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Category: transhumanism – Page 96

My new Vice Motherboard article on interviewing four humanoid robots: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/i-talked-to-four-humanoid-robots #transhumanism

“Human relationships can be hard to define.”

Over the last 18 months, I’ve found myself in the strange habit of hanging out and interviewing English-speaking humanoid robots. I was able to chat with four machines, each which possessed some level of artificial intelligence. Even though none of them could fully carry on normal conversations, they all had something to say. And sometimes, what they say and how they say it, is a piercing glimpse into the future of humanity.

Three of the robots I talked to were mass-production models: Pepper, Meccanoid, and iPal. The fourth was Han, which was presented by AI expert Dr. Ben Goertzel, chief scientist at Hanson Robotics. The various price tags of these bots range from $200 on Amazon, to potentially many millions of dollars for something like Han. The production robots are all between three to four feet tall and are mobile. Han is just an upper body, the torso of which rests against whatever he’s placed upon.

Continue reading “I Talked to Four Humanoid Robots and They’re Mostly Dumb as Doornails” | >

Wow! For context, that’s nearly 4x times the amount of daily views that Bill O’Reilly used to get on his #1 cable show on Fox before he was fired. smile Give the video a view: https://www.facebook.com/NowThisFuture/videos/1500983249942850/ #transhumanism

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An event on #transhumanism at a Christian university in Southern California in June. Looks interesting:

Humanism is “our most sympathetic understanding and treatment of human nature.”

TRANShumanism is “the drive to fundamentally revolutionise what it means to be human by way of technological advancements.”

For those of you who are new to the term, Dr. Joel Oesch, on his blog Fishing for Leviathan, defines it this way, “Transhumanism has nothing to do with your race or gender identity, at least not directly. Rather, the term reflects the human desire to transcend its current condition both individually and socially, most notably to rise above the limitations of our physical selves. Transhumanism is a movement of people committed to using technology to further the human race in profound ways. In most iterations, Transhumanism is viewed as the next great step of human evolution. Homo sapiens has evolved into a wholly new species, Homo technicus.”

Continue reading “Crosswise Summer Experience” | >

Happy Easter…and a reality check: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/where-were-going-we-dont-need-popes #transhumanism #reason

Modern values, transhumanist technology, and the embrace of reason are making many Catholic rules and rituals absurd.

Everywhere I look, Pope Francis, the 266th pope of the Catholic Church, seems to be in the news—and he is being positively portrayed as a genuinely progressive leader. Frankly, this baffles me. Few major religions have as backwards a philosophical and moral platform as Catholicism. Therefore, no leader of it could actually be genuinely progressive. Yet, no one seems to pay attention to this—no one seems to be discussing that Catholicism remains highly oppressive.

To even discuss how many archaic positions the Pope and Catholicism support would take volumes. But the one that irks me the most is that Pope Francis and his church are still broadly against condoms and contraceptives. Putting aside that this view is terribly anti-environmental, with over 175 million Catholics in Africa, it’s quite possible that this position may also create more AIDS deaths in Africa.

Continue reading “The Transhumanist Future Has No Pope” | >

It’s tricky to bring transhumanism into sharp focus. As with, say, feminism, the meaning of the word varies hugely between individuals who identify with it, and the level of commitment may vary between an occasional affirmation or a crusading passion. Like feminism, transhumanism has many factions, often at war with one another, or with the broader culture; as with feminism, a lot of people identify as transhumanist without spending much time learning what those who coined the term were actually on about. Transhumanism broadly considers technology as an emancipatory route to individual and/or collective transcendence over the ‘limitations’ of the human condition.

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A new 45-min video podcast interview I did with Cybrink on #transhumanism, my #libertarian run for Governor, and the singularity:

Cybrink talks with Zoltan Istvan about transhumanism, artificial intelligence, the singularity and his run for Governor of California in 2018.

Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/cybrinkmedia

Continue reading “Zoltan Istvan — Cybrink Podcast #3” | >

David Wood ‘s list would be a great syllabus for a 2017 Intro to Transhumanism course.

Antidotes to the six horsemen of the Trumpocalypse

Here’s one of my deeply held beliefs. We owe it to ourselves to take best advantage of the insights and experiences of those who have gone before us. Where researchers have seen more clearly or understood more deeply than their predecessors or contemporaries, we should pay special attention to their words and concepts. Where these researchers have written books that make accessible key aspects of their hard-won expertise, we should prioritise finding the time to read these books.

But in 2016, not everyone agreed that expertise is worth attention. Experts are over-rated, we heard. The elites deserve a comeuppance.

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