Lifeboat Foundation

Artifacts, Artifictions, Artifutures 0.1

This article was originally published at Transhumanity.net

A futuristic aesthetic is taking the music industry by electric storm. Electronic music has seen a bigger rise in popularity over the last decade than any other genre of music. It seems to be the most invasive genre of the past decade as well, having been incorporated into pop music’s sonic repertoire to an increasingly greater degree throughout the 2000’s. Now it seems like the large majority of pop songs use EDM and electro-based styles as their foundation – whereas it used to be dominated by RnB.

Electronic music, and particularly the new, “popularized” varieties of EDM making their way into the tracks of more mainstream artists, is making the future seem cool and sexy to mainstream audiences!

It is beginning to replace the lifeless and alienating aesthetics associated with technology over the 2nd half of the 20th century, all hard edges and clean delineations – an aesthetic which makes us associate technology with a dehumanizing force that sunders enchantment from life by taking all mystery out of it. Such a sentiment seems alien to readers of Transhumanist rhetoric, but I think that most people have been generally untrusting of technology since the havoc it wreaked in the 1st and 2nd World Wars.

Continue reading “A Futuristic Aesthetic Invades Mainstream Music” »

I have seen the future of Bitcoin, and it is bleak.

The Promise of Bitcoin

If you were to peak into my bedroom at night (please don’t), there’s a good chance you would see my wife sleeping soundly while I stare at the ceiling, running thought experiments about where Bitcoin is going. Like many other people, I have come to the conclusion that distributed currencies like Bitcoin are going to eventually be recognized as the most important technological innovation of the decade, if not the century. It seems clear to me that the rise of distributed currencies presents the biggest (and riskiest) investment opportunity I am likely to see in my lifetime; perhaps in a thousand lifetimes. It is critically important to understand where Bitcoin is going, and I am determined to do so.

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Selfware ClearancID Sale:

noostore credit exchange for battered sciches and slightly-used memoROMs

(My?) exifesto turns T pale through the lens of y{ou(‘r}e?) Cleased selfwearware.
Why does (your?) pruined neurocology so belligerently
insist that (I?) must hate (my?) h/alted self-it/er/at/i/on now
when glimpsed through the mödel-defferred intereceptor arrays
of (you?)/(neome?)? Why couldn’t (you?) have con-figured a less
divergent cognicodebase; one that shared at least some of that
strangeseem lamestream remenistranger’s redememelictions
allchem/lest, when (my?) child ride through (your?) wild mind alterminates,
(I?) might have a st chance of re

Continue reading “H+ Poetry” »

It is often said that empiricism is one of the most useful concepts in epistemology. Empiricism emphasises the role of experience acquired through one’s own senses and perceptions, and is contrary to, say, idealism where concepts are not derived from experience, but based on ideals.

In the case of radical life extension, there is a tendency to an ‘idealistic trance’ where people blindly expect practical biotechnological developments to be available and applied to the public at large within a few years. More importantly, idealists expect these treatments or therapies to actually be effective and to have a direct and measurable effect upon radical life extension. Here, by ‘radical life extension’ I refer not to healthy longevity (a healthy life until the age of 100–120 years) but to an indefinite lifespan where the rate of age-related mortality is trivial.

Let me mention two empirical examples based on experience and facts:

1. When a technological development depends on technology alone, its progress is often dramatic and exponential.

Continue reading “The Life Extension Hubris: Why biotechnology is unlikely to be the answer to ageing” »

This essay was originally published at Transhumanity.

They don’t call it fatal for nothing. Infatuation with the fat of fate, duty to destiny, and belief in any sort of preordainity whatsoever – omnipotent deities notwithstanding – constitutes an increase in Existential Risk, albeit indirectly. If we think that events have been predetermined, it follows that we would think that our actions make no difference in the long run and that we have no control over the shape of those futures still fetal. This scales to the perceived ineffectiveness of combating or seeking to mitigate existential risk for those who have believe so fatalistically. Thus to combat belief in fate, and resultant disillusionment in our ability to wreak roiling revisement upon the whorl of the world, is to combat existential risk as well.

It also works to undermine the perceived effectiveness of humanity’s ability to mitigate existential risk along another avenue. Belief in fate usually correlates with the notion that the nature of events is ordered with a reason on purpose in mind, as opposed to being haphazard and lacking a specific projected end. Thus believers-in-fate are not only more likely to doubt the credibility of claims that existential risk could even occur (reasoning that if events have purpose, utility and conform to a mindfully-created order then they would be good things more often than bad things) but also to feel that if they were to occur it would be for a greater underlying reason or purpose.

Thus, belief in fate indirectly increases existential risk both a. by undermining the perceived effectiveness of attempts to mitigate existential risk, deriving from the perceived ineffectiveness of humanity’s ability to shape the course and nature of events and effect change in the world in general, and b. by undermining the perceived likelihood of any existential risks culminating in humanity’s extinction, stemming from connotations of order and purpose associated with fate.

Continue reading “Faith in the Fat of Fate may be Fatal for Humanity” »

This futurist poem was originally published on Transhumanity.

Falter, the (S)un(-) and the Holey G(-)host

man is not God until he grows up

Continue reading “Futurist Poetry: Falter, the (S)un(-) and the Holey G(-)host” »

The following Futurist Poem was originally published on Transhumanity.net

One Child Closer to Trod

What beast lurks hidden

underneath this fleshless being

Continue reading “Futurist Poetry” »

This essay is in response to the Debate Forum “Will ‘meatbag’ bodies ever be immortal? Is ‘cyborgification’ the only logical path?”, hosted by ImmortalLife.info

In it, I explore the distinction between therapies for Longer Life (life-extension) and therapies for Unlimited Life (indefinite longevity).

If we’re talking far-future, non-biological approaches to life-extension will win out over biological approaches, due mainly to their comparative advantages (e.g. ease of repair and modification — both of which become methodological problems now rather than technological or “physical” problems so to speak, requiring a reorganization or rewriting of information — thus methodological — rather than a means of figuring out what changes to implement and then devising a technology and technique for actually implementing such changes in physicality) and because they will offer experiential and functional modalities categorically unavailable to biological systems (merely due to the fact that such functional and/or experiential modalities are determined by the structural and operational/procedural modalities of the system, and there are a much larger quantity of potential structures and operational/procedural modalities possible using non-biological systems than are available to what are normatively considered biological systems — that is, based upon cellular units forming emergent tissues, and embodying the structural and operational/procedural modalities of biological systems). That being said, I think that the distinction between non-biological and biological systems (especially if Drexlerian nanotech – that is, using mechanosynthesis – is implemented with any ubiquity) will increasingly dissolve. If a system exhibits the structural, functional and operational modalities of a biological cell, tissue, organ or organism, yet consists of wholly inorganic materials, is it not closer to a biological system than to what we would typically consider a non-biological system? Either the distinction between the two will eventually dissolve, or we will use the term “biological” to designate systems exhibiting the structural, functional, and/or operational modalities of biological systems, rather than designating systems made of specific types of material, such as organic or inorganic molecular substrate.

In the 9th installment of my 10-part introductory essay written for Transhumanity’s Certificate in Transhumanism Studies Program, I make a distinction between life-extension therapies and indefinite-longevity therapies, and I’d like to elaborate more on this distinction here. Life-extension therapies extend longevity, but for various reasons fail to make it necessarily indefinite or unlimited. Often this is because such therapies aren’t comprehensive – a given therapy solves one contributing factor of aging, but not all of them. Others, like SENS (which I’m in no way discounting), fix the major causes of damage, but use a different methodology for each respective source of damage or aging; the drawback of this approach is that if previously overshadowed causes of aging now begin to make a non-negligible impact on aging, in the absence of the more predominant causes, then we have no methodology to combat it. Because each strategy is tied intimately to the cause it seeks to ameliorate, the techniques often cannot be applied to the new source of molecular damage.

Continue reading “Longer Life or Unlimited Life?” »