Oh the transhumanity!
The best way to understand the present is to read science fiction. Only sci-fi writers are dreaming far enough into the future to tell us where we are in the present.
This week, the news read like science fiction. In South Korea, a company called RNL Bio received the first-ever commercial order for cloning. An American woman paid the company $50,000 to clone her dead pit-bull terrier, Booger.
Meanwhile, in the US, the world’s greatest scientists and futurists met to decide how science could best help the human race over the next 20 years. One of them, the scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, declared that in the next fifteen years, humanity itself was going to go through an upgrade, thanks to the emerging science of nanotechnology.
“We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” Kurzweil told BBC News. The nanobots, he said, would “make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system”.
Kurzweil is talking about something called transhumanism. Never mind communism, fascism, or any of those other 20th century –isms. The –ism that’s going to cause all the debate this century is transhumanism. (more…)