Blog

Our Final Invention: How the Human Race Goes and Gets Itself Killed

Posted by Seb in complex systems, defense, ethics, evolution, existential risks, futurism, homo sapiens, human trajectories, posthumanism, robotics/AI, singularity, supercomputing | Leave a Comment on Our Final Invention: How the Human Race Goes and Gets Itself Killed

12.07.
2013

By Greg Scoblete — Real Clear Technology

We worry about robots.

Hardly a day goes by where we’re not reminded about how robots are taking our jobs and hollowing out the middle class. The worry is so acute that economists are busy devising new social contracts to cope with a potentially enormous class of obsolete humans.

Documentarian James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, is worried about robots too. Only he’s not worried about them taking our jobs. He’s worried about them exterminating the human race.

I’ll repeat that: In 267 brisk pages, Barrat lays out just how the artificial intelligence (AI) that companies like Google and governments like our own are racing to perfect could — indeed, likely will — advance to the point where it will literally destroy all human life on Earth. Not put it out of work. Not meld with it in a utopian fusion. Destroy it.

The first person in the world to become a government-recognized cyborg

Posted by Seb in cyborgs, posthumanism, transhumanism | Leave a Comment on The first person in the world to become a government-recognized cyborg

12.02.
2013

The first person in the world to become a government-recognized cyborg

Annalee Newitz on io9

Neil Harbisson is the first person on the planet to have a passport photo that shows his cyborg nature — in his UK passport, he’s wearing a head-mounted device called an eyeborg. The color-blind artist says the eyeborg allows him to see color, and he wants to help other cyborgs like himself gain more rights.

Anyone who has ever gotten a passport photo knows Harbisson has accomplished something that once seemed bureaucratically impossible. Other people with cyborg headgear, like Steve Mann, have had their gear forcibly removed and been refused entrance into buildings for wearing devices on their heads. But with a passport photo that shows the eyeborg as part of Harbisson’s face, somebody trying to rip his augmentation off would be committing a violent crime equivalent to injuring his face.

Dezeen has a fascinating interview with Harbisson, where he talks about how his body adapted to the device he now thinks of as an integral part of himself.