A new feature story out on book Transhuman Citizen:
A former presidential candidate who believes a dramatic increase in science funding can help humans achieve biological immortality has told Newsweek he is considering a third White House run in 2028.
Zoltan Istvan ran as an independent candidate during the 2016 presidential election when he attracted widespread media attention for driving a bus modified to look like a coffin from San Francisco to Washington D.C., to illustrate his believe that death can be overcome.
In 2019 he challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination using the campaign motto “Upgrading America,” in what he admitted was primarily a stunt to increase conservative interest in his ideas.
Istvan is part of the global transhumanist movement of people who want to use emerging technology such as artificial intelligence to radically enhance human capabilities. Many transhumanists believe humans will eventually achieve biological immortality, meaning people will no longer die from illness or old age, and could potentially have their minds uploaded to computers and live virtually.
Want to find out how and why Anders Sandberg got interested in transhumanism and ethics? Want to hear his take on the singularity? Check out his interview for SingularityWeblog.com
In this study we show that residual muscle–tendon afferents enable a person with transtibial amputation to directly neuromodulate biomimetic locomotion, enabling neuroprosthetic adaptations to varying walking speeds, terrains and perturbations. Such versatile and biomimetic gait has not been attainable in contemporary bionic legs without the reliance upon predefined intrinsic control frameworks1,2. Central to the improved neural controllability demonstrated in this study are muscle–tendon sensory organs26,27 that deliver proprioceptive afferents. The surgically reconstructed, agonist–antagonist muscles emulate natural agonistic contraction and antagonistic stretch, thereby generating proprioceptive afferents corresponding to residual muscle movements.
During the ground contact phase of walking, the reconstructed muscle–tendon dynamics of the AMI do not precisely emulate intact biological muscle dynamics. The residual muscles of the AMI contract and stretch freely within the amputated residuum, only pulling against one another and not against the external environment. In distinction, for intact biological limbs, the muscle–tendons span the ankle joint, exerting large forces through an interaction with the external environment. These interactive muscle–tendon dynamics in intact biological limbs are believed to play a critical role in spinal reflexes, in addition to providing feedback for volitional motor control12. Therefore, for this study, the demonstrated capacity of augmented afferents to enable biomimetic gait neuromodulation is surprising given that their total magnitude is largely reduced compared with those of intact biological limbs26,27,45,46.
Dr. Ben Murnane has published an Opinion piece in FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education, a major US think thank. The essay covers #transhumanism and the new biography Transhuman Citizen, out in 10 days.
It’s telling that with the rise of AI the first instinct of many politicians is to regulate it.
Those who know Oxford University for its literary luminaries might be surprised to learn that some of the most important reflections on emerging technologies come from its hallowed halls. While the leading tech innovators in Silicon Valley capture imaginations with their bold visions of future singularities, mind-machine melding, and digital immortality by 2045, they rarely engage as deeply with the philosophical issues surrounding such developments as their like-minded scholars over the pond. This essay will briefly highlight some of the key contributions of Oxford University’s professors Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu to the transhumanist movement. It will also show how this movement’s focus on radical autonomy in biotechnical enhancements shapes the wider global bioethical conversation.
As the lead author of the Transhumanist FAQ, Bostrom provides the closest the movement has to an institutional catechism. He is, in a sense, the Ratzinger of Transhumanism. The first paragraph of the seminal text emphasizes the evolutionary vision of his school. Transhumanism’s incessant pursuit of radical technological transformation is “based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.” Current humans are but one intriguing yet greatly improvable iteration of human existence. Think of the first iPhone and how unattractive 2007’s most cutting-edge technology is in 2024.
In particular, transhumanists encourage radical physical, cognitive, mood, moral, and lifespan enhancements. The movement seeks to defeat humanity’s perennial enemies of aging, sickness, suffering, and death. Bostrom recognizes that he is facing the same foes as Christianity and other traditional religions. Yet he is confident that Transhumanism, through science and technology, will be far more successful than outdated superstitions. Biotechnological advances are more reliable for this worldly benefit than religion’s promises of some mysterious next life. Transhumanists claim no need for “supernatural powers or divine intervention” in their avowedly “naturalistic outlook” since they rely instead on “rational thinking and empiricism” and “continued scientific, technological, economic, and human development.” Nonetheless, Bostrom and his companions recognize that not all technology is created equal.
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This video explores the 4th to the 10th dimensions of time. Other related terms: advanced civilization, ai, artificial intelligence, future business tech, future technology, future tech, future business technologies, future technologies, aliens, higher dimensions, 10th dimension, 4th dimension, 5th dimension, 6th dimension, 7th dimension, 8th dimension, 9th dimension, time travel, etc.
Creating robots to safely aid disaster victims is one challenge; executing flexible robot control that takes advantage of the material’s softness is another. The use of pliable soft materials to collaborate with humans and work in disaster areas has drawn much recent attention. However, controlling soft dynamics for practical applications has remained a significant challenge.
In collaboration with the University of Tokyo and Bridgestone Corporation, Kyoto University has now developed a method to control pneumatic artificial muscles, which are soft robotic actuators. Rich dynamics of these drive components can be exploited as a computational resource.
Artificial muscles control rich soft component dynamics by using them as a computational resource. (Image: MEDICAL FIG.)
This led to the creation of a “bionic eye” that uses a combination of AI and several advanced scanning techniques, including optical imaging, thermal imaging, and tomography (the technique used for CT scans), to capture differences between parts of the scrolls that were blank and those that contained ink — all without having to physically unroll them.
Where’s Plato? On April 23, team leader Graziano Ranocchia announced that the group had managed to extract about 1,000 words from a scroll titled “The History of the Academy” and that the words revealed Plato’s burial place: a private part of the garden near a shrine to the Muses.
The recovered text, which accounted for about 30% of the scroll, also revealed that Plato may have been sold into slavery between 404 and 399 BC — historians previously thought this had happened later in the philosopher’s life, around 387 BC.
