Transhuman militancy appeals to the wired reptilian brain, and, like anger or fear, it may feel good in the short term to indulge the temptation to go prickly. But the long game has no place for weaponized rich fops, no matter how cyborgian.
Danila Medvedev is the head of the Russian Chapter of Humanity+. The organization has recently taken on an important project – to oppose a proposed law to ban several biomedical technologies. But let’s let him tell it.
Erik Davis is a marvelous writer whose project seems to be to invoke or evoke (or provoke) mystery and enchantment in the context of postmodern and transhumanist cultures that seem pretty much bent on hunting it down and draining it… one piece at a time. He thrives on a world of odd hybrids and strange hidden subcultures. At the same time, he has been known to delightfully illuminate such mainstream and semi-mainstream cultural expressions as The Matrix, Burning Man, and the works of P.K. Dick.
What is the ultimate goal of neural enhancement? It’s obvious many people want to do it, but why? Does it afford fitness advantages for natural selection? Probably, but if this is the case, then it is no different than enhancing the brain through education. If you get a good education you will be able to behave in ways unavailable to those without an education. Maybe this means you can write computer code, or perform complicated surgery, or confidently navigate our dense legal environment. Since the ultimate reason to want any enhancement is the new behavior it will allow (or the new behavior it will cause in other people, like the jealousy you will inspire in others when you buy that Ferrari), the fitness evaluations can only happen on this behavior and not on the enhancement itself.
One of the most venerable dreams of science fiction is that people might become immortal by uploading their personalities into some kind of lasting storage. Once your personality is out of your body in a portable format, it could perhaps be copied onto a fresh tank-grown blank human body, onto a humanoid robot or, what the heck, onto a pelican with an amplified brain. Preserve your software, the rest is meat!
Transhumanists pride themselves on basing their expectations on solid science. Karl Popper said that a theory is scientific if it can be proved wrong, and so we may ask: if the technological singularity is not happening, how would we know? I argue that online worlds like Second Life can serve as indicators that we are either on track or if the underlying technologies are faltering.
In January 2009, I moved from Los Angeles to New York City to begin a new career in finance. My former business partner made a similar move in 2006 and in three short years was making more than $300k per year as a financial planner for JP Morgan Chase. She gave me plenty of advice and I was happy to take it. I slept on her couch for my first two weeks in the city.
"He doesn’t dig imperfection, man," says aging hacker Kevin Flynn of his program CLU, the master of the Tron: Legacy (2010) universe. A zenned-out Jeff Bridges reprises his 1982 roles as Flynn/CLU in your choice of eye-popping Disney Digital or IMAX 3D. The gladiatorial combat, illuminated Frisbees, glowstick suits, and fast-moving lightcycles are back in a multidimensional "grid" that is sure to delight gamers.
Imagine a stage, perhaps a few years from now, in a large ballroom in a hotel in Bangkok. The reigning world champion of chess is defending his title against Deep Six, the latest generation of chess playing computers. It looks bleak for the human, as the computer has managed to establish a position which, it has predicted, will lead to checkmate in eleven moves. With its cold blue lights calmly blinking it is completely controlling the game, leading it to an inevitable, logical conclusion like a train on a track.
