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Faith groups reckon with AI and what it means to be truly human – Worcester Telegram

Posted: November 20, 2019 at 5:55 am


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On a recent Sunday at the Queen Anne Lutheran Church basement, parishioners sat transfixed as the Rev. Dr. Ted Peters discussed an unusual topic for an afternoon assembly: "Can technology enhance the image of God?"

Peters' discussion focused on a relatively new philosophical movement. Its followers believe humans will transcend their physical and mental limitations with wearable and implantable devices.

The movement, called transhumanism, claims that in the future, humans will be smarter and stronger and may even overcome aging and death through developments in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI).

"What does it mean to be truly human?" Peters asked in a voice that boomed throughout the church basement, in a city that boasts one of the world's largest tech hubs. The visiting reverend urged the 30 congregants in attendance to consider the question during a time when "being human sounds optional to some people."

"It's sad; it makes me feel a lot of grief," a congregant said, shaking her head in disappointment.

Organized religions have long served as an outlet for humans to explore existential questions about their place in the universe, the nature of consciousness and free will. But as AI blurs the lines between the digital and physical worlds, fundamental beliefs about the essence of humanity are now called into question.

While public discourse around advanced technologies has mostly focused on changes in the workforce and surveillance, religious followers say the deeper implications of AI could be soul-shifting.

It doesn't surprise James Wellman, a University of Washington professor and chair of the Comparative Religion Program, that people of faith are interested in AI. Religious observers place their faith in an invisible agent known as God, whom they perceive as benevolent and helpful in their lives. The use of technology evokes a similar phenomenon, such as Apple's voice assistant Siri, who listens and responds to them.

"That sounds an awful lot like what people do when they think about religion," Wellman said.

CONFRONTING AI AND FAITH

When Dr. Daniel Peterson became the pastor of the Queen Anne Lutheran Church three years ago, he hoped to explore issues meaningful both to his congregants and to secular people.

Peterson's fascination with AI, as a lifelong science-fiction fan, belies skepticism in the ubiquity of technology: He's opted out of Amazon's voice assistant Alexa in his house and said he gets nervous about cameras on cellphones and computers.

He became interested in looking at AI from a "spiritual dimension" after writing an article last year about the depiction of technologies such as droids in "Star Wars" films. In Peterson's eyes, artificially intelligent machines in the films are equipped with a sense of mission that enables them to think and act like humans without needing to be preprogrammed.

His examination of AI yielded more questions than answers: "What kind of bias or brokenness are we importing in the artificial intelligence we're designing?" Peterson pondered. If AI developed consciousness, "what sort of philosophical and theological concerns does that raise?"

Peterson invited his church and surrounding community to explore these questions and more in the three-part forum called "Will AI Destroy Us?," which kicked off with a conversation held by Carissa Schoenick from the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, followed by Peters' discussion on transhumanism, and concluded with Peterson's talk on his own research around AI in science-fiction films.

Held from late September to early October, the series sought to fill what Peterson called a silence among faith leaders about the rise of AI. Peterson and other religious observers are now eager to take part in a new creation story of sorts: Local initiatives held in places of worship and educational institutions are positioning Seattle as a testing ground for the intersection of AI and religion.

The discussion on transhumanism drew members of the community unaffiliated with the church, including David Brenner, the board chair of Seattle-based organization AI and Faith. The consortium membership spans across belief systems and academic institutions in an effort to bring major religions into the discussion around the ethics of AI, and how to create machines that evoke "human flourishing and avoids unnecessary, destructive problems," Brenner said in an interview at the church. As Brenner spoke, a few congregants remained in the basement to fervently chat about the symposium.

"The questions that are being presented by AI are fundamental life questions that have now become business [ones]," said Brenner, a retired lawyer. Values including human dignity, privacy, free will, equality and freedom are called into question through the development of machines.

"Should robots ever have rights, or is it like giving your refrigerator rights even if they can function just like us?" Brenner said.

AI, RELIGION AND THE WORLD

Religious leaders around the world are starting to weigh in. Last April, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission_the public-policy section of the Southern Baptist Convention published a set of guidelines on AI adoption that affirms the dominion of humans and encourages the minimization of human biases in technology. It discourages the creation of machines that take over jobs, relegating humans to "a life of leisure" devoid of work, wrote the authors.

In a speech to a Vatican conference in September, Pope Francis echoed the guidelines' sentiment by urging tech companies and diplomats to deploy AI in an ethical manner that ensures machines don't replace human workers. "If mankind's so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to ... a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest," he said, according to The Associated Press.

On the other hand, some faith perspectives have cropped up in recent years that hold AI at the center of their value systems. Former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski formed Way of the Future church in 2017 with the aim of creating a peaceful transition into an imminent world where machines surpass human capabilities. The church's website argues that human rights should be extended to machines, and that we should clear the path for technology to "take charge" as it grows in intelligence.

"We believe it may be important for machines to see who is friendly to their cause and who is not," the website warns.

But Yasmin Ali, a practicing Muslim and AI and Faith member, has seen AI used as a tool for good and bad. While Ali believes technology can make people's lives easier, she has also seen news reports and heard stories from her community about such tools being used to profile members of marginalized communities. China, for instance, has used facial-recognition technology to surveil Uighur Muslim minorities in the western region, according to a recent New York Times investigation.

"I think we need to get more diversity with the developers who provide AI, so they can get diverse thoughts and ideas into the software," Ali said. The Bellevue-based company she founded called Skillspire strives to do just that by training diverse workers in tech courses such as coding and cybersecurity.

"We have to make sure that those values of being human goes into what we're building," Ali said. "It's like teaching kids you have to be polite, disciplined."

Back at Queen Anne Lutheran, congregants expressed hope that the conversation would get the group closer to understanding and making peace with changes in society, just as churches have done for hundreds of years.

Bainbridge Island resident Monika Aring believes the rise of AI calls for an ongoing inquiry at faith-based places of worship on the role of such technologies. She shared the dismay she felt when her friend, a pastor of another congregation, said the church has largely become irrelevant.

"It mustn't be. This is the time for us to have these conversations," she said. "I think we need some kind of moral compass," one that ensures humans and the Earth continue to thrive amid the advancement of AI.

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Faith groups reckon with AI and what it means to be truly human - Worcester Telegram

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November 20th, 2019 at 5:55 am

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Zoltan Istvan, a Leader in Science and Technology, Will Run for US President and Challenge Trump in the 2020 Republican Primaries – PR Web

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Zoltan Gyurko Istvan

SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) November 19, 2019

Born in California, Istvan is a former journalist for National Geographic and has recently penned articles for The New York Times opinion section. In 2013, Istvan published his novel The Transhumanist Wager, which became a #1 Philosophy and Science Fiction bestseller on Amazon. The book has been compared more than 1,000 times to Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged. Istvans most recent book of political essays titled Upgrading America was a #1 bestseller in Politics on Amazon.

Istvan has become known around the world for spearheading the multi-million person transhumanism movement, which aims to upgrade the human body with science and technology. The #1 goal of transhumanism is to overcome biological death. While still outside the political mainstream, the worlds largest companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are key innovators in the transhumanist movement.

Istvan has consulted for the U.S. Navy and given speeches at conferences around the world, including for institutions such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Istvan has traveled to over 100 countries and is a former director of a major wildlife organization, WildAid. He has a degree from Columbia University in Philosophy and Religion. A successful entrepreneur with multiple businesses, Istvan lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his physician wife and two young daughters.

Istvans 20-point political platform, available on his campaign website http://www.zoltan2020.com, advances ideas that so far have been absent in the Republican primaries. Although his years as a businessman have made him fiscally conservative, Istvan supports a Universal Basic Income that is based off monetizing government resources, called a Federal Land Dividend. He proposes ending the war on drugs, making public preschool and college both free and mandatory, and licensing parents to make sure they are ready to raise children. He supports artificial wombs as a third option in the pro-life vs pro-choice debate, and would like to cut the military budget in order to create a science industrial complex in America. He aims to fight climate change with geo-engineering and end the IRS with a straightforward national sales tax. He favors nearly-open borders, tort reform, deregulation, banning private prisons, and using AI-operated drones and robots to stop mass shootings in public places and schools.

Istvan is also worried that China is beating America on the technological front in areas such as artificial intelligence, genetic editing, and neural prosthetic development. As president, he promises to get America innovating again, because once the Chinese take a lead in innovation, the United States may never get it back.

Pratik Chougule, Istvans campaign manager, says that Istvan is running as a new type of Republican politician. He expects Istvans bold ideas about the countrys future will resonate with a wide cross-section of Americans.

Istvans campaign slogan is: Upgrading America.

For more information, contact campaign manager Pratik Chougule at: pc@zoltan2020.com

To schedule an interview or talk to Mr. Istvan, email: info@zoltanistvan.com or call: 415-802-4891http://www.zoltan2020.comTwitter: @zoltan_istvan

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Zoltan Istvan, a Leader in Science and Technology, Will Run for US President and Challenge Trump in the 2020 Republican Primaries - PR Web

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November 20th, 2019 at 5:55 am

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The Most Elaborate Display of Ineptitude I Have Ever Witnessed: The BiChip Hoax – Patheos

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The first email was forwarded back and forth internally for a while due to a general sense of skepticism and a lack of clear interest:

From: S E

Date: Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:12 PM

Subject: Bichip Mark of the beast

Hail Satan

Hope you are all fine

I am writing to you since our Human Microchip company is having a big international event here in Copenhagen, November 26th. We are unveiling the cutting edge technology of human microchip implant with long distance read and internet data, for the first time in the history that is also known as the mark of the beast in the bible of Jesus and we have been facing opposition from churches and even been in the news for that:

‘Transhumans’ reveal why they want everyone to implant chips under their skin

Anyway, here is the link to the event is bichip.com/event

I wonder if you guys would like to help us promote the event which is actually free to attend? there are about 400 seats left yet and we can provide free VIP tickets to the temple members (Including free Flight and Accommodation)

Best

Simon

Bichip, Denmark

+4531751127

Professional emails lacking in basic details are, unfortunately, the norm. I receive emails from career journalists at major media outlets sometimes saying nothing more than that they would like to interview me. I get invitations to conferences that merely state that they seek my participation, leaving it to me to ask if they are asking me to speak, seeking sponsorship, or what, exactly? The fact that this email merely asked if we would help promote the event did not make it particularly suspect. The fact that there was apparently no cap set on flights and accommodations, however, was suspect, but could easily be seen as another common failure to specify. If one were to reply, one might then learn that a plus one is acceptable, but no more. It also is not unheard of for a start-up with delusions of grandeur to overspend on something like a conference. Still, they seemed to be offering too much while asking for too little.

Interestingly, the reference to the Mark of the Beast hardly caught my attention at all. Despite the email apparently referring the the biochip as the literal Mark of the Beast, I assumed it a matter of clumsy wording indicating the viewpoint that protestors were taking against the technology, certainly not the viewpoint of the manufacturers themselves. Still, I was not interested. I would not care to get the implant, nor am I horrified by the prospect of others carrying such implants in the future. The technology is not new, it is not terribly interesting, and the alleged controversy seemed a bit outdated in the social media age. In a world wherein nearly everybody willingly submits their most private information to Google and Facebook, and those companies work toward supplying face-recognition technology to public environments for the purposes of instant-tailored marketing, what does it matter if those using e-currency carry it always on their phone, a card in their pocket, or in a chip under their skin?

At some point, I was discussing current issues regarding social media and its regulation with our Ordination Director, Greg Stevens, when I remembered the BiChip email and forwarded it to him. Greg did a cursory investigation and replied to me:

As you know, Im an enthusiastic supporter of transhumanism as an overall direction and love the idea of biotech. Im looking forward to the day we have both the biotech and the AI to provide us with what I call full phenotypic freedom the ability to augment ourselves to be whatever types of creatures we want, and to interface with computer and each other in whatever way we want.

But, based on the material that I saw out there, BiChip is nothing more than a cute initial proof-of-concept in the early stages. Any details of BiChip as a company or its dealings aside, I like that promotion of the BiChip is something that can get the conversation started so that we can confront things like: what does it need to have to be useful? what are the risks and how do we build in protections against those risks from the beginning (instead of stumbling into abuses later and having to fix things after-the-fact).

I would not get the BiChip as its been described. Its simply not useful. I dont make purchases using e-currency in day-to-day life. The only reason something like ApplePay from my iPhone or Apple Watch is useful is that the software can access whatever bank account or credit card I set it up for.

Ive never seen actual whitepapers for BiChip. I saw marketing material, and marketing material is always vague. But based on what I read, BiChip was inherently crippled in that it only operated in ecurrency and was limited in what it could communicate with.

There is no revolution in this tech. The only thing exciting about it is that it was marketed as a product that might get people talking about what biotech may be able to do in the future.

This, of course, led to more in-person discussions and disagreements between Greg and I (I am far more the privacy advocate while he is more for cultivating a cultural adjustment to privacys natural diminishment through technology). Neither of us were against the concept of implants necessarily, though of course they would have to be implanted of ones own free will, without undue coercive influence. For my part, I thought that the very topic of implants might make people begin to look more clearly at the privacy they abdicate daily, finally considering regulation regarding proper usage and retention. We again began to wonder what BiChip was all about, what their event was meant to entail, and how they imagined that we would promote the event.

Over a month had passed from the original email, so I reached out to see if they were still interested in discussing details:

On Wed, 16 Oct 2019 at 07.24,

Dear Simon

We are very interested in the event.

My own position is that Data Privacy is going to necessarily be an ongoing dialogue that will always change as technology advances. I do not think we need to declare privacy dead, but I also do not think that the convenience of a microchip implant poses a deeper threat to privacy than RFID, smartphones, and social media. The question is one of responsible retention and usage of data, not a matter of withholding technologies.

Please let us know if you are still interested in our attendance and how we might help you popularize the event.

Thank you

Lucien Greaves

Spokesperson, Cofounder

The Satanic Temple

The reply came the same day:

Hi Lucien and friends

The offer is still valid and we can provide free vip tickets and free flights and hotel to Denmark for the attendees. However we prefer to have important members/board members as the priority but we can book up to 100 of these tickets.

Regarding the way you help out the event, you can come with any idea. I personally consider myself a member of the temple as i officially joined some years ago and maybe the time and money we are spending on this technology is directly a promotion for the satanist movement I guess it is time that the temple considers Bichip as a partner and help us fight together.

I recommend a direct call to Bichip president (Finn) on 004531751127 or to me 0013232180018 to speed up the process .

Best

Simon

Of course, this did not make any sense to me. An offer to fly some hundred members of The Satanic Temple (TST) to Denmark was grossly improbable even for a delusionally enthusiastic start-up. Further, the email again failed to be explicit in what Bichip would expect from me personally or TST as an organization. I lost interest entirely, but Gregs interest was piqued. Attempting a further investigation into what the whole thing was really about, Greg attempted to contact the numbers provided only to find that they were inoperative numbers. Clearly, none of this was on the level, but it was difficult to understand what exactly the scam was.

On November 08 I received a Direct Message through Twitter, which I never replied to:

I simply forgot about the whole matter.

Then, on November 16, I was tagged in a reply to a bizarre tweet by the same account that had reached out to try and confirm my presence at the international gathering.

This dialogue, I came to discover, was in reference to an article that had just been posted by biohackinfo.com claiming that authorities had raided the Bichip offices for unspecified reasons and that the event I had been invited to was therefore cancelled.

Of course, by now it was clear that the event was never intended to happen to begin with, but it was still unclear what this whole scam was meant to achieve. According to the Biohackinfo article:

Two days ago on November 14, Danish police raided the Copenhagen offices of tech company BiChip. This was three days after we broke the story about BiChips bizarre Chief Technical Officer Simon Sallienjavi, who is also the leader of a growing satanic cult that fuses devil worshiping with biohacking and transhumanism.

With all its operations shut down, BiChip has announced that all its offices are closed until December 29, and they have cancelled their much hyped November 26 event that was to be hosted at the Black Diamond building in Copenhagen. At the event, BiChip was set to unveil what it claims is a revolutionary human microchip implant that is both distance-readable and internet-connectable. Christian groups in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe were planning on protesting this event in part due to Sallienjavis notoriety in Denmark for converting Christians to satanism.

All of this was written without a single citation or hyperlink to any credible source that could confirm any of the claims made. No news articles about the police raid, no hyperlinks outside of those to other articles on the Biohackinfo page itself supporting the claims of Christian uproar, nor anything of any credible nature related to the very existence of Sallienjavi himself. The article went on to make even more extreme claims for which there are no reference anywhere outside of the Biohackinfo site:

Despite Sallienjavis eccentricities, despite his satanic cult, despite the bizarre claims he repeatedly makes in public about being the anti-Christ figure prophesied in the Bible, despite his questionable and borderline criminal activities one of which includes the disappearance of a former cult member named Anna Smolar; Sallienjavi has high level security clearance in many bureaus of the Danish government including Denmarks security services. Sallienjavi also oversees a Danish government-funded multinational called BEZH, which is the parent company of most of his numerous startups, including BiChip.

This was not a conspiracy theory. This was a conspiracy fantasy. The characters do not even exist in the real world. Searches for the story of missing cult member Anna Smolar yield nothing, and Sallienjavi is a fictional character. A significant population of people were credulous enough to believe the PizzaGate conspiracy theory which alleged that a small pizzeria in Washington, DC harbored underground tunnels where political elites engaged in human trafficking, but even that gullible audience (probably) needed at least the pizzeria in question to exist in reality before accepting claims of their covert activities.

The abrupt cancellation of the November 26 event, is going to be met with much anguish and grief from some of the people who were unexpectedly invited like American satanists from both the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple. The latter in particular, could not wait to attend, and according to our source inside BiChip, Lucien Greaves, the founder of the Satanic Temple, which BiChip has been donating to for years, practically begged Sallienjavi to let him attend the event.

Please let us know if you are still interested in our attendance and how we might help you popularize the event, Greaves had pleaded in an email to Sallienjavi.

Although Sallienjavi wants to absorb both the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan into his growing cult, he has little to no respect for the Temple and merely regards them as useful idiots and thralls. Sallienjavi however has respect for the Church of Satan, and BiChip had even invited Peter H. Gilmore, the current high priest of the church, to speak at the November 26 event as a secret special guest speaker. BiChip paid Gilmore with 10 bitcoin in advance, a book deal, and $15000 for his flight to Denmark. Gilmore also has an invite to the opening of Sallienjavis cults church.

The most nonsensical part about this, from my perspective, was that the Biohackinfo Twitter account reached out to me directly to taunt me with this article, thus bringing this whole farce to my attention. The claim that BiChip had heavily donated to The Satanic Temple was accompanied by a hyperlink to an image of a document with the TST letterhead at top. The text of the document stated, in embarrassingly poor English, that thanks were in order for the large donations to our church, imploring the donors, Finn and Flemming, to reach out into your network of trans humanists and pull others into the donation circle. The signature read, Kind regards, On behalf of Jacob McKelvy, T.H.

The letter, of course, is a fake, and that is why Biohackinfos enthusiasm in pointing this all out to me was perplexing. Why on earth would anybody create a story so absurd and then immediately send it to somebody who can immediately debunk it? Turns out, Jacob McKelvy is the name of some slob who pretended to be a Satanist for a while only to make a display of converting to Christianity in hopes of marketing himself to Evangelicals. He never had anything to do with TST. It is as though some fool merely Googled Satanist name and went with whatever sounded good at the time. Was Biohackinfo the gullible victim of somebody elses bizarre misinformation campaign? This seems unlikely, as in another article on the Biohackinfo site about the same fictitious Sallienjavi cult, the author writes again of my pleading to attend the international conference stating, This desperate plea by Greaves the self-professed progressive, is despite the fact that in his communication with Sallienjavi, Sallienjavi had made crazy statements to the tune of privacy is dead or privacy should be done away with. In fact, my only communication with the hoax conference (above) expressed my opposition to that perspective, a fact that Biohackinfo revealed to be fully aware of when confronted. When I replied to Biohackinfo, via public tweet, that I was confused by the extreme incompetence in their conspiracy-creation, the Twitter account responded saying, Dont lie followed by an image of my email reply to the hoax conference. And this was not an image of forwarded text from the email. It was clearly an image from the email account itself, indicating that Biohackinfo was in fact the same person behind the conference outreach email to begin with. I am hard-pressed to think of any other time I have seen something so elaborate also be so poorly-thought. This seemed to be the work of somebody who was not terribly bright, who was also quite convinced of their superior intelligence, acting in ways being mistaken for clever toward people who were being mistaken for severely mentally impaired.

Anyway, the fact that Biohackinfo was openly lying about the content of my email reply indicated that they were hardly gullible innocents being misled by another source. However, in a fit of tweets that again indicated the source to be at least partially fooled by the lies they were propagating, Biohackinfo soon began to post screenshots illustrating that they were uploading their files to Wikileaks, apparently believing that this would be of genuine concern to me

The Twitter account also began taunting the Church of Satan (which is actually little more than a Twitter account itself) with screenshots alleging to be a text correspondence with their Magus, Peter Gilmore. Gilmore, according to Biohackinfo, had accepted a speakers fee to deliver a keynote at the conference.

For their part, the Church of Satan denied that the correspondence was legitimate, and it certainly does not approach any reasonable vision of authenticity. For one thing, the correspondence suggests that monies were actually paid, which certainly never happened. Yet, here was Biohackinfo insistently sending these screenshots to the CoS Twitter, revelling in their whistleblower victory. The whole thing grew more confusing by the moment. If somebody is going to make up false accusations, why accuse somebody of something that is not even illegal, nor is it even clearly, in any way, immoral? When I asked Biohackinfo how Gilmore could have been faulted for accepting a speaking gig at the conference, if in reality he had (which he clearly did not), they replied that the effort to produce the literal so called mark of the beast was wrong.

I know that both Peter Gilmore and myself have imposter accounts manifest on a regular basis from Nigerian scammers looking to collect membership fees in our names. Is it possible that Biohackinfo was both trying to constuct an idiotic conspiracy theory about the Mark of the Beast while simultaneously being duped by an imposter Gilmore account? But what about the $15,000? Well, we dont know where the conversation went before or after that, but it looks as though the money was said to be in the mail, and the would-be scammer talking to the hoaxter may well have been skeptical, but what did they have to lose?

Interestingly, the Biohackinfo site is ostensibly a site advocating for Transhumanist agendas the technological augmentation and improvement of human biology but chip implants are a fairly mundane Transhumanist technology, and certainly not one any Transhumanist would be expected to refer to in superstitious fear-mongering language. Is it possible that Biohackinfo is a paranoid, ridiculously inept, religiously superstitious attempt to infiltrate and discredit the Transhumanist movement?

On October 22nd, 2019, the official website of the US Transhumanist Party published an article naming Biohackinfo in the creation of slanderous allegations against them:

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) unequivocally condemns the false, invented, and malicious allegations contained in two recent articles one by the pseudonymous authors Glyph and CyphR on the yellow-journalism Biohackinfo website, and another by the pseudonymous Nick Sobriquet, published in the Trigger Warning magazine edited by Rachel Haywire. These articles are part of a deliberate, coordinated attack on the transhumanist movement and the many decent, distinguished, accomplished, and benevolent people working within it. These articles also contain numerous outright lies and other half-truths and cherry-picked facts distorted beyond recognition.

The article reveals that the people behind Biohackinfo ran in the recent USTP Electronic Primary, speculating that it was their loss in that election that prompted them to sow chaos and exact vengeance. The Biohackinfo candidate, Rachel Haywire, apparently did not accept her second-place defeat gracefully, prompting the site to fabricate a story in which the USTP was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and intertwined in a massive web of nefarious special interests. Given that the simpletons of Biohackinfo could even make a credible run for the Transhumanist Party candidacy, my guess is that they are not very well connected with any established political players, nefarious or otherwise.

The next day, I received a Direct Message on Twitter from the legendary Sallienjavi himself:

I looked through the feed of the account. No mention of BiChip. Poor English. Various posts about President Trump that can not seem to decide whether the character of Sallienjavi is for him or against him. A few Tweets to indicate Satanism, not to mention he follows 666 accounts and has 666 embedded in his user name. Obviously, Metro.co.uk were duped by a press release when they interviewed Simon, who they then stated only uses his first name and doesnt appear on camera. The account was created in 2012. What kind of deranged fool would maintain this account for this long? Whose bitter antagonism could sustain such prolonged motivation for so long? There were no interactions on any of the posts of this alleged CEO. His followers appear to be nothing but bots and instant follow-backs. Why were these Biohackinfo clowns now messaging me from this account asking me to ignore them? My guess is that they were upset by the way I easily poked holes in their ludicrous story. At one point, the night before, they seemed to be trying to offer an olive branch so as to entice me to desist in my mockery of their infantile scheme:

Shortly thereafter, I received, also via Twitter DM, an unrelated piece of lunacy

And with that, I felt, normalcy had returned. This was a return to pure paranoia the likes of which I regularly receive without flagrant willful and grossly inept attempts at deception.

This Biohackinfo episode is easily the most elaborate and complicated display of absolute ineptitude that I have ever witnessed. I can only assume that they actually think their ploy is clever and that it will somehow prove convincing to a wider audience. They just may even be delusional enough to truly believe that their manufactured revelations will cause as they put it a geopolitical shitstorm, though to what end I can only still just speculate. One would pity them for their troubled idiocy if it were not so visibly stained with antagonistic malice. They created marketing materials for a fictitious product. They created a company and a villainous CEO. They managed to get media to pick up a press release. They manufactured a hoax conference. They put a massive amount of work into a complicated plot that was simultaneously so absurdly poorly-thought.

There is clearly more to this story for anybody who cares to look. That somebody is not presently me, but please let me know what you come up with

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The Most Elaborate Display of Ineptitude I Have Ever Witnessed: The BiChip Hoax - Patheos

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November 20th, 2019 at 5:55 am

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What is biohacking? The new science of optimizing your brain and body. – Vox.com

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Even if you havent heard the term biohacking before, youve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe youve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking salt juice each morning. Maybe youve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe youve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in dopamine fasting.

Maybe you, like me, have a colleague whos had a chip implanted in their hand.

These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle thats growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.

Biohacking also known as DIY biology is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger persons blood into your veins in the hope that itll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and its called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)

The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.

Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to hack biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe or legal they are.

As biohacking starts to appear more often in headlines and, recently, in a fascinating Netflix series called Unnatural Selection its worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.

Depending on whom you ask, youll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, Im mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, Ill also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).

Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology. Hes very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. Its all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.

One word Asprey likes to use a lot is control, and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about optimizing and upgrading their minds and bodies.

Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorseys routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesnt eat at all. (Critics worry that his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.

Supplements are another popular tool in the biohackers arsenal. Theres a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or smart drugs.

Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your bodys mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you or so the thinking goes.

Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.

A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chips in their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.

For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: Ive grown to relish and rely on the technology, he recently wrote in the New York Times. The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and its nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.

Istvan also noted that for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers. Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.

On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.

These goals have a way of escalating. Once youve determined (or think youve determined) that there are concrete hacks you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.

That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings, he told me.

Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. I dont want to be just healthy; thats average. I want to perform; thats daring to be above average. Instead of How do I achieve health? its How do I kick more ass?

Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But hes also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, hes irritated by federal officials purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims thats part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.

(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that I do ridiculous stuff also. Im sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.)

The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at hacklabs, improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.

Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.

Plenty of age-old techniques meditation, fasting can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.

What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that its a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we dont need to accept our bodies shortcomings we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we dont necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicines gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.

As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, Hey, people have always been dying, but I think theres going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.

Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology whos been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, all of modern medicine is hacking, but that people often call certain folks hackers as a way of delegitimizing them. Its a way of categorizing the other like, Those biohackers over there do that weird thing. This is actually a bigger societal question: Whos qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?

If its taken to extremes, the Whos qualified to do anything? mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers dont generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just dont think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.

Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.

But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.

After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We cant say that yet.

Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although theres a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals and much of it is promising the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because its done so ahead of the science, it falls into the proceed with caution category. Critics have noted that for those whove struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.

And while were on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a pound a day weight loss is to buy his expensive, science-based Bulletproof products. She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:

What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that arent relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.

Many of the studies werent done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldnt be generalizable to the rest of us.

Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, thats very understandable. If youre sick and in constant pain, or if youre old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?

Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, theyre just not worth the risk.

If youve watched HBOs Silicon Valley, then youre already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, thats when an older person pays for a young persons blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that itll fight aging.

This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet its gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.

As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although some limited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims havent been proven.

In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: Simply put, were concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.

Another biohack that definitely falls in the dont try this at home category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friends poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.

But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.

Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and people are going to get hurt. Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.

Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayners worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldnt buy Zayners kits, not just because they dont work half the time (shes a professional and even she couldnt get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists arent yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. Its a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.

At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases, Jorgensen says. They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, This is a fantasy. ... That is incredibly painful.

She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. Its bad for the DIY bio community, she said, because it makes people feel that as a general rule were irresponsible.

Existing regulations werent built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.

After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had ceased patient treatments. The site now says, We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.

This wasnt the FDAs first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.

In 2019, he was, for a time, under investigation by Californias Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.

The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because itll just drive the practice underground. They say its better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.

According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. Theyve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.

At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security, she said. And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.

Carlson told me hes noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down, he said. As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.

Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives, including in private laboratories in basements and garages.

Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. This technology is available and implementable anywhere, theres no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean? Carlson said.

Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, theyll be able to live longer but stay younger. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims people will be able to live to age 1,000. In fact, he says the first person who will live to 1,000 has already been born.

De Grey focuses on developing strategies for repairing seven types of cellular and molecular damage associated with aging or, as he calls them, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. His nonprofit, the Methuselah Foundation, has attracted huge investments, including more than $6 million from Thiel. Its aim is to make 90 the new 50 by 2030.

Wondering whether de Greys goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. Living to 1,000? Its definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it, he told me.

Hes optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, hes seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.

Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the small molecule approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the low-hanging fruit. He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.

The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out thats not very useful for treating humans we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.

But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. It wasnt a total cure they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.

Hes also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimers for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves but those probably wont help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: Its not a drug. You cant package and sell it, he said. Pharma cant monetize it.

Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldnt get it approved, he said. By the definition weve set up, aging isnt a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.

Not everyone whos interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.

My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology, Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs shes helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.

Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.

Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the first people to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small steaks of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called Disembodied Cuisine.

More recently, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has used old floral DNA to recreate the smell of flowers driven to extinction by humans, enabling us to catch a whiff of them once more.

And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If youre thoroughly grossed out by this, dont worry: The food wont actually be eaten this bioart project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.

When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, its easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what were coming to as a species.

But the fact is weve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, were all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.

The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia a fear of whats new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)

As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, test tube babies seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?

When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.

If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human, he said. And Im not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, its odd to say humans are static its not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.

Thats true. Nowadays, we live longer. Were taller. Were more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but thats nonetheless resulting in genetic change.

Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers upgrades dont get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?

Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldnt be expensive to produce. Theres no reason why that stuff cant be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society, he said. Insulin doesnt cost much to produce, but as a society weve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. Thats horrifying, but its not a function of the technology itself.

Heres another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology even if they dont want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay merely human.

The flip side of all this is the perfect race or eugenics specter, Jorgensen acknowledged. This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. Wed better think about it and use it wisely.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, youll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and to put it simply getting better at doing good.

Josiah Zayner is a biohacker whos famous for injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change (or hack) our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselves, and others, at home? On the launch episode of this new podcast, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Zayner about how hes thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.

Subscribe to Reset now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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What is biohacking? The new science of optimizing your brain and body. - Vox.com

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November 20th, 2019 at 5:55 am

Posted in Transhumanism

Are LED lights and other techno-implants slowly turning us into the Borg? – SYFY WIRE

Posted: October 16, 2019 at 8:45 pm


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You can sleep tonight, because we probably wont be assimilated into a colony of cyborgs who are more machine than human and call each other by number instead of their names. No one isturning into the Borg (like Captain Picardabove). The thing is that some transhumanists are willingly getting cyber-implants to fast-forward themselves into a future where man fuses with machine.

Transhumanists believe that we can upgrade ourselves through LED lights, computer chips and other implants that can give different human capacities an assist. Were already seeing this in the plans for Elon Musks Neuralink. Now an interview with BBC Scotlands The Nine has given us some insight into the people who voluntarily got LED lights under their skin for some cosmic sparkle or have chip implants in their hands that can open a car doorand already make keys seem archaic.

After engineer Winter Mraz nearly lost her life in a car accident that sent her to the operating room with a fractured back, ankle and knees, she had no idea how cybernetic enhancements would change her life forever. Her back needed to be bolted together, and one of her kneecap was so busted that she needed a 3D-printed replacement.

It if was not for my cybernetic kneecap I would not be able to walk, Mraz told the news channel. She also didnt know what she would be getting herself into.

It was the nearly fatal accident that convinced Mraz to get personal modifications unrelated to her injuries, like the microchips in her hands that can operate things as if by magic. She has a NFC (near-field communication) chip in her right hand that lets her phone, tablet and other gadgets share data. The RFID (radio-frequency-identification) chip in her left hand locks and unlocks her house door kind of like a workplace security card lets you open the door to the office. It also keeps her hand free for the cane she needs to get around.

Microchips are usually injected into the back of the hand like a syringe. When you really think about it, if you have a device like an Apple watch or Fitbit, microchip implants might freak you out right now, but they are (at least according to many transhumanists) the evolution of that technology.

If you want to see a really futuristic view of transhumanism, as in something that takes place in a fictional altverse where the cybernetically enhanced are at odds with the non-enhanced, read Steve Aokis Neon Future comic series. It will blow your mind.

(via BBC Scotland)

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Are LED lights and other techno-implants slowly turning us into the Borg? - SYFY WIRE

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October 16th, 2019 at 8:45 pm

Posted in Transhumanism

The transhumanists who are ‘upgrading’ their bodies – BBC News

Posted: October 8, 2019 at 6:48 am


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Winter Mraz says she loves having her keys in her hand but she does not mean holding them. She has actually had her door key implanted into her left hand in the form of a microchip.

In her right hand, she has had another microchip implant that acts as her business card but could also be used to store important medical information for use in the case of an emergency.

The 31-year-old engineer also has a magnet in one finger that allows her to sense electro-magnetic fields, which she says helps in her work.

But not all her body upgrades are practical. Her latest procedure is to have two LED implants, that turn on when a magnet is passed above them, illuminating her skin from inside.

Why? "Because they are sparkly and I'm a magpie," she says. "I like things that light up."

Winter is one of a growing number of people who call themselves "transhumanists".

It is the belief that the humans can improve beyond their physical and mental limitations and "upgrade" their bodies by incorporating technology.

For Winter, her first "cyber-enhancements" were not voluntary, they were through the hospital after a serious car crash in the United States that fractured her back, both her ankles and her knees.

Her back was bolted together by surgeons and one of her kneecaps was replaced with one that was 3D-printed, on the NHS.

"If it was not for my cybernetic kneecap I would not be able to walk," she told BBC Scotland's The Nine.

After her accident she moved on to voluntary personal modifications such as the microchips in her hands.

The RFID (radio-frequency-identification) chip in her left hand works on the lock in her house door in the same way as many workplace security cards operate. This means she does not have to carry keys and keeps her hand free for her walking cane.

The NFC (near-field communication) chip in her right hand has many potential uses. It is the same type of chip that allows phones and tablets to easily share data with each other.

Winter says: "I think saying that you should not alter your body and you should not change your body is a very ableist way to go about living. People who are disabled don't have that choice. It is made for us."

Steven Ryall, a 26-year-old technical operator from Manchester, says he wants to have chips implanted to make "smart hands".

"We have smart TVs, smart phones, everything is smart," he says. "Why can't I be smart?"

Steven believes that transhumanism is the logical next step in human development. He wants be able to programme the technology in his body to respond to his personal biology.

His "technological baptism" was at a private clinic in Leicester, where he had his first implant.

The microchips are usually delivered by a syringe into the back of the hand.

"I am slowly turning myself into part machine," he says. "I don't mind being biological but if I could be part mechanical that is so much more awesome than just my plain self."

Steven says the chip is "essentially" like those in a contactless bank card. "I can get an RFID or NFC reader and hook it up to a chip that I programme and then get that chip to recognise the chip in my hand and do whatever I want," he says.

Steven is an evangelist for humans "upgrading" themselves but he can understand why people might think it is an extreme thing to do. He says friends and family think it is "weird and kooky" but he believes that in the next five years they will start getting into it too.

Winter says wearable tech such as the Apple watch and Fitbit and other "doctor on your wrist" health monitors have taken off in the past few years and she believes that implants are the next logical step.

She says: "I don't think implants are inevitable but I think they are getting better, longer-lasting, cooler and have more functionality. It's going to be one more option people have."

Steven says he can easily see a time when companies are asking employees to have implants for security ID to access building or computer networks.

"I think that people would see it as an extreme thing because they are looking from a historical perspective, they are not looking forward," he says.

At the moment there are loose regulations on who can do it and most implants are done by tattoo artists and body piercers.

There are some people who are taking things into their own hands by buying the tools off websites to perform the procedure themselves.

Bio-hacker Jenova Rain, who implanted Steven's chip at her Leicester practice, said she was doing five implants a week and the numbers were rising as interest grows.

Although regulations on bio-hacking specifically are sparse, Jenova says she is covered to do implants as a tattoo artist and piercer.

Even though she promotes the idea of upgrading yourself through her YouTube channel and website she has no chips or "upgrades" herself. She says they would be "useless" for her.

Dr Mary Neal, professor of medicine and ethics at Strathclyde University, said she was "not surprised" more people were getting involved but there needed to be better regulation.

She said the procedure was similar to other body modification such as botox but there were many ethical discussions that needed to be had around bodily autonomy and regulation.

Dr Neal also said there were safety risks with people buying the equipment from online sites and doing the procedures from home.

The Scottish government told BBC Scotland's The Nine it intended to regulate procedures carried out by non-healthcare professionals and it was consulting on how this could be done.

A spokesman said it was looking at the "most proportionate and appropriate measures" and the government's priority was the safety of those involved.

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The transhumanists who are 'upgrading' their bodies - BBC News

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October 8th, 2019 at 6:48 am

Posted in Transhumanism

Insight: Transhumanists believe in the bionic body beautiful – The Scotsman

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No of course there shouldnt really be a religion based on The Bionic Woman that would require you to watch the show and it is cheesy and definitely for kids, laughs Ana Matronic, pop diva and Jaime Sommers obsessive.

We are having this conversation because, in her teens, she turned her fictional hero into a quasi deity the combination of the forces of science and nature and placed her at the centre of a belief system called Bionic Love. While she may now mock her fanzine flights of fancy, she still has faith in technology to transform humanity.

Matronic has been captivated by robots and cyborgs since C-3PO squeaked into her life at the age of three. Her right arm is a declaration of love a half-sleeve tattoo which began as a mishmash of cogs and springs, la Sommers, but now incorporates other favourites such as R2-D2 and Maria, the female robot from Fritz Langs 1927 film Metropolis.

Matronic, who was originally called Ana Lynch, has always been attracted to the blurring of boundaries. This is the woman who was once the only female drag queen in San Franciscos The Trannnyshack. That was before she became lead singer of the self-consciously flamboyant Scissor Sisters: a band that revelled in its own campness.

Today, she has lost none of that flamboyance; she still hosts the BBC Radio 2 programme Dance Devotion. But, an academic at heart, she also tours the country evangelising about transhumanism the merging of human and machine as well as warning of the dangers.

Later this month, she will be appearing at an event in the Dundee University Festival of the Future, along with Graeme Gerard Halliday, aka Hallidonto, a Scottish-born, London-based artist, who creates images of cyborgs, and Kadine James, Creative Tech Lead with Hobs 3D, a company that specialises in 3D printing.

Im really interested in all aspects of technology, from the three-minute pop song to AI [Artificial Intelligence] and advances in medical treatment, says Matronic.

I am interested in how things work and how they affect humanity. Technology holds so much promise, but it moves faster than governments. Thats a dangerous thing and something we ought to talk about.

The Dundee University event is timely. Not long ago, cyborgs were of mostly hypothetical interest, explored in science and speculative fiction, but not generally regarded as a contemporary reality impacting on everyday behaviour.

In the past year or so, however, transhumanism appears to have entered the mainstream; every day seems to bring a news story that could have come straight from Charlie Brookers Black Mirror; a story that challenges our preconceptions about what it means to be human.

Some of the technology we are seeing changes us physically. Blade prostheses that allow amputee athletes to run as fast as able-bodied ones for example, and power-suits that strengthen the muscles of elderly people, mean cyborgs are already in our midst.

Just last week, we learned a Frenchman paralysed in a nightclub accident had walked again thanks to a mind-controlled exo-skeleton suit. Recording devices implanted either side of his head between the skin and the brain read brainwaves and send them to a nearby computer, where they are converted into instructions for controlling the exo-skeleton.

Technology is developing so rapidly that both scientists and philosophers are pondering the possibility that we may eventually be able to transform ourselves into beings with abilities so great as to merit the label post-human.

The extent to which the concept of transhumanism (if not the word itself) has entered the public consciousness could be seen in the recent Russell T Davies drama Years And Years in which one of the main characters, Bethany, wants to become part-machine.

She has mobile phone implants in her hands, camera implants in her eyes and brain implants that allow her to make a mental connection with the internet. Set just a few years hence, and building on existing technology, the interesting thing about the series is not how futuristic it seems, but how feasible. Even when, towards the end, her aunt Edith uploads her consciousness to the cloud so she can continue to exist after death, it does not feel too far-fetched.

Martine Rothblatt, the founder of SiriusXM Satellite Radio, a super-fascinating person No 1 on my fantasy dinner party list is already developing the technology to create a mind file, says Matronic. The idea is you gather as much information on yourself as you can so that when you die your mind-file can be downloaded into a phone or into a robot and you or rather a facsimile of you can live on for your family. There are also people working on substrate independent minds brains that dont need a body to function. And people who are trying to extend life or eradicate death.

But if death becomes an option then the fairy tale of unlimited economic growth becomes even more of a fairy tale. And thats before we start thinking about storage. If you are a digital person, where do you live? And if the storage facility is so big it can store digital people then the computational power of that facility is not a what but a who. The whole thing is a crazy, crazy rabbit hole I love to jump down.

The first robot

Matronics right; it is a rabbit hole, and the further you go down it the more you lose yourself in an ethical maze.

At its best, technology has the power to tap into human potential; to make us the best we can be. When Makoto Nishimura created Japans first robot, Gakutensoku (the name means learning from natural law), he was conceived as an ideal.

At an exhibition to mark Emperor Hirohitos ascension to the throne in 1926 the year before Metropolis was released spectators were awe-struck as the God-like bronze figure appeared before them clutching a mace and arrow and smiled beatifically. Nishimura believed robots were a continuum of humanity a natural evolution. If humans are the children of nature, then robots are the grandchildren of nature, he said.

Yet, ever since the industrial revolution, western society has tended to have an adversarial attitude towards machines, viewing them as sleekit creatures who will steal our jobs or turn against us, like Frankensteins monster. In literature too, we are accustomed to the idea of scientific progress producing dystopias such as Airstrip One in 1984 or the boarding school for clones in Kazuo Ishiguros Never Let Me Go.

Overemphasising the downsides of technological advance may be discriminatory, says Matronic. When we have conversations about the evils of technology, we are being ablist. If you say, social media is bad, I will show you someone with locked-in syndrome or crippling social anxiety for whom it has opened up the possibility of friendship.

Technology could also eradicate paralysis; there would be no more quadriplegics. Also, at present we only use 10 per cent of our brains. If we have machines that can help us explore more of that, then its amazing.

Even so, neither Matronic nor Hallidonto is naive. They understand the potential pitfalls of transhumanism in a capitalist society where efficiency and profits are the most powerful drivers.

Technology initially developed for positive purposes may be subverted for negative ones, while the push to create a super-race of better, fitter, more cognitively capable humans veers perilously close to eugenics.

And then there is the question of marginalisation. We are already living in a world where those who do not own a smartphone are disadvantaged. How much greater will that socio-economic inequality become once it is possible to pay for superior physical strength and brain power?

Professor Kevin Warwick, the worlds leading expert in cybernetics, has been called the first cyborg. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, he experimented with his own body. First, he had an RIFD transmitter implanted under his skin which allowed him to control doors, lights, heaters and other devices. Then he had a BrainGate electrode array fitted which allowed him to control a robotic arm on the other side of the Atlantic a feat that conjures up the image of Thing in the Addams Family. Finally, he linked his nervous system electrically to his wifes in such a way that every time she closed her hand, his brain received a pulse. Was that not freaky? It was very intimate, he says. You are getting signals from someone elses body and nobody else knows.

The link cannot yet be made brain to brain, but when it can, it will be the basis of thought communication: telepathy, but for real.

Back in the 90s, Warwick faced criticism, not technically, just people saying: Youre a buffoon, because they didnt understand what I was doing. In the end, of course, the joke was on them.

Yet today, some people are still dubious, not about the science, but about the morality. The ethical dilemmas sparked by some of these developments are huge. For example, if you can control an arm miles from where you are, then presumably you can use it to commit crimes. Meanwhile the linking up of brains if achieved would be a useful way to communicate with someone who couldnt speak but, in the wrong hands, it could be used for coercive control.

Warwick accepts all this, but seems unperturbed. As a scientist, you are aware of things potentially going in a negative way, but you hope society will look at applications and say: Yes, this one is great it will help people and No, we dont think this one should be allowed.

Asked if it would be ethical to amputate a normal human leg in order to replace it with blades that allowed an athlete to run faster, he says yes.

I cant see a problem. We have to look to the future. At the moment, we have a body. The body does things OK and the brain controls it and its all a pretty limited package. But we have the possibility of redefining what our body and our brains can do. Why should anyone lag behind with ordinary human body parts when they could have something thats much better?

When I suggest this will exacerbate the disenfranchisement of the most vulnerable, he implies a degree of inequality is a social inevitability and points out that wealthy people can already pay for physical enhancements through cosmetic surgery.

Not everyone is this sanguine. Hallidonto is as passionate about robots as Matronic. Growing up in the 80s, the first cyborg he encountered was the one in The Terminator. I remember sitting on the sofa with my dad at three years old and being completely traumatised by it, he says. Later, I had Darth Vader toys and I would pretend I was wearing a robotic suit. I would feel quite powerful.

When he was 12, Hallidonto suffered a collapsed lung. He was put in a machine and experienced visceral, morphine-induced dreams about babies with wires coming out of their eyes. Then when he was 25, he had a brain injury on a holiday in Germany and it changed how he saw the world.

A graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, his work has always featured robots. At the launch of his exhibition, Cyborg Cadavers, in London last week, he explored some of the pitfalls. I spoke about the Anthropocene and the Promethean allegory and pointed out that if we dont watch what we are doing we may end up, not with the body we desire, but with the body that is required, he says.

With technology developing so rapidly, Matronic believes there is an urgent need for tech companies and governments to talk about ethics before it is too late.

Most of the negative stories about robots/cyborgs, from Frankenstein on, involve someone with a God complex thinking they can do what the Creator does. Those stories are a warning against hubris.

So we definitely need to have conversations about morality and every tech company should have its own ethicist. They should be saying things like: Dear Elon Musk loving the SpaceX stuff, but do we really need a flamethrower?

Matronic says some of her worst fears, technologically speaking, are already being realised with Facebooks lack of transparency and peoples identities and data being turned into a commodity.

I am really concerned about autonomous weapons too, she says. Mines are horrible enough, but guns that can walk and speak? That is a terrifying prospect. I dont think they should be allowed to exist.

The potential for technology to reinforce inequality will have to be addressed too because otherwise only some people will lag behind. It will be: Oh my God did you get the brain update? No, I am still working with version 2.4. Well, version 3 just came out and its amazing.

Chair of the Dundee University event, Karen Petrie, associate dean for learning and teaching in science and engineering, is developing educational software that can adapt to the learning speed of individual students.

Her biggest fear is the one feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez touches on in her book Invisible Women: that as computers take over more and more tasks, they will replicate existing biases.

Most AIs are built on machine learning, she says. That means they take a large quantity of data, mine that data and learn behaviour. Unfortunately, if theres any bias in that data, even if it is implicit bias, then the machine will learn it. A good example of this is a big tech firm that was trying to use a machine learning algorithm to scan CVs and work out who they should or shouldnt employ.

However, until now this tech firm has employed 95 per cent men, so when this algorithm was used it pretty much screened out all the women.

Body hacktivism

For all the potential problems, the notion that technology could transform us aesthetically, cognitively, spiritually cannot fail to excite the imagination. The myriad possibilities it throws up are proving a rich source of inspiration for both artists and philosophers.

Indeed they have engendered a new art form: body hacktivism. Tight restrictions on the kinds of surgery that can be done on humans has led to a school of DIY body modification artists, who carry out work on themselves or others. There is Neil Harbisson, who sees the world in black and white, but wears an antennae that translates the frequency of colours into sounds; Tim Cannon, who had magnets implanted in his fingers; Lukas Zpira, author of the body hacktivism manifesto, who offers tongue splitting, implants, and subincision (the splitting of the penis); and Steve Haworth, who specialises in subdermal and transdermal implants, such as the Metal Mohawk a row of spikes inserted into the head to replicate a punk haircut.

Despite her fixation with cyborgs, Matronic is a late adopter of new technology. I am last to everything I never even have the latest smartphone. But she believes the future will be more fluid. Others have connected this fluidity to transgenderism; after all, if you can change the human body at will, then sex and gender become less important. And if your consciousness can exist without corporeal form then, arguably, they cease to matter at all.

If you see yourself as a religious person and you believe in the soul, then, when your soul leaves, is it male or female? says Matronic.

You have just your body you can be anything. Gender really is a construct something that is mandated by society. Different societies have different expressions of gender and different codes. I think as we expand as humans, we understand there are different ways of being and definitions loosen, so we are going to have new words and new definitions and new genders.

Everything will be new, new, new. It might be scary for some people and difficult conversations will have to be had but I believe that us humans learn to human better as we evolve and I look to the future with hope.

How Robots Are Shaping the World We Live In, 6.30pm, October 19, Juniper Auditorium, V&A, Dundee

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Insight: Transhumanists believe in the bionic body beautiful - The Scotsman

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Education and Enhancement in a Transhuman Future – Patheos

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by David Lewin

Should we expect the schools of the future to be saturated with technology? It has been widely reported (e.g. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/319288) that some leaders within major Silicon Valley tech companies have, rather hypocritically, chosen to limit the influence of their products on their own children, by restricting access to screen time and social media. Take the following report:

You cant put your face in a device and expect to develop a long-term attention span, [said] Taewoo Kim, chief AI engineer at the machine-learning startup One Smart Lab A practicing Buddhist, Kim is teaching his nieces and nephews, ages 4 to 11, to meditate and appreciate screen-free games and puzzles. Once a year he takes them on tech-free silent retreats at nearby Buddhist temples. (https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-parents-raising-their-kids-tech-free-red-flag-2018-2)

Other educational spaces also appear to provide shelter from technology saturation, for instance Waldorf schools, which prioritise outdoor learning and low-tech play. This concern to shelter students reflects certain perceived risks of technology saturation: distractedness and diminished attention span, heightened depression and anxiety, poor health and obesity and, in extreme cases, suicide. Limiting access to technology has become newsworthy because of the prevailing assumption that technology enhances education. Whatever the truth of the matter, we currently know little about the long-term impact of many technologies on the educational formation of young people: the influence of technology seems widespread, indeterminate, and seldom given sufficient justification. This knowledge gap is by no means unique to modern technologys educational interventions, but is at the foundation of education itself: there is an interpretive gap between what educators intend and what students learn.

This raises two general questions: First, how do we justify influencing others? If the answer to this question is basically consequentialist (because the outcomes of influence are good), then we are presented with a second question which problematizes this response: namely, what are we to make of the gap between our intentions to influence or enhance, and the outcomes of these intentions?

I would argue that human enhancements have existed as long as education itself. Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg (https://nickbostrom.com/cognitive.pdf) have suggested that education may be usefully labelled as a conventional means of human enhancement, as distinct from nominally unconventional means of enhancement, such as nootropic drugs, gene therapy, or neural implants. This distinction has its place, though Bostrom and Sandberg acknowledge the continuum between enhancements that are conventional (working through education) and unconventional (drawing upon recent technologies), making the distinction fluid, indeterminate and contextual. Caffeine is one thing, but gene editing for purposes of non-therapeutic interventions (e.g. selecting or removing traits in reproduction) remains controversial. Of course, convention is a rather unstable form of justification. In general, the question of the justification of unconventional enhancement parallels that of conventional enhancement. It is one of the key questions that shapes education theory: namely, how are our intentions to influence justified?

The gap between the intentions and the outcomes could be understood as a weakness or risk intrinsic to education. Gert Biesta speaks of the beautiful risk of education (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMqFcVoXnTI), arguing that it is a misconception to see education as a stable relation between inputs and outputs in which we can eliminate the unexpected or the risky. To construe education without risk is to miss something of its beauty. Education can make use of, or better, relies on this gap in order to create spaces that are essentially open to something unbidden, an opening that involves, as Hannah Arendt puts it, the coming of the new and young. By contrast, the sciences of learning have worked to eliminate this gap through the development of what is known as the behavioural objectives model in which measurable educational objectives and outcomes are made explicit and become the sole target of education. The behavioural objectives model can be interpreted as the expression of technical subjectivity in which all forms of insecurity are eliminated in favor of pure transmission, and the risks of exposure to the unbidden are minimised. The idea that behavioural objectives ensure control of the educational process is seductive but, illusory and ultimately corrosive since, as Arendt, Biesta and others have argued, the educational event itself depends upon the introduction of something radically new. What makes the new radical here is that there is a discontinuity between the conditions in which newness may arrive, and the very arrival itself. Something about the new is necessarily unanticipated. Without the new, education becomes the reproduction of the old which, echoing Adornos critiques of Halbbildung (half-education), is only ever half the educational story.

This gap between educational intention and what actually takes place demands something of those involved: speculative, or interpretive judgements. We might say that interpretation constitutes the pedagogical relation between educator and student: the educator speculates that the student is educable, projecting ideas about what capacities the student could realise through certain educational influences; the student speculates about what the educator intends and is capable of, e.g. that they are (or are not) both interested in and able to support the students growth. Then there is speculation about the outcomes of the educational event: the enhancement of a capacity may not be immediately obvious to the student or educator, taking days, months or even years to be properly realised or recognised. In short, there is a great deal of faith in pedagogical structures, processes and relations. This is significant because unconventional means of enhancement likewise involve speculation, risk, and judgement. Just as writing may enhance or diminish human memory, so ubiquitous access to google may extend and undermine certain cognitive capacities; at least an ambivalence should be noted. Unconventional means of enhancement through, for instance, drugs like Ritalin or Modafinil, might be thought to involve unacceptable risks in comparison to conventional schooling, but risks are part of any effort to influence because they are defined by the gap described between intention and outcome.

In her essay The Crisis in Education, Arendt says that hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings; but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Indeed, the older generation cannot fully anticipate changes brought on by the young but can, indeed must, show the world and let go, hoping that in doing so conditions are created in which the new may arrive. Education involves creating conditions in which it is possible for the new to come in to the world, conditions that might also be described in terms of openness: openness to the mystery, the unbidden, the Other, or as self-transcendence.

I would not be the first to challenge the view that the technologically defined immortality of transhumanism would be an enhancement, though my challenge is based on educational insights. Specifically, the transhuman quest for immortality, in which the old seeks to sustain itself indefinitely, seems to oppose the radical renewal of education described by Arendt and others. There is the basic problem of resources: the old must make space for the new by the renewal of life through death, which perhaps could be solved by extraterrestrial colonization or through digitization and uploading. However, the educational principle that life is constituted by a creative tension between those coming in to the world (the young) and those going out (the old) is a basic condition for life itself. The necessity of education correlates with the necessity of the renewal of the world.

Rather than being regarded as revolutionary or radical, transhumanism is, then, fundamentally and ruinously conservative: it seeks to sustain what is, as it is. Transhumanists sometimes berate those who are hesitant about the scale and scope of technological change as bio-conservative, though maybe the transhuman community itself that is the most conservative of all: it fails to see how the preservation of the old world is an affront to the ongoing renewal that sustains the world.

This renewal is not a case of the new entirely replacing or displacing the old, as a cult of youth might have it. By no means does this jettison tradition and the past. In order for children to arrive in the world, they must, says Arendt, be introduced to it. Herein lies the legitimate but limited authority of educators: that, by showing the world, they are able to take responsibility for it, while letting the forces of renewal remake it. Arendt ends her Crisis in Education essay with the following appeal to love:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

For Arendt, this renewal is not realised in a techno-utopia in which we may exist indefinitely, but a common world in which the old order is in constant transformative renewal. This means convention and tradition provide the ground for representing the world to the young, who then are able to introduce something new through invention and transformation. This balance between old and new, past and future, makes education both necessary and possible.

My concerns are less that transhuman prospects for extended or unending life are real possibilities than what these prospects indicate about contemporary attitudes to human formation and education: namely, the current technologisation of education disregards the interpretive gap which makes education more than a mechanical process of construction. Bringing to view the interpretive gap reminds us that renewal is both possible and essential in order to exceed the conservative forces that seek only to recreate the patterns of the past.

Every parent, educator and transhumanist has an idea of the good and a belief or hope in the possibility of realising it; what might be called a faith in the future. Faith is necessary because of the gap between our intentions to make change, and the outcomes of those intentions. There is a twofold problem: we often dont know whether change is good, and even if we did know this, we often dont know if change can, or has, been realised. It is the human condition to live in this gap, a gap that requires us to live between the conventions and traditions that ground us, and the inventions and transformations that develop us. This gap ensures that, thankfully, the influences of the old on the young are not entirely mechanical or predictable, and that our humanity is staked upon a wager to affirm the world without hanging on to it indefinitely. Because of this gap, it is incumbent upon us to reflect upon the judgements that we must inevitably make, and the possible futures in which we put our faith, hope and love.

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Education and Enhancement in a Transhuman Future - Patheos

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Heavy data protection regulation looms in Labour plans for post-Brexit flows and IoT devices – The Register

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A minister has said that future Internet of Things and data regulation will take into account "decisions that we need to be aware we are making" when handing personal data over to tech companies.

Junior tech policy minister Matt Warman told a Westminster Hall debate of MPs last week that the IoT "represents a whole new chapter of how technology is becoming more common in our homes".

The debate occurred on the same day as the incumbent UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, co-signed a letter with the US attorney general and Aussie Home Affairs minister requesting that Facebook "does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption... without including a means for lawful access to the content of communications..."

One-time Ofcom gros fromage Chi Onwurah MP secured the debate, supposedly as a discussion about IoT regulation. It veered a bit into Labour Party electioneering for a new digital society based on heavy regulation of largely American tech and data-trading companies.

"We need an architecture of standards and a regulatory framework that enables security and interoperability across the internet and also considers the lifeblood of the internet of things data," said Onwurah.

Enthusiastically promoting a heavy-touch view of future UK IoT regulation, she continued: "That libertarian idea that technology is the answer to everything has driven our regulatory approach for too long, so he [Warman] is right to say that we need experts on technology who can stand up for and consider its future applications from the point of view of society and citizens."

Her Labour colleague Jon Cruddas, MP for Barking, reinforced this by dismissing Silicon Valley's confidence "in the potential of technology [which] goes hand in hand with a widespread libertarianism," while bizarrely adding: "What happens when transhumanist thinking informs the technologists?"

Transhumanism discussed in this 2017 Reg lecture here is, as many a reader will know, famously espoused by Kevin "Captain Cyborg" Warwick and Dmitry Kaminskiy of Deep Knowledge Ventures, who once appointed a robot to his company board.

SNP MP Patrick Grady observed, rather shakily, that he wasn't sure if his political party "has an established view on transhumanism" but returned to the topic of the debate to say that the IoT "is already part of some people's daily lives, perhaps without them even realising or with them already taking it for granted."

Liam Byrne, Labour's shadow Minister of Fun*, compared the rise of the IoT to the Industrial Revolution, giving PR flacks the world over a little shiver of delight, and likened the situation now to Adam Smith's linen shirt. Comparing that economic need (a man without one in Smith's day was thought to be poor, simply because everyone else at the time had one) to the progress of tech across the world, Byrne called for a digital "bill of rights" combined with "powerful regulation" to curb "some of the biggest, wealthiest and most powerful companies on earth".

Responding to all this, Warman said: "This is a debate about data, not the internet of things The consumer has to understand that they are giving up their data for a particular purpose and a particular benefit.

"I commend the approach that says we are dealing with issues that go far beyond a debate about technology," continued Warman, "which will have an impact on huge aspects of humanity itself, whether we get them right or wrong."

He then went on to claim that there will be 75 billion IoT devices worldwide by 2025, a figure that is half again as large as the discredited 50-billion-by-2020 figure disowned by Ericsson some years ago.

Whatever the future of IoT and/or data regulation, the government will probably remain tied up in Brexit for years to come.

* Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport

Sponsored: What next after Netezza?

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Heavy data protection regulation looms in Labour plans for post-Brexit flows and IoT devices - The Register

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A Novel That Riffs on Sex Dolls, Mary Shelley and Brexit – The New York Times

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[ To me, a proper dictionary is a book of spells, Winterson said in her recent By the Book interview. ]

Ry is also falling for a version of Marys creation: Dr. Victor Stein, a TED-talking tech disrupter with a God complex and a keen fashion sense. Thanks to cryonics, in which Ry once dabbled, the grisly horror of reanimating a body is now entirely feasible, but Stein wants to go further into the realms of transhumanism and beyond: The world I imagine, the world A.I. will make possible, will not be a world of labels and that includes binaries like male and female, black and white, rich and poor. It sounds like a utopia, but anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with Westworld, HAL 9000 and Philip K. Dick will know that this is dangerous territory. Ry has serious concerns about these visionary goals, even while empathizing with them: I am part of a small group of transgender medical professionals. Some of us are transhuman enthusiasts too. That isnt surprising; we feel or have felt that were in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that anybody is the wrong body.

This understanding aside, at times, its difficult to figure out why self-aware Ry falls so hard for Stein (although, admittedly, they have great sex). For someone whose eventual goal is to be free of the meat that makes up the body, he has an initial, almost prurient fascination with Rys choice to identify as hybrid, and is repeatedly at pains to assure Ry hes not gay (another sly nod to the contemporary discourse around gender and sexual identity). Occasionally, he comes across as little more than a TED Talk himself, spouting chunks of research and philosophical meanderings that, while fascinating, stall the novel. Its as if Winterson is at pains to remind us that issues around gender, notions of the self and fears of automatons supplanting human agency are not new concerns theyre as old as Ovids Metamorphoses. But these forays into didacticism are balanced with gleeful, highly imaginative set pieces rich with black humor: Dr. Steins lab lurks, Young Frankenstein-style, in decommissioned tunnels under Manchester, complete with its own pub. Severed, reanimated hands skitter, Addams Family-like, through the bowels of the lab, where Ron has been invited to create a Christian Companion sex doll for the evangelical market.

[ Peek inside Wintersons writing studio. ]

Weaving through all of this is the heart of the novel the primary love story promised on the cover, an uneasy, love-hate relationship between the author and her creation. As the Inventor of Dreams, Mary Shelley looses her novel into the world and mourns the loss of her lover and her children, were invited to consider what happens when a creation outlives and surpasses its creator (Yet, suppose my story has a life of its own?). The original novel has achieved immortality, and Wintersons Mary can never shake off the specter of her creation and the inventions it inspires. In parallel, and against their better judgment, Ry provides Stein with body parts snaffled from the hospital, laying them at his feet like a cat. They include a cryogenically frozen head in a flask that Polly D. hilariously dubs the iHead and that Stein hopes will be his key to the Singularity the moment A.I. changes the way we live, forever. Rys gifts will possibly give birth to another form of immortality the queasy notion of the consciousness living forever, disembodied, in the cloud and who knows where that will lead the human race?

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A Novel That Riffs on Sex Dolls, Mary Shelley and Brexit - The New York Times

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