The story is on bringing people back to life with radical science and it talks about transhumanism and cryonics. This is the most widespread story I’ve seen on #transhumanism in Eastern Europe yet. https://tenyek.hu/kulfold/237876_felelesztik-az-agyhalottakat.html
New story about the recent book on #transhumanism To Be a Machine:
For the (very very quickly) upcoming Love & Death Issue, I had the chance to interview the journalist, Mark O’Connell, who is the author most recently of To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. He also wrote that amazing piece in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago about Zoltan Istvan, the transhumanist who ran for president and drove across the country in a coffin-shaped bus. O’Connell’s new book reads like a travelogue among characters like Zoltan, futuristic types (mostly from California) that O’Connell describes with a charming blend of cynicism and aloof interest. Like an agnostic amidst a group of “true believers,” O’Connell is both repelled by and drawn in by the belief system that transhumanism proffers.
If you’re unfamiliar, transhumanism is the movement that asserts an immortal future thanks to technology and science. As O’Connell describes it, it is the technological teleology of salvation: “a projection whereby intelligent life takes over all matter in the universe, leading to a cosmological singularity.” In other words, the computers we’ve built, the science we’re discovering, will free us from our mortal coil, our bodies. We will live eternally in new bodies, machines unconstrained by sickness, vulnerability and death.
You can see how O’Connell hears the religious bells ringing. But he also, throughout the book, describes this paradox: that this futurism is just a new iteration of a very old idea. Despite all the science fiction lingo used to describe this singularity (“longevity escape velocity,” “whole brain emulation,” “cyborgs”), what we really have is the apex of Enlightenment thought, and before that, Gnostic thought. It is the idea that we are liberated by our minds, that certain refinements of knowledge will set us free.
Beneath the talk of future technologies, I could hear the murmur of ancient ideas. We were talking about the transmigration of souls, eternal return, reincarnation. Nothing is ever new. Nothing ever truly dies, but is reborn in a new form, a new language, a new substrate.
This bionic knee brace will give you superhuman strength…and it’s available to everyone!
Very interesting new feature in Aeon on AI that also discusses my short fiction The Jesus Singularity: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists…so-similar #transhumanism
The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why?
I’ll be on a panel and also doing an author’s roundtable (The Transhumanist Wager) at FreedomFest in Las Vegas on July 21. It’s one of the largest gatherings of free minds in the world and this year is the 10th anniversary. If you’re there, please say hello! Others are speaking on life extension and AI. Here’s my speaker’s page:
Check out what Zoltan Istvan will be attending at FreedomFest 2017.
The Evening Standard reviews the new book Radicals whose opening chapter is about transhumanism and my 2016 presidential campaign:
With the apparent collapse of Ukip and the defeat of Marine Le Pen, perhaps those of us fretting about the decline of liberal democracy may breathe easier. Still, many established Western parties remain in decline. And we have yet to deal with the consequences of the “populist” spasms that gave us Brexit and the absurd President Trump. This is the climate that impels Jamie Bartlett, of think tank Demos, to examine some of the new “radicals”.
Radicalism is important, he believes, because it is a source of new ideas: even if liberal democracy is forced to argue with racists or anti-democratic radicals, that should help make it stronger.
He is inevitably selective in his choice of seven different figures or movements, plus the anti-radicalisation work of the Prevent programme: there is an uneasy bracketing of political radicals and wacky futurists.
Thus in the latter group we meet US transhumanist presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, leader of assorted “biohackers” attempting to merge humans and machines. Bartlett spends time with the Psychedelic Society, organising supervised psilocybin trips; with the German Tamera commune in Portugal, practising free love; and with the scarcely less loopy Vit Jedlicka, founder of a putative libertarian state on the Serbian/Croatian border.
There’s been a few thousand comments between the various releases of the video too. It’s great to see so many people considering a Federal Land Dividend as a way to live and thrive in a challenging future tied to widespread automation, transhumanism, and AI: https://www.facebook.com/NowThisFuture/videos/1600120853362422/?fref=mentions
Join me today for this! https://www.meetup.com/transhumanism-78/events/240040904/ #transhumanism
The Transhumanist Party presidential candidate and a Libertarian candidate for California governor, Zoltan Istvan, will join Agah Bahari in a 45-minute conversation for the live recording of an episode of “NEOHUMAN with Agah Bahari” podcast, following by 30-mins of Q&A (predetermined based on prior submissions).
With his wildly popular US Presidential run as a science candidate, bestselling book The Transhumanist Wager, and powerful speeches at institutions like the World Bank, Zoltan Istvan has literally transformed transhumanism into a thriving worldwide phenomenon. He is often cited as the global leader of the radical science movement. A humanitarian activist and former journalist for National Geographic, Zoltan has been compared in major media to a young Al Gore and described as a modern-day Ayn Rand.
“NEOHUMAN with Agah Bahari” is a Toronto-based podcast, produced and hosted by futurist, philosopher, artist, and entrepreneur, Agah Bahari. It was launched on January of 2016 and have generated more than 150,000 downloads in Canada, USA, Europe, and Australia since. NEOHUMAN podcast covers wide variety of subjects and issues, with some of the past guests include Kevin Kelly (editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine), Zoltan Istvan (Founder & 2016 Presidential candidate of The Transhumanist Party), Mark Perlin (Chief Scientific and Executive Officer of Cybergenetics), James Hughes (Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies), Lincoln Cannon (Founder of the Mormon Transhumanist association), and Reverend Christopher Benek (Founder of the Christian Transhumanist Association), among others.
This film was compiled from audio of a discussion futurist FM-2030 held at the University of California on February 6th, 1994. In this discussion 2030 laid out an overview of his ‘transhuman’ philosophy and held a back and forth with other people present in the discussion. Discussion and debate included items such as the value of researching ‘indefinite lifespan’ technologies directly as opposed to (or in addition to) more traditional approaches, such as researching cures for specific diseases.
The excerpts in this archive file present a sort of thesis of FM 2030’s transhuman ideas.
About FM 2030: FM 2030 was at various points in his life, an Iranian Olympic basketball player, a diplomat, a university teacher, and a corporate consultant. He developed his views on transhumanism in the 1960s and evolved them over the next thirty-something years. He was placed in cryonic suspension July 8th, 2000. For more information about FM 2030, view the GPA Archive File: ‘Introduction to FM 2030′ or visit some of the following links:
Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies:
ieet.org/index.php/tpwiki/Transhuman
The New York Times:
nytimes.com/2000/07/11/us/futurist-known-as-fm-2030-is-dead-at-69.html