A blog focusing on some of the most prominent “-isms” surrounding humanity’s technological future: extropianism, transhumanism, posthumanism, the mouth-filling Singularitarianism, and others in that constellation.
July 27, 2010
The New York Times published last month an intriguing exploration by New School professor J. M. Bernstein of the philosophical underpinnings of the Tea Party movement. Does this analysis remind you of any other movement?: Where do such anger and such passionate attachment to wildly fantastic beliefs come from?… Tea Party anger is,...
July 27, 2010
I recently reviewed Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future. I note the shallowness of those science-policy arguments that pretend that the issues — like embryo-destructive stem cell research, or proposals to mitigate climate change — are purely scientific and...
July 2, 2010
[A continuation of our Resentment Watch series.] In my last post, I described the anti-humanism of utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer, who more than rhetorically ask the question of whether humans should exist. While I don’t believe (as, say, Wesley J. Smith does) that Singer’s anti-humanism is now characteristic of the West...
July 2, 2010
They told you life is hard, Misery from the start, It’s dull, it’s slow, it’s painful. But I tell you life is sweet In spite of the misery There’s so much more, be grateful. -Natalie Merchant Peter Singer recently published a New York Times blog post seriously posing the question of whether the human race should...
July 2, 2010
In case you missed it, the New York Times recently published a front-page (ask your parents) business-section article on the Singularity. The article is actually remarkably unremarkable. It narrowly explores Kurzweil and the Singularity University, but it’s pretty credulous and uninformative. Science writer John Horgan more or less...
June 23, 2010
In Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 tome The Singularity is Near, he has a section rebutting what he calls “the criticism from holism” — the idea that “machines are organized as rigidly structured hierarchies of modules, whereas biology is based on holistically organized elements in which every element affects every other.” His response...
June 22, 2010
In a recent post over on his Pop Transhumanism blog, Kyle Munkittrick makes four points against what we do here at Futurisms. A few quick responses: 1) The ideas of goodness of the sort we profess to be interested in change over time. This point is undeniable but trivial, unless one adheres dogmatically to the historicism upon which Mr....
June 22, 2010
Well, so much for liveblogging, but I wanted to share some final thoughts on the H+ Summit at Harvard that I recently attended. A rushed conference The lineup at the summit included several dozen presenters over the course of two days, most given only ten minutes to speak. As a result, almost all of the talks felt rushed. Also, most of...
June 20, 2010
[A few more posts about last weekend’s H+ Summit at Harvard.] Before I get to my final thoughts on the 2010 H+ Summit, I’d like to share some images from the conference, as well as a smattering of impressions I had on the large number of talks to which I wasn’t able to devote full posts: • One presenter — Alex Backer, I believe...
June 18, 2010
[A few more posts about last weekend’s H+ Summit at Harvard.] The last and keynote speaker of the 2010 H+ Summit was, of course, the big daddy of transhumanism, Ray Kurzweil (bio, on-the-fly transcript). In introducing him, the organizers noted that he flew into town that morning from Colorado, where he was filming his movie, and...