April 11, 2011
I am very excited to learn that starting in July, Netflix will have every Star Trek episode from every series available for instant streaming. And since I’ve been alluding to Star Trek quite a bit when touching on issues of … Read More
April 11, 2011
The act of mind reading is something usually reserved for science-fiction movies but researchers in America have used a technique, usually associated with identifying epilepsy, for the first time to show that a computer can listen to our thoughts. (Science … Read More
April 8, 2011
FutureMed today launched a contest to attend its newly launched executive program dedicated to where exponential technologies, medicine, healthcare and biomedicine collide and are headed. FutureMed is held at Singularity University on the NASA-Ames Research Park in Mountain View, CA … Read More
April 8, 2011
Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology (Volume 4, Issue 3) is now available by subscription only. Articles include: “Artificial Companions: Empathy and Vulnerability Mirroring in Human-Robot Relations” by Mark Coeckelbergh. “Brain Gene Transfer and Brain Implants” by Rolando Meloni, Jacques … Read More
April 6, 2011
Today marked the publication of the new book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution by Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blasocovich. Infinite Reality gets inside all of the technologies and animation that we now take … Read More
April 5, 2011
An advanced brain-machine interface enables patients to control individual nerve cells deep inside their own brains. In philosophy of mind, a “cerebroscope†is a fictitious device, a brain–computer interface in today’s language, which reads out the content of somebody’s brain. … Read More
April 1, 2011
Your favorite coffee shop is crowded with harried people, and you are standing shoulder to shoulder in a slow-moving line. Each jostling shift of the crowd aggravates your severe social anxiety. You start gasping for air; your heart quickens and … Read More
April 1, 2011
Miguel Nicolelis, a world leader in research that may one day allow paraplegics to control computers with their own thoughts, made a de rigueur stop for any new top-line author, visiting Jon Stewart last night on The Daily Show. (Scientific … Read More
February 15, 2011
It wasn’t that long ago that listing transhumanism, human enhancement, the Singularity, technology-driven evolution, existential risks, and so on, as academic interests on one’s CV might result in a bit of embarrassment. Over just the past decade and a half, … Read More
October 8, 2010
All it takes is a quick cyber-jaunt through the world of online gamer forums to see that, for many of the millions that play them, video and computer games are much more than simple diversions. Eidos Montreal’s smash hit, the … Read More
October 5, 2010
The blog Rationally Speaking has just posted two articles about the transhumanist movement, one by Julia Galef that defends transhumanism, and another by Massimo Pigliucci that dismisses transhumanism as “irrelevant,†among other things. (IEET)
September 22, 2010
Although the Vatican in 2008 issued a limited set of instructions on bioethics primarily dealing with in vitro fertilization and stem cell research (Dignitas Personae or “the Dignity of the Person†[pdf]) and a handful of Christian scientists, policy makers, … Read More
August 4, 2010
If we are to believe transhumanists, people who bill themselves as champions of superlongevity and artificial human enhancement, 2045 should be a very good year. (The Boston Globe)
July 12, 2010
Wallach is a pioneer in the nascent field of robot ethics and has captured the imaginations of futurists with his theories on artificial moral agents and computational ethics. In fact, he designed the world’s first course on the subject at … Read More
July 1, 2010
The American Journal of Bioethics (Volume 10, Issue 7, 2010) is now available by subscription only. Articles Include: “Disaster in the Gulf: Public Health and Public Responsibility” by Summer Johnson, 1-2. “Should Human Beings Have Sex? Sexual Dimorphism and Human … Read More
June 23, 2010
The New York Times Sunday business section recently ran an enormous puff piece on Ray Kurzweil and the “Singularity” cult (my term, not the Times’s). Kurzweil is a successful inventor–entrepreneur best known lately for his sci-tech prophecies. He claims that … Read More
June 14, 2010
Transhumanism is the idea of guiding and improving human evolution with intention through the use of technologies and culture. If those technologies are not robotic and cybernetic but, instead, genetic and organic, then so be it. (IEET)
June 14, 2010
ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen. (New … Read More
June 2, 2010
The emergent course of our human bio-technological transition is leading toward a species transformation. In light of this, approaches to transhumanism are varied and some are without clear conceptual apparatus; people want to extol its far-out promise or decry its … Read More
March 23, 2010
A major objective of the technoprogressive agenda is to close the gap between popular presentations of transhumanism and the mainstream of social/political thought. In order to effect a significant influence on public policies related to human enhancement technologies and other … Read More
March 10, 2010
I have proposed that a scenario of slower-than-disruptive tech development over the next 15-20 years combined with weak or reduced opposition to human enhancement could result in “increasing irrelevance†for transhumanists. But what exactly does that mean? (IEET)
January 25, 2010
Transhumanists, like Enlightenment partisans in general, believe that human nature can be improved but are conflicted about whether liberal democracy is the best path to betterment. The liberal tradition within the Enlightenment has argued that individuals are best at finding … Read More
November 25, 2009
In 2003, the idea that one might have a freedom to change one’s body and brain as one liked was being discussed in relation to the Transhumanist FAQ. This idea receives much less attention in the current FAQ, where it … Read More
November 20, 2009
IBM’s Blue Gene brain simulation has made gains in one of the most sophisticated tasks man has ever taken on—creating artificial intelligence (AI). With the true AI milestone comes the dawn of the singularity, when computers overtake humans. Contributing editor … Read More
November 4, 2009
Philosophy & Public Affairs (Volume 37, Issue 4, Fall 2009) is now available by subscription only. Articles Include: “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience” by Selim Berker, 293-329. “Neuroscience and Moral Reasoning: A Note on Recent Research” by F.M. Kamm, 330-345. … Read More
