Keywords: future, biotechnology, transhumanism, technological singularity
"More Than Human is about our growing power to alter our minds, bodies, and lifespans through technology - the power to redefine our species - a power we can choose to fear, or to embrace.
In 1990, a professor at the University of Colorado discovered that changing a single gene doubles the lifespan of tiny nematode worms.
In 1999, researchers searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease genetically engineered a strain of mice that can learn things five times as quickly as their normal kin – super-intelligent mice.
In 2002, scientists looking for ways to help paralyzed patients implanted electrodes into the brain of an owl monkey and trained it to move a robot arm 600 miles away just by thinking about it.
Over the last decade researchers looking for ways to help the sick and injured have stumbled onto techniques that enhance healthy animals – making them stronger, faster, smarter, longer-lived, even connecting their minds to robots and computers. Now science is on the verge of applying this knowledge to healthy men and women. The same research that could cure Alzheimer’s is leading to drugs and genetic techniques that could boost human intelligence. The techniques being developed to stave off heart disease and cancer have the potential to halt or even reverse human aging.
More Than Human takes the reader into the labs where this is happening to understand the science of human enhancement. It also steps back to look at the big picture. How will these technologies affect society? What will they do to the economy, to politics, and to human identity? What social policies should we enact to regulate, restrict, or encourage the use of these technologies?
Ultimately More Than Human concludes that we should embrace, rather than fear, the power to alter ourselves - that in the hands of millions of individuals and families, it stands to benefit society more than to harm it."
Link
Source: More Than Human
Amazon.com
More Than Human : Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
See also:
Ramez Naam - Google Search
More Than Human - Technorati
Ramez Naam - Technorati
Existential Risks
Discuss:
Cognitive Science - tribe.net
Biogeeks - tribe.net
Interview:
NuSapiens Exclusive: Interview with Ramez Naam - NuSapiens
Ramez Naam In Conversation with R.U. Sirius - NeoFiles
Audio:
Accelerating Change 2004 - IT Conversations
The Long Now Foundation: library
Scenarios:
Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change - J.R. Mooneyham
The World in 2020 - Guardian
Chronicle of the Future - Times
Book of the Future - BBC
Visions of the 21st Century - Time
Views of the Future - BT
Robotic Nation - Marshall Brain
The Anglosphere Challenge - James C. Bennett
Time 2026 - Time
The Artilect War - Hugo de Garis
Lexicon of the Future - Accelerating Future
The Information Age - Encyclopedia Galactica
Learn:
How Designer Children Will Work - HowStuffWorks
Biological Engineering Division - MIT OpenCourseWare
Science, Technology, and Society - MIT OpenCourseWare
Fiction:
The Matrix - Wikipedia
Cyberpunk - Wikipedia
Ghost in the Shell - Wikipedia
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