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Category: transhumanism

Munk Debate on Gene Editing

On April 21, the Munk Debates convened a special debate about gene editing in Deerfield, Massachusetts for 650 students at Deerfield Academy.

Motion: Be it Resolved, let’s engineer better human beings.

About the Debate:
New powerful engineering technology is already being used to edit human embryos, curing diseases and repairing defective genes before a child is even born. Some welcome this new science as a powerful tool to enhance human intelligence, memory, appearance and physical health. Why wouldn’t we embrace a science that allows people to live longer, healthier, and happier lives? Others warn that this new technology will be used to create designer babies and a new class of genetically “enhanced” elites. It will undermine human dignity and autonomy, and risk unleashing new diseases into the human gene pool. Playing G-d with human nature, critics argue, will result in a dystopian nightmare of our own making.

About the Debaters:
Arguing in favour of the motion was the biophysicist, best-selling author, biotechnology entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA School of Medicine, Gregory Stock. His debate partner was the internationally acclaimed strategic philosopher and pioneering transhumanist Max More. Arguing against the motion was the prominent American bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, Special Advisor to the Director General of the WHO and a former founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH. His debate partner was the award-winning educator, author, and Professor of Reproductive Science at University College London, Joyce Harper.

Fermi Paradox: The Partial Galactic Colonization Hypothesis

An exploration of the idea of an indefinite partial colonization of a galaxy as a solution to the Fermi Paradox.

An exploration of the question of whether transhumanism, and the analogue in alien civilizations is in fact the great filter.

My Patreon Page:

/ johnmichaelgodier.

My Event Horizon Channel:

/ eventhorizonshow.

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Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager Is A Choice We’ll All Have To Make

Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a writer who had just published his first novel.

It was Zoltan Istvan’s very first media interview as a book author.

The book was The Transhumanist Wager. The question behind it was simple and almost unbearable: what would you do, and what would you give up, to live forever?

I loved half of it. I argued with the other half. That tension is exactly why I think it still matters.

Zoltan built his story out of Plato and Nietzsche, out of Thomas More’s Utopia and Zen Buddhism, then wrapped it all in an Atlas Shrugged plot of lone heroes and evil states. The philosophy is sophisticated. The framing is stark. The contradictions are not a flaw. They are the point.

One line from our conversation has stayed with me for more than a decade:

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Chris Hables Gray on AI and the Singularity: We Need Strong Citizenship!

In 2013, I interviewed a man who studies cyborgs and war for a living.

Somewhere in that conversation, Prof. Chris Hables Gray predicted a global pandemic. I chimed in that it would most likely stem from a bird flu outbreak.

We were both right. Neither of us wanted to be.

That was six years before COVID. And here we are in 2026, watching H5N1 headlines pile up again.

The point was never the prediction. The point was what he said we should do about it.

Chris did not pitch a gadget. He did not sell a forecast. He argued that surviving the century is not a technology problem; it is a citizenship problem.

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Nigel Ackland: Ordinary…Extraordinary — Life with a Bionic Arm

I shook his hand once. I have never forgotten it.

It was a bionic hand, and Nigel Ackland gripped mine like any man would, except this one whirred and clicked and carried more meaning in a single gesture than most of us pack into a lifetime of handshakes.

Nigel is gone now. We miss him. He called himself ordinary. He was anything but.

Thirteen years ago, on Singularity 1 on 1, we sat down to talk about life with a bionic arm. And somewhere in that conversation we wandered into territory the world only just got around to naming this month: the Enhanced Games.

We asked whether people would one day volunteer to be enhanced. Whether the line between fixing a body and upgrading one was ever as solid as we pretended. Whether the Paralympics might one day be the more interesting show.

In 2013, those were thought experiments. Last weekend in Las Vegas, they sold tickets.

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My Video Tour of Alcor and Interview with CEO Max More

What counts as death? And who gets to decide?

In the summer of 2013, I traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona to visit the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s leading cryonics organization, founded in 1972. CEO Dr. Max More gave me a full tour of the facilities and walked me through the entire process: from the moment clinical death is declared, through controlled cooling and vitrification, to the cryo-tanks holding (at the time) 117 patients in long-term storage.

I also asked him, somewhat selfishly, whether my big bald head would fit comfortably in a neuro-patient container.

After the tour, Max sat down with me for a 25-minute conversation that covered:

Affordability and the real cost of membership Why minimizing cooling delays after clinical death is critical, and what long-distance members do about it Preserving pets, because of course people ask Chemical brain preservation as an alternative path The importance of protecting the neuron’s microtubules The case for an X Prize style competition to reduce tissue damage Where cryonics sits inside the broader transhumanist project.

My favorite line from Max, the one I still come back to:

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Stelarc on Transhumanism: We Are in a Time of Circulating Flesh!

“We are in a time of circulating flesh.”

Stelarc said that to me 13 years ago. In 2026, it reads less like art criticism and more like a status report.

He had grown an ear on his arm. He had hung himself from hooks 25 times. He had let strangers on the internet choreograph his muscles through electrical stimulation, his body remote-controlled across continents.

Most people called it spectacle. I think it was inquiry.

Because long before deepfakes, before voice cloning, before AI agents wearing our faces, was already asking the question we now cannot avoid:

Where does the body end and the network begin?

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Our Extropian Future, with Natasha Vita-More

Our extropian future: natasha vita-more on AI, nanotechnology, mind uploading, and the birth of transhumanism.

What happened to the future we dreamed about on the Extropian mailing list 30 years ago? Did we get the timelines wrong, or was the architecture of our thinking correct? In this compelling follow-up to the conversation with Max More, Giulio Prisco sits down with Natasha Vita-More—futurist, designer, and co-founder of the Extropian movement—to assess the state of \.

Jellyfish-Inspired Ultrafast and Versatile Magnetic Soft Robots for Biomedical Applications

JUST PUBLISHED: jellyfish-inspired ultrafast and versatile magnetic soft robots for biomedical applications

Click here to read the latest free, Open Access article from Cyborg and Bionic Systems.

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