Futurismic

Have the comforts and supports of modern life ended the process of natural selection in humans? Steve Jones, genetics supremo at University College London believes so:

Before modernity, life was so tough that most children died before they reached adolescence. It was a race for survival and only the strongest made it, making out a case for natural selection. This means babies with genetic mutations that made them more resilient had better chances of survival as well as passing on their genes to their offspring.

Jones’ argument is that in a modern world of central heating and plenty of food, the same mutation is far less likely to give a child any advantage. A baby born today can expect to live a long and healthy life, which in turn works against the evolutionary tool of natural selection.

George Dvorsky opines that the theory that human beings have “stopped evolving” is incorrect because it discounts things like genetic drift, sexual selection, and of course, the self-guided evolution of transhumanists.

[image from kevindooley on flickr]

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OK, hypothetical question - let’s say you could pick any personality trait to be chemically enhanced. Which aspects of your personality would be in the top three? [image by Tom Saint]

According to a recent study, you’re most likely to be willing to tweak the parts of your psyche that you don’t consider fundamental to to your identity as a person - your ability to concentrate, for example, or maybe the number of hours of sleep you need each night. [via FuturePundit]

Human enhancement drugs are still very much in their infancy at the moment; to draw an analogy, many people were pretty leery of plastic surgery when it was first becoming more commonplace. So I suspect that we’ll see the ‘early-adopter’ pattern with more drastic enhancements, with artists, outcasts and other pioneers of the psyche venturing out beyond mere ‘cosmetic’ cognitive enhancement… after all, think how useful it would be to become autistic for a week.

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If you were wondering why Mac Tonnies’ latest Loving The Alien column is a little late, here’s the answer — it turns out he’s been lurking in Second Life. What might the fluid nature of identity in the metaverse mean for our posthuman successors? Continue reading “Navigating the Metaverse”

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Straight out of the Greatest Kid’s Franchise of the Century So Far (please enlighten me if there is one greater) we have a transhumanist/human-augmentation project from IBM:

The technology, nicknamed “PENSIEVE” by the IBM team, uses associative recall to make connections between pieces of related data acquired by a person. The advantage of the new technology is its ability to understand the context in which data is captured, then connect various data, and then use this knowledge to help bring the correct information to a person when it is needed.

Along with similar projects, like MyLifeBits from Gordon Bell at Microsoft, technologies like this will presumably be the first steps towards the extremely advanced memory augmentation systems envisioned by Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near.

[story via Slashdot][image from edans on flickr]

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There’s a lengthy (but well worth the read) article at COSMOS Magazine about the prospect of functional human immortality, which - thanks to fairly recent scientific advances - now looks plausible as opposed to impossible. Unlike many articles of its kind, it looks at the psychosocial implications of such a change:

“Our relatively brief lives and our routine proximity to the deaths of ourselves and others are the foundations of everything we have ever thought or believed. Neither religion nor philosophy necessarily promises immortality, but each offers ways of coming to terms with or giving meaning to death and, therefore, life. If death is to be postponed indefinitely, then both religion and philosophy face fundamental crises.”

Well, at least we’ll have the leisure time to talk it all out! [image by brunkfordbraun]

On the flip-side, an article at Wired takes a look at a new computer game wherein the bodies of your slain opponents don’t disappear:

“Over the years, I’ve noticed that most of the seriously violent games I love deal with the corpses by simply whisking them away. [...] After I’d killed my way through about seven battles, I experimentally backtracked all the way to the beginning, and sure enough - every body was still lying there, every blood fleck on the ceiling intact.

Now, did this change the emotional, or even moral, timbre of the game?

In some ways, yes. You really do get a better sense that you’re a sociopath when the evidence of your crimes is stacked around you.”

Perhaps, rather than being the training grounds for murderers that some might claim them as, violent games could actually encourage their players to think harder about the consequences of their actions in the real world? That could come in handy - especially if we ever find we can live forever.

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In 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. His single-seat, single-engine monoplane - the Spirit of St. Louis - made the flight from New York to Paris in just over 33 hours, catapulting Lindbergh to instant stardom.

Initially, Lindbergh used his new-found fame to extol the virtues of commercial aviation; later, as leverage in the America First campaign against US involvement in the Second World War. In anticipation of the UK publication of David M. Friedman’s book, The Immortalists, journalist Brendan O’Neill highlights on a lesser-known chapter in the Lindbergh story [for BBC Magazine];

In the 1930s, after his historic flight over the Atlantic, Lindbergh hooked up with Alexis Carrel, a brilliant surgeon born in France but who worked in a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. Carrel - who was a mystic as well as a scientist - had already won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the transplantation of blood vessels. But his real dream was a future in which the human body would become, in Friedman’s words, “a machine with constantly repairable or replaceable parts”.

This is where Lindbergh entered the frame. Carrel hoped that his own scientific nous combined with Lindbergh’s machine-making proficiency (Lindbergh had, after all, already helped design a plane that flew non-stop to Paris) would make his fantasy about immortal machine-enabled human beings a reality.

But while the Lindbergh-Carrel duo made some significant breakthroughs, including ‘a perfusion pump that could keep a human organ alive outside of the body’ (and precursor to the heart-lung machine), their partnership had a darker side. In a New York Times review of The Immortalists, Kyla Dunn comments on the sinister undertones of these early cyborg dreams;

“We cannot escape the fact that our civilization was built, and still depends, upon the quality rather than the equality of men,” Lindbergh wrote in his 1948 treatise “Of Flight and Life.” As late as 1969, he remained concerned that “after millions of years of successful evolution, human life is now deteriorating genetically,” warning in Life magazine that “we must contrive a new process of evolutionary selection” in order to survive.

Of course, it’s worth noting that eugenicist views were fairly common in the 1930s, and some of the claims made by Friedman in The Immortalists have been criticised as based on circumstantial evidence. Either way, the New York Times has published the first chapter of The Immortalists online, for your perusal.

[Image from the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia]

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In a landmark ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, South African athlete Oscar Pistorius - nicknamed ‘Bladerunner’ after the carbon-fibre prosthetics he uses in place of his amputated lower legs - has won the right to compete against able-bodied athletes, and plans to represent his country at either the Beijing Olympics or the later London event. [image taken from linked article]

From a purely technological perspective, it’s fantastic that we can replace a man’s missing limbs and allow him to run at all, let alone run at record-breaking speeds.

But here’s George Dvorsky explaining why he believes Pistorius shouldn’t be permitted to compete against regular non-enhanced athletes:

“The short answer is that it’s not fair to the able-bodied athletes who don’t want to get into the enhancement game.

Moving forward, it sets up a situation where:

1. able-bodied athletes will increasingly be set at a disadvantage relative to the cyber-athletes, particularly as prostheses improve, and
2. able-bodied athletes will have no choice but to seek enhancement measures of their own, legal or otherwise, to remain competitive.”

Read the whole piece before making your mind up; it won’t take you long.

I’m not sure where I stand on this issue, because our species-wide fascination with competitive sports has always baffled me completely; I guess I don’t care who runs in a race, enhanced or otherwise. As long as it isn’t me.

But bearing in mind how financially lucrative the sports industry is, I can see Dvorsky having a point. After all, it’s not as if his second point doesn’t describe a situation that already exists in the present with regards to drugs and dietary supplements, without any pressure from cyborg athletes in the same leagues.

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George Dvorsky has a lengthy post discussing the development of the Male Birth Control Pill … or rather the lack of development, which he puts down to a number of factors including male reticence and reluctance from the big pharmacological companies. And militant feminists, too:

“For those men who truly don’t want to have children—something that is completely within their rights—the MBCP will help them achieve that level of control.

And again, female claims that this will allow men to forever shirk their paternal responsibilities and live in perpetual adolescence are not just gross generalizations, but sexist statements of the highest order.”

Now, I’m pretty positive Dvorsky is overstating the case here so as to provoke some discussion; it wouldn’t be the first time (e.g. “meat-eaters are bad people“), and I can’t think of any women I know who’d argue the line described above.

But the issue of complete control over the functions of one’s own body that Dvorsky raises - his central theme as a transhumanist - is an interesting one, because it has wider implications. Moving towards equality, across lines of gender or otherwise, may come with costs as well as gains at an individual level.

What do we want to gain, and what are we prepared to give up for it? [image by Beppie K]

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Welcome to the return of non-fiction essays to Futurismic! And welcome also to the inaugural Loving The Alien column, in which Mac Tonnies sets out his pitch for “transhuman ufology”.

How can Kurzweilian Singularitarianism and informed ufological speculation be reconciled? Read on to find out …

Continue reading “Transhuman Ufology”

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Yet more potential transhumanist body-modification! File under “you must all send me money until I can afford one of these”:

The strapline for the image on the Physorg report reads: “Waterproof and powered by pizza”. [Via Chris Roberson and many others]

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I really fell out with my parents over my body-mod efforts, as tame as they are by some standards. “It’s not natural,” my mother would say. “You’re marginalising yourself into a small group of people who aren’t content to leave their bodies the way they are.” [Image by UnsureShot - no, that's not me in the picture.]

Not such a small group after all, mother dearest - research suggests the British have spent over $1billion on cosmetic surgery in 2007 alone. [Via grinding.be]

Of course, they’re spending that money chasing after an unattainable media-manipulated conception of perfect beauty, which is still more socially acceptable than investing a few hundred dollars a year in having permanent pictures drawn on you and holes punched through various parts of your anatomy … horses for courses, I guess.

But whichever way you cut it, body modification of one type or another is becoming very commonplace. So why are people still so aghast at the concepts of transhumanism?

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Terry Hayman’s “Real Death” is a story of an unwanted legacy that poses questions about the value of immortality and the cost of affluence.

Real Death

by Terry Hayman

My mother’s funeral and her bequest to me were as embarrassing as the woman herself. A kind of final test.

The funeral…

The fact there was a funeral at all says it, doesn’t it? A major stakeholder in Genrev dying from old age? I’m sure the Genrev board would have simply “disappeared” my mother were it not for her uncontestable, world-posted will. It turned her fifty-one percent share over to an unsympathetic charity if her burial wishes weren’t carried out exactly.

So there we all were in her chosen barrio cemetery, eyes shifting about anxiously as the priest finished up, expecting some kind of swarming from the onlookers pressing their noses to the high black bars twenty meters to our left. Not that they’d try anything. Uncle Castor had hired a small army to keep us safe.

Now I and Mother’s four brothers — George, Bradley, William, and Castor — stepped forward, untied the ropes suspending my mother’s casket in a double trapeze, and lowered the casket into the dank earth. The ropes slipped roughly through our gloved fingers. The bugler played “Taps.” Continue reading “REAL DEATH by Terry Hayman”

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