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Category: transhumanism – Page 127

Will 2015 Be Remembered as the Breakout Year for Transhumanism?

My latest piece for The Huffington Post. It’s a recap of 2015 for transhumanism and includes some select stories & videos:

Last year, I wrote that 2014 was a great year for the transhumanism movement. But 2015 was simply incredible — it might end up being called a breakout year. I’m not yet willing to declare transhumanism as “mainstream,” but it’s getting quite close now. Transhumanism has become a word that is used frequently by people around the world and in major media when discussing radical science and technology changing our species.

Below is a quick recap of some select stories in English that came out this year on transhumanism and some of my efforts to bring the future closer.

Let’s start with what might end up the most in-depth story on transhumanism ever written. The Verge sent journalist Elmo Keep to ride on the coffin-shaped Immortality Bus. Two months later a behemoth 10,000+ word piece appeared, leading the front page of the site for a few days. The article was also translated into numerous languages. Photographer Nancy Borowick astonished us with amazing photos of transhumanist activism. Then, Digg ran the story and had a chat session on the piece with the author.

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The bionic pancreas: harbinger of a new era in organ replacement?

If you haven’t heard of the bionic pancreas, it’s likely you soon will. With diabetes on the rise and the demand for insulin therapies becoming a real pain point for the medical establishment, the need for innovative solutions has spiked. Back in April, we reported on the Do-It-Yourself Pancreas system, a closed-loop artificial pancreas scavenged from a Medtronic pump, Dexcom CGM, a Raspberry Pi, and CareLink USB. Now a fully bionic pancreas similar in design to the Do-It-Yourself model is being developed by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University, with the goal of winning FDA approval. If it succeeds, this will likely be the first bionic organ to see widespread adoption.

Let’s examine some of the previous attempts at bionic organs to see if we can catch a glimpse of where things are heading and some of the societal repercussions that lay in wait. The holy grail of bionic organs is without question the human heart. Coronary artery disease being one of the principal causes of the death worldwide, a fully functioning bionic heart could radically change life expectancy and alter the demographic landscape.

The first bionic hearts, designed over 70 years ago, were plagued by problems that often resulted in thromboembolism and hemorrhage, and made this even more of a gamble than donor transplants. Recent technological advances, however — specifically the advent of bio-prosthetic materials that fool the human immune system into believing the bionic heart is an organic part of the body — could indicate a new era of artificial organs is upon us.

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UAT Tech – Official Blog of the University of Advancing Technology

“Inhuman: The Next & Final Phase of Man is Here” is not fiction or a mockudrama but a new investigative documentary from Defender Films and Raiders News Productions.

Inhuman travels the globe to unveil for the first time how breakthrough advances in science, technology and philosophy—including cybernetics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, machine intelligence and synthetic biology are poised to create mind-boggling game changes to everything we have known until now about Homo sapiens.

As astonishing technological developments push the frontiers of humanity toward far-reaching morphological transformation (which promises in the very near future to redefine what it means to be human), an intellectual and fast-growing cultural movement known as transhumanism intends the use of these powerful new fields of science and technology as tools that will radically redesign our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring, and even perhaps—as Professor Joel Garreau, Lincoln Professor of Law, claims—our immortal souls.

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US elections 2016: John McAfee and Zoltan Istvan debate cybersecurity, immortality and sexbots

This tongue-in-cheek article highlights an interesting experience I had a few days ago on the Immortality Bus in North Carolina:

One wants to live forever, the other wants to push reset on the US Constitution. Both are running for president in 2016. As Republican and Democrat presidential candidates prepare for December’s debates, pioneering Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan and cybersecurity legend John McAfee met for the first time this week for their own debate, over several large drinks in a motel bar.

Istvan, who is currently touring the US aboard a coffin-shaped campaign bus, and McAfee both have technology at the core of their campaign policies, but in terms of specific policy this is where the similarities end.

“I can’t think of a more horrific concept than immortality,” McAfee told Istvan soon after meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It is anti-evolutionary. We need to die and die young preferably; dying is the most beautiful of all things. I’d get behind a platform where you kill everyone at 30. I would fight you tooth and nail to stop you making people live forever.”

John McAfee zoltan istvan elections

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