Oddly this article in Forbes has the T-word in the title even though it is never mentioned in the body, which is about Singularitarianism. Does this mean Forbes editors think transhumanism now needs no explanation?
Michael Vassar, the president of the institute, gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040 and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says nothing will be the same. “Humans living in the post-Singularity world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today’s world,” he says. His odds don’t take into account the chances of the world plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or a worldwide collapse into barbarism.
Vassar’s six staffers at the Singularity Institute… publish papers with titles such as, “Uncertain Future Project,” “Global Catastrophic Risk Project” and “Economics and Machine Intelligence,” and have developed software that supposedly predicts technology’s trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.
Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps. Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.
The pessimists, and Vassar is one of them, see threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence that will want to enslave humans….
Based on my experience, the military already has enhanced humans in their arsenal. You are way behind the times
I discovered just this summer that I am a transhuman. I have been trying to find an organization that can help me reverse it, if this is even possible. It was done without my knowledge or permission. The only benefit to knowing the truth about myself is that many things that didn’t make sense have been clarified. Can anyone tell me if normal tissue is lost when someone becomes transhuman? I can not rely on my vision, and I can’t help but wonder if this means that my eyes have been completely replaced. Also, I wonder how much brain tissue I might have lost to accommodate artificial eyes. It is so bad that I would be willing to die rather than continue as a slave of the military, which is what I have been since I was a child. Another question: is the ‘singularity’ mentioned a state where everyone on the planet becomes transhuman? I would agree with you, Sandra, but I am chilled when I wonder how you know this.