2011 Frontiers of Engineering: The Shape of Things to Come: Frontiers of Additive Manufacturing

National Academy of Engineering
2011 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
September 19-21, 2011
Google, Inc.
Mountain View, California


The Shape of Things to Come: Frontiers of Additive Manufacturing
September 19, 2011 
Presented by Dr. Hod Lipson.


ABSTRACT: Google hosted 100 attendees of the 2011 Nat'l Academy of Engineering's U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium (FOE) at our Mountain View office and Dinah's Garden Hotel in Palo Alto. The symposium is an annual three-day meeting that brings together 100 of the nation's outstanding young engineers (ages 30-45) from industry, academia, and government to discuss pioneering technical and leading-edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors.


About the speaker: Dr. Hod Lipson is an Associate Professor of the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University in New York.


New Technologies like additive manufacturing (3D printing) will change everything, from the way we produce things to the way we interact with them...

Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Post-Scarcity Anarchism is a collection of essays written by Murray Bookchin and first published in 1971 by Ramparts Press.^[1] It outlines the possible form anarchism might take under conditions of post-scarcity. It is one of Bookchin's major works,^[2] and its radical thesis provoked controversy for being utopian and messianic in its faith in the liberatory potential of technology.

Synopsis

Bookchin's titular "post scarcity anarchism" is an economic system based on social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and an abundance of fundamental resources. Bookchin argues that post-industrial societies are also post-scarcity societies, and can thus imagine "the fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a technology of abundance".^[3] The self-administration of society is now made possible by technological advancement and, when technology is used in an ecologically sensitive manner, the revolutionary potential of society will be much changed.^[4]
Bookchin claims that the expanded production made possible by the technological advances of the twentieth century were in the pursuit of market profit and at the expense of the needs of humans and of ecological sustainability. The accumulation of capital can no longer be considered a prerequisite for liberation, and the notion that obstructions such as the state, social hierarchy and vanguard political parties are necessary in the struggle for freedom of the working classes can be dispelled as a myth.

Exegesis

Bookchin's thesis is a more radical form of anarchism than that of Noam Chomsky; while both concur that information technology, being controlled by the bourgeoisie, is not necessarily liberatory, Bookchin does not refrain from countering this control by developing new, innovative and radical technologies of the self.^[3] Postanarchist scholar Lewis Call compares Bookchin's language to that of Marcel Mauss, George Bataille and Herbert Marcuse, and notes that Bookchin anticipates the importance of cybernetic technology to the development of human potential over a decade before the origin of cyberpunk.^[3] The collection has been cited favourably by Marius de Geus as presenting "inspiring sketches" of the future,^[5] and as "an insightful analysis" and "a discussion of revolutionary potential in a technological society" by Peggy Kornegger in her essay "Anarchism: The Feminist Collection".

References

1. ^ "Post-scarcity anarchism, [WorldCat.org]". WorldCat.org. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
2. ^ Smith, Mark (1999). Thinking through the Environment. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415211727.
3. ^ ^{a b c d} Call, Lewis (2002). Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books. ISBN 0739105221.
4. ^ ^{a b} "Post-Scarcity Anarchism". AK Press. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
5. ^ Geus, Marius (1998). Ecological Utopias. Utrecht: International Books. ISBN 9057270196.
6. ^ Kornegger, Peggy (2003). "Anarchism: The Feminist Collection". In Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Quiet Rumours. Stirling: AK Press. ISBN 1902593405.

 Source : Wikipedia

Occupy Wall Street Hackathons Produce Digital Tools and New Activists

Groups of programmers gathered in three cities this weekend to build digital tools for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Several of those tools have already launched, and in many cases they’re being maintained by activists who’ve never held a sign in a park.

“I was waiting to see how I should be involved,” says Jake Levitas, who attended the San Francisco hackathon. “In the last week, I thought, ‘I know I’m going to dedicate a lot of time to this movement. I don’t know how, but I know I want to be involved.’”

When he found out about the hackathon through Facebook, he knew how he wanted to participate. Levitas, working with a small team at the event, started a design library called OccupyDesign. It’s a database of Occupy Wall Street protest placards, logistical signs and icons — with a strong focus on infographics. The idea, he says, is that it is harder to argue with facts presented visually than it is a talking point, and that a centralized visual library can help the protests make a strong impression. And he hopes this project will get more designers like him involved.

“Especially if they don’t think they can sleep on the street for a while,” he says, “they don’t know how they can plug in.”

Around the same time Levitas was working on OccupyDesign in San Francisco, Mark Belinsky was working on a decentralized decision-making platform that he calls OccupyVotes on the opposite coast. Belinsky, the president of a non-profit called Digital Democracy, used his time at the New York City hackathon to turn a platform he developed for the Jan. 25 protests in Egypt into a tool for articulating the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“It kind of struck me, of course we can use it here, because the media keeps asking what the protesters want,” he says.

OccupyVotes simply asks users to cast votes for one of two movement goals. For instance, “allow collective bargaining” or “enact mandatory limits/caps on campaign spending” are two options. Users, theoretically Occupy Wall Street activists, choose one idea or “I can’t decide” and are immediately presented with another choice. Every idea stays “above the fold” and anyone is free to add a new idea. The hope is that eventually this approach will sort out what the decentralized group as a whole finds important.

Since Belinsky sent OccupyVotes to Occupy Wall Street listservs, put up a Facebook page and started tweeting about it, the site has collected about 10,000 votes. So far “repeal corporate personhood” and “allow the Bush tax cuts to expire” are the most popular ideas and “another bailout” is the least popular. Soon Belinsky hopes to send volunteers with tablet computers into Zuccotti Park to collect votes from the protesters there.

Other hackathon attendees built a group texting app for on-the-fly coordination, a Q&A site for occupy organizers, a video-editing platform that doubles as an advertising platform, an app that can use multiple cellphones in a small area to amplify one person’s voice and offered suggestions for the Occupied Wall Street Journal‘s website. Their projects are in various stages of launch.

Matt Ewing, the organizer of the San Francisco hackathon, said he solicited ideas from Occupy listservs before the hackathon. Many of those ideas were among the six built by about 40 programmers during the event, but some came from the programmers themselves.

“I think we’ve built some powerful tools that when deployed will help grow the movement,” he says. “It’s a small part of a movement that is constantly getting bigger, but an important part.”

Source : http://mashable.com/2011/10/19/occupy-wall-street-hackathons-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Embracing Post-Privacy !

Optimism towards a future where there is "Nothing to hide"

The breaking away of privacy in the digital world is often understood as something dangerous, and for good reasons. But could there be opportunities in it, too? Do the current cultural and technological trends only dissolve the protected area of privacy, or could they dissolve as well the pressures that privacy is supposed to liberate us from? What if we witness a transformation of civilization so profound that terms like "private" and "public" lose their meaning altogether? Maybe we won't need "privacy" at all in the future because we will value other, new liberties more strongly?

In the digital world, more and more data is accumulated about us. More and more methods of datamining are invented to extract information from these data. The youth grows up enjoying informational exhibitionism to a degree many find irresponsible. Ever greater parts of life are integrated into the global public information stream. Will privacy end? If so, what about liberty? We have to look closely at the value of privacy. What does it do for values like freedom, individualism or intimacy? Why is this protected area of privacy necessary?

The conditions of privacy are rapidly changing. We have to evaluate these changes with a perspective that does justice to new modes of identity, sociality and culture: Why hide your personal weirdnesses if 21st century society thrives on difference and originality instead of conformism and predictability? What identity is there to keep private if "identity" is more and more what you externalize from yourself into the internet? Is privacy worth missing out on participation in the global "hive mind" and the "ambient intimacy" of every mind connected with every other mind?

Such questions may sound utopian and/or crazy. They may sound irresponsible, considering anti-privacy trends that may seem much more real and dangerous -- like the surveillance state. But even if you disagree with their validity, they may provoke deeper thinking about the state and value of privacy in a world that is changing more and more rapidly -- and that could hardly be a bad thing.

More information about the 25th Chaos Communication Congress can be found via the Chaos Communication Congress website:http://bit.ly/25c3_program

Source: http://bit.ly/25c3_videos

Speaker: Christian Heller / plomlompom

How Drugs Helped Invent the Internet & The Singularity: Jason Silva on "Turning Into Gods"

The Singularity Summit is the premiere futurist conference (it's happening in New York City on October 15 and 16).Among the speakers is Current TV's Jason Silva, the director of the forthcoming documentary, Turning into Gods. Taking a page from Timothy Leary, the folks behind the Whole Earth Catalog, Ray Kurzweil, and other visionaries, Silva's work looks at the ways in technological progress is allowing humans to direct their own evolution. And the ways in which prohibitionists of all stripes push back on new ways of being human. "People have always sort of been scared of new technologies," says Silva. "But in the end we assimilate them and they improve the quality of our lives."

Interview by Reason's Zach Weissmueller. Shot and edited by Sharif Matar. About 11 minutes long.

Know and Remember Everything, Always and Instantly

Imagine you know everything on Wikipedia, in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the contents of every book in digital form. When someone asks you what you did twenty years ago, on demand you recall with perfect accuracy every sensation and thought from that moment. Sifting and parsing all of this information is effortless and unconscious. Any fact, instant of time, skill, technique, or data point that you’ve experienced or can access on the internet is in your mind.
Cybernetic brains might make that possible. As computing power and storage continue to plod along their 18-month doubling cycle, there is no reason to believe we won’t at least have cybernetic sub-brains within the coming century. We already offload a tremendous amount of information and communication to our computers and smartphones. Why not make the process more integrated? Of course, what I’m engaging in right now is rampant speculation. But a neuro-computer interface is a possibility. More than that: cyber-brains may be necessary.
The idea of a cyber-brain is pretty simple. Our brains are all-in-one systems that store, process, organize, and collect data. A cybernetic brain would augment one, many, or all parts of that system. The processing and organization part, not to mention analysis and synthesis, would require something resembling artificial intelligence. People would probably be wary to jack themselves into an A.I. helper brain. So, based on current trends and my rudimentary knowledge of computer progress, my guess is that cybernetic collection, storage, and retrieval of information will be the easiest pieces to integrate into our biological brains: a neural external hard drive. We’ve externalized the storage process for ages – the written word, anyone? But what if we could internalize it again?
That’s what cyber-brains could allow. Ever since we started writing things down, we’ve been trying to make it faster and easier to write, to read what others write, and to remember what we read. A cyber-brain takes the externalization potential of computers (massive amounts of stable and inexpensive data storage with rapid and accurate recall) and removes the lag time. Instead of sitting at your computer or pulling out your phone, opening the file, and taking in the contents, the information is already in your cyber-sub-brain. Anything you store on your cyber-brain, from a song to a novel to the contents of Wikipedia, would be as easily and rapidly accessible as your most vivid memories currently are. Speaking of, your memories would be stored more accurately and permanently than regular ol’ neurons can allow. Almost any piece of information you might need, whether experienced or downloaded, would be at your mental fingertips.
We face a spectacular information glut. It is impossible for any one person to, say, watch every good movie on Netflix, read every informative entry on Wikipedia, and follow every worthy news story. There just isn’t enough time to absorb and process all that content. But what if I didn’t have to actually watch or play or read the item in question to grok its quality and content? Cyber-brains might allow you to, a la Neo and Trinity in The Matrix, to download huge data sets and immediately utilize them. The major advantage is that the time-cost of gathering information becomes nearly zero. Thus, the extra time is freed up for information to be analyzed, synthesized, and, more importantly, utilized.
In the coming years, we may need a form of externalized cybernetic memory to compensate for the overwhelming influx of data. The ability to take digital files and put that content within direct, immediate access of the mind would at least give the average person a fighting chance.The possible benefits are almost unimaginable. Instead of the current information crisis, where the wealth of the world’s knowledge is available at a mouse-click but there is literally not enough time to absorb it all, we would be faced with a world of ultra-informed individuals. What would that world look like?
The optimistic part of me wants to believe all of that data would become knowledge that would lead to happier relationships, more logical decisions (e.g. voting, finances), and a better world would result. The pessimistic part of me fears a world of cynics and nihilists, simultaneously overwhelmed by and indifferent to the wealth of information they possess. The world would continue as it is, just a bit more jaded by what we all know.
The realistic part of me suspects something in between. In a world of cyber-brains, everyone would have nearly the same degree of information. However, information is just information until a mind processes and understands it. Thinking would still take a lot of work, and sometimes letting someone else do the thinking for you is still easier. ”Education” would be all practice and application. Granted, your basic intelligence would limit your processing power. Even though an infant with a cyber-brain might “know” calculus, she wouldn’t be able to understand calculus. Epistemology aside, the take away point is that a cyber-brain would eliminate the need for lectures, text-books, and rote memorization. Critical thinking and creative utilization would become the main priorities of education. Perhaps social stratification due to pure intelligence would be more noticeable, or maybe it’ll be willpower and determination that draw the lines.
My hope is that people would at least be more skeptical and the most egregious liars (coughGlennBeckcough) would have much less flexibility in spinning the facts their way. The first step towards understanding is raw data. The more people who have data, the more people will have real knowledge. What they do with that knowledge is still their prerogative. So I suspect the more things change, the more they will stay the same.
Sadly, cyber-brains are still a long, long way away. Until then, I guess we just won’t know.

Link : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2011/05/05/know-and-remember-everything-always-and-instantly/

Histories of Human Innovation as Histories of Computation

Innovation	Viewed as a Computation
Speech	Moving from gestures to speech gives people a higher bandwidth channel for communicating their thoughts. Society becomes able to perform more complicated computations.
Hunting and fishing	Knowing where to look for game means mentally simulating animal behavior, that is, it means emulating a computation. Using bait means influencing an animal’s computation by applying the proper inputs.
Agriculture	Knowing that seeds compute plants involves insight into the process of wetware computation. Plowing is a form of soil randomization. Irrigation is a way to program the analog flow of water. Crop rotation is an algorithm to optimize yields.
Animal husbandry	Caring for animal requires insight into their computational homeostasis. Selecting optimal individuals for further breeding is genetic engineering on the hoof.
Wheel	Wheeled carts allow long-range glider-like transferal of embodied information, making society’s computation more complex.
Law	A legal code is a program for social interactions. Enforcing the code produces high-level determinism which makes the system easier to manipulate.
Surveying	Surveys allow a society to determine simple address codes for physical locations. Space becomes digital.
Calendar	Noting the solar system’s cycles marks coordinates in time. Time becomes digital.
Sailing	Sailors learn to simulate and tweak the analog computation of airflow effects. Course planning involves higher-level simulation.
Pottery	The clay and the brushed-on glazes are the input, the kiln is the computer, the pot is the output.
Brewing and fermentation	The vat is a biocomputer, sensitive to the input variables of malt, sugar, and yeast. Over time, the best yeast strains are sought out by tasting and comparing; this is hill-climbing in a gustatory fitness landscape.
Spinning and weaving	The yarn is computed from the fibers. Weaving digitizes a surface into warp/woof coordinates. The loom is the first programmable mechanical computer.
Mining, smelting, and metallurgy	Mining is a form of data retrieval. The blast furnace transforms ore inputs into slag and metal outputs. Metallurgy and chemistry concern the computational rules by which matter combines and transforms.
Writing	Writing translates speech into a format portable across space and time. A written text promotes long-distance information exchange and long-term memory storage.
The alphabet	Using a limited number of symbols digitizes writing. Use of the alphabet also simplifies the algorithm for writing. The democratization of writing allows people to write things they wouldn’t be allowed to say.
Printing press	The type letters act as primitive symbols that are assembled into a kind of program--- which prints a page. Printing multiple copies of a text enhances class four communication.
Books	The book amasses large amounts of text into portable form. The book is the precursor of the hard drive.
Universities	A university provides a node where adults can exchange very large amounts of information. Given that the students go out and affect the society as a whole, the university is in some sense a central processing unit for the social hive mind, drawing together and processing society’s thoughts.
Water wheel and windmill	These devices convert chaotic fluid motions into regular periodic form. The excess information is returned to the fluid as turbulence.
Gunpowder	Bullets are high-speed gliders. Shooting someone allows an individual to do a remote erase. Reckless, catastrophic killing enhances interest in long-term information storage.
Machine tools	By creating precise mechanical tools for making machines, we model the biological process of self-reproduction. The machines come alive and begin evolving towards greater complexity.
Clocks	A finer-scale calendar, a zoom into the time dimension. Clocks use class two systems of gears that do the same thing over and over. Clocks are a tabletop model of determinism.
Steam engine	The steam engine is an artificially alive device that eats coal and transforms it into motion. The chaos of fire is converted into the reliable class two oscillation of the pistons.
Locomotive	When placed upon wheels, the steam engine becomes an autonomous glider. The country-to-city diffusion rate is changed, which in turn alters the Zhabotinsky scrolls of population movement.
Internal combustion engine	An evolutionary advance above the steam engine, and an early example of compressing the size of computational hardware.
Factory assembly line	The factory represents a computing system that codifies the procedures of a given craft. The possibility of mass production allows us to view physical objects as information, as abstract procedures to be implemented as many times as we please. Three dimensional objects can now be reproduced and disseminated as readily as books. Mass-produced devices become plug-ins for the computations embodied in people’s homes.
Movies	A temporal sequence is modeled by a series of discrete frames. An early form of virtual reality.
Automobile	The personal vehicle allows individuals to control transportation. A formerly centralized technology is now in the hands of the people. Meetings and markets can be freely arranged, making the economy’s computation more class four.
Electrical generators and motors	Electricity collapses the length of society’s computation cycles. The system clock speeds up. Electrical lights disrupt the cycle of day and night; computation becomes continuous. There is now less of a border between the media and the human nervous system. People begin to view themselves as components plugged into the hive mind.
Telegraph	Writing is transmitted as a digital binary code. Society begins to grow its electrical network.
Telephone	Unlike the telegraph, the telephone is a peer-to-peer medium--- you can make a phone call from your home without having to deal with a telegrapher. People are free to exchange “unimportant” information, that is, to talk about their moods and emotions, thus in fact exchanging a much higher-level kind of information than before.
Plastics	By designing new materials, chemists begin to program brute matter. Deformable and moldable, plastics can take on arbitrarily computed shapes. Objects are now programmable.
Radio	While books could broadcast digitized thoughts, radio broadcasts analog emotion. The hive mind gains power, as listeners form realtime virtual crowds.
Airplane	When riding in a plane, one can look out the window and see a landscape as an undivided whole, gaining a notion of a nation as a unit. With familiarity, people stop looking out the airplane windows, and air travel becomes a hyperlink, a teleportation device. In the United States, the “flyover” states become invisible to the cultural powers, promoting a schism in the hive mind.
Television	Since moving objects are important, our eyes have evolved to stare at flickering things; therefore we find TV hypnotic. Watching TV is work, our minds labor to fill in the missing parts of the virtual reality. Society gains a stronger hive mind than ever before. But at the same time, the hive mind is debased by ever more centralized control.
Atomic power	The physicists complete the chemists’ work, and even atoms become programmable. We see the must fundamental units of matter as information to be manipulated.
Computers	Billed as the universal machine, the computer is brittle and hard to use. The digitization of essentially everything begins, in most cases degrading and corrupting the information.
Email	Email spreads the workplace into the home. The upside is that you don’t have to commute, the down side is that you can’t leave the office. Email is addictive, and people become ever more plugged in. Yet email provides an alternate to the centralized news network, and many smaller hive minds take form.
The Web	The hive mind expands its consciousness. And at the same time the subhives’ minds gain further definition. The web page does for publication what the automobile did for transport --- the gatekeepers lose importance. The Web becomes the ultimate global information resource, the universal data base. Social computation becomes nearly frictionless; people can interact at a distant every more effortlessly.
Biotechnology	Biologists begin to program life. Society tries to apply legal codes to life, with unpleasant and confusing results. Real biological life continues anyway, still managing to avoid control.
Cell phones	A tight, personal, peer-to-peer medium that approaches telepathy. As people coordinate activities in real time, short-lived spontaneous mini-hive minds emerge.

The Past and Future Histories of Human Innovation as Histories of Computation

by Rudy Rucker
Copyright © Rudy Rucker, 2011

[In honor of Marshall McLuhan, this essay is adapted from Rudy Rucker, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul (Basic Books, New York 2005), and published online on July 24, 2011]

Link : http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/pastandfuture.html

Human, More Human !

Transhumanists strive to humanize–the opposite of “dehumanize.” We want everyone to be as human as possible.

What does “being human” mean? Whatever you want it to. But since you’re human, I’ll bet that it includes some or all of life, love, family, beauty, dignity, sexuality, creativity, freedom, learning, and the like. There are also other, less important values: To scarf a boxful of PopTarts, to see our enemies suffer, or to watch soap-opera reruns all day.

All these desires, the elevated and the base, were sculpted by evolution, hundreds of thousands of years ago on the African savanna. And in the millennia since we developed intelligence, we have also been shaping new values on top of this ancestral set. The elevated ones, the “true” values, are those which we want to keep when we reflect on our evolution-driven and societally-built urges and select the best.

Transhumanism is usually associated with technophilia. This is because technology consists of new ways to help people achieve their goals. But achieving some values for some people can infringe on other values. Technology can dehumanize, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other nostalgists have pointed out. A factory worker who runs an automated loom machine 12 hours a day makes clothes that keep people warm and decorated. At the same time, he is deprived of most opportunities to do what our ancestors enjoyed doing, what hunter-gatherers do today, and what we enjoy doing and wish we could do more of: Flirting, playing, exploring, hunting, socializing, and and resting, with no pressures other than the needs of the moment.

Even the freely-chosen technological luxuries of today’s wealthy societies can be dehumanizing. They may satisfy our baser needs, but interfere with the more elevated values. Television entertains at will, but also provides passive entertainment in place of interaction and storytelling. Modern medicine, even as it saves lives, gives us anonymous carers and white-walled institutions, replacing empathic nursing by loved ones. Grains keep more people per square kilometer alive than do hunting and gathering, and people enjoy eating sugars, but carbohydrate-based nutrition brings obesity and diabetes–like some dystopian factory-farm human feedlot.

Even imperfect technology can humanize. When the Roman empire brought eight thousand Sarmatian soldiers from today’s Ukraine to Britain in the second century CE, they never saw their families again, nor did they speak to them or write to them. This had always been the fate of those who left home. When Jewish immigrants moved to their ancestral homeland a century ago, most never again spoke with or saw the loved ones they left behind, but they at least had the benefit of postal service. Today, globetrotters, even poor job-seekers, can talk to their family members at will, for free, with video; many can afford to fly home for a visit. True, ink on paper is not as good as a conversation, and video-calls aren’t as warm as a face-to-face chat with a hug, but those weren’t the alternatives that the technologies replaced. The technologies preserved family ties that could not otherwise be preserved, and what is more human than that?

The complaint goes: “Make real friends, not Facebook friends.” But for me at least, online social networks are not pushing aside face-to-face friendships; they are connecting me to old and new friends to whom I would never otherwise maintain my ties. Sometimes a real-world meeting results. This browser-based interaction is helping me be more human.

Cell phones can annoy, but they have also eliminated a specific kind of social misery; the unpleasantness of missing rendezvous with a friend, checking your watch and walking around the block, wondering if you set the right time and place. We’ve lost some good storylines–Dr. Zhivago would have caught up to Lara right away–but cellphones ensure that meetings with friends happens as they should, and that’s wonderfully human.

Other technologies have nearly eliminated other forms of suffering, at least in the richer parts of the world. Start with the big ones: we rarely have to see our children die of disease; with heating and air conditioning, we rarely have to feel too cold or too hot if we don’t want to. Now some small ones: we never have to search in frustration to hear favorite songs; we never have to continue wondering who acted that bit part in the movie we saw. These forms of unpleasantness have mostly disappeared.

These are the technologies of the past. We’ve gotten used to them. But transhumanists always look forward. The past is behind us, but we can change the future.

Of future technologies, those which modify the human body get the most attention In transhumanist contexts: brain implants, blood-stream nanobots, genetic enhancements. Anti-transhumanists like Leon Kass and Frances Fukuyama condemn transhumanism mostly for the yuck factor of these technologies–a deep-seated disgust with modifying the human body. Indeed, to the extent that the perfection of the human body at its unblemished best is one of those human values which matter to us, an extension of our ancestral desire to preserve health, Kass and Fukuyama are right.

Today’s medical technologies are easy to accept because almost all modify the body to counter pathologies: vaccines, surgery, or cochlear implants. Even Botox counters a pathology, if like transhumanists, you consider aging a pathology–though Botox does no more than remove aging’s shallower signs. But the future may go one step better, bringing us technologies which actually improve the body’s optimum above today’s baseline.

Depending on how we define our values, we might feel that improving our abilities beyond the baseline can still preserve the best of what we consider human, particularly if the visible form is left untouched. Or we might decide that physical features are not the essence of humanity. Considering that people have been dying their hair, tattooing their skin, and piercing their bodies for thousands of years, we might accept even visible enhancements as human and not monstrous.

Still, there is no need to get under our skin to make us more human. Eyeglasses can improve vision almost as well as laser surgery, and our eyes feed Wikipedia’s knowledge into our brains pretty well, if not as well as through direct brain interfaces.

Regardless of whether we assimilate future technologies or just use them externally, they can make us more human, more able to achieve our values than we are today. If poverty were eliminated through well-distributed innovation-driven wealth, then a major cause of dehumanizing indignity would disappear. Today, most people live in awareness and joy for a tiny fraction of their lives. If we could stimulate our brains to clear-minded alertness with smart-drugs or electrical implants, what could be more human? If we could, at will, connect ourselves to loved ones with a telepathic link, we could strengthen our empathy. What greater spiritual fulfillment could we hope for? If leisure time and greatly improved transportation let us visit other planets or the bottom of the sea inexpensively and safely, each one of us could satisfy our desire to explore the universe in a way that we cannot today.

Dangers remain. Future technologies, like those of the past, could dehumanize by satisfying base needs, while preventing achievement of more elevated values. Direct currents to the pleasure centers of the brain could meet the human desire for happiness while removing the incentive to work towards other values. Immersive virtual reality could entertain but distract from other important personal goals. And in the end, the ultimate dehumanizer would be a weapon which satisfies one not-so-nice human value–the desire for revenge–while extinguishing humanity and all human values with it.

Our technologies today have changed so much, yet sometimes it seems that nothing has changed. Achilles’ mourning for his battle-slain friend Patroclus 2200 years ago and Daisy Miller’s flirtations as she tours Europe 150 years ago seem the same, in essence, as our experiences of the twenty-first century. This is because we remain human as we always have. Little has changed in our basic motivations, like love and conquest.

Staying human is good. We should let technologies increase our abilities, but not change our fundamental preferences. More accurately, we can allow changes in some of our less desirable desires, as for ingesting sugars to the point of diabetes, or for fleeing shame through suicide. But we must avoid changing those preferences which, on reflection, we want to keep.

I don’t want a technology to change any of my most important goals. I don’t want anything to take away my love for newness and learning so that I’m satisfied watching TV all day; or to take away my compassion so that I turn into a psychopathic killer; or to take away my sense of beauty so that a mountain-top panorama means nothing to me. I want technologies to help me, and everyone else, better achieve our goals.

Transhumanism is all about being human. Becoming transhuman might mean changing our humanity by removing preferences which on reflection we don’t want, or by adding abilities beyond what we have today. But becoming transhuman means becoming more human–treasuring the human values which matter most to us.

By: Joshua Fox
Published: June 7, 2011

Joshua Fox works at IBM, where he co-founded the Guardium Data Redaction product and now manages its development. He has served as a software architect in various Israeli start-ups and growth companies. On the transhumanism side, he is a long-time supporter of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Links to his talks and articles are available at his website and blog.

http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/06/07/human-more-human/