Among those who see possible radical evolutions in the near human future, there are those who view the coming changes as a big win for human engineering and there are those who see it as a gnosis, as the achievement of a sort of religious divinity. Like Daniel Pinchbeck in our last issue, Jonathan Bethel’s views fall within the latter category.
Ten years ago, Netscape’s explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.
Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web’s core idea – hyperlinked pages – in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.
At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me – way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o’clock in the afternoon – about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3×5 cards, of which he had plenty.
Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of “transclusion” and “intertwingularity” as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.
Contents:
Countercultures.
The Hippie
Society ? A Road Back to the 60s.
From the Hippies to Cybersociety
The
Cultural Creatives and Hippies.
The
Transformational Society.
High-Tech
Varieties.
High-Consciousness
Varieties.
The
Evolution of Consciousness.
Transformational
Psychology.
Unexpected
Events.
Transformational
Politics.
Space
Age.
Space
Settlements.
Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence.
Time Travel
Four Distinct
Categories for Images of the Future
Beyond the Limits:
Confronting Global Collapse – Envisioning a Transformational Future.
Overview: A Political
System for the Transformational Society.
Part I: A Conceptual
Model of Participatory E-Democracy.
Arguments.
Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.
We’re almost able to build better human beings. But are we ready?
The surge of innovation that has given the world everything from iPods to talking cars is now turning inward, to our own minds and bodies. In an adaptation from his new book, Washington Post staff writer Joel Garreau looks at the impact of the new technology.
There are thinkers who claim that, if the modern age began with the discovery of America, it also ended in America. This is said to have occurred in the year 1969, when America sent the first men to the moon. From this historical moment, they say, a new age in the life of humanity can be dated.
I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going thorough a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in – ? global embrace, abolishing both space ace and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be “a good thing” is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.
In this issue:
Nick Bostrom “A History of Transhumanist Thought”
Robert Pepperell “Posthumans and Extended Experience”
Robert A. Freitas Jr. “Microbivores: Artificial Mechanical Phagocytes using Digest and Discharge Protocol”
Journal of Evolution and Technology
Every 1% decrease in health care costs saves the country $10 Billion a year. Every 1% increase in productivity makes the country $100 Billion richer in a year, or a $1 Trillion richer over a decade. That money comes from innovation ? architects designing better buildings, engineers making better cars, coders putting out better software, scientists inventing entirely new things we haven’t conceived of. And that’s why we invest in things like education ? because we know they pay dividends later on. Biotech enhancements have the same potential.
CybDemite Ramez Naam’s book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement was released this week, and it has been getting great reviews in, for instance, the LA Times, the Washington Examiner and NuSapiens Review. And MTH reached 1000 on Amazon this week. Excellent news for progressive transhumanism. NuSapiens has also posted a great interview with Mez:
NuSapiens: Part of your argument in More Than Human is that these technologies need to be available to everyone, not only people living in certain nations, and not only the rich. What steps can society take to ensure equal access to enhancement?
Ramez Naam: Really there are two key things. The first is to keep these technologies legal. One of the best ways to limit something to the rich is to ban it. When you do that, you create a black market. On the black market, prices rise, quality and safety suffer, and the legal punishments tend to get applied far more frequently to the poor than the rich. This is what we see in the War on Drugs today, or what we saw in Prohibition in the 20s.
The second is to recognize enhancement technologies as investments in the most valuable natural resource we have – people. Governments support these sorts of investments already. We give out scholarships and guarantee student loans. We provide free primary and secondary schooling. We immunize poor children for free. All of those steps actually pay for themselves and more in the long run – they prevent later health care costs or they produce citizens who contribute more to the economy after they’ve grown up and entered the work force.
In the US alone, a 1% reduction in health care costs would save almost $200 billion over 10 years. And a 1% productivity boost would earn the country $1 TRILLION over 10 years. If we could achieve that by subsidizing the cost of using biotech to slow the aging rate or boost mental capacity, wouldn’t it be worth it?
via CybDem
?What idea, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?? This was the question posed by the editors of Foreign Policy in the September/October issue to eight prominent policy intellectuals, among them Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and member of the President?s Council on Bioethics.
And Fukuyama?s answer? Transhumanism, ?a strange liberation movement? whose ?crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates.? This movement, he says, wants ?nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.?
From Nick Bostrom via abuddhas memes
WELLESLEY, Mass.—Ray Kurzweil doesn’t tailgate. A man who plans to live forever doesn’t take chances with his health on the highway, or anywhere else.
As part of his daily routine, Kurzweil ingests 250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea. He also periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, down to his “tactile sensitivity.” Adjustments are made as needed.
“I do actually fine-tune my programming,” he said.
The famed inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away.
From RedNova News
A set of fundamental principles for the cybernetics domain is sketched, based on the spontaneous emergence of systems through variation and selection. The (mostly self-evident) principles are: selective retention, autocatalytic growth, asymmetric transitions, blind variation, recursive systems construction, selective variety, requisite knowledge and incomplete knowledge. Existing systems principles, such as self-organization, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, and order from noise can be reduced to implications of these more primitive laws. Others, such as the law of requisite variety, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the law of maximumscope.
PDF via Vortex Egg
Cybernetics is the science that studies the abstract principles of organization in complex systems. It is concerned not so much with what systems consist of, but how they function. Cybernetics focuses on how systems use information, models, and control actions to steer towards and maintain their goals, while counteracting various disturbances. Being inherently transdisciplinary, cybernetic reasoning can be applied to understand, model and design systems of any kind: physical, technological, biological, ecological, psychological, social, or any combination of those. Second-order cybernetics in particular studies the role of the (human) observer in the construction of models of systems and other observers.
PDF via Vortex Egg
This essay theorizes dialogic communication as discursive systems comprising cybernetic minds of autonomous bodies, each with partial consciousness. Autonomous bodies are organisms and machines that communicate (i.e., produce and record) in the spaces between subjectivity and consciousness. Cybernetic minds are the structured couplings, the creative circles, the circuitries and feedback loops, that animate the articulated bodies of cybernetic minds. The production of subjectivity situates agency; partial consciousness is the articulation of this situated agency with embodied experience. Insofar as consciousness is both embodied and partial, and insofar as subjectivity is both fluid and situational, autonomous mediate consciousness and subjectivity. Identities, both claimed and assigned, are names for subjects. As bodies communicate from the spaces between subjectivity and consciousness, rather than from the positions of objectivity and truth, the possibility of dialogue emerges, a possibility of communication that moves beyond the dialectics of representation and reference to the dialogics of reflexivity and implicativity. These shifts in generic modes of communication are nonlinear, impermanent and unstable, and constitute a qualitative shift from a materialist to a cybernetic epistemology. Cybernetic mind, then, manifests as the production of subjectivities through the circuitries of self-reflexive partial consciousness -immanent communicative praxis.