h+ Magazine

Our knowledge of how the human brain works is rapidly increasing and some people will use that knowledge to enhance their minds – to make themselves more intelligent, to feel permanently happy or to choose different aspirations. This will challenge the existing political order in many ways: Hyper-intelligent people will find it easy to dominate their relatively dim fellows.

With over 150,000 people dying every day, I hope governments would respond to the animal experiments by accelerating our journey to escape velocity through massively increasing funding for longevity medical research, because the cost of dying this year goes way up if it causes you to just miss out on the chance to live long enough to live forever.

Selfishness used to be a virtue. It was a way to advance ourselves in capitalist society. We were supposed to put ourselves before other people and this was supposed to be the gateway to success. Yet this was not the way of the future and many of us were in for quite a surprise.

Most of our holidays celebrate past events, or cyclical processes of nature – why not have a holiday to celebrate the future?

An overview of science news from the last week, and some older news items of interest. Includes news on nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, stem cells, and metamaterials.

Very small embryonic like stem cells (VSELs) are purified from adult tissues and are potential sources of stem cells for application in regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies. In contrast to embryonic stem cells (ESCs) their derivation does not require destruction of embryos and thus are non-controversial from an ethical point of view.

As computers begin to reach a human level of intelligence, some consideration must be given as to their concept of ethics. Appropriately aligning moral values will mean the difference between a contributing member of society and a sociopath.

Through the due exercise of reason, human thought processes can approximate rational thinking. Rationality skills are a prerequisite for humans to understand how the world works and in order to be able to make better decisions about how to act in the world. Progress in science and technology would not have been possible without the human ability for rational reasoning.

Contemporary biotechnologies, and especially emergent technologies, are taking art into wet yet nimble associations with science fiction, science fraction and science fact. Bioart and its subsets are working with genetics, cloning and hybridization, and its practitioners are “co-creators” alongside the gods, stirring up moral issues, and portraying the role of lab-technician, scalpel in hand.

The question of boosting the intelligence of animals other than humans, to the level of self-awareness and consciousness, is one that cannot be considered in isolation from the general process at work in the social and speculative movement known as Transhumanism.