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

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

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.

Read the original post:
Education and Enhancement in a Transhuman Future - Patheos

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?

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

[ 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?

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

And by the time people are in a position to begin colonising other planets, mankind will be a technologically-augmented species, Bob Flint, the technology director with BPs Digital Innovation Organisation, predicted. The recent BBC One drama series Years and Years touched on such concepts, with one character voicing her desire to become transhuman - in other words, dramatically enhanced by technology - and Mr Flint said the concept was perhaps not as far-fetched as it might sound. Mr Flint, who will present his ideas during a talk entitled The Upgradeable Human at the New Scientist Live festival at Londons ExCel centre, said: Humankinds development is a story of using technology to add to our capabilities think clothing and spectacles, or more recently pacemakers and laser eye surgery.

We can imagine augmenting our strength, stamina, senses and even intelligence

Bob Flint

Now, with technology becoming incredibly powerful through digital, the possibilities are becoming exponentially greater. We can imagine augmenting our strength, stamina, senses and even intelligence.

It was yesterday announced that a French man, known has Thiabault, had managed to walk in the exoskeleton in a pioneering experiment carried out by scientists at the University of Grenoble in France.

As a result, the next few decades could see an increasing blurring of the lines between man and machine, Mr Flint said.

He explained: Wearables are an early example of this trend, but new technology is emerging which can be incorporated more seamlessly into the body, heralding an era where humans and machines will be closely integrated.

Eventually, its possible humans may be able to move beyond the evolutionary process by selecting digital upgrades that overcome the constraints of biology and allow each of us to choose powerful new abilities, which can be used in our personal and working lives.

Such concepts have been featured in modern sci-fi shows including Charlie Brookers Black Mirror, and the aforementioned Years and Years, written by Russell T Davies and even as far back as the Six Million Dollar Man in the 1970s.

Mr Flint said: I loved Years and Years, and thought it was great to see TV drama exploring some very futuristic concepts.

Personally, I think were some way from the transhumanism that is mentioned (one of the characters wanted to upload her personality and experiences to become a purely digital being, which would need huge advances in computing).

Im actually talking about the opposite idea, using digital technology to give our human selves greater powers - this is possible now.

READ MORE: Jet suit breakthrough: Buck Rogers in the 21st Century

Im just predicting it will become easier, cheaper and much less noticeable in the near future.

I think the bigger issue is not so much whether this will be technically possible there are lots of research projects and early products which signpost the direction of travel.

Its more whether upgrading ourselves will be seen as socially acceptable. This is hard to call, but I think that if it gives us an advantage, maybe in work, sport or socially, then eventually it will simply be regarded as a normal thing to do.

There are all sorts of major ethical questions here, some of the ones weve come across are: will human upgrades only be available to the very rich? How will the most deserving get hold of necessary technology even if they dont have the means to pay for it?

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What does privacy mean in an age where technology can collect lots of personal information on our physical or mental state? How do we hang onto the rights to our own data?

If a company is looking to hire a new member of staff, how should they treat the technically augmented versus the non-augmented applicants? Is the playing field ever going to be level again?

We really need a public conversation on these issues, so we can decide what regulation or legal change we may need in this area.

For example, the Royal Society has recently kicked off a public dialogue on neural interfaces, which is a great start.

Looking further into the future, Mr Flint believed technological enhancements may also help humans conquer space.

He explained: I know theres a big debate about whether its preferable for humans to lead the exploration of other worlds, or robots.

Certainly, robotic methods are going to be easier (and less costly) in the short term, as you dont need to create habitable conditions on board the spacecraft or on the planet you land on.

But eventually, if humankind is going to become an interplanetary species, well need to get good at moving life across vast tracts of space.

I actually dont think that having an upgraded human is mandatory to enable this. But I do think that the timescales will coincide in other words, we will be a technologically-augmented species anyway, by the time we seriously attempt to colonise other worlds.

The Upgradeable Human is on the Humans stage on October 10 between 10.45am and 11.25am.

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Man meets machine: 21st century is age of the upgradeable human, says expert - Express.co.uk

Being cancelled getting you down? Well now theres a conference for youand everyone else booted from mainstream political discourse for thoughtcrimes.

Imagine a conference for people banned from other conferences, the announcement for Founders Funds exclusive new three-day event reads. Imagine a safe space for people who dont feel safe in safe spaces.

Imagine indeed.

Hereticon (yes, its actually called that) promises to include many of our cultures most important troublemakers, specifically ones committed to improving civilization. That might rule out a few names, but wed expect Founders Fund to highlight at least a handful of thinkers from its portfolio companies.

Palantir will probably show up, given recent protests and the decision by both the Grace Hopper Celebration and the Lesbians Who Tech conference to remove the company, which contracts with ICE, as a sponsor.

Retiring Texas Rep. Will Hurd also seems like a natural choice, after being disinvited to keynote the Black Hat security conference due to his political record on abortion. Hurd is also friendly with Founders Fund portfolio company Anduril.

Unlike gatherings of right-leaning online provocateurs that the event resembles, Hereticon will draw a more pedigreed set. The invite-only conference in May 2020 will likely attract attendees from the much-grumbled about liberal strongholds of American tech, and perhaps others whove been cast out of the silicon gates already.

From Galileo to Jesus Christ, heretical thinkers have been met with hostility, even death, and vindicated by posterity, the blog post grandly opens, going on to declare that troublemakers are essential to mankinds progress, and so we must protect them.

The topics that will take center stage at Hereticon? Theyre a doozy. Conversations will center on a smorgasbord of libertarian micro-obsessions, including transhumanism, the abolition of college (a favorite of Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel), the benefits of starvation a la Jack Dorseys fasting diet, the softer side of doomsday prepping, and immortality, naturally.

While its no surprise to see such an event emerge from the crowd that sees eye-to-eye with a man seen as Silicon Valleys seastead-loving deep-pocketed free press assassin, its interesting to see Founders Fund throw the event themselves. Some of the firms investments, like defense-friendly Palantir and Anduril, are considered controversial in techs left-leaning circles, but many of its portfolio companies are more quotidian utilities like Stripe, Facebook, and Credit Karma. Not exactly heretical.

Its likely a strategic choice for a venture firm that could benefit from drawing the self-identified misfits stalking tech's fringes in toward the center and giving them something to feel collectively persecuted and intellectually invigorated about.

Then again, they might just come together to chatter about UFOs and wax poetic about corporate counterculture. Either way, well be staying tuned to see which technocrats and/or heretics get the invite nod.

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Hereticon, From Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Is a 'Conference for People Banned From Other Conferences' - The Daily Beast

For all of those people who feel they have become victims of an ideological witch hunt or have been evicted from all forms of intellectual debate, theres a new Promised Land to share with other like-minded individuals.

Even crazy Uncle Mike, or someone like the best friend of the Oklahoma City bomber, or Aunt Lily who is obsessed with building survival bunkers and keeping an eye out for unmarked, black helicopters would be welcome with open arms.

This coming May in New Orleans, the Founders Fund, run by billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, will host a three-day event called Hereticonand the turnout promises to be unusually decent.

Imagine a conference for people banned from other conferences. Imagine a safe space for people who dont feel safe in safe spaces, the fund wrote.

The main reason for hosting the conference? The organizers believe that these apparent intellectual troublemakers are essential to mankinds progress.

We must protect them, opines the Fund. Butwhile our culture is fascinated by the righteousness of our historical heretics, it is obsessed with the destruction of the heretics among us today.

In an announcementfor the event, the fund compares potential attendees to martyrs like Galileo and Jesus Christ, and poses the question: Are our heretics the first in history who deserve to be burned?

There is no doubt that the event will attract many banned outcasted opinion havers, from all fields, since the event will welcome intellectuals from all walks of life that have been banned from other conferences.

Topics including, but are not limited to: biological self-determination, geo-engineering, transhumanism, the abolition of college, transgressive media, sex, the softer side of doomsday prepping, constitutional monarchy, immortality, drag culture, and building nations. Related: The Doodle Frenzy Is Earning Unethical Breeders Top Dollar

And at the end of the day, on the top floor of hotel, in a hidden room plastered in newspaper clippings of sightings and secret bases, there may be a talk or two on UFOs.

Though the organizers failed to include any information as to who might be presenting on this conference of heretics, media is already speculating as to who might show up. The event is invite-only, but members of the general public can apply for a spot.

While his mainstream ventures include PayPal and Facebook, many of Thiels other activities are naturally leading to something like Hereticon.

Hes been known, for instance, forusing controversial blood transfusion therapiesin pursuit of his dream of living forever.He also signed up with cryogenics company Alcor, which will freeze the ailing body in the hopes of unfreezing it in the future when there is a cure.

However, what apparently makes Thiel an intellectual outcast most is his negative attitude towards Silicon Valley. According to the Wall Street Journal, last year herelocated his home, personal funds, 50-person staff and his foundation from Silicon Valley to Los Angelesapparently because Silicon Valley was too liberal.

Thiel is one of the most vocal supporters Trump has ever enjoyed.

More recently, he accused the Google of treason for operating an artificial intelligence lab in China, which Trump promptly tweeted:

As the impeachment proceedings gain momentum, Hereticon may just gain more requests for attendance that it was planning on.

By Josh Owens for Safehaven.com

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Peter Thiel's Promised Land For Intellectual Troublemakers - SafeHaven.com

Respect means a lot to all of us. This is how you can get more of it.

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The renowned Aretha Franklin sung about it, but everyone and I do mean everyone wants some of it. We want respect in our personal lives and in our professional lives as well. We want to be appreciated for the work we do and to get proper recognition for our contributions. When our colleagues respect us, they take us more seriously and view us as professionals who get things done in the right way while applying professional standards and ethics. If you want to be respected more by your boss, your staff or your colleagues, you absolutely must do these seven things consistently.

1. Apologize for what you get wrong but not for who you are or what you accomplish.

By all means, dont apologize excessively. Doing so might cause people to see you as inferior, especially when your inclination is to automatically apologize to others for not only the stuff you get wrong but for the stuff they get wrong too.

In no way am I recommending that you neglect to take ownership of your mistakes or the mistakes of your team. That is what weak leaders are known to do. Instead, I posit that strong leaders answer for their teams actions and their own actions by taking full responsibility for mistakes, and they are respected much more for doing so. But dont apologize for things that you have no control over, things outside your authority or for the things that make you who you are.

Apologize for being rude or arriving late to a meeting but not for another persons discomfort with your identity, professionalism, competence or expertise. Apologize for disrespecting or discounting someone else but not for setting performance standards and holding people accountable. Apologize for a process, service or quality failure, but never apologize for being confident, assertive or successful.

2. Have the audacity to point out whats not working and the diligence to propose methods that will.

If you are the resident fault-finder on the team, no one will like or respect you. While it is very important to highlight mistakes, flaws and areas for improvement, it is equally if not more important to add your ideas, recommendations and methods to the mix. People respect problem solvers and solution finders more than complainers.

To gain more respect, demonstrate your ability to be a strategic thinker and offer up thoughtful and comprehensive proposals with solutions. When you have the courage to not only point out what is wrong but also stand behind it with a well-thought proposal for how to make it better, you gain more respect. Even if people dont fully accept your proposal, they will respect you for providing one. It shows that you are truly invested in making things better, and you will gain a reputation for generating ideas, solving problems and improving processes.

3. Treat other people the way they want to be treated rather than the way you want to be treated.

Although well intentioned, the Golden Rule principle falls short. The Golden Rule suggests that we treat others the way we want to be treated. A better approach is to treat others the way they want to be treated. This is called the Platinum Rule, and it considers that when dealing with other people, it is best to try to make it about them. Focus on what they need and what they care about to the extent possible.

When you treat others the way you want to be treated, they might view you as arrogant and overly presumptuous. Think about it. How can we just decide that other people want to be treated the same way we want to be treated? Who gives us the right to presume that?

Youll gain more respect when you make it about other people. Another way to do this is to simply respect them. Regardless of position titles or status, find a way to show you value and appreciate the maintenance worker who cleans the bathrooms as much as you appreciate the chief executive. When you make it about other people and elevate their needs and concerns, they will elevate you and come to respect you more.

4. Ask more questions and remain open to new ideas.

In case you were wondering, people really dont like know-it-alls. If you go around diminishing others while acting like you have a monopoly on bright ideas, the best expertise or the best solutions, you will be disliked. People will respect you less because they dont feel you value their ideas or expertise.

A better strategy would be to show people that you are open to learn new things and think differently about processes. This will get you further than you will ever get by touting your expertise, college degrees or how much experience you have. In todays society, your ability to learn, unlearn, ask great questions and learn some more is truly valued, and this will garner you more respect with your colleagues.

5. Make your needs a priority, and deal with conflict even when its uncomfortable.

People respect people who respect themselves and value their own needs. When you avoid conflict, you send a message that your needs are inferior to anothers. When you do it excessively, people come to expect that you will certainly accommodate and prioritize their needs over your own.

There are five different conflict styles (collaborating, compromising, competing, accommodating and avoiding), and each style has a time and place for its suitability though we are inclined to lean on one or two styles more frequently. It is okay to sometimes avoid conflict, but if you tend to avoid it even when issues beg to be addressed, you become part of the problem. By being a reliable conflict avoider or accommodator, others become less and less interested in meeting your needs, and they lose respect for you.

Regardless of which conflict style you prefer, you have to get comfortable applying other styles when necessary. Go ahead and apply the collaborative style and even the competitive style when you need to fight or advocate for your needs or the needs of your team. As people see that you are adept with flexing between the styles, they will come to respect you more.

6. Be courageous enough to ask for help and invite critique from others.

Let go of the kind of thinking that says that only weak people need other people. Thats false. Strong people have the courage to admit they need help from other people. They have the courage to allow others to provide assistance. When you ask for help, you show your strength. You show that you are indeed confident in your abilities and have the willingness and courage to accept guidance. You show others that you dont believe yourself to be superior to those around you, and you create opportunities for others to contribute to your development.

Respected leaders seek opportunities to develop themselves and others. Let others help and advise you along the way. People will respect you more when they see that you welcome critique and feedback. Even when you might not really need the help, you can still benefit from asking for it. You will garner more respect just for creating opportunities for others to flex their intellectual or creative muscles more often!

7. Do the right thing even when it will cost more than you want to pay.

I learned a long time ago that an ounce of dishonesty will have far more impact on whether people respect me than a pound of accomplishment ever will. A lot of people get lost here. No advice about how to gain respect would be complete without a category on integrity and ethics.

Ethics is about how we meet the challenge of doing the right thing when that will cost more than we want to pay. -The Josephson Institute of Ethics

We can respect people even if we disagree with them, and we can respect people we dont even like. But you would be hard pressed to find someone who will tell you that they respect people they dont trust or cant count on to use good judgment to make ethically sound decisions especially when those decisions run counter to their own interests.

If you care about garnering more respect, you absolutely must commit to a set of professional standards that reflect high levels of integrity and ethics. Zig Ziglar said the most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity. Hes so right. Ethical leaders have integrity and work to bridge the ethical dilemma gap and build distinguishable standards for behavior. They then hold themselves and others across the organization accountable.

I know youve got this.

Just take a hard look at your behaviors and assess whether your actions may be diminishing the respect you garner from others. People advance professionally for many reasons, and commanding respect is certainly one of them. Make the necessary modifications to your own behavior so that you can gain more respect from your colleagues, your staff and your boss. The results will be reflected in positive and tangible ways that advance your career as well as your professional standing.

Read more:
7 Things You Absolutely Must Do If You Want To Be Respected - Forbes

Story Highlights

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans are more likely to approve of President Donald Trump's job performance than they are to approve of him as a person in the latest Gallup poll, with his ratings on these measures coming in at 40% and 34%, respectively. The largest gaps in Trump's job and personal approval ratings are among Republicans and weekly churchgoers -- both with double-digit gaps. Democrats' approval ratings on the two dimensions are essentially the same (5% job and 6% personal).

Approval of President Donald Trump's Job Performance vs. Ratings of Him as a Person

Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president? Apart from whether you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, what do you think of Trump as a person? Would you say you approve or disapprove of him?

Trump's latest ratings are from a Sept. 16-30 Gallup poll, which spanned an unfolding saga regarding the president's reported attempts to solicit help investigating a potential election rival from foreign leaders. These events have led to an impeachment inquiry from the U.S. House of Representatives but have not immediately had a significant impact on Americans' assessments of Trump's performance as president. His current 40% job approval rating is just slightly lower than Trump's previous 43% in the first half of September. Internal numbers in the latest poll suggest that his approval rating was steady at 40% in both the first week (before the whistleblower case exploded) and the second week of interviewing.

Gallup also updated a question occasionally used with other presidents between 1999 and 2003, which asks respondents for their views of the president personally, separate from their views of his job performance. The question was initiated during the presidency of Bill Clinton as he presided over a strong economy but, like Trump, was embroiled in scandal.

Among most groups, approval of Trump's performance is higher than approval of him as a person.

Trump's 34% personal approval rating is similar to scores Clinton received toward the end of his presidency but much lower than those given to President George W. Bush in his early years in the White House.

The six percentage-point gap between Trump's personal and job approval ratings nationally is narrower than Gallup recorded for Clinton and Bush during their presidencies. However, unlike Trump, Clinton was much more popular as a president than he was as a person while the opposite was true for Bush.

Approval of a President's Performance vs. Approval as a Person, 1999-2019

With less than a year and a half left in office, roughly one in three Americans approved of Clinton personally -- ranging from 29% to 36% from 1999 to 2000. But his job performance ratings were much higher, by between 21 and 32 percentage points. It's likely that Clinton's image had been dinged by his own actions -- which came to light in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent investigations. But with a booming U.S. economy, many Americans were willing to set aside reservations they had about him personally.

Though Clinton's and Trump's personal ratings are similar, all political party groups made distinctions between Clinton's performance and him as a person at the time -- whereas Democrats currently make no such distinctions for Trump. Additionally, Trump's personal image among Republicans is currently much more positive than was the case for Clinton in the eyes of Democrats.

Bush, on the other hand, received greater personal approval ratings than he received for his job performance in his early years in office. Bush enjoyed majority job approval in nearly all polls from 2001 to 2003, but Americans were even more likely to approve of him as a person by between eight and 13 percentage points. Bush's personal approval ratings -- which were taken both pre- and post-9/11 -- more than doubled his disapprovals, ranging from 65% to 70% from 2001 to 2003.

Ratings of Trump as a person are similar to those of Clinton in the final 16 months of his presidency, during a period when Clinton's personal behavior was being heavily criticized by both parties. But there was much more daylight between the personal and job performance ratings of Clinton, who had recently endured an impeachment himself at the time, than is currently the case for Trump.

Clinton's and Bush's respective ratings illustrate that Americans view presidents' performance differently than they view them as people, but that distinction might be lessened in the highly polarized political environment Trump governs in. It is also possible that Democrats' views of Trump are specific to him, seeing him as a president for whom the line between his personal and work behavior may be more blurred.

Still, Trump's personal ratings are sharply lower than his performance ratings among two groups that are key to his base: Republicans and regular churchgoers -- with less than half of the latter group approving of Trump as a person. This could put pressure on Trump to keep these groups satisfied through presidential actions and policies rather than the personal expressions he is wont to make.

Explore President Trump's approval ratings and compare them with those of past presidents in the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center.

View complete question responses and trends.

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Trump Job Approval Higher Than Approval of Him as a Person - Gallup

Microsoft's Surface Pro X uses the company's SQ1 processor, a variation of Qualcomm's 8cx chip for Windows laptops.

We knew we'd get a bunch of new laptops at Microsoft's Surface event on Tuesday. What we didn't know is we'd also get a new Microsoft processor, a Qualcomm-derived chip called the SQ1. That chip in the new Surface Pro X carries a message from Microsoft: It's time for laptops to get phone-like all-day battery life, but not if that means sacrificing processing power to get there.

Microsoft's Surface products, with their integrated hardware and software, serve a dual role. First, they're a serious business at Microsoft. Second, they also let the company show consumers and other computer makers Microsoft's view of the future of personal computing.

The SQ1 gives Microsoft a bit more control over that future while telling software makers they'd better get with the program, too.

And it could offer better competition to Apple, whose influential designs already are tightly integrated. iPhones and iPads use Apple's own A series of Arm-family processors, and its future MacBookis rumored to be embracing Arm chips, too.

Now playing: Watch this: First look at Surface Pro X, Pro 7, Laptop 3

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For Microsoft, steering its own chip designs is "crucial for maximizing user experience and battery life, as Apple has demonstrated over the last decade with custom iPhone chips," Forrester analyst Frank Gillett said.

Arm-based PCs haven't caught fire so far, even with good battery life and an ability to connect to mobile networks. They just can't match the performance of x86-family chips from Intel and AMD, and there are software compatibility problems since mainstream software for x86 chips won't run on Arm machines.

But Microsoft isn't afraid to raise performance expectations this time around.

The SQ1 gives the Surface Pro X "incredible power," said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president for Microsoft's modern life, search and devices group. "We've got amazing graphics power. We're going to do AI on the chip."

The companies didn't share many performance specifics, though. The graphics performance is twice that of the eighth-generation Intel Core processor from two years ago or of last year's Qualcomm 850 smartphone chip, Qualcomm said. And Microsoft preferred to focus on efficiency, not raw performance, when comparing the Surface Pro X to its Intel-powered Surface Pro 6.

"This product has three times more performance per watt than the Surface Pro 6," Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay said at the event. That older model Microsoft laptop uses an Intel eighth-generation Core processor.

Microsoft is hardly abandoning Intel, its business partner for decades. Indeed, two new Surface designs rely on Intel chips -- the Ice Lake chip for premium laptops this year, like the 13-inch Surface Laptop 3, and the Lakefield chip for next year's more exotic dual-screen Surface Neo that's something like a folding tablet. Microsoft also shared the love with perennial Intel rival AMD, picking its mobile Ryzen chip for the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3.

But figuring out how to bring Arm chips into the Microsoft fold -- and let mainstream PC users benefit from battery life that means they can just leave their charger at home -- is the bigger challenge.

Arm licenses its chip designs and lets others build compatible models of their own design, and a rich library of options can be added -- "intellectual property" in industry licensing terms. That flexibility has let many Arm licensees tailor chips for different products, prices, performance and power consumption levels.

Microsoft's SQ1 processor for the Surface Pro X laptop

Now it's Microsoft's turn to do the tailoring. "We brought our engineering and we brought our IP with the Qualcomm team to build basically a brand-new chip," Mehdi said.

The move is "really smart," said Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart. "It suggests unique capabilities and it allows Microsoft to avoid direct comparisons with other Qualcomm-based products," the Arm-based laptops available from companies like HP, Lenovo, Asus and Samsung.

The SQ1 is based on Qualcomm's mainstream offering for PCs, the Snapdragon 8cx, Qualcomm said, but it's not the same chip you'll see in 8cx-based laptops. For one thing, the graphics processing unit (GPU) is different.

"The GPU and its cores were optimized for Surface Pro X specifically to enhance the performance and user experience for graphics-rich applications," Qualcomm said. "Microsoft wanted a truly mobile experience, from long battery life to rich displays to LTE connectivity and of course to be 'instant on' like a smartphone."

Boosting graphics performance is a good idea, said Real World Tech analyst David Kanter.

"Qualcomm's GPU can run Windows, but it's weaker than Intel, AMD and Nvidia graphics," he said. That's especially the case when it comes to the critical Windows DirectX drivers, software that apps use to control the graphics hardware, he said.

The SQ1 includes dedicated hardware: the fourth-generation AI Engine also used in the flagship Snapdragon 855 processor, Qualcomm said. Accelerating AI software boosts software that uses brainlike processing for tasks like understanding human speech, recognizing who's in a photo or automatically editing video.

One of the big sticking points for Arm PCs has been software incompatibility. The Surface Pro X and the fact that Microsoft is willing to co-design a special chip for it could help Microsoft lure those developers, though.

Adobe demonstrates its Fresco drawing app on Microsoft's Surface Pro X. It'll bring other Creative Cloud apps to Arm-powered PCs.

One big holdout has been Adobe, maker of Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Illustrator and many other apps used by creative types. But Adobe shared Microsoft's stage to demonstrate its new Fresco drawing app on the Surface Pro X and commit to bringing more of its Creative Cloud software suite along, too.

"Surface is an important platform for Creative Cloud and will become even more important in the future," said Scott Belsky, Adobe's chief product officer for Creative Cloud. More than half of today's Surface customers are also Creative Cloud customers, he said, so Adobe decided to bring "much of" the software suite to Arm-based Surface machines, he said.

"We're working hard to bring other key parts of Creative Cloud to the Surface Pro X as soon as possible," Belsky said. Adobe declined to share details about which apps besides Fresco will arrive, though.

Software support is the ultimate key to the success of the Surface Pro X and other Arm-based laptops, Forrester's Gillett said. "It all comes down to whether developers -- and Microsoft's Windows team -- can make the experience sing without x86 processors."

Now playing: Watch this: Microsoft reveals 5.3mm ultrathin Surface Pro X

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Here's why Microsoft wanted a custom chip for the Surface Pro X's brains - CNET