h+ Magazine

In the bright and shiny future, we all live in green, gleaming communities, monorailed shuttles at the ready, climate-controlled at all times — a sort of Logan’s Run, but without the forced euthanasia.

This is a separate question from whether machines can be intelligent, or whether they can act like they feel.

Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process.

Looking more like an armless mecha from the Flesh Fair in Spielberg’s film A.I. Artificial Intelligence than Bruce Willis in Surrogates, InTouch Health’s RP-7i robot is controlled by a remote doctor through a joystick and a secure Internet connection. Thirty one Michigan hospitals make use of doctors at St. Joseph Mercy Oakland hospital, in Pontiac, Mich to treat patients with symptoms of stroke using such bots.

With his long flowing beard and optimistic predictions about engineering an end to death, Aubrey de Grey has become a legend within the longevity community.

If North America’s annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) can be thought of as the pumping heart of the video games industry, then Japan’s annual Tokyo Game Show might be thought of as something more akin to its soul.

"Transhumanism Day" at the Woodstock Film Festival approaches zero hour and so, in the wake of the summer of Woodstock nostalgia, I’m pumping this nostalgia for the future again because it looks pretty cool.

I will be among the speakers this week at Arse Electronica 2009, a conference in San Francisco. The theme for 2009 is about "… Of intercourse and intracourse: Sexuality, Genetics, Biotech, Wetware, Body mods."

Can a movie be ham handed and clever at once? Can it make a strong, important statement and also have clichéd dialogue, trite turns of plot? Can it be written with almost no nuance but still be vigorously directed? Can it have good ideas and still miss all kinds of ramifications? Oh yes. Surrogates is that movie.

Flying high over the Gulf of Mexico, researchers from NASA and Case Western Reserve University found a key to unlocking oxygen from the surface of the moon.