Money is at the very center of how human beings communicate with one another in complex societies and yet it is almost completely ignored in all private k-12 education in the united states and most nations. Money isn’t economics, Money is human behaviour, it is group and individual psychology.Particularly now, as the world body of nations and central banks escalate currency wars(and trade wars), more people are turning their attention to money.
EET’s latest offerings highlight the politically pernicious elements of transhumanism and Singularity movement. P. Tittle promotes licensing for parents as a logical expansion of the state’s prerogative to control everything, Giulio Prisco contemplates Terran aggression against Cosmists, and piero scaruffi chides the Greeks for their “lavish lifestyle” and lack of nuclear power.
The National Spelling Bee of 2023 started out like any other, but controversy enveloped the contest when Suzy Hamilton, an 8-year-old from Tulsa, emerged as the new champion. Contestants had been getting younger for years; that was nothing new. But midway through the event it was discovered that Suzy was—in the words of one commentator—”amped.” At the age of 4, suffering from seizures and severe attention and behavioral problems, Suzy had received an experimental new treatment: a neural implant that prevented her seizures and helped her to focus. As it turned out, the device also appeared to make her a prodigy at memorization, as her parents and teachers soon discovered.
Abstract
Bostrom rejects Nietzsche as an ancestor of the transhumanist movement, as he claims that there were merely some “surface-level similarities with the Nietzschean vision” (Bostrom 2005a, 4). In contrast to Bostrom, I think that significant similarities between the posthuman and the overhuman can be found on a fundamental level. In addition, it seems to me that Nietzsche explained the relevance of the overhuman by referring to a dimension which seems to be lacking in transhumanism. In order to explain my position, I will progress as follows. First, I will compare the concept of the posthuman to that of Nietzsche’s overhuman, focusing more on their similarities than their differences. Second, I will contextualise the overhuman in Nietzsche’s general vision, so that I can point out which dimension seems to me to be lacking in transhumanist thought.
The future is impossible to predict. But that’s not going to stop people from trying. We can at least pretend to know where it is we want humanity to go. We hope that laws we craft, the technologies we invent, our social habits and our ways of thinking are small forces that, when combined over time, move our species towards a better existence. The question is, How will we know if we are making progress?
As a movement philosophy, transhumanism and its proponents argue for a future of ageless bodies, transcendent experiences, and extraordinary minds. Not everyone supports every aspect of transhumanism, but you’d be amazed at how neatly current political struggles and technological progress point toward a transhuman future. Transhumanism isn’t just about cybernetics and robot bodies. Social and political progress must accompany the technological and biological advances for transhumanism to become a reality.
I am a scientist and academic by day, but by night I’m increasingly called upon to talk about transhumanism and the Singularity. Last year, I was science advisor to Caprica, a show that explored relationships between uploaded digital selves and real selves. Some months ago I participated in a public panel on “Mutants, Androids, and Cyborgs: The science of pop culture films” for Chicago’s NPR affiliate, WBEZ. This week brings a panel at the Director’s Guild of America in Los Angeles, entitled “The Science of Cyborgs” on interfacing machines to living nervous systems.
An early effort at defining general intelligence in groups suggests that individual brainpower contributes little to collective smarts.
Instead, it’s social awareness — the ability to pick up on emotional cues in others — that seems to determine how smart a group can be.
“We lack a shared criterion in predicting which groups will perform well and which won’t,” said psychologist Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University. “There’s an underlying factor that seems to drive how individuals perform in multiple domains. I wondered if that was true of groups as well.”
In individuals, general intelligence is a measure of each person’s tendency to perform similarly on different types of cognitive tests, suggesting an underlying — general — intellectual competence. Exactly what produces those smarts, and how they correlate with biological and environmental factors, is controversial. But even if the causes are unclear, the evidence of individual general intelligence remains.
Why is Eric Schmidt so in love with the Singularity, and so determined to make Google the company that initiates our complete subservience to The Machines? We guess he just doesn’t see it that way. Because, according to Schmidt, we have so many computers in our lives, “you’re never lonely, you’re never bored.”
IEET Board Member George Dvorsky and blogger Greg Fish appear on the “Skeptically Speaking” podcast to discuss the predictions and the problems in the quest to enhance human beings. How will advancing technology affect our bodies, our lives, and our society? Also, another installment of “Everything You Know is Sort of Wrong” with Greg Laden.
Technology and art relate more to each other than you might think. Art mimics life. And it’s an understatement to say that technology is changing the way we live. The Transhumanist movement embraces technologies like cognitive science, cryonics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology—the same forces that are bringing about profound physical and societal change. And as technology advances, so do our visions of the future.
