TRANSHUMANISM
Details
Topic:
TRANSHUMANISM
Chairperson:
Mary Kennedy
Moderator:
Spencer Sinclare
Meetup Date:
Wednesday, October 15th 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., with a 15 minute break at 8:00 p.m.
Meetup Location:
Upstairs at The Bent Mast, 512 Simcoe St. Victoria, BC, V8V 1L8
Members:
If you plan to attend, please take a moment and RSVP. If your plans change and you cannot attend, to the right of your name there are three dots. Please click on them and move yourself to "Not Going."
Thank you :)
Quotes:
“Transhumanism is the ethics and science of using things like biological and genetic engineering to transform our bodies and make us a more powerful species.”
~ Dan Brown
"By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it."
~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
Synopsis:
Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available new and future technologies that can greatly enhance longevity, cognition, and well-being.
Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies. Some transhumanists speculate that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings of such vastly greater abilities as to merit the label of posthuman beings.
Another topic of transhumanist research is how to protect humanity against existential risks, including artificial general intelligence, asteroid impact, gray goo, pandemic, societal collapse, and nuclear warfare.
The biologist Julian Huxley popularised the term "transhumanism" in a 1957 essay. The contemporary meaning of the term was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, a man who changed his name to FM-2030. In the 1960s, he taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles, and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity as "transhuman". The assertion laid the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990, organizing in California a school of thought that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement.
Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy and religion.
Watch:
"The coming transhuman era: Jason Sosa at TEDxGrandRapids" on YouTube.