h+ Magazine

Some have pointed out the supposed increase in multitasking during recent decades.  An overlapping issue is the increase in raw information that humans have access to.  It is certainly a fascinating sociocultural change.  However, humans are not capable of true multitasking.  First I will describe what humans do have presently, and then I will discuss what future humans might be capable of.

See Also: A Cosmist Manifesto (Excerpt)

The term Cosmism seems to have been introduced by Konstantin Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900.  Now, Ben Goertzel's Cosmist Manifesto (published by Humanity+ Press and available on Amazon) gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century.  Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era.  Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact in the unfolding future.  Goertzel weaves a philosophic tapestry using AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelic drugs, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity.  The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities.



An interview with Timothy Taylor in a recent issue of New Scientist highlights how, contrary to Darwin’s theory, human evolution is more complex than simply “survival of the fittest.”  In fact, many of contemporary humanity’s physical features are “weaker” than the earlier model due to the technologies used by our ancestor hominins (australopithecines) and early Homo sapiens.  Examples of accumulated biological deficits include soft nails, hairless bodies and weak jaws.  It is also now clear that the use of primitive tools to create slings (to carry young infants) may have been a key facilitator allowing for our big brains, as development could continue outside the space-restricting womb.

Currently a professor at Xiamen Universty, where he teaches theoretical physics and computer science, Hugo de Garis is legendary in AI and futurist circles.  He’s been working on neural networks and “artificial brains” since the 1990s.  de Garis is also an advocate of Femtotechnology — the notion that we could operate technologically at a level a million times smaller than nanotech.  In 2005, de Garis published a controversial book called Artilect Wars that predicted an upcoming “gigadeath” war between Terrans (those who want to remain human) and “Cosmists” (those who want to unite with AIs and become posthuman and post-terrestrial).