Natasha Vita-More

Do We Need to Have a “Future Day”?

by Nikki Olson
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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 around the idea of creating a better future” The remarks above were made by Ben Goertzel during the question and answer period of last week’s H+ Leadership Summit (see the full video at the end of the article), a discussion held in virtual world Second Life on leadership and the realization of Transhumanist goals. Author [...]

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Visual Culture and Transhumanism

by Nikki Olson
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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, communicating a particular set of social, political, and lifestyle beliefs. What can we identify in the Singularity and Transhumanist community as playing this particular role, and what ideology does some of the present visual culture communicate? Transhumanist visual culture can be characterized broadly as forward looking imagery that captures Transhumanist concepts, such as augmented [...]

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Natasha Vita-More on Singularity 1 on 1

by Socrates
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Want to find out who, according to the NY Times, is “the first female philosopher of transhumanism”? Today’s episode of Singularity 1 on 1 features Natasha Vita-More. (As always, you can listen to or download the audio interview above, or scroll down and watch the video recording in full.) During our conversation with Natasha she covers a wide variety of topics such as: her personal artistic background and how she got to be interested and involved in transhumanism, as well as her take on technology, religion, death, the singularity, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and others. I found Natasha to be a fascinating interviewee and hope that you enjoy the interview as much as I did. So, check it out and don’t hesitate to let me know what you think… Who is Natasha Vita-More? Natasha Vita-More, Ph.D. researcher, University of Plymouth, is [...]

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