futurist R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have published a witty , snide , and implausibly informative young al-Qur’an entitle , superiority : The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity . We spoke to the authors to learn more about the task and their own personal visions of the future .
Many of you will remember R.U. Sirius — aka Ken Goffman — from his co - publishing work atMONDO 2000 , the first pop digital culture magazine ( and a kind of herald to io9 ) . He ’s a “ digital iconoclast ” who has written about technology and culture for Wired , BoingBoing , Rolling Stone , and many other publications .
Jay Cornell is a writer , editor in chief , and web developer . He ’s also the former managing editor ofh+ cartridge , and the former associate publisher ofGnosismagazine . He ’s quite active in the futurist community , presently swear out as a member of the Board of Advisors of theLifeboat Foundation , a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending humanity from experiential risk of infection .
Together , they ’ve put together a book that offers a multilayered looked at the accelerating forward motion in a number of fields tied to both transhumanism ( i.e. human enhancement ) and the uniqueness , include AI , cognitive science , genomics , nanotechnology , cryonics , place exploration , synthetic biota , and robotics . Importantly , the book also reckon the influence of historical precursor and personality to these mind , from Timothy Leary to Ray Kurzweil .
Here ’s my recent conversation with them .
R.U. : The aim was to create an irreverent but informative Christian Bible about these ideas and seek to get them to a diverse interview . It serve as an entry to a figure of the scientific discipline , engineering science , meme , organizations , and a few of the people who make up the cultures of transhumanism and the Singularity .
I trust that this will also amuse , and maybe overturned , a pot of already extant transhumanist sorts and that they ’ll also feel hooey in their they did n’t have intercourse or had n’t think about in the peculiar ways that I or Jay think about them .
I did an A - omega “ exploiter ’s guide ” to cyberpunk / cyberculture in 1993 under the auspices of Mondo 2000 mag ( with assist from Rudy Rucker and Queen Mu ) . That was pretty successful at bringing this then - mysterious new digital terrain into popular culture . I think the timing is correct to do something similar for ( or to ) transhumanism . It ’s a good way to organize information and thoughts . It worked pretty well for Voltaire .
Jay : In our curt - attention - dyad digital civilisation of Tweets and Vines and listicles , I call back a book structured this way of life is pass away to be more accessible for many people . It also help make collaboration easier .
Jay : For many the great unwashed , it ’s just too far out . They intend about their job and their wellness and their family line , not about whether they ’ll be able to upload their brain to a estimator in 30 years . If they do think beyond the near and personal future , they ’re likely worrying about mood change or resource depletion or government debt , and not call up about anticipate technical developments .
Another factor is that changing human organism in “ unnatural ” ways is , on some layer , inherently troubling . Even mass who are OK with the transgendered might experience uncomfortable around someone with facial tattoos and horn , or someone whose brain is lift directly to the internet , so that they ’re recording you and google you while they ’re talking with you . This predilection toward the “ natural ” is also characteristic of many religions . For many Christians and members of other Abrahamic faiths , transhumanism is a contour of idolatry or “ scientism , ” and conquering death and transforming humans amounts to “ playing God . ”
R.U. : frankly , as with any -ism , I think the believers be given to give chase the great unwashed away from the belief .
Of all the people I know who claim to detest transhumanism , I think they ’re all transhumanists in the sense that they tend to tolerate technical enhancements and radical tech development and are mostly pretty tech progressive . If I may quote myself , I threw this to Charlie Stross , a frequent critic of “ transhumanism , ” in a conversation in h+ mag in 2012 : “ You said ‘ I ’d be very felicitous with cures for senescence , cardiovascular disease , Crab , and the other cruddy failure mode to which we are prone , with arm re-formation , and tissue technology and limitless life prolongation . ’ It seems to me that this still frame you in the transhumanist coterie . ”
Transhumanism is a good elbow room to take isolated ultra tech growing and bundle them together so that we can see where we might be headed ; what the possibilities are , both howling and terrible . Some of the multitude who take it too seriously can be kind of scarey , but in a marvelously science factional sort of way . Science fiction is somewhat much dine out on nothing but transhuman construct these days .
Jay : I find it riveting how construct of the next displacement over time . There are always convinced and electronegative views , but ordinarily one is dominant . I think the 19th and 20th one C were unusual in have many periods that were mostly techno - optimist . Today it finger like the largely affirmative touch of the ’ 90s have been supercede by pessimism get by 9/11 and the various unpleasant political and social developments that followed . We go for this Good Book avail people see the affirmative side of the future again .
R.U. : In the early ’ 90s , we had a cyberculture . We were still inform and convince people that our world was a techno - world . That ’s no longer necessary . So in a mother wit , fantast culture is presentist civilisation and it ’s everybody .
Regarding organized transhumanist fantast culture , there are the long time organisation like h+ , formerly the World Transhumanist Association ; and there ’s IEET . James Hughes of IEET and some folks recently release a “ technoprogressive declaration , ” which I signed .
There ’s Zero State , which sort of leaning towards left anarchist ideas , but by all odds does n’t urge the everlasting abolition of the state .
There are mainstream insane asylum and companies like Google , DARPA , Singularity University ( which apportion physical outer space with NASA ) and multitude like Peter Diamandas and Ray Kurzweil who mix with the powerful and influential .
There are outsiders and agent provocateur like Grinders and Rachel Haywire and her various undertaking : her Extreme Futurist Festival kept the cyberpunk vibe going and I hope it keep .
There are Aubrey de Grey ’s various seniority research and protagonism groups like SENS .
There ’s a lot of interest and living among libertarian sort — Reason clip , Peter Thiel , Glenn Reynolds .
Max More , who is sort of the conceiver of transhumanism as a movement is still an important voice . I ’d say the culture is somewhat diverse .
There ’s Zoltan Istvan ’s Transhumanist Party and his 2016 presidential bidding . His philosophy of Teleological Egocentric Functionalism and his Three Laws of Transhumanism are at the rank edge of weird and scary and a fair number of people appear to be eat it unquestioningly . His political party platform is o.k. , though , and he ’s a hella nice guy . He ’s emphatically worked his way of life up to a high visibility . I may just endorse , out of perversity .
Jason Silva is another mediagenic personality who is into a very upbeat , hedonistic and well-disposed sort of Learyesque transhumanism . And David Pearce is also on the psychedelic transhumanism hint with his ideas for a “ epicurean imperative mood ” and his emancipationist undertaking to terminate all sentient suffering .
Oh my , the listing could go on . I experience like I sort of model at the center of it in this book and attempt to be both court fool and diplomatist at the same metre . It seems to be shape , for the most part .
Jay : You could say that transhumanists would wish to clear everything . Humans have always tried to work problems like hunger , illness , ignorance , impoverishment , and so on . Transhumanists would go further : curing the tired of is fine , but how about make the healthy even good for you ? How about seize dying itself ? So instead of merely trying to bring everyone up to “ normal , ” transhumanism hop-skip to improve people in agency antecedently look at impossible .
There are risks , of course . Some things wo n’t play , or will have disconfirming side effects . One risk of infection is increased social and economical inequality . As with most advancement , the first beneficiaries are the rich and the connected . Nobody wants a mentally - enhanced , immortal overclass of rich people and politicians whose enhanced children get all the best jobs and deliver the goods all the accolade . But it ’s worth remembering that when rich people spend excess in guild to be first , it helps make it cheaper ( and often safer ) for the residuum of us later on . The rich spent one C or thousands of dollars on the first digital watches 40 year ago , and high society survived .
The risks I ’m most concerned about are n’t about sweetening . As genetic technology becomes cheaper and light to do , it becomes more likely that some terrorist or apocalyptic en will attempt to make super - Ebola in their kitchen .
But besides welfare and risks , there ’s the family of disappointments . Many thing never be up to the hope of their proponents . Some people reckon that the telegraph , dynamite , airplane , and even motion ikon would end state of war . Even an easy , cheap method of intelligence increase would not be a panacea : in high spirits intelligence service often just enable multitude to make more complicated mistakes .
R.U. : I think the greatest benefit could be that we either get more time away from hustle around for free-enterprise reward and livelihood and the greatest risk of exposure could be that we ’ll get no time away from it at all . Right now , the refinement is about adapting to the pep pill of the tech . The cultivation could become about letting the tech be its affair , having it around and in us , but giving more of our attention to ourselves and each other and other modes of creative living and saying . I ’m in the particular position of not being so in love with a lot of aspects of the civilization of engineering as it is right now . I see it as a necessary transition to a place where the tech is mainly invisible .
R.U. : I think it ’s funny ! But I ’m also agnostic when it comes to the Singularity . I recall that citizenry who are certain that it will happen and those that are indisputable that it wo n’t probably have similar character structures but different temperament .
Jay : It ’s a capital quip , because it ’s got more than a little true statement in it . People enthuse about any secular ideology will often think and behave in slipway similar to religious zealots . I think one of the strengths of our book is that we ’re not fanatical worshipper or cynical naysayers , so it ’s a sympathetic look at these topics , but we ’re not afraid to advance an supercilium when we think it ’s justify .
Jay : It is interesting how a telephone number of multitude all talk up about this at the same metre , is n’t it ? Did tidings go out on some secret e-mail list ? Because as far as I know , while artificial general intelligence has been cause progress for many year , it has n’t made any huge leaps recently . Like controlled unification , it always seems to be 20 years in the time to come . Maybe it ’s because so many people have iPhones and using Siri gets them think about this .
R.U. : Maybe it ’s because Ray was hired by Google . I call back its mainly people who are passably well off that are sound off about this . Most multitude have more immediate experiential threats or at least experiential burdens to worry about .
Jay : There ’s a graphene tissue layer called Perforene which Lockheed Martin is developing . It could make pee desalinization and refining much cheaper , which would be an unbelievable boon .
I ’m sceptical about judgement uploading . The idea is that we ’ll be able to transfer our minds to a reckoner , which would vastly speed up our thinker and possibly accomplish immortality . But the technological , psychological , and even philosophical problems are vast . Even if it can be done , would the mind in the reckoner remain reasonable , disconnect from all normal bodily senses , and thinking millions of times faster ? And would that Digital You really be you , or just a transcript of you ? To an outside observer , Digital You might verbalize like you , but that wo n’t be much solace to your inside percipient when older - fashioned Meat You break .
R.U. : As a psychedelic veteran , I wish neurotech . It ’s a complex young science , but having an cognizance that one can feel really ripe while being as smart and functional as one can be , dependent on your neurochemistry , has been a lifespan foresighted enticement . ( I theorize I ’m talk about stimulants as much as psychedelics there . ) That this could be done without the sloppiness and the consequence of chemical substance or even works seems like a heavy potential blessing .
I recollect nanotechnology is a arriver that has been dismissed by many in the transhumanist earthly concern recently . It became hip to know better than to hope for big nanotech breakthroughs . Ending material scarceness while improving the environment should be the first precept of all radical technologist . Death is a scarceness of year , but beat it runs an of import 2nd place to a well - distribute end to the extremes of lose under our current mortal condition . Of naturally , the nature of human society is that we have to do diverse things . I ’m all for the ending death projects too .
I ’m a bit skeptical that AGI will exceed human intelligence any time soon ( this century ) in a way that we can speak about meaningfully . My sentience is that it will wind up being so different from human intelligence service that it require a different discourse .
I ’m more sceptical about human political relation and societal adjustment and our attainment at snatching defeat out of the jaw of victory . And I think that nasty weather ( literally ) , conflict and unfit memes are potential to seize the mean solar day during this decade and the next one and never permit go . How ’s that for a deflating end ?
Get your copy of Transcendence : The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularityhere .
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