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Core77 has a nice interview with "cyborg anthropoloigst" Amber Case, who claims that "Good technology should make you superhuman." She makes an interesting case (no pun intended) that the Industrial Revolution disconnected people from each other, when "everyone was distributed by highways and cars and stretched out into the suburbs." But now, newer technology has "stitched all of that reality together so that you no longer have to worry about being geographically separate. It's giving us back a tremendous part of our humanity." The whole thing is worth checking out. [Core77] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5874973&view=rss&microfeed=true Christianity teaches that the saved will live together, and many Christians believe in the Rapture, when the chosen few will be lifted up, leaving just their clothes behind. So how should Christians feel about ideas like Transhumanism and the Singularity, which involve another way to transcend your physical form and possibly live forever? These are questions with no easy answers — which is why it's so fascinating to listen to the IEET's podcast on the topic with theologian Brent Waters, author of This Mortal Flesh: Incarnation and Bioethics and From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Postmodern World. Warning: Deep philosophical topics ahead. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5867432&view=rss&microfeed=true Over at FT.com, Tim O'Reilly has a must-read essay about the symbiosis between humans and computers. We're already propagating our knowledge and our culture at a much faster rate than in the past, he argues, and the next step is computers that can learn from "the activity of human teachers" but then notice things the humans wouldn't. He cites the example of Google's autonomous vehicle, which beats other self-driving cars because it can draw on all the experience of "millions of road miles put in by human drivers building the Google Street View database." More »
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Ever wonder how we're going to create humans who can breathe underwater? Of course you do. Now a study published this week about how algae insinuate themselves into salamander embryos (and DNA) could provide the beginnings of an answer. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5789151&view=rss&microfeed=true Posthuman Blues by Mac Tonnies was one of our favorite blogs. Since Tonnies' untimely death in 2009, friends and fans have gone to great lengths to preserve a copy of the entire site, showing how digital creations can live on after their creators. The New York Times Magazine has the thought-provoking story. More »
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The mid-1990s was the heyday of Vertigo Comics, DC's trippy, grown-up imprint. But one of the best Vertigo-esque comics appeared instead, almost unnoticed, on DC's Milestone Imprint. And after 14 years, the unsettling supernatural nanotechnology tale XOMBI is coming back. More »
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Humans are built to thrive on Earth, but even a yearlong round-trip mission to Mars could pose major medical risks. If we want humans to colonize the solar system, we may have to fundamentally alter our biology and become cyborgs. More »
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Long after the last human has died off, most robots continue to perform the functions for which they were built. But sometimes an illegal bohemian chip sends a robot in search of more, across the Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life. More »
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We all dream of upgrading beyond Human 1.0. But meanwhile, our fantasy worlds are full of creatures who've already become superhuman and semi-immortal. Which deathless creatures are closer to our cherished posthuman ideal: vampires? Or zombies? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5556915&view=rss&microfeed=true Just after we linked to the Physics and Cake blog's post about whether there might be a "ceiling" in the level of theoretical physics that humans can understand, Reith Lecturer Martin Rees wrote an essay for the London Times, explaining the first of his Reith Lectures. And Rees does believe that there may be intrinsic limits to human understanding of the cosmos: More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5552803&view=rss&microfeed=true Over at the Physics And Cake blog, there's a great discussion of exactly how machines will replace theoretical physicists, with their only goal being to create a perfect model of the universe, and no ego at stake. More »
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Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2009, Jamais Cascio is a futurist who writes about the environment, technology, and culture. Here he argues that yesterday's posthumanism is today's boring quotidian. More »
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Need an antidote to those apocalyptic scenarios filled with gray skies and scorched earth? Josh Keyes' witty paintings depict a kinder, gentler post-apocalyptic world, where humans have simply vanished, giving fish, fowl, and the occasional bear some elbow room. More »
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With Michael Jackson dead, we're at the end of an era. But even though we have to hustle into the future without him, nobody will ever forget Jackson's strangely brilliant contributions to science fiction and fantasy. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5302714&view=rss&microfeed=true Interviewed by BoingBoing's readers, New Wave legend Michael Moorcock says he's disconnected from science fiction that gets too abstract: "I'm not entirely sure about transhumanist fiction. It holds no attractions for me. Assuming I really know what it is. I've only really ever been interested in 'humanist' fiction. That is, fiction about people. As I've said, I don't read sf for pleasure and very little of it for review, so I'm no expert. I think I'm probably sympathetic to the writers you mention, but personally believe political fiction should be set in at least some version of the here and now. [...] This was always my argument about sf — that generally, by abstracting it, putting it in some 'other place', you lost some of the relevance. That said, I haven't been vastly interested in technological advance since I was young. I have every sympathy with Banks, Mcleod et al, but to be honest I've been no more able to read more than a page of their stuff than I have Heinlein's or Asimov's. The moment a spaceship turns up, you've lost me." — BoingBoing via Tachyon via Ken McLeod. More »
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You might know your chronological age, but do you know your "molecular age"? A newly found chemical in the human body could indicate how old your body actually feels, acting as a marker for aging in the body. More »
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Nemo Nobody is a regular guy, until a hole in reality opens up and deposits him in the shimmering year 2092, when everybody's immortal. And then, judging from this new trailer, the suddenly-old Mr. Nobody does a Sliding Doors riff and examines several possible versions of his life. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5270842&view=rss&microfeed=true Analyzing the Octomom phenomenon on the H+ blog, futurist trickster R.U. Sirius writes: More »
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Terri Schiavo was "the first celebrity posthuman," but posthumanism is coming for all of us, according to a group of science fiction writers who met to discuss the future of identity and media. More »
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Your next prosthetic arm will be almost as good as the one you were born with: It will fuse with your existing skeleton. Veterinarians at North Carolina State University have developed a technique for attaching prosthetic limbs directly to the underlying bone structure in the remaining limb portion. Called "osseointegrated prosthetics," these limbs knit themselves with the patient's bone, allowing more for natural movement and avoiding some of the problems of "strap-on" prosthetics. A German Shepherd named Cassidy was the first canine patient to receive an osseointegrated prosthetic, and the researchers feel advances in fabrication and materials will allow them to shift the technology to humans in the near future. More »
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To-do lists are a great way to plan your week, and it turns out they're also not a bad tool for futurists either. We've put together 20 to-do list items that anyone can use to stop environmental disaster, speed the invention of artificial intelligence, jumpstart a moon colony, and help everyone become posthuman. Usually it seems like ordinary people can't contribute to massive projects that require scientific minds as well as philosophers and other specialists. But there are actually a lot of things you can do. Over the past week we've posted four separate to-do lists for futurists, and now we bring them all together so you can print them out, tuck them in your pocket, and start checking items off to change the world. More »
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Pundits from Bill McKibben to Susan Greenfield have written scare manifestos about the horrors of a posthuman future where everybody has souped-up DNA and can change their sexes like changing clothes. But here at io9, we are all about the posthuman future: we want to download data directly into our brains, grow a new set of arms (and then take them off again), get cybernetic implants that let us feel electro-magnetic fields, and house nano-colonies in our guts that keep us cancer-free. Plus, we want to have emotional relationships with robots that go beyond hurling our cell phones across the room and crooning to our spastic Linux boxes. If you want to be posthuman too, or transhuman or cyborgian, you'll be waiting a long time. But we've got five things you can put on your to-do list today to make all of us more posthuman by this time next year. More »
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If you're a post-human robot living in a world that's long since been discarded by humanity, you're going to want some tunes to listen to. Or at least process them through your sub-neural micronet. Eventually robots will figure out how to make their own superior robo-songs, but until then we've compiled the definitive list of the best robot songs by humans. More »
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