<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div><br><br>On Mar 2, 2010, at 6:41 PM, "spike" <<a href="mailto:spike66@att.net">spike66@att.net</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><div></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><span></span><blockquote type="cite"><span></span></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span></span></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span></span></blockquote><span></span><br><span>Feel free to tell us something about you.</span><br></div></blockquote><br><div>Thank you. I live in South<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); "> Florida, where it is currently 72 degrees with a lovely ocean breeze. I work for a small publishing company, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); ">editing several periodicals pertaining to military vehicles. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.226562); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.226562);"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); ">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:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.226562); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.226562);"><br></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); ">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". <br><br>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:<a href="http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html"><a href="http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html">http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html</a></a>. 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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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). <br><br>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.<br><br>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>Take a look at YouTube or his own site of the work of the performance artist Stelarc, who is a transhumanist. <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Sarah Wood <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:wood.sarah.m@gmail.com"><a href="mailto:wood.sarah.m@gmail.com">wood.sarah.m@gmail.com</a></a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); margin-top: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex; ">Do you have any reading recommendations? I thought you might have some stuff from your History of the Future course. <br></blockquote><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 35, 163);"><br></span></div></div></span></body></html>