Lifeboat Foundation

I have recently read the report from Sharad Agarwal, and here are my outcomes by adding some examples:

Transhumanism is the concept of transcending humanity’s fundamental limitations through advances in science and technology. This intellectual movement advocates for enhancing human physical, cognitive, and ethical capabilities, foreseeing a future where technological advancements will profoundly modify and improve human biology.

Consider transhumanism to be a kind of upgrade to your smartphone. Transhumanism, like updating our phones with the latest software to improve their capabilities and fix problems, seeks to use technological breakthroughs to increase human capacities. This could include strengthening our physical capacities to make us stronger or more resilient, improving our cognitive capabilities to improve memory or intelligence, or even fine-tuning moral judgments. Transhumanism, like phone upgrades, aspires to maximize efficiency and effectiveness by elevating the human condition beyond its inherent bounds.

Human history can be seen as a catalogue of our technological pushback against nature. Our earliest technologies—including fire and clothing—enabled us to endure relentlessly harsh climates, and subsequent eras saw our creativity give birth to anesthetics, electricity, antibiotics, and vaccines.

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In this video, we explore 20 emerging technologies changing our future, including super-intelligent AI companions, radical life extension through biotechnology and gene editing, and programmable matter. We also cover advancements in flying cars, the quantum internet, autonomous AI agents, and other groundbreaking innovations transforming the future.

Continue reading “20 Emerging Technologies That Will Change The Future” »

A new feature story out on book Transhuman Citizen:

A former presidential candidate who believes a dramatic increase in science funding can help humans achieve biological immortality has told Newsweek he is considering a third White House run in 2028.

Zoltan Istvan ran as an independent candidate during the 2016 presidential election when he attracted widespread media attention for driving a bus modified to look like a coffin from San Francisco to Washington D.C., to illustrate his believe that death can be overcome.

Continue reading “Meet the presidential hopeful who wants to end death” »

Want to find out how and why Anders Sandberg got interested in transhumanism and ethics? Want to hear his take on the singularity? Check out his interview for SingularityWeblog.com

In this study we show that residual muscle–tendon afferents enable a person with transtibial amputation to directly neuromodulate biomimetic locomotion, enabling neuroprosthetic adaptations to varying walking speeds, terrains and perturbations. Such versatile and biomimetic gait has not been attainable in contemporary bionic legs without the reliance upon predefined intrinsic control frameworks^1,2. Central to the improved neural controllability demonstrated in this study are muscle–tendon sensory organs^26,27 that deliver proprioceptive afferents. The surgically reconstructed, agonist–antagonist muscles emulate natural agonistic contraction and antagonistic stretch, thereby generating proprioceptive afferents corresponding to residual muscle movements.

During the ground contact phase of walking, the reconstructed muscle–tendon dynamics of the AMI do not precisely emulate intact biological muscle dynamics. The residual muscles of the AMI contract and stretch freely within the amputated residuum, only pulling against one another and not against the external environment. In distinction, for intact biological limbs, the muscle–tendons span the ankle joint, exerting large forces through an interaction with the external environment. These interactive muscle–tendon dynamics in intact biological limbs are believed to play a critical role in spinal reflexes, in addition to providing feedback for volitional motor control¹². Therefore, for this study, the demonstrated capacity of augmented afferents to enable biomimetic gait neuromodulation is surprising given that their total magnitude is largely reduced compared with those of intact biological limbs^26,27,45,46.

Is this the beginning of the age of bionic humans?

Dr. Ben Murnane has published an Opinion piece in FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education, a major US think thank. The essay covers #transhumanism and the new biography Transhuman Citizen, out in 10 days.

It’s telling that with the rise of AI the first instinct of many politicians is to regulate it.

Those who know Oxford University for its literary luminaries might be surprised to learn that some of the most important reflections on emerging technologies come from its hallowed halls. While the leading tech innovators in Silicon Valley capture imaginations with their bold visions of future singularities, mind-machine melding, and digital immortality by 2045, they rarely engage as deeply with the philosophical issues surrounding such developments as their like-minded scholars over the pond. This essay will briefly highlight some of the key contributions of Oxford University’s professors Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu to the transhumanist movement. It will also show how this movement’s focus on radical autonomy in biotechnical enhancements shapes the wider global bioethical conversation.

As the lead author of the Transhumanist FAQ, Bostrom provides the closest the movement has to an institutional catechism. He is, in a sense, the Ratzinger of Transhumanism. The first paragraph of the seminal text emphasizes the evolutionary vision of his school. Transhumanism’s incessant pursuit of radical technological transformation is “based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.” Current humans are but one intriguing yet greatly improvable iteration of human existence. Think of the first iPhone and how unattractive 2007’s most cutting-edge technology is in 2024.

Continue reading “Training Transhumanists at Oxford University” »