Vikki was born without her right hand and says her “life has changed forever” after receiving a Hero Arm. Vikki’s bionic arm was funded by generous donors, and there’s more funding available now for upper limb amputees from low-income families! Apply here: http://www.openbionics.com/sign-up 😍😍😍.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
Leading futurist Tracey Follows has written an article at Forbes on #transhumanism documentary IMMORTALITY OR BUST. Check it out!
Zoltan has a more radical idea of change than almost anything else you are seeing on your TV screens today but the mainstream media continue to miss him. That’s why it’s good to see he has made his own documentary film explaining to a broader audience what he’s doing, how it all works, and why they should be interested in transhumanism at all.
‘Immortality or Bust’, winner of the Breakout Award at the Raw Science Film Festival in Los Angeles, follows Zoltan on his 2 year campaign running for President of the US. The film starts by explaining his passion for this transhumanist cause and shows him building a custom-made Bluebird motorhome like his father drove when he was a kid, turning it into a mobile coffin to take him on his journey to Washington DC. There he is to deliver his Transhumanist Bill of Rights.
He enlists friends and family in his quest but we also see him travelling to meet unbelievers and skeptics too, putting his case for Transhumanism over traditional religion. At one point in the documentary he reminds us that atheists never bomb anyone. An important plank of his policy platform is to drastically reduce military funding and redistribute that investment into science. He makes a strong argument that we are living in a military-industrial complex that is out of date, whilst the war we should really be fighting, in this century, is the war on cancer.
He’s actually fighting a war on ageing. For at the heart of transhumainsm is the idea of life extension. As the title suggests, it is life extension that ties together the threads of the film. Those threads include a man on a mission to spread the word of Transhumanism, a U.S. Presidential candidate coming face to face with the religiosity of his nation, and a son whose father has had four heart attacks and whom he would love to protect so he can live forever. These three stories together depict Zoltan as the impossibly human face of Transhumanism.
In “2030: Beyond the Film” Director Johnny Boston discusses the futurist FM-2030, the Coronavirus Pandemic, and a range of urgent issues in the medical, philosophical, longevity & futurist space with leading voices.
In this episode, Boston talks with David A. Kekich on why Kekich believes working towards Biological Superlongevity should be the first goal of Transhumanists and futurists.
About David A. Kekich: (from Maximum Life Foundation)
David Kekich is President/CEO of Maximum Life Foundation that focuses on aging research. In 1999, he realized the inevitability that science will someday control the human aging process. He understood human beings will someday be able to enjoy very long health spans by studying aging research, the root cause of most deadly diseases. The problem? He was in a race against the clock. He was faced with the possibility of being part of the “last generation to suffer from heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and other aging related diseases”. His solution was to further that aging research and hopefully move it forward by establishing the Maximum Life Foundation.
Maximum Life Foundation Website:
About 2030 the film:
Johnny Boston was 10 years old when he first met FM-2030, a futurist who intended to live forever. But in 2000, after his body ceased to function, FM was cryonically preserved. 16 years later, an unexpected call places FM’s future in Johnny’s hands.
Directed By: Johnny Boston
See 2030:
Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/2030-FM/dp/B08…
The ability to restore sight to the blind is one of the most profound acts of healing medicine can achieve, in terms of the impact on the affected patient’s life — and one of the most difficult for modern medicine to achieve. We can restore vision in a limited number of scenarios and there are some early bionic eyes on the market that can restore limited vision in very specific scenarios. Researchers may have taken a dramatic step towards changing that in the future, with the results of a new experiment to design a bionic retina.
The research team in question has published a paper in Nature detailing the construction of a hemispherical retina built out of high-density nanowires. The spherical shape of the retina has historically been a major challenge for biomimetic devices.
Posted in aging, biotech/medical, business, environmental, futurism, government, health, innovation, posthumanism, transhumanism | Leave a Comment on Dr. Thupten Jinpa, Founder and Chairman of Compassion Institute, and The Dalai Lama’s Principal Translator — Discussing Compassion, Spirituality and Human Longevity — ideaXme — Ira Pastor
3. Evolution shifts to off-world human colonies.
4. Transhumanism will drive evolution.
Is natural selection still a major force in human evolution? As far back as high school biology, we’ve been taught to think the answer must be yes. But is it really true?
Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species back in 1859, around the same time that Charles Dickens was making a name for himself writing about social conditions in England. Dickens’ stories emerge from a period in which only 50 percent of British children survived to adulthood — a number not so different from animals in the jungle. In that vein, Darwin was right when he said natural selection was operating on humans full force.
Yet the forces that came into play in the 1850s are far different from those we experience today, prompting some high profile biologists to suggest that our advanced medical capabilities have, in effect, blunted natural selection. In a 2013 Radio Times interview, science communicator David Attenborough described it this way:
Panelists: andy gelme, jon oxer, greg adamson, jeremy negal at humanity+ melbourne.
Panelists and audience members weigh in on a variety of topics: technology adoption across demographics, technology used to harvest your data / the rights to your data, technology changing the world — what used to be value choices with regard to technology use and adoption now just seem to be matters of fact, and social implications of technology in general.
While the video is newly produced, the conference was held in 2011.
Panelists and audience members weigh in on technology adoption across demographics, technology used to harvest your data / the rights to your data, technology changing the world — what used to be value choices with regard to technology use and adoption now just seem to be matters of fact… and social implications of technology in general.
Panelists include: Andy Gelme, Jon Oxer, Greg Adamson & Jeremy Nagel.
Audience members who asked questions include Lorin Ford, Cobina Crawford, Colin Kline, Hugo de Garis, Rosemary Watson, Adam Ford, Avatar Polymorph, Tony Smith, John Donovan, Sean McMullen…
While the video is newly produced, the conference was held in 2011.
This was filmed at the Humanity+ @Melbourne 2011 Conference — website (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20131106021014/http://au.humanityplus.org/conference/
Also see Jon Oxer’s related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EOPKBbW9Hs
#HumanityPlus #SciFuture #TechnologyAtHome
@geekscape @jonoxer @GregAEngineer @jeznag @HumanityPlus
A superficial treatment of Transhumanism by CNN.
Photographer David Vintiner’s portraits feature subjects identifying as “transhuman,” including a man with bionic ears and a woman who can “feel” earthquakes.
Transhumanism is a form of “Humanism” (atheism or naturalism). The word and concept was coined by Julian Huxley back in the day. I was a student of A.J. Ayer who suceeded Huxley as head of British Humanism. https://humanism.org.uk/humanism/the-humanist-tradition/20th-century-humanism/sir-julian-huxley/ We must nowadays include “Christian Transhumanism” and tolerate all religions and superstitions (however daft), without right to criticise such “Holy” sanctified cows. And so the posthuman goddesses and gods 😉 have decreed it is a good idea to make MVT, FM-2030 and post/ “humanist” ideas available tor current religious self-IDers, I have kicked things off with Posthuman Buddhism https://www.facebook.com/groups/posthumanbuddhism/ and Posthuman Christianity https://www.facebook.com/groups/2164360640528843/
Perhaps we can update and reform such bastions of anachronism and conventionalism with the light of (actual, not gospel) truth?
Julian Huxley was the grandson of T H Huxley (staunch supporter of Charles Darwin and creator of the term “agnostic”). He continued his grandfather’s valuable work – in 1927, he joined H G Wells and his son in producing a comprehensive book called The Science of Life, which helped to spread a general understanding of evolution and to promote Biology in the school curriculum. He believed that the study of evolution could help us to understand our own nature and behaviour. He was a professor at King’s College, London, and a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour (ethology) and conservation.
His wife wrote of him: “Julian had a gift of enhancing the moment, making a memorable event of an ordinary walk. He was intensely aware of the moods and treasures of the natural world, knew mountains and their geological structures, feeling their bones under the skin of earth and trees. I loved his all-embracing recognition – knitting together the earth and the animal world, including human beings…”
In 1935 he became one of the first directors of London Zoo. In the early sixties, he wrote articles about hunted and endangered species in Africa, which contributed to the founding of the World Wildlife Fund.
