Nikki Olson

Do We Need to Have a “Future Day”?

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“In thinking about how to get people interested in and excited about Transhumanist ideas explicitly, one idea I thought about was to create a holiday for the future. You think about all these holidays we have they are all about past events, but what if there were a holiday specifically oriented towards future events. So you could have many of them, you could have a ‘Singularity Day’, an ‘Artilect War Day’ for the future war, or simply a ‘Future Day’, to try and bring people together [...]

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Visual Culture and Transhumanism

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‘Visual Culture’ has to do with the creation, transmission and perpetuation of ideas in culture by visual means. Imagery, including shapes, colors, logos, fonts, apparel, and more broadly, ‘styles’, become symbols acting to carry and transmit meaning in a particular culture, and communicate ideology. A culture’s symbols can originate in that culture, or be a combination of new and borrowed ideas and meaning from others. For instance ‘tie-dye’, although dating back to ~500 AD, in the West is seen primarily as a symbol of hippie culture, [...]

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Who are the Heroes of Transhumanism?

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Transhumanists identify scientists and theorists that have been especially important to the development of the movement. Among these are Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Feynman. But could we identify hero figures that have done the same? And, what is the relationship between Transhumanism and heroism? I came to this question after learning of Australia’s recognition of Julian Assange as a heroic figure, awarding him the Australian Peace Prize for “exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights.” Assange is a live, modern day Prometheus figure, thought [...]

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How Do Transhumanists Party?

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It’s difficult for humans to ‘live in the present’; we are wired to worry about the future, and to dwell upon the good things of the past. These instincts serve us well, since overestimating negative future possibilities better prepares us for them, and having nostalgia for the past suppresses memory of hardship, making life overall seem better and more worth investing in. Futurist groups such as Transhumanists and Singularitarians tend to take a different approach, coming at things in almost the opposite way; focusing on the [...]

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The Singularity is Near! What’s Next?

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Those who look ahead three or four decades and see a technological singularity taking place confront a future in which time appears to stand still. However, few look beyond 2045 because it is near-impossible to foresee what happens post-Singularity. So although we may be certain that the Singularity is Near, we are uncertain about what’s next. This reality differentiates Singularitarians from every other major worldview to shape human history: other groups, in looking out into the future, have always had some kind of ‘destination’, or ‘endpoint’ [...]

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Transhumanism for Children

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It is often pointed out that Transhumanism shares many features with religion. It answers questions regarding the nature of the world and humanity’s place in it, it offers guidance on how to live, and inspires hope. However, there are a number of important things distinguishing it from a religion, such as the lack of belief in a Deity and its emphasis on the empirical method and reason. Another distinguishing feature relates to the obstacles associated with teaching Transhumanism to children. Although being religious as an adult [...]

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A Turing Test Point of View: Will the Singularity be Biased?

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Computers, by their very nature, don’t need to have a point of view. However, for our purposes, it is often preferred that they do. In the days before natural language processing, this manifested as a bias towards other computers. For example, Macintosh hardware didn’t run Windows software until 2006, and printers weren’t recognized by PC hardware without deliberate driver installation until Windows 7 came out in 2010. But as of late, computers are capable of holding a new kind of ‘bias’, that being a ‘biased’ opinion [...]

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