Category Archives: Transhumanism

UB boffins craft cells that never age

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Photo: Bob Bobster (LIC)/Flickr CC

In a big step toward human superlongevity, University at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo) boffins have made adult stem cells that *do not age.*

The UB researchers anticipate their finding could result in “cost-effective treatments for diseases including heart disease, diabetes, immune disorders and neurodegenerative diseases.”

More from the announcement:

UB scientists created the new cell lines – named “MSC Universal” – by genetically altering mesenchymal stem cells, which are found in bone marrow and can differentiate into cell types including bone, cartilage, muscle, fat, and beta-pancreatic islet cells.

via Researchers Engineer Adult Stem Cells That Do Not Age, Overcoming a Major Barrier to Progress in Regenerative Medicine.

Top o' the heap: Burning Man worshippers to help us evolve

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Mankinds future. Photo: CC/Ben Piven

Mankind's future. Photo: CC/Ben Piven

The theme at this year’s Burning Man Festival, for artists, is Evolution.

Organizers of this quasi-religious rave party for repressed hipsters claim to be creating culture for a human race that no longer weeds-out its less than ideal candidates for natural selection.

Read the muddleheaded copy, below, from the event’s official website (bonus: includes a kindergarten lesson in natural selection):

The process of trial and error that has made this possible is called Natural Selection. Genetically encoded traits that aid survival tend to spread throughout entire populations. Living entities that bear these genes endure and reproduce, but maladaptive traits are not passed on. This causes species to evolve to better fit the world in which they live. However, this rigorous weeding out of ‘unfit’ individuals has gradually ceased to occur within our species. Medicine and mutual aid assure that nearly anyone is able to survive and reproduce.

Now adrift in our own gene pool, we have encountered a new phase of evolution. We’ve become a conscious breed of culture-bearing animals. Black Rock City is a kind of Petri dish, and Burning Man is an experiment in generating culture. We’ve learned that culture’s a spontaneous phenomenon. It thrives as a result of numberless and unplanned interactions. All that’s really needed is a fitting social vessel to sustain it. This happens best within communities that harbor many different modes of self-expression. We’ve also learned that cultures effloresce when human beings feel free to offer up their gifts.

via 2009 Art Theme: Evolution.

Chopped liver: Jobs at head of line

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Steve Jobs gets his new liver… Tennessee has shorter waits, no residency requirement. That suggests those who can pay are getting to the head of the line for this sort of thing.

Incredibly, way back in 2003, the wait for a liver was 67 days. And if you were a member of the elite class, you could have a new liver the day after you put in for one.

The Journal, which says it has no specifics on precisely where or when Jobs had the transplant, notes that the waiting time for donated livers is substantially shorter in Tennessee than it is elsewhere. The wait time is shorter in Tennessee because fewer people come to the three hospitals in the state that do transplants. There is no residency requirement to be a recipient.

People in Tennessee wait 48 days, on average, compared to 306 nationally, according to 2006 figures from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

via Steve Jobs Undergoes Liver Transplant – ABC News.

Transhumanists envision a life at sea

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Photo: Cynthia thanks mother ocean. CC/Bettina Neuefeind

Cynthia thanks mother ocean. Photo: CC/Bettina Neuefeind

Some folks are planning for a life at sea–on man-made islands:

The mission of the [Seasteading Institute] is to enable the building of ocean communities, to experiment with innovative political and social systems…The Seasteading Institute | SHARKRIDE!, May 2009

The Seasteading Institute (TSI) is backed by billionaire PayPal founder and transhumanist Peter Thiel.

Seasteading enthusiasts, apparently in no rush for a return on their investements, have contributed more than $500,000 to the institute to-date.

It is not clear whether the poor and the profane will find their way onto these islands. TSI does argue, however, that the islands might help isolate undesirables.

Winning entry. Image: CC/ejacobhansen

Winning entry. Image: CC/ejacobhansen

I’m not sure what is meant by “innovative political and social systems,” in the Seasteaders’ mission, but Aftermath News notes that the Bilderberg gang has been discussing overcoming resistance to depopulation:

The UK newspaper The Times reported that these “leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population,” and that they “discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.”

via Secret Bilderberg Agenda to Restructure Global Political Economy « Aftermath News.

Transhumanism watch: Big pharma to hand out speed like Chiclets

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CC/Unity Gain

Amped up on Adderall. Photo: CC/Unity Gain

Shrinks on the take from the pharmaceutical industry and the Rockefeller Foundation are pushing Adderall and Ritalin as productivity boosters for humans.

This can’t come to any good. Even the authors of this Nature piece (described in a Yahoo article, link and excerpt, below) concede the likelihood of a rich-poor divide over who gets the “brain-boosting” drugs.

My take: The poor will get their pills. Corporations can employ fewer, more productive workers, especially if they are on speed.

The seven authors, from the United States and Britain, include ethics experts and the editor-in-chief of Nature as well as scientists. They developed their case at a seminar funded by Nature and Rockefeller University in New York. Two authors said they consult for pharmaceutical companies; Farah said she had no such financial ties.

Some health experts agreed that the issue deserves attention. But the commentary didn’t impress Leigh Turner of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics.

“It’s a nice puff piece for selling medications for people who don’t have an illness of any kind,” Turner said.

The commentary cites a 2001 survey of about 11,000 American college students that found 4 percent had used prescription stimulants illegally in the prior year. But at some colleges, the figure was as high as 25 percent.

via Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people – Yahoo! News.

Gender-bending beyond meatspace

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CC/Rivka Rau

Loosen up! In virtual worlds, you can be any *thing* you want to be. Image: CC/Rivka Rau

I’ve been out of the Second Life loop lately, save for this piece, which I wrote for the Boston Globe: Virtual business, for real?

But here’s an interesting development I missed this fall, in the extropian/transhuman community in Second Life: a call for the first-ever “Gender Freedom Day in Virtual Worlds,” with the admirable goal of showing solidarity with people whose GLBT avatars have been taking abuse from inworld bigots.

Sophrosyne Stenvaag, a real-life woman who writes in the voice of her fictional Second Life character, describes her inspiration:

a friend was attacked in social media and later pilloried on a blog for the expression of her sexuality. What happened was despicable, and I’m not about to credit the infantile, frightened, intolerant vermin who attacked her by linking to what they did, nor do I want to bring more painful attention to the victim.

What happened to her happens to countless women, and to queers of all gender presentations, every day in digital worlds. Yes, it happens in the atomic world too, where it’s often coupled to violence, even murder. But my home is here in the digital, and my responsibility is to not sit silent and permit a culture of hatred to flourish in my own home.

via Sophtopia: Gender Freedom Day in Digital Worlds

But rather than freedom *for* those with gender identities outside the mainstream, Stenvaag appears to also be calling for freedom *from* gender for virtual worlds avatars. In her blog, she notes Second Life’s support for “creative gender, sexual, species and artificial self-expression,” as pluses, for people who might want to try something new.

Stenvaag failed to rustle-up any sponsors for Gender Freedom Day for its original date, Oct. 25. Real-world (or, as Stenvaag calls them, “atomic”) and inworld (“digital”) organizations ignored her pleas entirely

Stenvaag has rescheduled the event to occur on December 21, the day of the Winter Solstice.

Robot "skin jobs" in the works

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<a href=Japanese scientists say they’ve developed a fully-flexible, and stretchable, conductive skin for robots with carbon nantubes.

U.S. scientists this week also announced they have made a flexible material that might make an excellent covering for artificial eyeballs.

Material bends, stretches and conducts electricity? | Technology | Reuters
They stretched the sheet of material to nearly double its original size and it snapped back into place, without disrupting the transistors or ruining the material’s conductive properties.

The elastic conductor would allow electronic circuits to be mounted in places that would have been impossible up to now, including “arbitrary curved surfaces and movable parts, such as the joints of a robot’s arm,” Sekitani and colleagues wrote.

Live long and prosper? We might do neither

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Biotech body snatchers. A genetically “inferior” underclass. Increased terrorist attacks. Futurists will “make it so.“

(Marketing buzzword alert: “Futuring,” a verb, is the act of exploring of the future, according to those who do it. Photo: Futurist Thornton A. May flashes the three-finger “Sustainability Symbol.” More about this strange hand signal shortly. Credit: Dragonpreneur, under a Creative Commons license.)

from Mark:

A new book by a futurist and adviser to three U.S. presidents portrays a horrific near future scenario filled with body snatchers, a booming “neuromarket” for false memory implants, and a self-aware internet that rebels against humanity.

The author of “The Extreme Future,” James Canton, Ph.D. (below), was a student of Alvin Toffler, according to Publisher’s Weekly. He will be speaking at the U.S. Army War College this fall, at a conference aimed not at predicting, but shaping, the future.

“The goal of futuring (exploring the future) is not to predict the future but to improve it,” reads a quote from futurist Edward Cornish, on the U.S. Army War College’s website.

For more about how futurists plan our futures, see these blurbs and broadcasts by Alan Watt.

Bloggers from the military and intel communities are talking about the book. Here is an excerpt from one dot-mil blog:

(Dr.) Canton…includes “Top Ten” lists detailing everything from Energy Trends to Robo-Futures.

In THE EXTREME FUTURE, Dr. James Canton predicts that:

• The high cost of oil will force the West to invent new alternatives to oil and lead to depressed OPEC economies, leading to more terrorism against the West

• Radical life extension will create a two-class global society of those who live over 150 years and of those who cannot afford to

• The Internet will develop an awareness of itself and its own personality and rebel against human controls

• Human cloning will become the ultimate in identity theft

• A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India is more likely then not

• Copy-cat products from Asia—from drugs to auto parts—will perform better then the original branded products they’re based on

• Radical life extension will reshape entire markets and society

• The new global Innovation Economy will deliver widespread prosperity and wealth

Zealots haunt environmentalist religion

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Global warming now a core “belief” among environmentalists, says Freeman Dyson

(Love your mother.)

from Mark:

Environmentalism is a secular religion that we can all get behind, physicist Freeman Dyson writes in the Times.

There is just one problem: The movement, Dyson argues, is run largely by non-scientists, and many of those believe that “global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet.” (See excerpt, below.)

Now any global warming skeptic is being labeled in popular culture as “an enemy of the environment.”

One transhumanist (or H+, short for human-plus) complains that many of his fellows have already bought into the global warming “dogma.” Follow the link, below, to see the comments to this blog post, at Sentient Developments:

Sentient Developments: Freeman Dyson on the ‘religion of environmentalism’ There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

"Big Blue" rebuttal: No transhumanists here

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IBM researcher defends Second Life, World of Warcraft, against Parallelnormal blog posts.

from Mark:

High-profile virtual worlders are trying to correct what they see as misrepresentations by Parallelnormal of their recent meetings and events.

One of them, Second Lifer “Dale Innis,” writes a comment blasting my comparison of real and virtual versions of New England, and my description of a conference about the convergence of reality with virtual reality.

“(You) drastically misread your sources about the WoW conference and the Extropia sims, and you seem to do the same thing in many places where Second Life is involved,” Innis writes.

Innis in real life (RL) is IBM researcher David M. Chess.

IBM has built inworld stores for big box retailers.

Chess is working to develop autonomic technologies, which are self-aware and can fix themselves.

Chess, speaking for himself, and not IBM, denies that Extropia and the World of Warcraft conference “are in fact about transhumanism.”

Yet the WoW conference was organized by a transhumanist, and one who views the world’s major religions as an obstacle to the advancement of his own beliefs.

And extropians, by their own definition, are transhumanists, real or imagined.