|
|
|
|
|
Community Comments:
Have something to say about this video? Signup and
login to share your thoughts with the community.
|
Michael Anissimov (a good friend from AcceleratingFuture.com) recently wrote this on his blog about Transhumanism and the World Transhumanist Association (WTA):
"The WTA is basically a group of forward-looking people that agree that the foremost issue of the century will be the way in which mankind deals with accelerating developments in nanotech, biotech, robotics/AI, and other areas. We support the right of humans to change our bodies and minds using technology, while simultaneously encouraging social responsibility and empathy.
I’ve been a member of the WTA since 2001. I’ve been very pleased with the connections I’ve made through the organization and the thoughts it has inspired. I will continue to be a member for quite a long time, perhaps until the organization is no longer necessary.
Transhumanism is the next evolutionary step of humanism. Traditional humanists tend to obsess a little overmuch with deriding religion (when that only makes theists angrier), while transhumanists take a more pro-active stance in developing emerging technologies and guiding them to beneficial ends. Transhumanists own multimillion-dollar companies in medical technology, Internet services, speech recognition technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and occupy top posts in universities and labs worldwide. Earlier this year, transhumanist and Accelerating Future reader, Dan Stoicescu, became the second person in the world to buy the full sequence of his own genetic code.
In the last year especially, positive media coverage of transhumanism and transhumanist goals (like radical life extension) has been fairly constant, with a positive article popping up every month at least. Nowadays, I can’t even safely surf an entirely mainstream site, like CNN.com or Times Online, without finding an article coming out in favor of human enhancement or deriding its critics. The latest, from the Times, from just over a week ago, was “Who’s Afraid of a Synthetic Human?” A couple days before that, the Sarcos robotic exoskeleton was hitting the news. People are starting to get clued in to the fact that, hey, if we can use technology to radically modify our surroundings, we can use it to modify ourselves as well. And the impact will be revolutionary, exceeding in importance many of our petty tribal squabbles.
Us transhumanists are positioned directly at the convergence point, where technologies come together to create devices for human enhancement. We are the early adopters, the people the world will be watching to see if these new technologies are a good or a bad thing. That’s a lot of responsibility, but a lot of excitement and opportunity at the same time. When enhancement technologies hit the market in a big way, it will be transhumanists that start the companies, and collect on the profits. Therefore, we have to foster a mentality of social responsibility and philanthropy so these advancements benefit all of humanity rather than an elite few. This is not about money. It’s about mankind’s technologically-facilitated evolution past the boundaries of the last 200,000 years of our species.
The World Transhumanist Association is where we gather to discuss these emerging technologies, and how we can play a direct part in their development. We need to expand outwards, recruiting people of more diverse cultures and views, so that the upcoming wave of enhancement technologies meets the needs of human beings everywhere, not just geeky types in the United States and Europe. We need to get more women involved, integrating feminine perspectives into developments emerging from the hard sciences. Currently, many perspectives towards enhancement technologies are reactive rather than proactive, and that has to change.
So, consider joining us. There’s a lot of work to do, and a lot of opportunities ahead — but also dangers. Transhumanism is not techno-utopianism. In fact, we are more acutely aware of the dangers of emerging technologies than almost any other group. Help us step into the future intelligently and responsibly."
....that about sums it up. I think it was a great post by Michael. Please visit his blog over at http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/
If you would like to learn more about transhumanism, visit: http://www.transhumanism.org
|
I like this quote, by Ray Kurzweil:
"Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably towards this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking."
Source: The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology, Page: 389
|
|
|
Add Videos
