Dr Neal also said there were safety risks with people buying the equipment from online sites and doing the procedures from home.
The Scottish government told BBC Scotland’s The Nine it intended to regulate procedures carried out by non-healthcare professionals and it was consulting on how this could be done.
Meet the people seeking to improve their bodies by implanting technology such as microchips.
Here’s my new story for Quartz on cyborg and #transhumanist bill of rights! It offers a look at the various ideas around the world surrounding this provocative issue:
Transhumanists are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human. Our governing principles may need to progress along with them.
Are you ready for the future? A Transhumanist future? One where everyone around you—friends, family, and neighbors—has dipped into the transhumanist punch bowl. A future of contact lenses that see in the dark, endoskeleton attached 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. Some of 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 brain wave 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 just with your thoughts too. In fact, well over a year ago now, 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.
The history of transhumanism—the burgeoning field of science and radical tech 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 a half century ago. 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. Some experts surmise as many as half of Americans will have implants by 2020. I already have one in my hand. It’s truly a new age for humans.
As noted by Dan Ariely, who is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, this “worry that tugs at the corners of our minds is set off by the fear of regret…that we’ve made the wrong decision about how to spend our time.”
Why do such fears rule our day? Perhaps due to the fact that our lives are severely limited, and thus our experiences are confined by an hourglass. Would we reminisce of our past decisions so often if life weren’t so short?
FOMO — the Fear of Missing Out — has been an anxiety of ours since birth. Will our future endeavors provide us a cure or will we continue living and expiring with this constant psychological state?
I’m excited to share I did an interview on transhumanism with Skyy John of Tipsy Bartender. He’s an actor and one the most famous people in the alcohol business!
We are about to live FOREVER because of new advances in technology and artificial intelligence! I sat down with futurist and transhumanist Zoltan Istvan as he explains how all of this will happen.
FIND ZOLTAN
Get a FREE copy of Zoltan’s new book: https://amzn.to/2LTg8lX
Tweets by zoltan_istvan
https://www.instagram.com/zoltan_istvan/
ROB ROY RECIPE:
2 oz. (60ml) Scotch
3⁄4 oz. (22ml) Sweet Vermouth
3 dashes Angostura Bitters
BUY TIPSY BARTENDER GEAR:
My mission is to drastically improve your life by helping you break bad habits, build and keep new healthy habits to make you the best version of yourself. I read the books and do all the research and share my findings with you!
This video is me (Brent Nally) interviewing Transhumanist Party US Presidential Candidate Ben Zion on October 3, 2019 at RAADFest at the Westgate Hotel & Casino.
Ben’s Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100010498697361
Ben Zion for President 2020 Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/edgeoflivingmemory/
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At RAAD Fest in Las Vegas on October 6, 2019, Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP), announces the results of the 2019 USTP Electronic Primary for President of the United States, and introduces the winner of the Electronic Primary and the USTP-endorsed candidate for President of the United States in 2020, Johannon Ben Zion.
See the detailed results here: https://transhumanist-party.org/2019/10/02/ustp-2019-electronic-primary-results/
Read about USTP’s endorsed candidate, Johannon Ben Zion, here: https://transhumanist-party.org/candidate-profiles/johannon-ben-zion/
Join the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party for free, no matter where you reside: https://transhumanist-party.org/membership/
Radio program The Current had me on this morning discussing #transhumanism, specifically #robots & #AI running for political office. It’s Canada’s most listened to radio program with millions of listeners. Here’s a fun write-up of it:
We ask if we should ditch flesh-and-blood politicians, and give the robots a go at leadership.
The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days. It is offered both as a way for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workplace, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently commented that humans can escape being outmoded by AI by “having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence.”1 To this end, he’s founded a company, Neuralink. One of its first aims is to develop “neural lace,” an injectable mesh that connects the brain directly to computers. Neural lace and other AI-based enhancements are supposed to allow data from your brain to travel wirelessly to one’s digital devices or to the cloud, where massive computing power is available.
For many transhumanists, uploading is key to the mind-machine merger.
Perhaps these sorts of enhancements will turn out to be beneficial, but to see if this is the case, we will need to move beyond all the hype. Policymakers, the public, and even AI researchers themselves need a better idea of what is at stake. For instance, if AI cannot be conscious, then if you substituted a microchip for the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness, you would end your life as a conscious being. You’d become what philosophers call a “zombie”—a nonconscious simulacrum of your earlier self. Further, even ifmicrochips could replace parts of the brain responsible for consciousness without zombifying you, radical enhancement is still a major risk. After too many changes, the person who remains may not even be you. Each human who enhances may, unbeknownst to them, end their life in the process.
