We kind of like Kevin Warwick a lot here. And for good reason, he is, like Tony Stark, using himself as a test-pilot for the future.

So, of course, we must post this interview with him over on Motherboard.tv:

Most interesting is him further confirming that neuro-streaming will be the Next Big Thing, in Lifeblogging..

via Gizmodo

In a great victory for the SATANIC GLOBAL TRANSHUMANIST CONSPIRACY, Mattel have released the perfect gift for all the little Transhumanists in the house, Barbie Video Girl.

As this video shows, the camera quality is pretty decent, and the design is frankly hilarious:

I am hoping this could mean the return of the Barbie Liberation Organization.

thanks for the tip-off Seej500!

The UK’s Astronomer Royal, Baron Martin Rees, recently gave a fascinating lecture as part of the Seminars of Long-term Thinking series, put on by the Long Now Foundation.

From Stewart Brand’s summation of the speech:

“We are the nuclear waste of stellar fusion,” Rees noted, the ash from long-dead stars all over the galaxy exchanging their gases in a complex ecology, and the galaxies show a mega-structure of density contrasts generated by gravity. Poised midway in scale between atoms and stars, biological life appears to be the peak of complexity in the universe—a flea is more complicated than a star.

Since we don’t know how our own life emerged and haven’t discovered any elsewhere, we still have no idea whether life is common in the universe or if we are unique. We can be certain that we are not the culmination of life forms here, because we are less than halfway through the Sun’s lifespan. In the six billion years to come, there are likely to be creatures as far beyond humans as we are beyond microbes, and science as far beyond our present understanding as quantum theory is remote to a chimpanzee.

Now that we are stewards of this planet, we are responsible for maintaining life’s possibilities in this cosmic neighborhood.

It’s over an hour and half long, but it’s riveting stuff. Grab the link and (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere) sit outside, stare at the stars and listen. Or just hit play here:

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Bonus Content!

For your patience you get a treat – A Glorious Dawn, an auto-tuned mash-up of Carl Sagan’s work, featuring Stephen Hawking:

Second, a profile of Elon Musk and his desire to retire to Mars.

Lastly, Charlie Stross has been having fun dissecting various aspects of space colonization; from working out the size of an independent off-world colony, to critiquing the much worn ’space as another Wild Frontier’ myth.

“Man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” – Julian Huxley

“Transhumanism is the philosophy that we can and should develop to higher levels, physically, mentally and socially using rational methods.” – Dr. Anders Sandburg

“[Transhumanism is] a strange liberation movement” [that wants] “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.” – Francis Fukuyama

“Transhumanism is the idea that new technologies are likely to change the world so much in the next century or two that our descendants will in many ways no longer be ‘human’” – Dr. Robin Hanson

“Transhumanism is the doctrine that we can and should become more than human.” – Mitch Porter

“Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life [..]. Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies[…]” – Dr. Max Moore

I want to share something with you – probably the most important thing I’ve told you in these pages.  It’s not quite a secret, though you probably won’t hear it this way from anyone at the Singularity Summit.  Still, it is the single most important thing you will ever learn about the “Transhumanist movement.”

There is no such thing as Transhumanism.

Don’t ignore the bulk of Transhumanist and Extropian research and writing.  Don’t ignore the  vast amount of pontificating on post-singularity existance.  Don’t ignore the ten-thousand dollar a head business day camps and the tech seminars and the religious zealots who desperately need a mind-controlling conspiracy to oppose.  All of that work and thought and effort is very real and, even if you’re just hearing about Transhumanism in the last couple of years you will see these things trickle into your life in the most unexpected places.

That’s because Transhumanism is real.

What do you think of when you think of Transhumans?  Life extension. Cyborgs.  Artificial Intelligence.  Uploading. Skynet. Nanoswarms. Uplifted octopi. Geoengineering. Sex-bots.

What if I asked you to think about examples of Transhumanism in the present?  Life extension. Athletes with prosthetics.  Prosthetic faces. RFID chips. Artificial eyes. Printable organs. Transexuals.  Rudimentary robots.  Industrial exoskeletons.  Military exoskeletons. Genetically Modified Organisms.  Artificial life. Patenting genomes. Augmented Reality. Sex-bots.

What if I asked that question in 1990?  1970? 1960?

It’s pretty easy to answer in these decades.  There’s a wealth of books and articles and essays and failing that, it’s simple to turn to fiction as the decades move backwards.   Implants hook antiheroes to computers beneath skies the colour of dead televisions while FM-2030 tries to open eyes to Transhumanity in the 80’s before his date with an Alcor storage chamber and hopeful cold resurrection.

The term “Transhuman” wasn’t coined until 1957, so before then to ask our hypothetical question, we might have to be a bit more descriptive.  Still, if you conjured an image of human and technological hybridity for the advancement of the human organism in years prior you’d get different but amazingly similar images as you traveled back to the industrial revolution and beyond.

There would be repeating themes as you traveled back – immortality, health, flight, a desire to be smarter/faster/stronger.  After that, though, you’d be left with  - just as our technological obsessions reveal, today – the image of humanity in the interviewee’s eyes.

Transhumanism – the desire to refine the human vessel and spirit into something more via technology is not new.  As Erik Davis points out in his book TechGnosis – this drive has been there as far as we know how to look back to.  The tools are new but the aims are the same.   Yesterday’s mysticism beget yesterday’s alchemy, which brought the enlightenment, which brought industrialization, which brought futurism and today, we call the mass of thoughts surrounding this drive “Transhumanism.” (Or better still: Extropianism, which is a more specific and technically precise term but one that hasn’t permeated the popular consciousness, yet.)

Here’s the trick of it, though.  Many individuals when discussing Transhumanism, get tied up in the technology aspect of it and the miss the forest for the trees because the trees seem to be growing human tissue.  To consider Transhumanism a movement, you have to realize that it is refering to a series of events that began when Grock picked up his first rock.

Transhumanism is a name applied to a kind of thinking concerning technological hybridity.  It is a mathematics that adds human to a variable to get Human Plus, which in turn is added to a variable and a new result is produced.

This isn’t new.  We’ve been a tool-using species for a hell of a long time.  Grok plus a rock for hitting things was Grok Plus.  Grock with a rock and fire was the Grok Kurzweil of his time.   It might have been a low-bandwith exchange, but Grok was changed by his usage of tools as much as he used his tools to change his environment.

We have always been human/technology hybrids.

Throk has symbols and sounds.  Those symbols become language.  Language both changes how the brain works and jacks Throk and his descendants into the very first augmented reality.  Throck pointing at a symbol on the wall and evoking a wolf shares the same technological space as my pointing at a wolf made of prims in Second Life as a kid pointing at the wolf on an AR display in Tokyo.   Throk has the killer app and from now on everyone will have proto-Augmented Reality and someday it will be so ingrained and natural that we will be unable to uninstall it.

Throk begat a species of Transhumans who will always have self-upgrading versions of Language installed.  Even if for some freak reason the app doesn’t get installed, the wetware will still be optimized to use it.

Language and tools gave us discernible culture – a whole series of interlocking technologies that are designed to propagate and spread and protect the clients who have it installed.  Culture becomes agriculture and suddenly everything changes all over again.  The technologies of agriculture make humans change their lives around them.

Transhumanism is concerned with events that began before the dawn of recorded history.  Transhumanism – as most people will present it to you – does not exist because the core concern of Transhumanity is the Human condition itself.

Human history is Transhuman history.  We have always been a species using technology to transform ourselves, make ourselves better or even just figure out what “better” means.

In fact I’ll go out on a limb here and lay out my most tightly held belief - I’m not a big believer in “human nature” but if there is one facet of human nature that I believe in it’s this:

The nature of mankind is to transcend itself.

The urge for technological transcendence and refinement – and the follow-through upon it is not new.  What changes is the scale and complexity involved.  Things become more complex, which creates change at a faster and faster rate however; while the shells may be moving faster and there may be more of them – the game remains the same.

William Godwin tells his daughter Mary Shelley about the link between liberty and human immortality as elsewhen Thomas Aquinas St. Ambrose performs the nearly miraculous act of reading silently without moving his lips.  Agriculture causes a vast population boom, but also creates the conditions that will one day develop into global war, ecological disaster, patriarchy, and genocide.

Fukuyama who has devoted his life to Capitalism and Democracy proclaims that Transhumanism is a threat even though Capitalism in and of itself is a technology designed to propagate and maneuver goods, services and currency which are all in and of themselves technologies designed to enhance or expand the human condition.  Francis Fukuyama is a Transhumanist, too.

Transhuman technologies heal your diseases, bind your wounds, purify and pollute your air.   Memory palaces made the mind bigger, psychedelics make the ego membrane more permeable.   The internet makes us smarter or maybe it just makes us faster at being shallow.

Transhumanism does not exist, because it is an illusion.   It is a construct that allows the examination of Humanity through a lens that makes the implicit hybridization of the human organism and technology explicit.   It is a trick of the eye to try and help us not suffer ontological shock when the future comes and it is both different from the one we expected and filled with changes to ourselves.   Each generation takes technologies and normalizes them – moving them from the realm of the strange and the Other into their accepted schema of how the world works.  Glass eyes move on to artificial hearts, to personal internet  to sex changes to better-than-human prosthetics.

This is how it works, because this is how it has always worked.

There is no such thing as Transhumanism. And that is why it is such an important and vital concept at its core when stripped of the commercial baggage.

Transhumanism is a story we tell ourselves in order to recover from the culturally-stagnating and dangerous idea that we as humans are separate from and somehow not responsible for our technologies.  And in that way, while it is a fiction, it is a useful fiction – a minor trick of mental prestidigitation that people of all types can use to contextualize themselves in the ever more complex and constantly transforming narratives of history.

It’s the eternal romance that even though the dancers may change – somewhere out there, humanity will still be dancing.

Time for a chuckle, as we watch this stumbling interview between a NY Times journalist and the robot “Bina48″, a creation of Terasem:

As is made clear, Bina48 isn’t actually a robot, but rather an imperfect digital emulation of a person, based on an incomplete ‘upload’. Which would be a far more interesting thing to explore. Rather than, “LOL, robot speak funny”. Better luck next time, NY Times!

How about a round-up post showing a few ways in which (if we can survive long enough) we just might get to live forever?

First off, scientists! have created stretchy artificial skin:

Scientists at Spain’s University of Granada have created artificial skin with the resistance, firmness and elasticity of real skin. It is the first time artificial skin has been created from fibrin-agarose biomaterial. Fibrin is a protein involved in the clotting of the blood, while agarose is a sugar obtained from seaweed, commonly used to create gels in laboratories. The new material could be used in the treatment of skin problems, and could also replace test animals in dermatological labs

They say perfect for burn victims, I say skin-covered body mods would be neat too.

Speaking of DIY efforts, how about an interview in the Economist about DIY BIO?

It will surprise few of you that DARPA is still bent on creating super-soldiers, or in this case making them super-survivors.

Lastly, this TEDMED Talk from 2009 on regenerating organs is just… whoa:

Previously:

• TED Talk: Suspended animation is within our grasp

To Age or Not to Age profiles the science of aging, it also addresses some of the moral, religious, practical and economic implications of increased, lifespan. Who will have access to the medicine? Who will benefit from the breakthroughs? Will the price of these compounds make this a drug for the elites?

This has had very limited screenings so far, but if you’re in, or near, Paris you can see it on the 29th.

From Technology Review:

The UK company Peratech, which last month signed a deal to develop novel pressure-sensing technology for screen maker Nissha, has announced that it will use the same approach to make artificial “skin” for the MIT Media Lab.

Peratech makes an electrically conductive material called quantum tunneling composite (QTC). When the material is compressed electrons jump between two conductors separated by polymer insulating layer covered with metallic nanoparticles. QTC has already been used to make small sensors for NASA’s Robonaut and for a robotic gripper made by Shadow Robot Company.

QTC robot skin could perhaps let a robot know precisely where it has been touched, and with how much pressure. It could also be helpful in designing machines that have better grasping capabilities, and for developing more natural ways for machines to interact with humans.

The company says QTC can be screen-printed as a flexible, robust sheet as thin as 75 microns or made into a coating just 10 microns thick. Because the material reacts only when a force is applied, it consumes little power. And it’s flexibility will let it conform to unique robotic shapes.

First factory robots, then better prosthetics and in the future, whole new sensory organs for posthumans, I say.

(OK, fine, and better sexbots..)

From Yahoo! News:

An Italian who lost his left forearm in a car crash was successfully linked to a robotic hand, allowing him to feel sensations in the artificial limb and control it with his thoughts, scientists said Wednesday.

During a one-month experiment conducted last year, 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello felt like his lost arm had grown back again, although he was only controlling a robotic hand that was not even attached to his body.

…

Petruzziello, an Italian who lives in Brazil, said the feedback he got from the hand was amazingly accurate.

“It felt almost the same as a real hand. They stimulated me a lot, even with needles … you can’t imagine what they did to me,” he joked with reporters.

While the “LifeHand” experiment lasted only a month, this was the longest time electrodes had remained connected to a human nervous system in such an experiment, said Silvestro Micera, one of the engineers on the team. Similar, shorter-term experiments in 2004-2005 hooked up amputees to a less-advanced robotic arm with a pliers-shaped end, and patients were only able to make basic movements, he said.

Experts not involved in the study told The Associated Press the experiment was an important step forward in creating a viable interface between the nervous system and prosthetic limbs, but the challenge now is ensuring that such a system can remain in the patient for years and not just a month.

via Joshua Ellis

In this provocatively titled lecture, from the very aptly named Festival of Dangerous Ideas , Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Melbourne–Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration:

…examines the nature of human beings as products of evolution, in particular their limited altruism, limited co-operative instincts and limited ability to take account of the future consequences of actions. He argues that humans’ biology and psychology are unfit for the kind of society we live in and we must either alter our political institutions, severely restrain our technology or change our nature. Or face annihilation by our own design.

Which is a nice way of saying he makes a strong case for meddling in the genes of our children, and more importantly, can now identify just which ones to tweak.

This is nugenics kids, and it’s shit scary.

(OK, it would be slightly less creepy if he wasn’t wearing his suit jacket like a cape)

Watch on and be afraid;  sooner or later a Government somewhere is going to try this!

The QnA starts mid-way through the second video and is particularly good, in that most of the questions you will have are actually asked by the audience.

thanks to my buddy The Dingo Strategy for the tip-off!

Related:

• Nick Bostrom on existential risks and posthumanity

Just one of Shane Hope’s excellent transhumanist art pieces.

via Accelerating Future

In this video from Activate 09 Nick Bostrom gives a short overview of world history, coming threats to the planet and the likelihood of posthumanity arising.

Nick is a philosopher we’ve perhaps neglected a tad here so far.  Firstly, he’s Swedish, so you may struggle to parse his accent.  Just watch the slides then, you’ll get a feel for what he’s saying.

Secondly, he’s the director of the Oxford Institute for the History of Humanity.  As opposed to pure technologists like Ray Kurzweil he does more than just quote Moore’s Law, and his writings range around a variety of subjects.

Bostrom’s article, co-written with Anders Sandberg, The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement is particularly thought-provoking.  Have a wander around his site to see the breadth of his subject matter.

You could also buy the book he’s contributed to, Human Enhancement, and send us in a review.  It looks fascinating, but I don’t think I’ll have time to read it in the near future.