Tag Archives: Transhumanism

Little RASCALS stir up Second Life

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(Caution: Four-year-old Eddie might just tear your heart out. That’s because he’s built on an AI framework for the military. Images: RPI)

Cognitive scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute claim to have created a Second Life avatar with the reasoning skills of a four-year-old child.

The artificial child, “Eddie,” runs on an RPI supercomputer, and comes from a lab funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Selmer Bringsjord, leader of the RPI research team that created “Eddie,” says applications for the tyke might include “homeland defense.”

That’s because Eddie also goes by the name, “Edd.”

And Edd (below) is a baddass homeland security robot who looks like the villainous machine in the film, Robocop. Both Eddie and Edd are based on the Rensselaer Advanced Synthetic Architecture for “Living” Systems, or RASCALS, an artificial life form platform created for military and intelligence operations.

Eddie’s supercomputing descendants will be much more capable of mimicking humans than he is.

“Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things.” – Bringsjord

The Pentagon and Homeland Security would then be free to use synthetic characters as spies inworld, for example. There they will able to operate undetected, and unhindered by the pangs of a truly human conscience.

Bringing Second Life To Life: Researchers Create Character With Reasoning Abilities of a Child

Troy, N.Y. – Today’s video games and online virtual worlds give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before. But despite having your hair, your height, and your hazel eyes, your avatar is still little more than just a pretty face.

New York Times: Let computers think for us

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David Brooks (left) argues in his latest New York Times column that people should let cell phones, media players and personal computers do our thinking for us.

Such devices, Brooks says, tongue-in-cheek, can lighten our cognitive loads, by cultivating our media tastes for us.

Internet services such as Google can also fill the gaps in the memories of both the young and old, which have already been compromised by technology.

In the “The Outsourced Brain,” Brooks, tongue-in-cheek, describes a “romantic attachment” to his car’s Global Positioning System navigation device, which eliminates the need for him to remember directions.

Brooks is making a satirical cultural observation–that individuals are routinely tapping artificially intelligent agents and databases (such as the notoriously corrupt, and inaccurate, Wikipedia) to compensate for their memory lapses, even their lack of creativity.

So-called internet “music discovery services,” for example, suggest new songs for your library, based upon the contents of your computer hard drive. (I have written about some of these services in my Boston Globe column.)

Outsourcing our brains to the digital “external mind” could damage our original grey matter, which transhumanists clinically refer to as our “wetware,” some neuroscientists believe.

Brooks presents his piece as satire. But his advertising industry contacts clearly expect to benefit from the wetware-to-hardware migration.

Those contacts include brand managers for several mobile phone companies. Their aim: to turn consumers “brand fanatics”–people who are addicted to particular products and services. Continue reading →

Is transhumanism a religion?

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Movement promises “an end run around mortality”


A real beauty, or virtually so. (Image: from the transhumanist book, The Perfect World Tour, by “A.R. Teest.”)

Natasha Vita-More does not appreciate being called a religious leader. (See her reply to a recent parallelnormal post here.) Vita-More and her husband, Max More, are leaders of the transhumanist and extropian movements, which advocate for the use of technology to transform the human into a “posthuman,” which they believe will be better than the originals.

But the movements, which have ties to the United Nations, and to Oxford and Yale universities, do offer hope to those who long for life “beyond our current biological limitations,” and for greater security in a dangerous world.

Transhumanism also has its share of famous followers, drawn largely from the fields of science, engineering and biology.

The transhumanists, after all, will need the help of scientists to realize their dream of creating a life form to supplant mankind.

Posthumans will replace ordinary, biological, humans with “completely synthetic artificial intelligence,” according to one scenario described by the Extropian Institute, Max More’s think-tank.

Such virtual life might arise from human brains being downloaded to computers, or humans being modified with multiple computer implants, the extropians add.

The inventor Ray Kurzweil and MIT artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky are transhumanists.

Kurzweil is not a religious man. But he does believe science might help him “live long enough to live forever.” He takes dozens of supplements daily, and spends a full day each month at a Massachusetts clinic, where he receives massive vitamin doses intravenously.

“The promise of eternal life through continuous upgrades obviously satisfies one of the chief needs of religious personalities — an end run around mortality,” my brother, Erik, told me last week.

Erik covered a meeting of the World Transhumanist Association at Yale for the Village Voice in 2003.

Erik does not share my belief that transhumanism might meet the deifinition of a cult. “But,” he said, “some vulnerable people attracted to it might be ripe for such exploitation.”

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More information:

Red Ice Creations special report

Alan Watt’s Cutting Through the Matrix

New York Times rehashes "we're all in a sim" story

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No mention of connections to science and technology cult, Yale University

Back to the Future: Oxford University professor Nick Bostrum’s friends and Transhumanist cohorts, Natasha Vita-More and Max More, yuck it up with Star Trek star William Shatner. (Photo: Natasha Vita-More’s website.) Note: Vita-More (see her comments, below), states that I do not have her permission to use this image. I consider my use of the image “fair use” under the U.S. Copyright Act, however.

The New Times is continuing its drumbeat for Transhumanism, even where it fails to mention the science and technology cult by name.

Times science columnist John Tierney in an August 14 story (link and excerpt, below) suggests that we are already living in the Matrix.

This is exactly the same story the Times reported over four years ago.

But the Matrix idea (that we are all living in a computer simulation) may be more timely now, given the media hype surrounding virtual worlds such as Second Life.

The most striking thing about this story, however, is that Tierney fails to mention that his subject, Nick Bostrum, is the leader of the modern Transhumanist movement, which aims to replace traditional religions with a belief system based solely upon science and technology.

Bostrum, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998. He has also worked as a consultant to the CIA and the European Commission. Continue reading →