing at other museum exhibitions, including Proof of Art: The History of Digital Art & NFTs at the Photo and Media Art Museum in Linz, Austria, alongside works by luminaries such as Ai Wei Wei and Nam June Paik. This exhibition now offers a companion book on Digital Art and NFTs. This December, Marjan is exhibiting in Transformations, a group exhibition of NFT Art at Unit Londons Mayfair gallery. Her works are sold on Superrare, Institut from Unit London, Boson Protocol/Zora, and Rarible. This December she is creating a White Hot Magazine Commissioned NFT cover for sale on Foundation, and #GlitchGoddess will appear at the Vancouver 2022 Winter Festival as a commissioned AR installation, large format outdoor prints, and a 30 tall soft sculpture.WM

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Digital art pioneer Marjan Moghaddam's retrospective in the Metaverse at MOCDA - whitehotmagazine.com

The faint remnants of The Matrix Online still reverberate somewhere in the ether. I'm not saying it's possible to jack in, but... well, do some Googling and you may or may not find a website dedicated to emulating this beloved, doomed MMO long after its funeral. You may or may not uncover a hyperlink that downloads a preserved version of the game client and a crack designed to jailbreak it from Sony's rigamortis grasp. You may or may not be asked to fabricate login credentials, and you may or may not watch your computer seize up as it attempts to render assets that have been left to atrophy since 2009.

Against all odds, The Matrix Online keeps finding ways to stubbornly survive

But if you follow the white rabbit long enoughif you take the red pill and eschew the moldering firewalls like the brave pirates of the Nebuchadnezzar once didyou will eventually find those abandoned greyscale buildings, that queasy smog-stained sky, and a deep, permeating sense of loss. The Matrix Online shambles on, creaky but undeterred.

It will not take long for you to understand that The Matrix Online has grown shriveled and desiccated in its afterlife. The game was released in 2005, and Sega pulled the plug just four years later. The Matrix Online's emulation projectthe only way to play the game in 2021was pieced together by a hacker named Rajko through reams of server code he scraped up as the game entered its hospice period. Rajko has toiled for 12 years as the MMO's personal curator, and as of this writing, the emulation resembles more of a zombie than a messiah. A huge swathe of content is missing and will likely never be recovered. The project is not capable of providing combat, quests, character progression, or really, any of the game elements that a nation of redpills once enjoyed.

And yet, against all odds, The Matrix Online keeps finding ways to stubbornly survive. For those who grew up adoring this game and the greater Matrix mythos, that's more than enough.

"You [use the emulation] to chat, explore, equip clothing and weapons, and emote," says Bitbomb, one of the many denizens of a Discord server dedicated to the ongoing resuscitation of the MMO. "Most recently, your character can finally sit on things. That didn't work for the longest time."

The Matrix Online deserved better. Hell, The Matrix itself deserved better. All the pieces were in place. The Wachowski sisters pioneered a dense fiction perfectly tuned for an ascendant generation of technophiles: a filthy dystopia embellished with snakeskin trench coats and mirrored sunglasses. They used Hollywood to realize a generation's worth of latent cyberpunk wish-fulfillment. The franchise was downright monolithic for a few years, the first film scooping up nearly $500 million at the box office and earning a quartet of Oscars at the Academy Awards. Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus were quickly consecrated into a new pantheon of superheroes long before the Marvel revolution.

If you asked me what I thought the future held in 1999, I'd tell you that it seemed inevitable that The Matrix would continue to cultivate its multiversal empire with a litany of sequels, TV shows, comic books, and video games, securing its place as an omnivorous media juggernaut. The Matrix Online was supposed to be the ultimate capstone of that promise; a persistent metaverse where the saga could grow, twist, and iterate forever. The Wachowski sisters named the MMO as the canonical successor to the trilogy, so for a crop of newly-minted fans captivated by transhuman potential, a subscription was a no brainer.

But you probably know the story from here. The Matrix's two muddled sequels lacked the watershed, mind-bending clarity that elevated the original, and by 2005, the franchise's zeitgeist had thoroughly passed through the nervous system of American society, leaving only a chittering niche of diehards behind. The Matrix Online earned middling reviews and a small, negligible playerbase upon release, and when it was mercifully snuffed out of existence, nobody really seemed to notice. But the passage of time has been kind to the pop relics of the early 2000s and right now, we are once again living through a hot flash of Matrix mania.

When I was hearing the same canned dialogue in WoW over and over, The Matrix Online was experimenting with spontaneous public theater

The fourth film in the seriesThe Matrix Resurrectionsis about to enter theaters, and rumors of a fifth entry are already abound.

Those who adored this misadventurous MMO did not need a renaissance to reignite their love, but when I hit the dirty avenues of the emulation myself, I caught a few other newbies hiding out in the chat box, probing the ancient DNA of our once-and-future blockbuster. They, like me, caught the fever again. The Matrix has us, same as it ever was.

Nobody, not even the most ardent Matrix Online defenders, wants to argue that the game was unfairly treated by critics. "The flaws were numerous," says Vesuvius, another Discord member who was perhaps the most effusive about the MMO's legacy during my interviews. "The combat [was unbalanced,] there were bugs, exploits, and a PvP system with no reward other than bragging rights."

All of those problems eventually proved untenable. The MMO held under 500 active players by the time it was shuttered, which is about as grim as a server population can get.

But Vesuvius believes that there are certain elements of the Matrix Online experience that haven't been replicated before or since by any of the major players in the games industry. In particular he points to the game's Live Events Team, which was composed of genuine Sony developers who would take control of important lore charactersthink Morpheus or Seraphand act out a crucial junction of the narrative in real time.

The idea of a studio reaching through the looking glass and manipulating the contours of the Matrix without any scripting or artifice is so perfect I can't believe it didn't make a bigger splash. When I was hearing the same canned dialogue in WoW's Stormwind over and over again, The Matrix Online was experimenting with spontaneous public theatera cavalcade of players chasing Niobe through the corridors, desperate to eavesdrop on any juicy intel. That is a bold bit of game design; maybe we really were missing out.

"The [live events] were unannounced, spontaneous, secretive," says Vesuvius. "Even if an event took place on your server for your organization, there was no guarantee you could participate. Screenshots depicting the events were posted to forums on the following day. They were often the best way to stay up to date on the story."

Other players I spoke to extolled the flexibility of The Matrix Online's talent treeanother element of the game that is sadly impossible to resuscitate in the emulation. "We could swap out our abilities whenever we wanted. In other MMOs when you chose your role you had to stick to it, but I loved the freedom to change my loadout when it suited me," says Dan, who tells me he started playing the game when he was 14 years old. Given how the rest of the RPG landscape has slowly sanded down the hegemony of the Almighty Spec, perhaps Dan is right when he says that The Matrix Online was ahead of its time.

By and large though, these wayward fans are most fond of the way this MMO told its story. The Matrix Online was religious about its plot; dispensing frequent cinematics and universe-altering "critical missions" that slowly unfurled what life was like after Neo. In 2005, as it became clear that there was no more Matrix fiction on the horizon, this video game was the only way to get a taste of that endlessly cascading code. The Matrix Extended Universe goes places, and these players savored it to the last drop.

"Niobe revealed her true feelings for Neo. Ghost resisted temptation and corruption at the hands of a sexy machine liaison designed to appeal to humans. As the Oracle hinted, he went on to lead the charge absent of Neo and Morpheus," says Vesuvius. "The lore was always the heart of the game."

For now, only a few people if Lana Wachowski pays that groundwork forward in The Matrix Resurrections. I love the idea of the band getting back togetherKeanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Jada Pinkett Smithfor an Endgame-style supergroup bonanza that still honors the scaffolding laid out by an old, dead MMO. Imagine the wondrous expanse of The Matrix where some of the most momentous inflection points are laid out in YouTube cutscene compilations.

After the franchise's long, circuitous trip back to the pinnacle of pop culture, it would be almost fitting.

Vesuvius says that he desperately hopes the MMO remains canonically enshrined in the new movie, but others have made peace with the Wachowskis potentially pressing the reset button. "A reboot could be supremely inventive. I feel like I would be experiencing it with the same folks I did way back when," says a Matrix Online lifer who goes by Sugaree. "The deepest feeling of satisfaction I got came from socializing. I'm not afraid of a reboot."

Regardless of what comes next, The Matrix Online will never flicker out for good. The game is enfeebleda shell of itselfbut it persists because the memories have never grown stale. Take a walk in the uncanny metroplex of MegaCity, close your eyes, and be whisked away to an era where these streets were packed with kung-fu fights, leather dusters, and smoked ammunition. A crack of light is pouring into this tomb as The Matrix stirs once more.

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The Matrix Online may have died in 2009, but there's still a ghost in the machine - PC Gamer

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo*

In his must-read new book,The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F. KennedyJr. describes how journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Faucis secretive experiments on hundreds of HIV-positive foster children at Incarnation Childrens Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities in New York and six other states between 1988 and 2002 (p. 245). He describes in detail how Faucis NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and his Big Pharma partners turned Black and Hispanic foster kids into lab rats, subjecting them to torture and abuse in a grim parade of unsupervised drug and vaccine studies (p. 246).

The real Anthony Fauci was a greedy egomaniac hell bent on creating an image of himself as the savior of the world during the AIDS crisis while generating billions in profits for his pharmaceutical industry partners. The partners would then share some of the loot with Fauci and others in various ways, including sharing in patent rights, the revolving door of very highly paid jobs for former government bureaucrats, paying multimillion dollar user fees to the NIAID, distributing shares of stock, etc.

The pharmaceutical industry remunerated Incarnation Childrens Center for supplying children for the tests, writes Kennedy. The tests involved giving the children experimental drugs that were toxictheyre known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage, and fatal skin disorders (p. 246). Torture is not too strong a word to describe what happened to these children. If the children refuse the drugs, says Kennedy, theyre held down and force fed. If the children continue to resist, theyre taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital, where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their stomachs (p. 246). This wasnt science fiction or a sick horror movie, says Kennedy, but Fauci-funded AIDS research.

Many of these children died as a result of the research. Investigative journalist Vera Sharav, who spent years investigating all of this, told Kennedy that Fauci just brushed all those dead babies under the rug. They were collateral damage in his career ambitions. She said that at least 80 children died from Faucis drug torture chamber in the Manhattan foster home alone.

You probably never heard of this, but the BBC produced a documentary of the savage barbarity of Dr. Faucis science projects in 2004 entitled Guinea Pig Kids. A BBC investigative journalist said in the documentary that I found the mass graves at Gate of Heaven cemetery in Hawthorne, New York. I couldnt believe my eyes. It was a very large pit with AstroTurf thrown over it. Under it one could see dozens of plain wooden coffins there may have been 100 of them (p. 247).

The New York City Administration of Child Services commissioned a four-year investigation of Faucis Dr. Mengelestyle experiments and found that eighty of the 532 children who participated in Faucis clinical trials diedand twenty-five died while enrolled in a medication trial (p. 251). By 2003 Faucis NIAID was running 10,906 clinical trials involving children in ninety countries (p. 257). Today Fauci, his longtime vaccine-manufacturing billionaire partner Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the World Economic Forum are desperately campaigning to have every child in the worldeven infantsinjected with their latest vaccine. These are the same people who have publicly fantasized about all humans someday having an implanted digital ID in their bodies to achieve their goal of transhumanism. They say they want a digital IDimplanted into everyone for purposes of government monitoring of all human behavior by some kind of super, internationalgovernment institution. (Where is James Bond when we need him?)

Another charming fact about Fauci that Kennedy discuses is that Fauci has also funded (with your hard-earned tax dollars) experiments where Beagle puppies had their heads locked into cages where they could be eaten to death by flies. He also gave University of Pittsburgh researchers $400,000 to graft the scalps of aborted fetuses onto living mice and rats (p. 253). Not exactly the type of job one would expect a good Jesuit Catholic schoolboy like Anthony Fauci to have. Fauci is a Catholic in the same sense that abortion worshipper Joe Biden is a Catholic.

The man is in reality a sociopath who has pushed science into the realm of sadism writes Kennedy (p. 253). Who else but a criminal sociopath would have any involvement at all in such things? (Or for that matter in dropping atomic bombs on helpless Japanese civilians; firebombing entire European cities occupied by civilians; lobbing thousands of artillery shells a day on your own countrys cities also occupied only by civilians, i.e., Atlanta, Charleston, and Vicksburg during 186165; killing four hundred thousand Filipinos for refusing to be occupied and conquered by your government; mass murdering fifty thousand Plains Indians to make way for the railroads, as General Sherman once announced, etc., etc.ad infinitum? But I digress).

Government bureaucrats love crises like wars, hurricanes, depressions, pandemics, etc. because in times of crises millions of average citizens become childlike, their IQs seem to be cut in half (at least), and they beg for a substitute mommy and daddy to protect them, their new mommy and daddy being the state. All of a sudden they are willing to abandon all of their civil liberties and embrace totalitarianism like a drowning man embraces the side of a lifeboat. This is exactly the behavior of millions of Americans since March of 2020.

Theabsenceof a crisis, on the other hand, creates a crisisfor government bureaucrats. To the bureaucrat there is a crisis crisis whenever there is no real crisis. It is imperative, therefore, that every government bureaucrat becomes ahysteric who is constantly trying to alarm the public with theperceptionof a crisis or an impending crisis. He is professional liar, in other words, and can rely on the socialist indoctrination organs known as the media to hype his crises. After all, itsperceptionsthat count in politics, not reality.

Fauci is no more than your ordinary, run-of-the-mill bureaucratic crisis monger and serial liar, as Kennedy documents in chapter 11, Hyping Phony Epidemics: Crying Wolf. Early in his government career Fauci was involved in promoting hysteria over what was called the swine flu. NIAID and its pharmaceutical industry puppet masters told Congress and the White House that the swine flu was the same strain of virus that caused the infamous 1918 Spanish flu epidemic that is said to have killed 50 million people worldwide. The government poured money into Faucis NIAID and Big Pharma made big bucks by getting President Ford (in 1976) to give them $135 million to supposedly inoculate 140 million Americans. In the end, writes Kennedy, the actual number of pandemic swine flu casualties in 1976 was not 1 million but 1 (p. 358).

Patients injured by the experimental swine flu vaccine filed 1,604 lawsuits forcing the government to pay out over $80 million in damages and incur tens of millions in legal fees. Kennedy hits the nail on the head when he concludes that At the dawn of Dr. Faucis career, he learned that both pandemics andfake pandemicsprovide an opportunity to expand the bureaucracys power and to multiply the wealth of its pharma partners (p. 360, emphasis added).

Then there was the 2005 bird flu hysteria where Fauci once again predicted unprecedented carnage. This time he partnered with Bill Gates and hired the now disgraced and discredited British conman statistician Neil Ferguson to construct models that predicted up to 150 million people could die from the bird flu. In the end, about 100 people died from it, and most probably had comorbidities that were the real causes of death. That was after President Bush asked Congress for $1.2 billion for Big Pharma to come up with another of its experimental vaccines.

The 2009 Hong Kong swine flu caper was a carbon copy of the earlier ones. Fauci promised to fast track a vaccine once again, and the mediadutifully poured on the government-sponsored hysteria.

By the Fall of 2009 thousands of Americans were complaining about devastating side effects of the new Fauci shot. Fauci promised the public that Big Pharmas new drug was perfectly safebut in reality there was an explosion of grave side effects, including miscarriages, narcolepsy, and febrile convulsions as well as severe neurological injuries, paralysis from Guillian-Barre syndrome and cataplexy as well as brain damage (p. 365). Some things never change. The epidemic never materialized and As usual, there was no investigation of Dr. Fauci or the other medical officials who choreographed this multi-billion-dollar fraud (p. 366). Congress would never investigate it because too many fingers would be pointedat themfor funding the whole charade. They just collect their millions in campaign contributions from Big Pharma as a form of kickback for the millions in taxpayer dollars given to these corporations and then move on to the next phony health crisis for which they will also take no responsibility.

In 2016 Fauci diverted billions from taxpayer-funded research on malaria, influenza, and tuberculosis to his newest scam, the zika virus. Right on cue, he enriched his Big Pharma partners with $2 billion to produce yet another vaccine to prevent microcephaly, a supposed effect of the zika virus. In the end, there were fifteen cases of the virus in the USandnoneof them was associated with microcephaly. Dengue fever was another Fauci scam in that same year that funneled additional billions to Big Pharma withsurprise!the exact same scenarios and results.

In every single instance, Kennedy writes, Fauci and others at National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention load up the committees that vote for permission to market all of these experimental drugs with people who have Big Pharma connections or who are current executives for one or another pharmaceutical company. It is all rigged, all permeated by mountains of lies repeated over and over by the lying lapdog media which pockets millions or billions in advertising revenue from Big Pharma. (Have you watched network television lately?). It is not about public (or private) health at all, but to make more billions for Big Pharma, to bloat the NIAID budget even more than it already is, while throwing a few crumbs to Big Pharmas supporting cast of house pets in the public health bureaucracy and academic world. They fully intend to keep this racket going forevereven if it kills you.

*About the author: Thomas DiLorenzo is a former professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute. He is the author ofThe Real Lincoln;How Capitalism Saved America;Lincoln Unmasked;Hamiltons Curse;Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government; andThe Problem with Socialism.

Source: This article was published by the MISES Institute

Excerpt from:
'The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, And The Global War On Democracy And Public Health' Book Review - Eurasia Review

Humans have always been fascinated with the concept of immortality but what seems to be even more exciting to some is the thought of using technology to make immortality a real-world application. A movement called transhumanism is even devoted to using science and technology to augment our bodies and our minds, and to allow humans to merge with machines, eradicating old age as a cause of death. So the big question is can we really evade death?

From Hans Moravecs classic book Mind Children to Gene Roddenberrys iconic TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the idea of uploading a persons feelings, memories, and experiences onto a machine, has been explored in many popular non-fiction and fiction works. However, whether or not mind uploading could become a reality, like 3D printers, robots, and driverless cars? We are yet to find out.

Mind uploading describes a hypothetical process of separating a persons consciousness (which involves their emotions, thought process, experiences, and basically everything that makes a person unique), then converting it into a digital format, and finally transferring the digital consciousness into a different substrate, like a machine.

The process would conceivably incorporate different steps, like mind copying, mind transfer, mind preservation, and whole brain emulation (WBE). Here is a detailed overview of how mind uploading can actually work:

The human brain regularly performs complex processes with the help of its 86 billion neurons that function simultaneously in a large neural network. And the complexity does not stop there. There aremore than 125 trillion synapsesjust in the cerebral cortex alone. That is a lot of information and storage capacity. Some have suggested that, in order to completely replicate an individual's brain, it would be necessary to first dissect the brain.

However, mind uploading advocates claim that noninvasive brain scans can provide sufficient resolution for copying the brain without actually killing the person to do it. The information stored in our brain would then be used to create aconnectome, a complete map of the neural connections in the brain, created using incredibly precise scanning of the neurons, and the synapses.

However, to date, we only have a complete connectome for a 1.5-millimeter roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans, which has just 302 neurons and about seven thousand synaptic connections.In 2014, theOpenWorm projectwhich mapped the brain replicated it as software and installed it in a Lego robot which was capable of the same sensory and motor actions as the biological model.

Building a human connectome is clearly a much more complicated process. Even in the case of the C. elegans, researchers had to work for more than a decade to understand the organisms neuronal pathway.

Now imagine how much time and resources will be required for the identification of about 86 billion neurons, determination of their precise location, and tracing and cataloging of their projections on one another. Building and interpreting even a single human connectome is inconceivable using existing technologies.

Another proposed method of getting information from the brain is through a brain-computer interface (BCI). There are already existing implanted devicesthat can translate some types of neuronal information into commands, and arecapable of controlling external software or hardware, such as a robotic arm.However, modern BCIs are only very slightly related to the theoretical BCIs which would be needed to allow us to transfer our brain states into a digital medium.

Brain-computer interfaces which would allow mind uploading would need a technology similar to modern-day brain scanning technology. Some suggest that downloading consciousness would require technology capable of scanning human brains at a quantum particle level.

Elon Musks Neuralink is one company working on aspects of mind-uploading. They are designing a neural implant which would work "like a Fitbit in your skull". It would have many micron-scale electrode threads connected to different parts of the brain. While this technology is showing some promise in allowing humans to interface with computers in a limited way, it is not close to the technology needed to upload an entire brain.

Neuralinks website mentions that their chip will kick off a new kind of brain interface technology and as it develops further, they will be able to increase the channels of communication with the brain, accessing more brain areas and new kinds of neural information.

Some wealthy individuals who wish to live foreverare opting to preserve their brains and sometimes bodies through cryopreservation. In theory, in the future when human connectome technology is fully developed, their consciousness could then be retrieved and uploaded. An American cryonics company Alcor Life Extension Foundation already stores around 180 cryopreserved human bodies (with more preserving just their head) at its Phoenix-based facility.

However, some experts also claim that such cryonic techniques may damage the brain beyond repair.

Recently, an MIT graduate Robert McIntyre, rekindled the brain preservation hype when he announced his Y-Combinator backed startup Nectome is building some next-generation tools to preserve brains in the microscopic detail needed to map the connectome.

While previously working at a cryo research firm 21st Century Medicine, McIntyre along with cryobiologist Greg Fahy developed a method that combines embalming with cryonics. Fahy suggests that through this technique they could preserve the entire brain to the nanometer level, including the connectome. They even received an $80,000 science prize from the Brain Preservation Foundation for preserving a pigs brain so well that every synapse inside it could be seen with an electron microscope.

One element of this process that may give some pause for thought, however, is that the "brain embalming" needs to take place while the person is still alive. The company hopes the process will be allowed as part of doctor-assisted suicide programs. Even if it does not lead to an uploading technology, any brains that Nectome manages to preserve might help in the research towards building the human connectome.

Once all the neural activity is mapped out and the connectome is ready, the next step would be to digitize it. According to a rough estimate published in Scientific American, the memory storage capacity of the human brain could be around 2.5 Petabytes (2,500 TB).

While the popular notion is that we only use 10% of our brain, neurologists say this is actually a myth and we actually use almost all of our brain, all the time. That's a lot of storage.

Apart from the storage, we will require a computer architecture on which the brain can be reconstructed in the form of computable code. And there is the issue of power for that architecture.Today, a computer with the same memory and processing power as the human brain would require around 1 gigawatt of power, or "basically a whole nuclear power station to run one computer that does what our 'computer' does with 20 watts," according to Tom Bartol, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute.

In computing, artificial neural networks (ANN) have been created which are inspired by the biological neural networks. An ANN is based on a collection of connected units or nodes which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. However, there are some major differences between an ANN and a human (or animal) brain:

Also, the human brain uses approximately 300 times more parameters (neurons combined with synapses) as compared to GPT3, the largest artificial neural network ever built.

Once all the requirements are fulfilled and the artificial brain is ready, the mind can now be uploaded into a simulation, such as a virtual world,like the metaverse, or into a network of artificial brains connected to each other in a swarm (also called hive mind). Another transhumanist idea suggests that the mind can also be uploaded on a humanoid robot. Uploading into a physical robot would require robots that are a lot more functional than any that currently exist.

However, if the consciousness is uploaded as a substrate-independent mind (SIM), and if the SIM is deemed to be conscious, then it will also need toexist in a place and be able to interact with things. This will require virtual reality that is identical to how humans experience actual reality, everything from tasting a soda to feeling the pain of a car accident. All of this will require yet more storage capacity, signal bandwidth, and power.

Neuroscientist Michael Hendricks from McGill University called mind uploading an abjectly false hope in his 2015 report published in the MIT Technology Review. According to Hendricks, scientists still dont know exactly what kind of technology can allow them to replicate a human mind.

In his report, Hendricksalso raised doubts about the success of current or foreseeable freezing methods for brain preserving, as well as methods for retrieving the information stored in the human brain. Furthermore, as an expert on the neural activity of the C. Elegans roundworm, he says that having a connectome is by itself not a sufficient condition to simulate a nervous system.

Even once we figure out the technical side of whole brain emulation, there's still the philosophical part of the equation. Would that emulation still be you? Answering that will require a great deal of thinking about what it is that constitutes consciousness and identity something there is no clear answer to.

Another study reveals, that depending on their personal views on death, suicide, fiction, philosophy, and science, some people may show great support for mind uploading, while others strongly disapprove of any such practice.

Sure, mind uploading has the potential to change human lives forever, but this is also why the advent of this sci-fi technology in the real world might also give rise to a lot of conflicts revolving around its ethical and social impact on humanity.

Steve Jobs once said, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." If this is true, then defeating death by mind uploading may in fact be self-defeating. It would allow a few individuals to go on, but at the expense of everything and everyone else.

For now, a number of scientists, researchers, and tech companies are working towards making mind uploading a reality. Whether they would be successful or not, and how our society would react to consciousness transfer, only the future could tell.

See the rest here:
Will We Ever Cheat Death and Become Immortal With Mind Uploading? - Interesting Engineering

Image credit: urikyo33, via Pixababy.

These days, anti-humanism is as thick as molasses among the intelligentsia. That includes an ongoing conversation in bioethics about whether all things considered human extinctionwould be a fine thing because of the suffering that never coming into existence would avoid.

Example: A few months ago, Oxford professor Roger Crisp opined that we might not want to stop a huge asteroid from hitting the Earth. FromWould extinction be so bad?:

Consider the huge amount of suffering that continuing existence will bring with it, not only for humans, and perhaps even for post-humans, but also for sentient non-humans, who vastly outnumber us and almost certainly would continue to do so. As far as humans alone are concerned, Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill at the University of Oxfords Global Priorities Institute estimate that there could beone quadrillion(1015) people to come an estimate they describe as conservative.

These numbers, and the scale of suffering to be put into the balance alongside the good elements in individuals lives, are difficult to fathom and so large that its not obvious that you should deflect the asteroid. In fact, there seem to be some reasons to think you shouldnt.

Perhaps one reason we think extinction would be so bad is that we have failed to recognise just how awful extreme agony is. Nevertheless, we have enough evidence, and imaginative capacity, to say that it is not unreasonable to see the pain of an hour of torture as something that can never be counterbalanced by any amount of positive value. And if this view is correct, then it suggests that the best outcome would be the immediate extinction that follows from allowing an asteroid to hit our planet.

Crisp equivocates a bit at the end, writing, I am not claiming that extinctionwouldbe good;only that, since itmightbe, we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date. Good grief. Is the issue really debatable?

Meanwhile, writing in response to Crisp in theJournal of Medical Ethics Blog, University of Calgary professor Walter Glannon shrugs his big brain at the prospect of us being gone.From A world without us:

We cannot predict the sort of lives future people would have because we do not know the sort of world they would inhabit. But the circumstances described above make it difficult to be optimistic. Regardless of the hypothetical value or disvalue of these lives, possible people are not deprived of anything if they do not come into existence.

We have an obligation to collectively act to prevent or reduce the suffering that present and future humans will actually experience. This depends on controlling natural habitats, deforestation, carbon emissions and other processes. Future actual people have the same rights and interests in avoiding suffering as present actual people. The extent of suffering may provide a pro tanto reason to prevent them from existing. Even if there is no such reason, merely possible people do not have these rights and interests because they do not and will not exist. If we become extinct, then the world will go on without us and will be good or bad for no one.

Why do ivory-tower discussions like this matter? Because these nihilists are teaching the society leaders of tomorrow, those who will exert tremendous influence over future public policies and cultural attitudes. With our supposedly best minds suggesting thathuman extinctioncould be desirable, is it any wonder that so many of our young people seem to be despairing?

Moreover, the utter terror of suffering is pathological and leads directly to evil and/or terribly wrongheaded utilitarian policies such as eugenics and social Darwinism. It is also the moving force behind the euthanasia movement, which seeks to eliminate suffering byeliminating the sufferer. Avoiding suffering is also the central philosophical core of thetranshumanism quasi-religion, which seeks to create a corporeal immortality by instilling a new eugenics with very sharp teeth.

So, what should be our attitude toward suffering? It should not be utopian scheming. Nor, to be sure, should it be indifference. Rather, we have a human duty tomitigateeach others suffering, to love and suffer with each other which is the root meaning of compassion. And we can harness our own suffering to grow and become better individuals.

In this regard, for myHumanizepodcast, I recently interviewed the quadriplegic Christian evangelist and disability rights activistsJoni Eareckson Tada,who unexpectedly took a deep dive into this very issue, and in a very intimate and personal way. Regardless of faith issues, her attitude toward and personal response to her own deep suffering is much healthier than the nihilism that has grown so dark within utilitarian bioethics that some dont reject the prospect of human extinction out of hand.

Read the original:
Bioethicists Okay Human Extinction - Discovery Institute

Photo: Unax LaFuente

Published Dec 03, 2021

8

Since the 2012 breakthrough of her Stretch EPs she has played in the fertile chaos of liminality, straddling possibilities beyond binaries with ease. In her visual collaborations with transhumanist artist Frederik Heyman, for example (see the music video for "Prada/Rakata"), esoteric symbolism meets CGI latex in fusions of human and machine. Her reconceptions of gender, genre, language, physicality, and erotic expression coexist in a transgressive multiverse where nothing is out of the question. Her music lives here, too.

Though she is known for helping produce Yeezus, collaborating with artists like FKA twigs and Bjrk, and posing for portraits for Calvin Klein, the essence of Arca's creative mission is made most apparent elsewhere. Following positive reception of her 2020 album KiCK i (including a Grammy nomination), she released an LP composed entirely of remixes of the track "Riquiqui" generated by the AI software Bronze. Last year she released a single called "@@@@@"which clocked in at 62 minutes. Her contributions to Philippe Parreno's installation in the MoMA lobby a technological entity named "Echo" who responds to stimuli ranging from movements of the public to cloud coverage outside the building have expanded into an online project (echo.world) which allows anyone to tune into the dreamscape of live AI technology.

She has a vast community of online followers who call themselves "Mutants" and, in 2015, she was banned from Instagram for art created with Jesse Kanda for her single "Vanity," in which a cyborgian human is depicted with anatomically correct genitalia. Xen, the "genderless being" that shaped her 2014 album of the same name, was not just a character Arca made up. It was an aspect of her identity which she once used to sign off journal entries.

For Arca, fluid embodiment, category defiance, and the merging of dissonant worlds are more than abstract concepts. Her work exists deliberately beyond the margins of what can be neatly categorized.

The five-record KICK cycle also refuses to be reduced by a lens of linearity. A press release explains that Arca's follow-ups to KiCK i are not sequels, but fractal-like "expansions."Each is intended as a self-contained and totally unique world within a larger multidimensional self-portrait.

The first of these new fractals forays into familiar territory, further developing the avant-electro-meets-reggaetn universe Arca started building withKiCK i. Sung primarily in Ghersi's native Spanish, KICK ii manages symmetry and catchiness despite its descents into the bizarre. Gravelly purrs and the sounds of blades sharpening collide with robotic heartbeats and the crackling of flames. Even at her most accessible, Arca refuses to paint from a predictable palette. But for all her experimentation and chaotic tangents, it is clear in KICKii that she is acutely aware of the balance necessary to build a bop.

The record is nothing if not danceable, although the territory it covers varies. In "Born Yesterday," Arca and Sia pull off anthemic pop. On "Lula Llena," which translates into "Full Moon," eerie otherworldly musings are subdued by a hypnotic dancefloor beat on the cusp of dissolution, while "Araa" invites listeners to tune into something resembling the soundtrack to a video game gone wrong.

If KICKii keeps things weird while remaining approachable, KicK iii practically dares listeners to come closer. The opener "Bruja" makes it clear from the get-go: Arca will not cater to those easily spooked out of her turbulent cyborgian utopia. "Hush it while I lick my bloody claws," Arca instructs. "Did I stutter? Hear me roar." An aggressive rhythmic pulse drives the 12-track album, which harks back to Arca's roots in underground dance music. She bends and breaks down structural formalities, letting echoes and aberrations create warped containers for incendiary sonic layering. There are moments which approach the lucidity of pop, such as in "Seorita," the record's punchy lyrical centerpiece, and "Joya," which closes iii on a note of all-encompassing peace. For the most part, though, the album bears little narrative consistencyonly expansions and distillations of sound which create an ambience so overpowering it is inescapable.

We then enter the eye of the storm. kickiiii swaps cacophony for the serene comfort of atmospheric subtlety. Songs like "Esuna" grace us with raw orchestral elements which are seldom found in Arca's work. While "Whoresong" sees Arca describe her cyclical rebound from hardship and the "bloodlust for beauty" which guides her, "Witch," a collaboration with No Bra, recites a hypnotic incantation and meditates loosely on Kristeva's "abject" over a stripped-down piano melody. In "Queer," Arca and Planningtorock ode LGBTQ+ resilience, singing of the "tears of fire" inherent to the struggle in a sea of celestial sound.

By KiCK iiiii, we are in truly subdued territory. An avant-classical journey into quieter realms, it privileges instrumental detail and tender lyricism over rhythmic intensity. In fact, the record is largely stripped of percussion. Even at its most upbeat, it is reminiscent of the sublimity of Aphex Twin, reminding listeners of the influences which shaped Arca's earliest musical ventures. The KICK anthology is an intergalactic escapade with occasionally violent pit-stops, and iiiii signifies our landing on a planet where peace is possible. One can practically hear birds chirping in the distance.

If the KiCK cycle is an ambitious attempt to make Arca's multidimensionality as human/artist/machine tangible in the formation of a musical universe, the result is neither fully cohesive nor flawless. Her apparent artistic worldview begs the question, though: is it supposed to be?

After all, the anthology began last year with the track "Nonbinary," in which Arca takes wry stabs at those who are distressed by her sovereign ambiguity. Arca seems uninterested in guiding us from a starting point to a definitive destination. Instead, she invites us to explore layers of being with her in a descent/ascent that is constantly both departing and arriving.

KICK ii, iii, iiii, and iiiii demonstrate Arca's prowess in multiple worlds, as she curses in English and laments in Spanish, oscillating between softness and grit, symphonic realness and grating distortion. The records' stand-out moments are almost exclusively moments: a glitch which grows to an arc, a sudden instance of sharp contrast, or a verbal assertion of badassery from Arca herself. KICKlacks a stable throughline, but it is perhaps the possibility of holding many discordant throughlines at once that drives Arca. The albums paint a self-portrait, and no human, no matter how cyborgian, is composed of parts which can be perfectly consolidated.

As a fully-formed whole, KICKis vibrant if not somewhat scattered. As a jumping-off point for more fractal-like expansions, though, it is explosive, with potential only really conceivable to Arca herself.(XL)

See more here:
Arca's 'KICK' Cycle Is an Explosive Exploration of Her Multidimensionality - Exclaim!

Series Tomorrows Utopias and Dystopias, Episode 3: What if it were possible to organise a perfect death? The latest instalment of our science fiction short story series is about NecrosIA, a luxury robot-assisted suicide service. But when a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence system is used on clients, voluntary death becomes harder than anticipated

Your time is precious. Dont waste it organising a perfect death,because every minute of your last moments should be magical. Forget your worries and let our luxury service take care of everything.

NecrosIA the leader in robotic systems for assisted suicide.

Utopia or dystopia? Dream or reality? The contemporary technological revolution confronts us with fundamental questions about the future of humanity. Will new technologies be our ally or enemy? How will they change our role in society? Are we destined to evolve into a species of superhumans or to be outclassed by the power of machines?

Tomorrows Utopias and Dystopias is an original series of science fiction short stories created by SWI swissinfo.ch to try to answer these questions in an innovative and visionary way. Thanks to the creativity of a group of fiction writers and the collaboration of researchers and professionals working in Switzerland in the fields discussed in the stories, we will try to imagine and understand how technology might shape our lives. Each science fiction story will be accompanied by a factual article in collaboration with leading Swiss scientists to give an understanding of whats happening in some of the most cutting-edge research fields and spark your imagination!

I toss the business card on the table of the hotel room where I have just left my luggage.On the back of the card, in rainbow letters, are two small words: Call me. The significance they carry is as heavy as the mental load and burden of the legacy that my mother wants to entrust me with.

I havent heard her voice for months, ever since I left her office, slamming the door.To tell you the truth, I cant really remember the original sound of her voice the one from the past. The one that used to comfort me with lullabies and laughter.The voice synthesiser that for years has served as her interface doesnt really do justice to the magnificent woman who brought me into this world.Whenever one of my boyfriends encountered the device for the first time, they used to raise an eyebrow or found it amusing and made jokes about Hawking [the dead physicist Stephen Hawking]; they generally then didnt get much further than an invitation for a family dinner.

I take off my walking boots, anorak and hiking trousers and stretch out on the bed to check my schedule for tomorrow.A group of centenarians want to climb the Matterhorn and then descend in wingsuits to celebrate one of their birthdays. This is the third event of this kind that Ive organised this year. Its as if these clients are spreading the word, and my business card.Sunshine, wind strength and the profile of each participant: I do all the safety checks. My lips tighten into a sneer.Healthy lunatics can be improved to live forever and even learn to fly. But is there no cure for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease that put you in a wheelchair?What kind of world was I born into, mum?

The first orange light of dawn reflects on my window.Im delaying my call toNecrosIA.My mother is probably already busy there, despite the early hour.She doesnt understand why I didnt come home to sleep, nor why I refuse to take over the running of the successful company that she built.

I sink into a dreamless sleep and wake up with a start.I instantly touch the small hollow behind my right earlobe.My skin feels smooth and soft, untouched.I let out a sigh, take a breath and begin our conversation.

Hi, mum?

I was waiting for your call.In fact, Im waiting for you.Will you come to my bedside?

Yes, but I dont agree with your decision.

Which decision?The one to die tonight, or the one to bequeath the business to you?

All of your decisions!

I couldnt help raising my voice.My phone asks if I want to switch to a video conference.I switch mode and my mother appears in her wheelchair, more curled up than ever.The three lights on the implant behind her ear are bright green, a sign that the nanorobot attached to the base of her brain will send its lethal instructions at the set time.

Look at me, Lydia, commands her synthetic voice.Look at me and you will see that I am at peace with my decision to end things.I will leave behind a healthy and successful multinational.Our transhumanism department is self-financing thanks to itsEthernitysection.When our customers start going crazy that they cant die naturally, they buy one of oureuthanisingrobots.Just in case.It gives them a sense of relief, an assurance that they can leave before they lose their minds.

Mum, it changes nothing for me.I know all that and I dont want it.

Lydia, you are the only one I trust.NecrosIAhas made only one error of judgement out of thousands of effectivekills. You must continue to improve the system.

Thats impossible, mum.Listen, I dont want to argue with you, especially today.You can force me to witness your suicide, but not to take on your role as general manager.All this money, these responsibilities, the media pressure

Its less risky than your work as a guide.You put your life in danger every day.

Her voice is distorted and her image starts to become blurred. Suddenly, I feel uneasy and then everything goes black.When I open my eyes, I find her in her executive chair, surrounded by the licence renewal committee.Her monotonous voice is unable to conceal a sense of triumph.

Dear committee, as you can see,followingher accident in the high mountains, my daughter wanted to stop living and activated the euthanasia process.A nanobot is lodged in her hypothalamus [in her brain] and is currently performing a series of tests.In her semi-conscious state, the subject reveals to us some of her deepest desires.Guided scenarios like the one you just witnessed feed our global database and refine our criteria for when granting authorisation to kill.The fact that she does not accept my own fictitious euthanasia decision is triggering a round of additional checks.All in all, our central artificial intelligence system that communicates with each nanobot is performing several trillion objective tests.If there is a tiny doubt, we keep the person alive.

Heads nod in approval.Roboticist, ethicist, doctor, psychologist their profiles are very diverse, but none of them noticed the triumph in my mothers penetrating gaze. Instead, they are focused on my shapeless body, which will no longer climb snow-capped peaks, and my implant, whose last small light refuses to go green.

The director gives a big wink and orders an autonomous stretcher to take me back to my gilded cage-like hospital room.Tomorrow, she will extract me to show me off to the press.

Go to hell, mum, you andNecrosIA!Nothing can keep me alive, except your excessive caution.

As a child,Tu Wstwanted to become an astronaut (what a clich!) or a garbage collector (an outdoor job. Great!).But after studying maths and sustainable computing, she is now working in public administration.Throughout these different twists and turns, several traits persist: a taste for science fiction and an unfailing optimism.As well as an accent, which is very Swiss.

Howrealisticis the story you just read?A 3D printed capsule, intended to be used for assisted suicide, couldsoonbe used legally in Switzerland.Read our article:

Originally posted here:
NecrosIA: waiting for the perfect death - Expat Guide to Switzerland - Expatica Switzerland

POTOMAC, Md., Nov. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Google Doodle has honored and celebrated the late Prof. Lotfi Zadeh (of UC Berkeley), the world-renowned mathematician, computer scientist, and engineer ("The Father of Fuzzy Logic"), for the publication of his seminal and revolutionary work on Fuzzy sets in 1965. Prof. Zadeh is known for the invention of Fuzzy Logic and the co-invention of Z-Transform (in 1952), which have thousands of applications and appear in many products. In addition, he has made major contributions in the other scientific and engineering fields, e.g., in the linear system theory, the control systems, Computing with Words (CWW), and Soft Computing. He has won more than 50 prestigious international awards and has been a member of Academy of Sciences in 7 countries. He is also an AI Hall of Fame inductee. Since 2011, he had been involved in Z Advanced Computing, Inc. (ZAC) and was one of the ZAC's inventors. ZAC is the pioneer Cognitive Explainable-AI (Artificial Intelligence) (Cognitive XAI) technologies, e.g., for the detailed complex 3D Image/ Object Recognition from any view angle.

Google Doodle has honored and celebrated the late Prof. Lotfi Zadeh (of UC Berkeley), the world-renowned mathematician, computer scientist, and engineer (The Father of Fuzzy Logic), for the publication of his seminal and revolutionary work on Fuzzy sets in 1965.

Since 2011, he had been involved in the Cognitive Explainable-AI startup ZAC and its founders & was one of its inventors

"We are very proud of Prof. Zadeh and his accomplishments. His great legacy and impacts in science and engineering continue forever through his students, friends, colleagues, and associates in various companies and universities around the world, and through the thousands of software, products, and appliances that use one of his technologies in many applications and industries. It was a great honor for us to work with him," emphasized Dr. Bijan Tadayon, CEO of ZAC.

ZAC has had major AI and Machine Learning (ML) breakthrough demos in the recent projects for the US Air Force (USAF) and for Bosch/ BSH (the largest appliance maker in Europe): ZAC has achieved detailed complex 3D Image Recognition using only a few training samples, and using only an average laptop with low power CPU, for both training and recognition. This is in sharp contrast to the other algorithms in industry (such as Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or ResNets) that require thousands to billions of training samples, trained on large GPU servers.

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ZAC owns a very strong IP portfolio with over 450 inventions, including 12 issued US patents.

Contact:Z Advanced Computing, Inc. (ZAC)Tel.: 301-294-0434media@ZAdvancedComputing.comwww.ZAdvancedComputing.com

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SOURCE Z Advanced Computing, Inc.

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Google (Doodle) honors Prof. Lotfi Zadeh of UC Berkeley (the Father of Fuzzy Logic), who was also an inventor in a Cognitive Explainable-AI...

EUROBIO SCIENTIFIC LAUNCHES THE FIRST PCR TEST ALLOWING SIMULTANEOUS SARS-COV-2 VIRUS SCREENING AND DETECTION OF THE DELTA AND OMICRON VARIANTS IN A SINGLE REACTION

Test to detect the presence of the Omicron variant and type the Delta variant during routine COVID screening

First test with multiplex technology requiring only one reaction

PCR result obtained in just 45 minutes

Proprietary test available in RUO format

Paris, November 30, 2021 5:45pm

Eurobio Scientific (FR0013240934, ALERS, PEA-PME eligible), a leading French group in specialty in vitro medical diagnostics, announces the launch of a new proprietary test, EurobioPlex SARS-CoV-2 Fast Screening & Variants Detection (SARS-CoV -2 Fast-SVD, EBX-047), a real-time multiplex PCR * test for the detection of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the Delta and Omicron variants.

EBX-047 is a kit developed and manufactured in France by Eurobio Scientific, allowing, in a single PCR well, the screening of the coronavirus and the detection of the two currently predominant variants, including Omicron, which could present a risk of immune escape. The test performs a standard screening with two genes, and targets the L452R mutation present on the Delta variant, and the K417N mutation present on the Omicron variant. This orientation test with a very fast (45 minutes) PCR phase, is integrated with the other tests in the EurobioPlex range for open instruments available in large hospital and private medical biology laboratories.

Pending CE marking, the SARS-CoV-2 Fast-SVD kit is already available for sale as a Research Use Only (RUO) test.

With this new test adapted to the Omicron variant, Eurobio Scientific confirms its continued investment to design and develop the tools necessary to manage and fight against the current pandemic and its evolution. The SARS-CoV-2 Fast-SVD kit is thus the first test to enable real time monitoring of the spread of the Omicron variant, and in the context of global health monitoring, to explore its possible ability to escape the immune system of vaccinated patients.

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* The "Polymerase Chain Reaction" (PCR) is a method based on the selective multiplication of target DNA sequences, which makes it possible to detect specific DNA sequences present in a product.

Next financial meeting2021 FY revenues: 24 January 2022

DisclaimerThis press release contains elements that are not historical facts including, without limitation, certain statements about future expectations and other forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on managements current views and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, profitability or events to differ materially from those anticipated. In addition, Eurobio Scientific, its shareholders, and its affiliates, directors, officers, advisors and employees have not verified the accuracy of, and make no representations or warranties in relation to, statistical data or predictions contained in this press release that were taken or derived from third party sources or industry publications. Such statistical data and predictions are used in this press release for information purposes only. Finally, this press release may be drafted in the French and English languages. If both versions are interpreted differently, the French language version shall prevail.

About Eurobio Scientific

Eurobio Scientific is a key player in the field of specialty in vitro diagnostics. It is involved from research to manufacturing and commercialization of diagnostic tests in the fields of transplantation, immunology and infectious diseases, and sells instruments and products for research laboratories, including biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. Through many partnerships and a strong presence in hospitals, Eurobio Scientific has established its own distribution network and a portfolio of proprietary products in the molecular biology field. The Group has approximately 164 employees and three production units based in the Paris region, in Germany and in the United States, and several affiliates based in Dorking UK, Sissach Switzerland, Bnde Germany and Utrecht in The Netherlands.

For more information, please visit : http://www.eurobio-scientific.com

The company is publicly listed on the Euronext Growth market in ParisEuronext Growth BPI Innovation, PEA-PME 150 and Next Biotech indices, Euronext European Rising Tech label.

Symbol: ALERS - ISIN Code: FR0013240934 - Reuters: ALERS.PA - Bloomberg: ALERS:FP

Group Eurobio Scientific

Denis Fortier, General Manager

Herv Duchesne de Lamotte, General Manager

Tel. +33(0) 1 69 79 64 80

Calyptus

Mathieu Calleux / Gregory Bosson

Investors relations

Tel. +33(1) 53 65 68 68

eurobio-scientific@calyptus.net

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Eurobio Scientific Launches the First Pcr Test Allowing Simultaneous Sars-Cov-2 Virus Screening and Detection of the Delta and Omicron Variants in a...

U.S. Transhumanist Party Putting Science, Health, and Technology at the Forefront of American Politics

The U.S. Transhumanist Party was founded on October 7, 2014, and has since grown to over 3,600 members.

Learn about future technology and trends that will affect the lives of everyone you care about.

Join us weekly at the Virtual Enlightenment Salon to learn from other Transhumanists.

Join our party. Membership is free and open to everyone worldwide.

Find out the Values of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and read our extensive, member-generated Platform.

Read our Constitution and the Transhumanist Bill of Rights.

For an overview of what the U.S. Transhumanist Party stands for, watch Chairman Gennady Stolyarov IIs address at RAADfest 2017, The U.S. Transhumanist Party: Pursuing a Peaceful Political Revolution for Longevity.

Read Chairman Stolyarovs 60-page essay, The United States Transhumanist Party and the Politics of Abundance, published as Chapter 5 ofThe Transhumanism Handbook, a major compilation of transhumanist thought edited by Newton Lee.

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