Transhumanism & Singularity

Transhumanist Essays:

Turing Twists. Alan Turing once asked "can machines think?" and designed a test to find out. If a machine could hold a convincing conversations with a human, they could be said to think. I ask "can machines fuck?" and suggest that if they can do so with a human convincingly, they could be said to think.

Life Sciences. An organisation based on 8 Essential Realities. From these 8ER, guiding principles and projects are being developed.

Designer Babies. Is it a good thing to re-design your offspring?

Truth, Quantum Theory and Holism. You, me and it.

The Future of Pornography. Less natural, more synthetic.

Some Arguments for the Social and Legal Acceptance of Recreational Drugs. Eat me.


Transhumanist Resources. Transhumists believe that we should use all available means to improve the human condition. This is nothing new: we have been doing that for ages with fire, farming, steam, bicycles, antibiotics, vaccines, dental prothesis, cell phones, etc. Transhumanists take this common sense approach to its natural conclusion: we believe that modern science and technology can safely improve the human condition by overcoming natural limits, and that they should be used to this end. So if today, for example, we say yes to therapeutic cloning and cryonics research, tomorrow we will say yes to aging reversal and intelligence enhancement.

In general transhumanism takes a protechnology stance, but insists that our deployment of emerging technologies ought to be done in a critical and ethical manner. New technologies such as nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence research have associated risks and benefits: used unwisely these technologies could have disastrous consequences for humanity. The risks and benefits of technology issues raise a number of ethical questions. A recent debate over cloning is an example. The World Transhumanist Association is in favour of therapeutic "cloning" but has suspended judgement on human reproductive cloning at present because it is not yet demonstrated to be safe.

Kurzweilai.net. KurzweilAI.Net focuses on the exponential growth of intelligence, both biological and machine, and the merger of the two in a post-humanist future.

This site paints a picture of the future where nanobots float through our bodies, healing sickness and augmenting our senses and cognitive abilities, and where you can be anyone you want to be in virtual reality.

Singularity Watch. Some 20 to 140 years from now—depending on which evolutionary or systems theorist, computer scientist, technology studies scholar, or futurist you happen to agree with—the rate of self-catalyzing, self-organizing, ever more autonomous (human-independent) technological change in our local environment will undergo a "singularity," becoming effectively instantaneous from the perspective of current biological humanity. It has been postulated that events after this point must also be "future-incomprehensible" to existing humanity.

Consider our planet's history of accelerating creation of first pre-biological (galactic-atomic and planetary-molecular-based), then genetic (DNA and cell-based), then neurologic (neuron-based), then memetic (abstract mental pattern-based), and finally, technologic (extra-cerebral pattern based) evolutionary epochs, each requiring less space, matter, energy, and time to represent or perform any standardized "computation" (e.g., forming an encoded internal representation of specific laws or information gleaned from the external environment). The brief history of digital computers, which have themselves moved ever faster through five separate substrates over the last century, as Kurzweil observed, makes this process of "accelerating rearrangement" even clearer. The universal evolution of information involves the continuous movement to new physical-computational substrates, with the most computationally complex of the local emergent forms always exponentially increasing their information processing pace over time. There are occasional pauses and brakes on this progression, but again, the record shows that these pauses become ever briefer with time. From a larger perspective, we see a smooth and unmistakable progression of exponential growth in local computational complexity. Perhaps most amazingly, this growth process is most accurately described as gently hyperexponential (or "double exponential," or "hyperbolic"), because even the doubling times themselves gently shrink with each successive doubling.

We—and more particularly, our technological creations—are on a wild ride to an interesting destination, a local rate of computational change so fast and powerful that it must have a profound and as-yet-unclarified universal effect. As a side effect of this hypergrowth, biological human beings will not be able to meaningfully understand the computer-driven world of the near future unless they are able to make some kind of transition to "transhumanity." How this transition will and should occur, and more importantly, how it is presently occurring, is a subject of spirited and insightful debate.

ExtroTech Future Webring.

ExtroTech Index. These links go to further resources and websites concerning Transhumanism and Singularity.

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