Tag Archives: transhumanism

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Has evolution halted? Only TIME will tell

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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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Personality hacking – what are we willing to enhance?

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purple pillsOK, 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.

Loving The Alien

Navigating the Metaverse

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Mac Tonnies - Loving the AlienIf 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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The Pensieve: memory augmentation device

memoryStraight 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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Contemplating immortality, contemplating death

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ninjaThere’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.