transhumanism

George Dvorsky on Singularity 1 on 1: Specialization is for Insects

by Socrates
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This is my second interview with George Dvorsky. The first time I had George on Singularity 1 on 1 we ended up talking for 1h 14 minutes. I am afraid that I enjoy his company so much that this time we talked for almost 1h 40min. During our conversation we discuss issues such as: Dvorsky’s agonizing decision to stop being vegetarian and embrace the Paleo diet; cross-fit training, organic farming and the cost of food; the seeming contradiction between transhumanism and paleo/cross-fitness; animal enhancement (aka animal uplift), human-equivalent non-person rights and the list of candidate species; mass extinction and the Fermi paradox; SETI and the Dysonian approach that George and co are suggesting; the potential for and implications of friendly and unfriendly alien intelligences. This interview is long but if you are interested in the above topics, then, it is very much worth [...]

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Eric Boyd on Singularity 1 on 1: DIY Transhumanism

by Socrates
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Last week I went to visit Eric Boyd at HackLab.TO. While visiting I took the opportunity to interview Eric for my Singularity 1 on 1 podcast. Eric is the president of HackLab.TO, one of the co-founders of StumbleUpon and a regular public speaker on topics such as cyborg, transhumanism, electronic jewelry and hacking. In the past, I have lacked the proper equipment to do an on-site audio or video recording without having to borrow it from my friends or my very generous brother-in-law. Fortunately, though, last week I got the biggest anonymous donation ever received at Singularity Weblog. (Thank you anonymous donor.) The money allowed me to purchase a brand new Canon VIXIA HF G10 (aff) camcorder as well as a Fujifilm X10 (aff) photo camera, and thus equipped I headed to HackLab.TO. During our conversation we discuss issues such as: Eric’s early interest in technology; his [...]

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Ramez Naam on Singularity 1 on 1: The World Needs Innovation. Don’t Be a Spectator, Participate!

by Socrates
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Yesterday I interviewed Ramez Naam for my singularity podcast. Ramez is the author of an award-winning, timely and easy to digest book on the ethical, political, economic and other implications of transhumanism titled More Than Human. Since I enjoyed reading the book very much I simply had to interview Naam and ask him to talk more about his ideas. During our conversation we discuss a variety of topics such as: Ramez’ early interest philosophy, physics and computer science; the motivation behind his work at Microsoft on projects such as MS Word, Outlook and the Bing search engine; the inspiration behind his book on transhumanism; human evolution and the way technology has become a crucial part of who we are; playing God in general and altering the human DNA in particular; life extension and the probability of overcoming death; artificial intelligence, the technological singularity and why he [...]

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Robert J. Sawyer on Humanity 2.0

by Socrates
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Robert J. Sawyer is one of my all-time favorite science fiction writers. Thus, when I heard that the Literary Review of Canada and TV Ontario’s Big Ideas are co-hosting a talk by Robert at the Gardiner Museum, I simply had to attend. Robert J. Sawyer is one of those very rare people who truly know a lot about everything and — even rarer ones — who can communicate clearly and convincingly about what they know. Below you can watch the recording of Sawyer’s very engaging, eloquent and empassionate presentation touching up on a variety of issues such as cosmology, SETI, transhumanism, the singularity, longevity, mind uploading and other ways of upgrading humanity to version 2.0. The event was held on November 21, 2011 in Toronto and it took a couple of months before it was eventually aired on TVO and posted online. Program Synopsis: When [...]

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Rachel Haywire on Singularity 1 on 1: Art is Intellectual and the Intellect is Artistic

by Socrates
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A couple of months ago I interviewed Rachel Haywire for Singularity 1 on 1. I had some dificulties in posting this interivew but, since those were eventually resolved, better late than never… Rachel Haywire is a multi-media artist and writer currently residing in Los Angeles, California. She is the founder of The Human 2.0 Council which is a Transhumanist network of artists and students on the edge of society and media. Known for bridging the gap between the counterculture and academia she founded the Extreme Futurist Festival which is a 2 day entertainment and tech convention focusing on radical performers and voices of the new evolution. Rachel is known as an “antisocial media coach” and considered a leading voice in digital media. She is credited for bringing DIY Transhumanism into the mainstream. I have to admit that I worked for 10 hours before my interview with [...]

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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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Deus Ex: The Eyeborg Documentary

by Socrates
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It has been some time ago that I first posted the Deus Ex: Human Revolution original trailer about the stunning video game from Eidos. The clip is so visually captivating that I am forced to re-watch it every once-in-a-while and ponder the myriad of profound issues that it touches on. Even more so, a reader of this blog once told me that it was seeing the Deus Ex trailer for the first time that made him aware of transhumanism and consequently pushed him to devote his life to studying it. Enter Rob Spence. Those who missed my interview with Rob should know that he is known as the Eyeborg – a self proclaimed cyborg who lost an eye in an accident and replaced it with a wireless video camera. Rob is a wacky documentarian and recently joined forces with the gang [...]

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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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