[extropy-chat] CSO Online: Securing the Post-Human Future

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

In the last few months the CIO Magazine published a good review of
James Hughes' Citizen Cyborg and a good article on transhumanism. A
few days ago the CSO Online ("The Resource for Security Executives",
voted 2004 ASBPE Magazine of the Year and Winner - Best New Web
Publication) published another good article on "Securing the
Post-Human Future", beginning with "CSOs will very likely live to see
the day when human brains are easily augmentable through an array of
knowledge implants, apps and Wi-Fi capabilities". Both CIO Magazine
and CSO Online are examples of mainstream business journals for IT
professionals open to current ideas on human enhancement.
The article quotes, of course, Fukuyama's recent Foreign Policy
statement on transhumanism as the single idea currently posing the
greatest threat to humanity, and continues with a good summary of some
transhumanist ideas:

"Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced
individual enhancement. While it includes physical modifications
(diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube
bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles), most of the interest in
the technology focuses on the integration of brains and computers -
especially brains and networks. Sample transhumanist apps could
include cell phone implants (which would allow virtual telepathy),
memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex accelerators,
collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and a very
long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology
could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and
out of host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that,
theoretically, would have no definitive nor necessary end. That is,
immortality, of a sort.
While some of these abilities are clearly quite far off, others are
already attracting researchers (see "Making the Head Case," Page 52),
and none are known (at the moment at least) to be impossible. Fukuyama
obviously felt the technology is close enough at hand to write a book
on it".

In the rest of the article the author avoids value judgements and
adopts a matter-of-fact approach: these things will come, and perhaps
sooner than we think despite Fukuyama's objections. He focuses mainly
on neurotechnology and the future enterprise secutity problems
associated with brains running on a network: "In other words, it looks
as though the transhumanist era is going to present a host of problems
for which there are no immediate solutions. Consider, for example, the
extremely vexing problem of neurosecurity".

All links are in the online version of this post at:
http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/inthenews/cso-online-securing-the-post-human-future/
I also posted it to Always On:
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=7879_0_5_0_C
to stimulate sone interest in a mainstream community.