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R.U. Sirius Co-Authors New Book On Transhumanism
An anonymous reader writes "I've never been able to work up a fear of the robot apocalypse," admits R.U. Sirius, who more than 20 years after Mondo 2000's original guide to geek culture has again collaborated on a new encyclopedia of emerging technologies. As we progress to a world where technology actually becomes invisible, he argues that "everything about how we will define the future is still in play," suggesting that the transhumanist movement is "a good way to take isolated radical tech developments and bundle them together". While his co-author argues transhumanists "like to solve everything," Sirius points out a much bigger concern is a future of technologies dominated by the government or big capital.
Film at Elevelty-Nine!
I checked, and it is stated that
Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities
Tell you the truth I simply do not understand what the fuck it meant !!
That mistook the headline's mention of RU Sirius for Yahoo Serious? Same era, same stupid sounding name, same flash in the pan. I wonder if they were separated at birth
I was just a small kid, but back then they called it an acid trip.
I think I'll wait until H++14 is fully supported before upgrading myself.
Come on, even Playboy has a nice cover. Let's see a chapter list and a summary of one of the ideas.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Who would have predicted that AI would have advanced so little in the last 20 years?
The ever-increasing power of computers doesn't seem to have made any difference.
I think that the transhumans would react like humans, with passion, maybe with better ability to reach their passionate goals.
One human's passion can change history, or the truths about human passion can change history ...Each transhuman would be free to choose alike paths. With humans these paths are bounded by err ... birth, love, suffering, numb, teachings, death ?
Transhumanism is not medecine, is has no "Hippocrates" manifesto, or "Asimov" cyber implants rules. LoL, A transhuman would prove that these kinds of rules must rely on a tangible highest moral/fabric authority.
In 2050, if accumulation of wealth by 1% of the population is irreversible, if climate change is irreversible, what would be irreversible with transhumanism ? Today the idea of mankind, humanity, is still tangible, I think that the alien bars in Star wars, Star trek etc. are entertaining and numb. The heroes always pass the Turing test (The "Sapiens" imitation game) and the universe is filled with happy ends (70th anniversary of the liberation)
Transhumanism is a financial investment, the middle class of the world may mitigate the risks, absorb the impact. Hey ! this is already a movie too, Elysium.
The last movie is about numb sapiens screwing the fragile ideal of transhumanism, Transcendance, LoL.
So transhumans would certainly react with passion, because they are actually so caricatured by their parents.
Want to know more about the new book by R. U. Sirius? Read our review, co-authored by I. Kannt and B. Lievtis...
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Goffman is a huckster and charlatan, why is anyone still paying attention to this enemy of relevance ?
Kenny Boy Goffman has been the self appointed Court Jester to the psychedelic and transhumanist communities for far too many years. In reality, neither camp has anything in common and Kenny does great damage with his hucksterism and nonsensical gibberish. This crusty old hippy and now goofy shill for techno-fascism needs to shut up for once and for all. He damages what little remains of the potential for a real psychedelic culture with his boosterism for the truly evil transhumanist technocrats who oppose democracy and who cheer-lead for general mechanization and dehumanization. Kenny Boy Goffman, you are truly nothing at all but the Enemy of Relevance and the enemy of what is actually Human.
Professor Dale Carrico on his 'Amor Mundi' blog has (with razor wit and insight) completely destroyed the puny intellectual rationalizations and extremely flimsy philosophical foundations of the ridiculous "transhumanist" movement. In particular he more than makes the case that the bones of "transhumanism" are in fact : fascist, plutocratic elitist, sexist, racist and overwhelmingly adolescent ie the worst case of arrested development posing as science and sound thinking ; when it is in fact nothing more than terrible and gratingly naive science fiction which has had the temerity to form a little club for the lost fanboys, nerds and wannabee fascist dictators who live in efficiency apartments and are obsessed with Japanese anime. Some of these greasy manboys are libertarians, they are even more despicable and deluded. Ending death, even if possible, would only for these lads lead to one question : can I really play Dungeons and Dragons until the entropic heat death of the Universe and still remain sexually inexperienced? If Ayn Rand wrote terrible sci fi, that would be "transhumanism." Finally, transhumanists are profoundly anti-democratic and opposed to progressive politics, as their imaginary Robot God is gonna nano up some Cyber Paradise and bring on the Singularity Nerd Rapture (IN LESS THAN 20 YEARS) when we will be 'all watched over by Machines of Loving Grace.' They were saying "less than 20 years" to Machine Utopia back in the late 1980's when the middle brow lunatics Max and Natasha more started all this Extropian E-jacyoolation and Saturday morning kid's cartoon show rolling along on its square, lumpy wheels. Giving this book to a minor is child abuse, no different than warping kids' minds with the Book of Mormon.
"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed." - F. Herbert
Http://www.ChromosomeQuest.com
Ken Goffman is Straight Up Vaudeville.
Kenny Boy is some kind of oldies act, like Sha Na Na
Also posted at the World Future Society.
Their prose was all purple, there were VCs running everywhere, tryin' to profit from destruction, you know we didn't even care.
via Singularity Hub (h/t David Golumbia):
Google, a long-time supporter of Singularity University (SU), has agreed to a two-year, $3 million contribution to SU's flagship Graduate Studies Program (GSP). Google will become the program's title sponsor and ensure all successful direct applicants get the chance to attend free of charge. Held every summer, the GSP's driving goal is to positively impact the lives of a billion people in the next decade using exponential technologies. Participants spend a fast-paced ten weeks learning all they need to know for the final exam—a chance to develop and then pitch a world-changing business plan to a packed house.
"Exponential technologies" is a short hand for the false and facile narrative superlative futurologists spun from Moore's Law -- the observation in 1965 (the year I was born) that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit had been roughly doubling every two years, and the paraphrase of that observation into a law-like generalization that chip performance more or less doubles every two years -- into the faith-based proclamation that this processing power will inevitably eventuate in artificial intelligence, and soon thereafter a history shattering super-intelligence that will control self-replicating programmable nanoscale robots that will provide a magical superabundance on the cheap and deliver near immortality through prosthetic medical enhancement and the digital uploading of "informational soul-selves" into imperishable online paradises.
The arrival of superintelligent artificial intelligence is denominated "the Singularity" by these futurologists, a term drawn from the science fiction of Vernor Vinge, as are the general contours of this techno-transcendental narrative, taken up most famously by one-time inventor and now futurological "Thought Leader" Ray Kurzweil and a coterie of so-called tech multimillionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jaan Tallinn all looking to rationalize their good fortune in the irrational exuberance of the tech boom and secure their self-declared destinies as protagonists of post-human history by proselytizing and investing in transhumanist/singularitarian eugenic/digitopian ideology across the neoliberal institutional landscape at MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Google, and so on.
That most of these figures are skim-and-scam artists with little sense and too much money on their hands goes without saying as does the obvious legibility of their "technoscientific" triumphalism as a conventional marketing strategy for commercial crap (get rich quick! anti-aging! sexy-sexy!) but amplified into a scarcely stealthed fulminating faith re-enacting the theological terms of an omni-predicated godhead delivering True Believers eternal life in absolute bliss with perfect knowledge. Not to put too fine a point it, the serially-failed program of AI doesn't become more plausible by slapping "super" in front of the AI, especially when the same sociopathic body-loathing digi-spiritualizing assumptions remain in force among its adherents; exponential processing power checked by comparable ballooning kruft is on a road to nowhere like transcendence; and since a picture of you isn't you and cyberspace is buggy and noisy and brittle hoping to live there forever as an information spirit is pretty damned stupid even if you call yourself a soopergenius.
Since the super-intelligent and nanotechnological magicks on which techno-transcendentalists pin their real hopes are not remotely in evidence, these futurologists tend to hype the media and computational devices of the day, celebrating algorithmic mediation and Big Data framing and kludgy gaming virtualities like Oculus Rift and surveillance media like the failed Google Glass and venture capitalist "disruption" like airbnb and uber. That this is the world of hyping toxic wage-slave manufactured landfill-destined
http://hpluselection2013.tumblr.com/
read that, and you will never stop laughing at the incredibly stupid and petty turf wars of the Transhumanist Elite... it reads like a high school 'slam book' teenage girls put together to war on their enemies with asinine verbal nastiness, it is seriously Pathetic.
I am the co-author of this book (and disappointingly unnamed in this discussion), so I thought I would register and reply to a few points.
Just as reporters often don’t get to write the headlines for their stories, authors don’t always have final say about the titles of their books. Our working title was “The User’s Guide to Transhumanism,” which I think would have been a little more on-point. The word “encyclopedia” notwithstanding, we couldn’t cover everything, certainly not in any depth, in the number of words we had to work with. However, contrary to a post above, we do have an entry on Cosmism. Since the entries are alphabetical, I don’t know how the commenter missed it.
We tried hard to be objective. While we are both largely supportive of transhumanism, neither of us are starry-eyed “believers,” and I think the book (and even the interviews linked in the story) make that clear. We at least mention the criticisms and potential downsides of transhumanism, and in fact there’s a relatively lengthy entry called “Criticisms of Transhumanism” which is online.
Unfortunately there is an "Anonymous Coward" trolling this discussion, making a lot of wild and baseless charges. I’ve known R.U. for nearly 30 years, and it’s completely absurd to call him “fascist"/"sexist"/"racist"/"elitist"/"technocratic" by any normal meanings of those terms. I’d describe him as somewhere on the left on many issues, but he’s hard to pigeonhole politically. I would never consider him a dogmatist or even much of a joiner. (For the record, I’m a sort of impure libertarian who tries to take a somewhat distant and objective view of politics, and is often more willing to compromise with the left or right than a libertarian is “supposed to.”)
Whatever Peter Thiel funds, sadly, he’s not funding me or R.U. We could use some of that money. The Anonymous Coward is seeing conspiracies where none exist (as far as I know, at least). Transhumanism is a large, diverse thing, with many political and personal divisions and factions. Some people in it one could fairly call “right-wing” or “neo-reactionary,” but there are also many who could be fairly called “left-wing” or “socialist.” Labeling all advocates of transhumanism as "fascist" or "technocratic" is simply ignorant.
It's self-interested of me to say this, but I would recommend that people buy and read the book, and make up your own mind. We think it will be entertaining and informative for people interested in transhumanism, or in the future in general. If you think we've made an error or left something out, contact us through our website and we'll fix it in the next edition (which we hope will happen). In any case, please don't jump to conclusions based on anonymous mud-slinging.
Transhumanism + ( capital / government ) * domination = Borg
Transhumanism is riddled with serious issues related to the ultimate rights of the user, including the right of privacy of thought and hacking susceptibility in the wake of NSA-Style "information domination" plans and Skynet-inspired networks. This is coming from a robotics and medical device engineer. Who needs psy-ops when you have neural implants?
http://techrights.org/2010/02/19/defamed-by-access-employee/
"This perp (David "Lefty" Schlesinger) aka "Stonemirror" who cried (real tears) in front of Open Source visionary Bruce Perens because he didn't join his anti-Stallman crusade is just trying to tarnish the GNU brand which is almost synonymous with Richard Stallman."
http://techrights.org/2010/02/19/defamed-by-access-employee/
"This perp (David "Lefty" Schlesinger) aka "Stonemirror" who cried (real tears) in front of Open Source visionary Bruce Perens because he didn't join his anti-Stallman crusade is just trying to tarnish the GNU brand which is almost synonymous with Richard Stallman."
http://techrights.org/2010/02/19/defamed-by-access-employee/
"This perp (David "Lefty" Schlesinger) aka "Stonemirror" who cried (real tears) in front of Open Source visionary Bruce Perens because he didn't join his anti-Stallman crusade is just trying to tarnish the GNU brand which is almost synonymous with Richard Stallman."
Summary: Serial harasser of Free software luminaries may be put on their blacklists, but the verbal abuse continues