Posts Tagged ‘Singularity’

…well, Ben Franklin shocked himself with a bolt of lightning to see its conductive properties, so I suppose a guy carving himself up to turn himself into a cyborg isn’t all that far out. It’s usually people like that, that end up changing science for the better.

Let’s just hope he doesn’t seriously hurt himself.

I’m sort of inured to pain by this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it; I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get.

Sadly, they don’t do it like that on TV. The art of improving the human is shiny and bright in the media. You see million-euro cryogenics policies and hormonal life-extension regimes that only the elite can afford. You see the hypothesis of an immortal silicon body to house your artificially-enhanced mind. You could buy that too, maybe, if you sold most of your organic body and the home it lives in. But you can do something to bring it down a notch: homebrewing.

Scrapheap Transhumanism

…is near.

Perhaps. I remain unconvinced we’ll transcend all of humanity’s problem within my lifetime…but then, that may be the cynic in me talking.

By the time Al Gore released his Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth“, few skeptics were left that the world’s climate was changing. Now, Ray Kurzweil — one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century -  is releasing an eminent documentary of his own.

Many futurists, including a growing band of leading scientists, predict that by 2045 we will have multiplied the intelligence of the human-machine civilization a billion-fold and reached the Singularity.

Whereas personal computers, videogames and cellphones were the emerging technologies of the 1970’s and 1980’s, today’s include mind-reading headsets, organic computing and nanotechnology.

The rest is here.