Or how technological alienation, cultural stagnation and fucking robots will be the end of us all. On this planet. But might just see us reborn on the other side of the galaxy in five thousand years, give or take. WARNING: PARTS OF THIS PROBABLY AREN’T SAFE FOR WORK (the clue might be in the title). I MEAN, […]
Read more "A Very Robosexual Human (De)Extinction Sync Log [NSFW ish]"The following essay was originally serialised on The State from May 20, 2013. genesis and forking timelines It’s the early 90s. In the form of an Australian teenager finishing high school, with a head full of Heinlein, I tried to join the Army. That future never eventuated—in this timeline, anyway. I entered university still full of […]
Read more "ANARCHIST FUTURISM & THE LIE OF HISTORY [From the Archives of TheState]"This is a re-release of my essay It’s Not A War, It’s A Rescue Mission – originally published on the now defunct website, Grinding.be, March 7th, 2011. Also available in this PDF version – (thanks lizbt!) And translated into Spanish, courtesy of @Rabbitz – No es una guerra, es una misión de rescate [PDF] – I’ve chosen to publish this […]
Read more "IT’S NOT A WAR, IT’S A RESCUE MISSION! [re-released from the Grinding.be archives]"What follows are my extended thoughts and personal reflections a week two weeks after watching Bruce Sterling deliver a lecture on Alien Aesthetics. It’s a look at the weirder side of cyborg life and our posthuman future. A glimpse at the many ways in which we try to see the unseen and embrace the cosmos. […]
Read more "LOVECRAFTIAN CYBORGS AND THE ALIEN AESTHETIC: Part 3 – CETI & The Aesthetics of Aliens"What follows are my extended thoughts and personal reflections a week two weeks after watching Bruce Sterling deliver a lecture on Alien Aesthetics. It’s a look at the weirder side of cyborg life and our posthuman future. A glimpse at the many ways in which we try to see the unseen and embrace the cosmos. […]
Read more "LOVECRAFTIAN CYBORGS AND THE ALIEN AESTHETIC: Part 2 – The Colours Out Of Space"What follows are my extended thoughts and personal reflections a week two weeks after watching Bruce Sterling deliver a lecture on Alien Aesthetics. It’s a look at the weirder side of cyborg life and our posthuman future. A glimpse at the many ways in which we try to see the unseen and embrace the cosmos. […]
Read more "LOVECRAFTIAN CYBORGS AND THE ALIEN AESTHETIC: Part 1 – Cyborgs of the Abyss"There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Read more "Protected: Lovecraftian Cyborgs and the Alien Aesthetic [SECRET DEATH CULT INITIATES EDITION]"
An antenna built for interplanetary connection. The Soviet Union was planning to build bases on other planets, and prepared facilities for connection which were never used and now lie dormant.
From – Wreckage in the snow: Russia’s forgotten future
Meanwhile, in Cloud Atlas:
And in reality – a snapshot of our current Earth-Space Comms Network:
Read more "Space Communications Networks: Past, Present & Fictional"Yet of all the projects currently under development, the most revolutionary is the attempt to devise a direct two-way brain-computer interface that will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn. What if such interfaces are used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or to directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort of Inter-brain-net? What might happen to human memory, human consciousness and human identity if the brain has direct access to a collective memory bank? In such a situation, one cyborg could, for example, retrieve the memories of another – not hear about them, not read about them in an autobiography, not imagine them, but directly remember them as if they were his own. Or her own. What happens to concepts such as the self and gender identity when minds become collective? How could you know thyself or follow your dream if the dream is not in your mind but in some collective reservoir of aspirations?
Such a cyborg would no longer be human, or even organic. It would be something completely different. It would be so fundamentally another kind of being that we cannot even grasp the philosophical, psychological or political implications.
The way you tell it is that we’re at a point of inflection: that we’re on the cusp of perhaps the greatest change for the human race ever?
“Probably, yes. I mean the one thing that has remained constant in history was humans themselves. Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.”
The “next revolution”, as Harari sees it, the latest in a line that began with the cognitive revolution and takes in the agricultural revolution and the scientific revolution, is what is happening in the biotech field, in artificial intelligence.
“When people talk about merging with computers to create cyborgs, it’s not some prophecy about the year 2200. It’s happening right now. More and more of our reality exists within computers or through them.”
But this is only the start of it. For the first time in history, “we will see real changes in humans themselves – in their biology, in their physical and cognitive abilities”. And while we have enough imagination to invent new technologies, we are unable to foresee their consequences.
“It was the same with the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. Nobody sat down and had a vision: ‘This is what agriculture is going to be for humankind and for the rest of the planet.’ It was an incremental process, step by step, taking centuries, even thousands of years, which nobody really understood and nobody could foresee the consequences.”
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jul/05/yuval-harari-sapiens-interview-age-of-cyborgs
[the Posthuman Revolution will be like the Agricultural Revolution? OK http://m1k3y.tumblr.com/post/122146219689/excerpt-from-uplifting-civilisation-2-the]
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 