What Future?

Posted by Greg at January 25th, 2007

A quote from a friend of mine:

“##### started off as a man
but then he wanted to be female so he switched
but we couldn’t get the beard off
so he’s this fat short girl with pigtails and a beard
and he goes around telling people how sexy they are”

If you’re looking for this wonderful little mangirl, her Second Life name is LaBamba Yao, and my friend is Cranberry Jonze.

Posted by Greg at December 13th, 2006

I’ve talked about stem cells before, and I don’t think that clumps of cells inside women count as anything more than clumps of cells. No matter when you believe that clump of cells becomes a human, I think everyone can agree that this is even more wrong than it is weird:

Healthy new-born babies may have been killed in Ukraine to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells, evidence obtained by the BBC suggests.

So, to recap–

Risky but ok:

There is a trade in stem cells from aborted foetuses, amid unproven claims they can help fight many diseases.

Not ok:

But now there are claims that stem cells are also being harvested from live babies.

This is a real “what the hell” moment.

Posted by Greg at December 10th, 2006

Holiday cheer got you down? Consider this: Earth is a scary place and there are a lot of things that could kill us.

We know a lot about the current threats, and yet we’re only marginally well-equipped to deal with them. We’ve had fusion weapons for fifty years without wiping ourselves out, but such weapons are making their way into the hands of less stable dictatorships. We’ve had both Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis save us from being smashed by Hollywood space rocks, but we don’t have a real plan for detecting and destroying real ones. The flu could kill millions of us, but at least we’re talking about ways to mitigate an outbreak. The 20th century may have been the bloodiest ever, but considering the risks we faced, we didn’t do too badly.

Enter the 21st century. It seems that the transhumanist community has been addressing the possible threats of emerging technology with more seriousness. This is a good thing. There are serious risks posed by nanotech, biotech, and advanced artificial intelligence. But how to enumerate and prepare for them?
Accelerating Future is attempting to list and categorize the threats that accidents, military leaders, mad scientists, supervillians and disgruntled grad students will throw at us in the 21st century:

The important ones:

1. superintelligence - not just AI - but superhumans too
2. deliberate misuse of nanotech (arms race, nanoweapons)
3. accidental misuse of nanotech
4. killer artificial virus
5. antimatter holocaust?
6. particle accelerator disaster

Fortunately, they have some potential solutions too. Go contribute your own.

Posted by Greg at October 20th, 2006

When I wrote about liability in the virtual world, I wondered how far and how quickly the laws and regulations of the real world would creep into the virtual. I did not expect it to happen this soon, but a US Congressional committee is looking at ways to tax virtual income and investment:

“Right now we’re at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise — taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth,” said Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee. “You could argue that to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there’s no mechanism by which you’re taxed on this stuff,” he said.

Reuters has placed what Warren Ellis called “embedded reporters” within Second Life to cover the recent DoS attacks plaguing the network and to look at issues like this Congressional committee. This is just an example of how virtual worlds are being treated with an increasing seriousness by just about everyone who addresses them– academics, journalists, and now even politicians. Many of us have become accustomed to playing in virtual worlds, but more of us will have to get used to the idea of working there as well.

Posted by Greg at October 10th, 2006

It has been a long time coming, but I’ve finally found time to post my MA thesis, Dying to Live Forever: Challenging representations of radical life extension.

From the abstract:

The idea that bio- and nanotechnologies could drastically extend human lifespans is gaining currency, both among supporters and opponents of the potential technologies. Loosely organized immortalist groups are under political fire from all sides, faced with opposition from well-organized conservative, religious and environmentalist groups. If they do not find political allies soon, immortalists may find that the technologies they have such high hopes for are banned before their potential can be realized.

This thesis explores the culture of those who believe that human lifespans should be open-ended and propose technological interventions to keep us youthful and prevent “involuntary death.” A study of mythological and fictional tales of immortality lays the groundwork for an examination of immortalist discourse. Through Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations and Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the beliefs and attitudes of immortalists are explored and suggestions are made for improving engagement with potential political allies.

A special thanks to BJ Klien at the Immortality Institute, the participants on the ImmInst forum, and to Dr. Aubrey de Grey for your participation in the project. I sincerely hope that my work proves useful to the immortalist community, or at least provides interesting fuel for discussion.

If you have any feedback, comments, or want to give me a book deal, please leave comments here or email me at gmcmullen at gmail dot com.

Posted by Greg at September 27th, 2006

ITWales.com has posted perhaps the best transhumanist-themed material I’ve read in a long time. Ian Pearson is a futurologist with BT, which is of note itself– big business is taking note of the weirdness that is the near future. While the interview doesn’t really cover new ground, it take a pragmatic approach that addresses the concerns as well as the benefits and looks how the emerging technology will be adopted and used by the non-transhumanist set.

Best of all, Pearson is able to explain his ideas in a way that anyone can understand. He doesn’t rely on fuzzy concepts like “the singularity” or “molecular manufacturing”, rather drawing on pop culture and concrete examples to illustrate a future that is at once exciting and frightening.

Highlights include:

• “in the next 15 years - what we can reasonably expect in that timeframe is still probably largely metal and plastic robots, and something not very far away from what we saw in the film I, Robot, you know, slightly more humanoid.”
• “in around 20-25 years time where we can do the full 3D video straight into your active contact lenses, and full 3D audio, and also a sensory experience in terms of touch… Many would do it for relationship purposes - if you’re in New York and your partner’s in London you might want to make love across the network.”
• Discussion of a world where we give up on any pretenses of security, because the sophistication of threats so greatly exceed our ability to effectively manage them.

Read it now.