[ExI] Question from a neophyte

[Sarah Wood]

On Mar 2, 2010, at 6:41 PM, "spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:


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> Feel free to tell us something about you.

Thank you. I live in South Florida, where it is currently 72 degrees  
with a lovely ocean breeze. I work for a small publishing company,  
editing several periodicals pertaining to military vehicles.

And in the interest of sparking further discussion, I will share with  
you the reading recommondations made to me by one of my former  
professors with whom I still keep in touch:

Sure! Ranges from the modestly sane to the totally wacky. Also this is  
a topic where it's hard to tell what's "plausible fiction" and what's  
"implausible nonfiction".

Ray Kurzweil is a major presence in transhumanism discussions. You  
could read his Age of Spiritual Machines and move on to The  
Singularity Is Near. If you want the short version on the Singularity,  
sometimes known as "the geek version of the Rapture", read Vernor  
Vinge's online essay that invented the term and the concept:http:// 
mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html. Kevin Kelly's Out of Control is  
another book on singularity-type ideas, much more skeptical or  
concerned. If you want out and out skepticism, read Bill Joy's online  
manifesto, "The Future Doesn't Need Us", which is all over the place.

Simon Young's Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto, is a good  
overview of "polemical transhumanism", e.g., people who advocate  
transhumanism as a political and scientific objective. Kurzweil is  
also a promoter of transhumanism, but Vinge isn't necessarily: his  
idea about the Singularity is that it's inevitable but that the  
precise nature of its transformations are by nature unpredictable.

Hans Moravec is a kind of transhumanist founder--he's a roboticist who  
taught at CMU for many years and promoted the idea of uploading our  
consciousness into what he called "bush robots", meaning robots that  
would not have humanoid forms (and therefore would not limit our  
capabilities or possibilities to what he sees as the clumsiness of the  
humanoid form).

Francis Fukuyama, the moderately well-known conservative figure who  
became a darling in the waning years of the Reagan Revolution for his  
argument that we had reached the "end of history" past which no  
possible alternatives to liberal democracy could ever present  
themselves, wrote a surprising and rather odd book about transhumanism  
called Our Posthuman Future, in which he suddenly perceives  
transhumanism as the one thing which could trump liberal democracy,  
not entirely in a good way. I wouldn't start with it, but if you're  
sufficiently interested, it's worth a look.

Transhumanist stuff dovetails with the literature on nanotechnology,  
AI and genetic engineering at some point or another--but that's  
another difference between transhumanists of various kinds, namely,  
which technology they tend to favor or see as critical to the project  
of transhumanism. Anyway, you can follow the path into those  
literatures and find a lot of transhumanist-oriented work as well as  
some more skeptical or hostile views of transhumanism.

There's some influential science fiction on the subject, too: William  
Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Charles Stross most notably. Stross' recent  
novel Accelerando is practically a guided tour of work on  
transhumanism and complexity theory. Vinge's Rainbow's End is another  
good work in the genre. I also liked John Wright's The Golden Age, but  
it's less closely tied into the literature on transhumanism.

Take a look at YouTube or his own site of the work of the performance  
artist Stelarc, who is a transhumanist.

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Sarah Wood <wood.sarah.m at gmail.com>  
wrote:
Do you have any reading recommendations? I thought you might have some  
stuff from your History of the Future course.

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