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[dalovindj]

Yale recently hosted the World Transhumanist Association conference according to this Village Voice article! Nice to see them getting a little bit less like a Star Trek convention and more like a collection of important ethical voices in a serious forum.

International academics and activists, they met to lay the groundwork for a society that would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren’t necessarily human at all. A good many of these 160 thinkers aspire to immortality and omniscience through uploading human consciousness into ever evolving machines.

This is a really interesting article. This could be a Great Debates type of thing, but I’m more just pointing it out because it makes me happy to see this discussion reach a broader audience. I have considered myself a member of the Transhuman/Extropian movement for many years. It’s nice to see it moving from the fringe to the masses. If this thread ends up getting moved or spawning a GD thread that’s fine by me, but mostly I just wanted to say “Cool.”

I especialy loved this part:

If he’s right, we can’t afford to renounce a role in a new intelligence’s emergence or cede the chance to imprint it with cultural values. One day, that first cybernetic, genetically spliced, or wholly artificially created being will step into the town square of democracy. What then of the seminal words of our society: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“Men,” or even “human beings,” won’t be adequate labels anymore. Life will have been radically redefined, along with the fundamental events of birth and death that bracket it. Equality will be moot, and enforcing it could reasonably be seen as unjust to beings with categorically different or greater abilities. Blake’s words ring here: “One Law for the Lion & the Ox is Oppression.”

We are coming up on some interesting times for sure. . .

DaLovin’ Dj