Transhumanism – Ciaran Laval

It’s like buses, you wait ages for one and then a load come at the same time. Recently I blogged about discussion of transhumanism in Second Life and beyond :

The topic has long been considered controversial, but it’s a discussion area that was once very vibrant in Second Life. I am surprised we have not seen more of a resurgence in this area of discussion within the Virtual Reality hype cycle.

Before I go further, with regards to the previous post I linked to, Giulio Prisco has commented on that post to say that people are welcome to go to the meeting mentioned in that post.

Over at Motherboard Vice there’s an article by Zoltan Istvan : Wild Transhumanist Campaign Tech We’ll See in Future Presidential Elections.

There are links between the post at Motherboard and my previous post, the common denominator is Terasem.

Zoltan Istvan is a 2016 USA presidential candidate for the Transhumanist party. In the article he talks about how wearable tech, the rise of VR and changing technology could very well change the way election campaigns are run. Zoltan is no stranger to the tech, indeed he was in Second Life last year and in the article he says :

As a presidential candidate myself, I also recently gave a virtual speech in Second life. At the Terasem Annual Colloquium on the Law of Futurist Persons, I spoke to an audience that consisted of about 50 avatars—some who appeared as creatures, cyborgs, and significantly mutated transhuman beings. My own avatar—kindly created by transhuman spiritual organization Terasem for this event—looked quite like me, and even had the afternoon shadow, which apparently I’m often guilty of having.

I also see from the video that Extropia DaSilva was there. The article talks about augmented reality, suggesting that candidates may want to use AR to demonstrate pie charts, live stream how walls would look and more.

Continue reading “Will Robots Rule The World As Politicians?”

Away from Second Life’s 13th birthday celebrations we move into an area that used to be discussed a lot more in the earlier days of Second Life; Transhumanism. Over at The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) Giulio Prisco has a published a post : Paradiso and Inferno in Robin Hanson’s ‘The Age of EM’.

The post discusses a book by Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. The topic has long been considered controversial, but it’s a discussion area that was once very vibrant in Second Life. I am surprised we have not seen more of a resurgence in this area of discussion within the Virtual Reality hype cycle.

The blurb from the book tells us :

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like?

Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.

Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.

Giulio, in his post, gives us more information regarding the content of the book :

Robin’s future em world is derived from our world with one – and only one – big change: the arrival of operational and cheap mind uploading technology, sometime in this century. Robin’s methodology is to take our world as it, with all the facts and trends that we can see in technology, society, politics, and economics, and add mind uploading technology to scan living people and copy them to “ems” – software emulations running on suitable computing hardware.

This is very Science Fiction and if you’re not familiar with the topics, you may find this all a bit daunting, odd, scary or all three.

Continue reading “Robin Hanson’s Book “The Age Of Em” To Be Discussed In Second Life On Sunday”