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Category: transhumanism – Page 114

Flaunt Magazine

A column on #transhumanism I did for Flaunt:

Are you ready for the future? A Transhumanist future in which everyone around you—friends, family, and neighbors—has dipped into the cybernetic punch bowl? This is a future of contact lenses that see in the dark, endoskeleton artificial limbs that lift a half-ton, and brain chip implants that read your thoughts and instantly communicate them to others. Sound crazy? Indeed, it does. Nevertheless, it’s coming soon. Very soon. In fact, much of the technology already exists. It’s being sold commercially at your local superstore or being tested in laboratories right now around the world.

We’ve all heard about driverless test cars on the roads and how doctors in France are replacing people’s hearts with permanent robotic ones, but did you know there’s already a multi-billion dollar market for brainwave-reading headsets? Using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that pick up and monitor brain activity, NeuroSky’s MindWave can attach to Google Glass and allow you to take a picture and post it to Facebook and Twitter just by thinking about it. Other headsets allow you to play video games on your iPhone with only your thoughts as well. In fact, a few months ago, the first mind-to-mind communication took place. A researcher in India projected a thought to a colleague in France, and using their headsets, they understood each other. Telepathy went from science fiction to reality, just like that.

The history of cybernetics—sometimes used to describe robotic implants, prosthetics, and cyborg-like enhancements in the human being and its experience—has come a long way since scientists began throwing around the term in the 1950s. What a difference a generation or two makes. Today a thriving pro-cyborg medical industry is setting the stage for trillion-dollar markets that will remake the human experience. Five million people in America suffer from Alzheimer’s, but a new surgery that involves installing brain implants is showing promise in restoring people’s memory and improving lives. The use of medical and microchip implants, whether in the brain or not, are expected to surge in the coming years. NBC News recently reported that many Americans will likely have chip implants within a decade’s time. It’s truly a new age for humans.

Standing proud at the forefront of all this change is the fascinating biohacker culture, where extreme inventors and innovators are leading the way by sticking RFID tracking chips in their bodies, permanent wireless headphones near their eardrums, and magnets in their fingers.

Prepare for the real political game changer: robots with votes

My new story for New Scientist on robot voting rights. This story came about because of my discussion with Professor Lawrence Lessig on the BBC World Service. To read my article, you may have to sign up for a free New Scientist account (it takes 1 minute). Please do it! It’s an important article. Gerrymandering in the AI and & robot age: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23231043-300-prep…ith-votes/ #transhumanism

If human-like AI comes to fruition then we may have grant voting rights to our silicon equals. Democracy will change forever, says Zoltan Istvan.

The United Kingdom Has Approved a ‘3-Parent’ Fertility Procedure

In September, a doctor named John Zhang announced that a baby, created via a complicated fertility treatment involving DNA contributions from three people, was successfully delivered the previous April. Now the U.K. has opened the way for more attempts at creating babies with three parents.

The fertility treatment involves sperm, an egg from the prospective mother, and an egg from a donor and has been used to help women who have mitochondrial issues with their eggs, replacing the nucleus DNA of those eggs with that of donor, either before or after fertilization. The embryo then carries the donor’s mitochondrial DNA, which amounts to less than 1% of the resulting child’s genes. CBS News reports that on Thursday, Britain’s fertility regulator, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, approved the technique.

Will Gene-Editing Technologies Spark the Next Cold War? They Already Have

Excellent article by Nick Gillespie, Editor-in Chief of Reason. Genetic editing is so far the 21st Century’s most important science—and it’s already being challenged by many as too radical: http://reason.com/blog/2016/12/15/will-gene-editing-technologies-spark-the #transhumanism #CRISPR #Future

The folks behind CRISPR gene editing were runners-up for Time’s Person of the Year. Their creation may win the future for secular China.

First Brain-to-Brain Interface Demonstrated

Another breakthrough on our path to Singularity.

Researchers at Duke University have demonstrated for the first time an electronic link between the brains of pairs of rats. The link allowed the rats to communicate directly and solve simple tasks. A follow up research demonstrated a similar link created between animals thousands of miles apart—one in North Carolina and one in Brazil. The research might allow scientists in the future to connect multiple brains to form a combined multi-brain which could allow sharing of both motor and sensory information between several animals. How easily can you connect one brain directly to another? The surprising answer is that it might be significantly easier than previously thought, at least when it comes to rats. Professor Miguel Nicolelis from Duke University School of Medicine and his team, discovered in previous studies that rat brain are much more “plastic” than we expected, and that they can adapt quickly to accept input from devices outside the body and even learn how to process invisible infrared light generated by an artificial sensor (somewhat similar experiments are currently being done in humans, where blind people are fitted with bionic eyes connected to the optical nerve which is given time to adjust to the new stimuli with the hope of eventually allowing them to process the information and regain partial sight).

Following his initial research Professor Nicolelis asked himself an important question: “if the brain could assimilate information from artificial sensors, could it also assimilate information from a different body?”. This was the trigger which pushed Nicolelis and his team to conduct the current series of experiments.

In the first stage of the experiment the researchers trained pairs of rats to solve a straightforward problem – press the right lever when an light above it is switched on. When done correctly, the rat received a reward in the form of a sip of water.

Mind Controlled Bionic Limbs

In the George Lucas classic Star Wars, hero Luke Skywalker’s arm is severed and amputated during a lightsaber fight and consequently fitted with a bionic arm that he can use as if it were his own limb. At the time the script was written, such a remedy was pure science fiction; however, the ability to manufacture bionic arms that have the functionality and even feel of a natural limb is becoming very real, with goals of launching a prototype as soon as 2009. Already, primates have been trained to feed themselves using a robotic arm merely by thinking about it, while brain sensors have been picking up their brain-signal patterns since 2003. The time has come for implementing this technology on paralyzed human patients and amputees. This article will provide a brief explanation of the technology, its current status, and the potential future it holds.

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