Augmented Reality Moves One Step Closer

This video showcases a really exciting area of augmented reality and gives us a pretty good insight into what practical augmented reality (mix reality) will look like. It’s easy to see this technology being used to navigate streets even in absolute darkness or to display virtual signs and directions in windshields using a combination of augmented reality and super bright transparent OLEDs screens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L6ee0KAdXA

Christmas Shopping after the Singluarity

On Alex Kay's blog "Alexx's LJ" he writes about how fast Amazon.com ships and then wonders just how fast shipping can get with a technological Singularity. Then as a follow-up comment, metahacker adds an imagined note from a post Singularity Amazon. Amusing and short -thanks to both for thinking about the tranhumanist little things.

Re-thinking Star Wars, Star Trek and UFOs

I have been thinking for a while now that it's time for American pop culture to banish for good non-engineered biological humans from the future unless it's within a subspecies context. While we are in banishing mode, we might as well get rid of the popular assumption that visiting aliens are non-engineered entities.

Most people, including many UFO buffs, still assume that ET is a natural biological being like humans are today except millions or maybe billions of years more evolved than us. Apparently, from discussions, cloning is the limit of their breeding technology. Most people also assume that humans will not be engineered even hundreds of years from now. Part of misconception is the result of popular media such as Sci Fi television and movies.

In Star Trek The Next Generation for example, Geordi La Forge only had his visor interface going into his head. The visor itself was external. To be fair, I need to note that in a later Star Trek TNG movie, they internalized the visor technology. The point, however, is that cyborgs such as Geordi and Luke Skywalker (post amputated arm) remain the exception rather than the norm in film. We can see the tide turning with movies such as I Robot which depict a rapidly evolving future (Singularity?) where cyborgs are beginning to blend seamlessly but this is a representation of a transhuman future not a posthuman future.
Other shows such as Battlestar Galactica, although incorporating strong AI, still manages to keep humans and technology separate (that was until the Cylons and humans started have sexual relations.) The Matrix, while depicting cyborgs as the norm due to the Matrix energy harvest and breeding program, also does not depict a posthuman future. The closest movie I can recall that had the possibility of a posthuman future was the movie AI but even this movie may actually depict a dark future because in the end there are no humans post or otherwise mentioned, only benevolent AI.

The other part of the misconception of a posthuman future is that it's probably too difficult to visualize and even harder still to connect with on a human level. Posthumans may just be too alien for us to understand even in our imaginings of the future.

Virtual Potential: Second Life As A Transhumanist Meetinghouse

Anne C. who runs a blog called Existance Is Wonderful, recently posted on the World Transhumanist Association website her first impressions of Second Life as a meeting place for transhumanists.

The World Transhumanist Association has a Second Life Chapter (WTA-SL) boasting 90 members and still growing. Right now, the WTA-SL Board is organizing monthly programs. The first will be a joint Eudoxa and WTA-SL presentation by Eudoxa partner Anders Sandberg on December 18 at 10 a.m. PST on Uvvy Island in Second Life. The presentation will be titled "Keep on raging against aging." everyone is welcome to attend.

Children's Myths and the "Truth" Revisited

Joesph, in his blog, Posthumanity Rising, writes about how even though he's atheist he still thinks Christmas is important to celebrate. His blog inspired me to write about the myths we tell our children and the valuable life lesson that can be passed on when they learn the "truth."

For generations in America and elsewhere, myths have been an integral part of growing up, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny come to mind.

Many parents have been there for their children when they learn that Santa Claus is not what they had been led to believe but a product of their imaginations, reinforced by adults and media such as cartoons.

Myself, I only have a year or two left before I will also be there for my children.

What will I say to my child when he discovers that what he believes can no longer be supported by what he sees in the world around him. He's already asking questions. He's still holding on to the "magic yet I can see that he senses something is not right.

How many conversations have you had whith your children where he or she says, "Magic must be real because how could Santa deliver all those presents in one day?"

What lesson should we pass on to them?

While I have been determined to not tell my children what to believe about religion or even death, especially since I am unsure myself, I am also determined to let them know that nothing can be taken for the absolute truth.

Most of us remember the recent discussions on whether Pluto should remain a planet. My son didn't like the answers he was hearing since up until that point every book he had read told him it was in fact one of nine planets. His concern revolved around the question, "How can scientists decide that it's not a planet anymore?" In his mind, he imagined it literally disappearing from our solar system and obviously no scientists can make planets disappear.

I believe it's at times like these were a little philosophy maybe even transhuman philosophy can come in.

Many of us are bright enough to know that we don't know everything and things that we think we know for sure will likely change. The transhumanist point, here is that our understanding of the universe will change.

The message I intend to convey to the first of my kids to cross the magic barrier is that we can only know what we know but that we should never ever take for granted that that's all there is. There is no ultimate truth that we can ever hope to comprehend, only temporary models or better approximations that we are forced to use until something better comes along. I'm sure I will add some reassuring thoughts at the end about gravity and the light from the sun because I don't want him to be insecure or afraid of the universe coming to an end tomorrow, I just want him to be cognisant of the fact that what we know will change.

I'm not sure, exactly, how to convey these thoughts meaningfully to a child so if anyone has any advice or input have at it. It may be a multistep process.

The First Posthuman

Okay, real short. The first posthuman won't usher in an age of celebration. The first posthuman won't be recognizable as human. The first posthuman will be patterns of thoughts, memories, relationships but not what we would want to consider a complete human. Let me tell who the first posthuman is:

The first posthuman is the guy who has a couple of memory implants and maybe even a frontal lobe implant for reasoning. This guy has a diagnostics port which is intended for use by researchers to study the interactions of his implant with his biological brain. Something happens; he's going to die. The researchers have already been uploading his neural net patterns for study. They do one more upload before he dies. The pattern of the neural net and associated data remain in storage for a few years while scientist continue to study it. Scientists learn how to simulate the missing regions of a typical brain. Eventually they have a complete simulated brain and insert his neural net patterns to see how it responds compared with his actual. It works but not like they wanted. The problem is that brains need external inputs to thrive. So they decide to provide that sensory input and ways for it to interact with its environment. What they discover is that the posthuman has some memories of the life it once was a part of but that it doesn't have the personality or responses of the original person.

Discussions among scientists ensue. They determine that the infant person they created is significantly different from the origninal but also agree that it had incorporated the neural net information and that it would develop its own identity and personality some of which might even resemble the guy who died. This person continues to grow and thrive but would likely have some psychological and personality issues as it struggled with memories and thoughts from another life.

I imagine the situation like that of a new born baby that grows up accepting its environment and learning how to manipulate its world but also having a sense of a time and of a life before, a sort of reincarnation.

Posthuman Shit: It really does smell like roses

Apologia:
Here I go again. It's my fourth post and I'm still talking about the little things in life. This time it's all about the smell of posthuman excrement. Seriously, don't I have something better to do.

Nope.

So before, I draw any scientific (used loosely here) conclusions about what posthuman waste is or isn't, I think it's prudent for me to step way back and ask a fundamental question. Will posthumans crap?

Sure, some of you may be saying to yourselves, "Who gives a shit." (lame pun intended) and some of you will even press the left arrow to prove the point but for those of you curious enough to stick it out a bit longer, you can feel good knowing that we are about to discover a deep insight into the reality of posthuman life.

Biology and Conservation of Energy:
Back to that posthuman crap. Will they? Why would they? What about the smell? Without going through a biology class, let me just say that crap in equals crap out. Many of you IQ follower types are probably thinking that the posthuman energy source of tomorrow isn't crap because crap isn't a very efficient food source and that you just scored yourself another IQ point. But you are wrong. Here's why.

The only energy source that would be available to a human who goes through a transhuman phase to become posthuman is the organic kind and if it's organics in it's organics out. Decomposing organics don't really smell that great unless you're a gardener. Even better, a gardener who grows rose bushes. I am not a gardener.

You see, the most readily available energy source for non-biological components in a biological human would probably be Adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP). Again, we'll skip biology class and try to get to at least one point. The point is, that at each stage of each transhuman phase will be the installation of components that use biological process to derive energy. When that last bit of biological human is finally removed, and good riddance because it was starting to stink up the hardware, there will remain a complete non-biological human that was designed to use organic food as the primary energy source.

Waste of Effort:
As we all know, not every organic molecule is useful to our bodies. If all of the molecules were useful, our throne would have to be resigned to the fact that it was just a porcelein God. Alas, this is not the case, we use it regularly for a throne and only on rare occasions do we pray to that forgiving God.

Surely we recognized that our bodies, through evolution, have predetermined which molecules take a little energy input to get a large energy output and which molecules are just a plain waste of effort. This "waste of effort," my friend, is what we shall call "posthuman crap."

Removing That Smelly Smell:
Now about the smell. If, for some reason, our posthuman selves determine that smelly crap is beneath us then our embedded nanites could expend the extra energy required to sequester the remaining aromatic volatiles and move them to off site storage or possibly convert them to something useful.

Or...

Since it would be a waste of effort to sequester organic volatiles or to convert them to something useful or especially to add the extra step of replacing the crap smell with essence de la rose petals, it would be much more likely that crap smells will continue to smell like crap.


This smelly crap future is not so bad though. Posthumans will be able to specifically filter out unpleasant odor information or reroute automatic response signals in such a way that the famed smell of butt won't be perceived as necessarily good or bad but merely as useful information such as for predicting what a person ate the night before. "Ewww! Did you have a dozen boiled eggs for dinner or what!"

There's Always a Catch:
This posthuman crap thing, however, only works if posthumans decide to continuously occupy their regularly upgraded living quarters (their bodies). All bets are off, if instead the posthumans decide to upload their minds and completely leave the body behind, which, by the way, is a decent segway into my next post...The First Posthuman.

The Dangers of Posting: or CFOSHGB

For those of you who can't read my mind, CFOSHGB is an acronym for Chief Financial Officers Shouldn't Have Gambling Blogs.

Well, after my posthuman sex post from last night, I figure I should take a moment to reflect upon the dangers of posting my mind to the world.

How many of us have given thought to the pervasiveness of the net? Have you ever thought about the permanence of the messages you post? I think I have given it some thought but, then again, maybe not enough.

Four years ago, I posted a conspiracy theory (using another id) to a news website. It was fun and harmless but guess what, it's still on the web floating around. What if, 10 years from now, I decide that I don't want to be a transhumanist anymore. I know, it sounds crazy right now but I have been known to change my mind from time to time. Now let's suppose that instead of thinking about getting my next implant towards posthumanity, I am heavily involved in a conservative Christian organization and was just getting ready to be promoted to preacher or something. My employer, the church, decides to look me up on the 3D Internet. Loweth and beholdeth (that's how churchy types talk) guess what they find my friend. They find out that I am Lucifer incarnate because of my transhuman past and believe it or not, for some strange reason, I don't get the job because God doesn't like the competition. Not only that but rumors start to circulate (because conservative Christians have nothing better to do than circulate rumors of Satan) and I am embarrassed out of my dream job.

So here I am, torn between being who I really am, talking about what I really want to talk about or just quietly pretending to be someone I currently am not.

Since the quiet thing seems kinda boring and isn't a good topic for discussion unless you're Garrison Keillor writing about shy rights, I guess I will need to accept that I cannot be a conservative Christian preacher in the future.

End of story? Not quite.

I also see people post their pictures all over the web. Right now, there is software in beta that can scour the Internet comparing photos of cats (or maybe dogs, I forget which). If you don't get the implications of that, Mr. picture posty pants, I will tell you.

It means that, your awesome girlfriend, Mary Jane, you know the one that talks not the one you smoked, who snapped a photo of the two of you over the weekend can scan that photo and compare your face to every picture on the web looking for a match. I hope for your sake you anticipated her doing that, the sneaky little (bleep), and have prearranged the perfect explanation for why your mug shot turned up on your "secret blog" with a random group of people at a rave that you swore was a late night meeting.

Moral of the story kiddos, don't do anything that you'll regret because there is someone out there making sure you will.

My Next post: Posthuman Shit...It Really Does Smell Like Roses.

Posthuman Sex...WTF!

Maybe it's premature but as I sit here on my love seat alone drinking homemade beer, I wonder why the hell no one is talking about what posthuman sex might be like. I mean, sex is always ripe for discussion, right? And don't give me that "posthumans won't be having sex because they don't need to, end of story" crap. That's just a boring thoughtless answer. Obviously, some of the six billion humans on this planet are having sex even though they aren't making babies (my boring thoughtless response).

Like most humans, I generally do "it" because it feels good. Humans, if nothing else, love things that give them pleasure. Given this generalization, I can make a simple assumption here without stepping to far out of line. Posthumans will be having sex because it will still feel good. At least, that's how the future had better be. I don't want to be posthuman if there's no pleasure in it. Who's going to want an upgrade that takes away their desire to seek pleasure. Personally, I'm planning to skip early adopter upgrade versions and wait for ver. 2.0. especially if Microsoft is involved.

Since posthumans will be pleasure seeking and since we can be fairly certain that businesses will be catering to transhuman sexual pleasures (there will be lots of those) when the first posthumans are upgraded into existence, we can move on to imagining what it might be like to have sex as a posthuman.

My first thought on posthuman sex is drawn towards the "Lawnmower Man" type virtual reality sex scenario but this seems kinda boring because of the body suit and v.r. helmet they used in the movie which, by the way, is here but no one has figured out how to make it mass marketable. Instead, I want to start with thoughts on how the posthuman possibly senses the world. The posthuman will, I imagine, have pretty complicated firmware. This firmware could be adjusted at will to allow, for example, an auditory signal to be routed to both the auditory processing system and to pleasure processing systems so that sounds could be perceived as sexual pleasures. Then certain auditory frequencies and amplitudes might lead to a posthuman orgasm (posthuman orgasm to follow). Even this experience is limiting because that auditory stimulation is still related to the current five senses. Going further, I imagine senses being developed in the transhuman era which incorporate a sixth sense that, for example, might be perceived as a kind of pressure or resistance when network bandwidth is restricted possibly due to high volume traffic or slow routing. In this strange posthuman sexual scenario, then, a pair of posthumans or a group of posthumans (maybe posthumans are used to sharing intimacy with groups since sharing will be so easy) link their traffic sensing and routing systems with their pleasure sensing systems, create a virtual private network (VPN) and voila, commence with manipulating bandwidth and wildly manipulating routing network traffic...ooohhh...aaahhh!!! Wild routing of the network traffic...Gotta love that style!

So what happens at the end of the errr...umm...wild routing?

Orgasm of course. Uncontrollable spasms of pleasure and random processes swirling through neural pathways, temporarily overloading and shutting down and then, after a few moments, thoughts and feelings become coherent again as the posthuman mind adjusts and reflects upon what took place just moments earlier

After a pause, the posthuman mind and body settles down. All is calm and relaxed again. Euphoria is all that remains...and some grogginess...

"Was it good for you," she asks, unsure.

You respond, "I have never lasted more than three microseconds since the doctors removed that last bit of biological brain tissue...It Was Great! You continue. Yawning, "Sorry babe but my diagnostics are logging an unusual amount of errors. I need to go into sleep mode for a little while until my maintenance system sorts things out. Night."

Damn, some things never change!

If You Don't Have Anything Nice To Say...

Why is it that transhumanists present themselves as being arrogant even towards other transhumanists? Individually, do they think they are better than everyone else? Do they think they know more?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that most of us are arrogant. But I do get a strong impression (maybe I'm just being sensitive) that we are plagued by the same ideological prejudices that permeate the rest of the world. I have seen postings in transhuman blogs and message boards criticizing other transhumans for being homosexual, homophobic, a prostitute, a fascist, a racist, Jewish, rich, poor, capitalist, American, European, promoting transhumanism in Second Life, being religious, being christian, being non-christian and more.

If we are truly as enlightened as we believe ourselves to be then it seems we should recognize that nothing productive can come out of these types of postings and should stop. In place of these postings we should focus on reaching out to the non-transhuman world, discuss implications of future technologies and even have some strong disagreements about what it means to be transhuman.