Category Archives: Transhuman

The success of mutual aid groups across the UK is the unexpected plus of the Covid-19 pandemic. These community-led groupstake a secular approach to helping their neighbourhoodswithout profit in mind, and are united by a belief thatsocial exclusion increases individual and community vulnerability.

As the UK negotiates its path outside the EU, we are all faced with a collective challenge. Can we build on these community-led initiatives andwidespread feelings of solidarity among popular movements across the world to bring about a different future? Or do we passively take a blind path into the deeper embrace of trans-national corporations who are ready to impose their untested technical solutions, backed by a government more than willing to hand over control?

It is not just the top-down nature of these digital-eratechno-fixes that is causing widespread fear. There is also a high risk thatthisFourth Industrial Revolution(4IR)would draw us into a de-humanising spiral of short-term profiteering, surveillance and control that will sink the climate and our food system.

Technology

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates is already selling his 4IR dream offarmers replaced by drones, mini robots and extreme forms of genetic engineering.

Though the virus has taught policymakers across the globe the value of using aprinciple of precautionin one context of future public policy, the 4IR fan club which includes the influentialWorld Economics Forum- doesnt appear to understand that their techy-AI vision must also be subject to similar safeguards.

The disruptors motto to move fast and break things is the polar opposite of precaution. A precautionary approach to 4IR wouldnt stop people having clever ideas for fixing things, but it would force potentially risky research to open itself to public scrutiny - allowing time to assess potential harms as well as benefits.

Capitalist systems have taken resources from the poor to allow accumulation of new wealth by elites, despite this leading to simultaneoushuman and ecological disastersfrom asbestos, lead, benzene, pesticides, ozone-depleting chemicals, factory trawler fishing and GM crops.

The twenty-first century scientisms core myth, that of the selfish gene, guides many of those who back 4IR. Their save-the-world mantra tends to a kind of neoliberaltranshumanist fantasy- that humans are automatons controlled by our genetically-encoded competitive desire for individual gain. This will see many of us replaced by robots in the service of corporate profit.

Symbiosis

Happily, 4IRs normalisationof selfish individualism appears to be contradicted by the spectacularblossoming of mutual aid across the world since the pandemic began. In the UK, 4,000 localgroupswere created by the grassroots within a couple of weeks of the 23 March lockdown.

Despite its core position in capitalist economic theory, the basis for the claim that competition is the main driving force in the living world has always been suspect. It has bizarrely become a myth that we live by, to quote philosopherMary Midgley.

Now an increasing number of ecological researchers are concluding that living systems are founded on their interconnections and mutual dependency.

It started with the youngBeatrix Potter, a pioneer Victorian scientist before she became a celebrated storyteller. She was among the first to notice that lichens -those curious encrustations living on tree trunks, seashores, and walls -are made up of not one but two organisms in intimate alliance. A century later,Lynn Margulis, a celebrated biologist, referred to this relationship as symbiosis, literally living together.

Most plants receive essential nutrients via their underground microbial symbionts, to which they supply sugars in return. Plant-eating animals can only digest the tough cellulose in their diet because of symbiotic bacteria in their gut. A co-originator of the Gaia Hypothesis with James Lovelock, Margulis devoted most of her lifeto showing that the very plants and animals that make our parks, gardens and rural landscapes, the food we eat, even the evolution of eukaryotic cells, of which all non-bacterial life on Earth is composed, all depend onsymbiotic associations.

Interdependence

In the same way, the emergence of human civilisation was profoundly shaped by mutual childcare and the sharing of food. Really it should come as no surprise that the UKs thousands of Covid-19 Mutual Aid groups should function well. Competition may be one feature of our existence, but so too is interdependence.

After so many weeks of clapping key workers, will westill accept a society in which nurses and carers are paid a minute fraction of the salary of a hedge fund manager?

What about the other jobs without which society cant survive, but are often rewarded with a minimum wage farm labourers, rubbish collectors, public transport and nursery workers, not to mention the countless unpaid and largely invisible care-givers almost all of them women?

The current surge of mutual aid is already strengtheningthe hand of civil society alliances arguing for a global reset of capitalism .The world cannot claim mutualist values while also continuing an economic system that values some people in the world so much more than others.

Accountability

What hope is there for our post-Covid survival if we continue with the economics of consumer capitalism - encouraging us to measure our freedom by the amount of stuff we buy that we really dont need? Or by allowing our corporate-government complex to gather digital data, compute and monetise every action we take inside and outside our homes, everything we say, where we go, who we meet, what crops we plant, what food we eat?

Rather than accept a fourth industrial revolution that is not only immoral, but surely a collective death sentence for much of humanity, Covid-19 gives us the opportunity to pause and collectively envision how the UK could move to a future based on the values of mutual aid.

This Mutualist New Deal would be guided by precaution and democratic accountability, without an unquestioning rush to adopt new technologies, particularly those owned and controlled by corporations or nation states which give scant attention to people.

This Author

Dr Tom Wakeford is a senior researcher atETC Groupand Honorary Associate Professor at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter.

Image: Ilona Pimbert, from an original drawing by Christie Lyons.

Link:
Mutual aid, global solidarity and techno-fixes - The Ecologist

Will Hinton, executive editor at Tor Books, has acquired North American rights to two books by debut novelist Neil Sharpson, from his agent Jennie Goloboy at the Donald Maass Literary Agency. The first book, When the Sparrow Falls, is scheduled for publication in spring 2021.

Part thriller, part literary science fiction, When the Sparrow Falls is an exploration of the coming AI revolution, transhumanism, totalitarianism, loss, and the problem of evil.

In the future, AI are everywhere. They are our employers, our employees, our friends, lovers and even our children. Over half the human race now lives online.

But in the Caspian Republic, the last true human beings have made their stand, and their repressive, one-party state is locked in perpetual cold war with the outside world.

The republic is thrown into chaos when the virulently anti-AI journalist Paulo Xirau is found dead in a bar. At his autopsy, the unthinkable is discovered: Xirau was AI.

Security Agent Nikolai South is given a seemingly mundane task; escorting Xiraus widow while she visits the Caspian Republic to identify her husbands remains. He is stunned to discover that the beautiful, reserved, Lily Xirau bears an unearthly resemblance to his wife, who has been dead for thirty years.

As Nikolai and Lily delve deeper into the circumstances surrounding Paulos death, trying desperately to avoid the attentions of the murderous Bureau of Party Security, a tentative friendship between the two begins to blossom. But when they discover Xiraus last secret South must choose between his loyalty to his country and his conscience.

Neil Sharpson said:

Ive been living in the Caspian Republic (whether as a play, screenplay or novel) for around nine years now and its almost impossible to believe that the journey is finally at an end. Its a story about one man trying to survive in a brutal regime who is given one final chance to make amends to the woman he let down. Im incredibly grateful to Will Hinton and the team at Tor for choosing this book, and to Jennie Goloboy, the best agent any writer could ask for. And most of all to my wife Aoife, who never doubted for a second, even when I did. And while its certainly not a place Id recommend moving to, I sincerely hope people enjoy their time in the Caspian Republic.

Will Hinton added:

It is a rare and joyous occasion to discover a debut novel brimming with this much talent, insight, poise and heart. The voice of Nikolai South is indelible and the world he brings us into is unforgettable, part Le Carr, part Philip K. Dick, and many layers besides. Sharpson asks questions, and gives a few answers, about what is gained and what is lost in the way we live in the 21st century that will keep me thinking for a long time. I cant wait for you to read it!

When the Sparrow Falls is scheduled for publication in spring 2021 by Tor in the US and by Rebellion in the UK.

Neil Sharpson lives in Dublin with his wife and their two children. Having written for theatre since his teens, Neil transitioned to writing novels in 2017, adapting his own play The Caspian Sea into When the Sparrow Falls.

Read this article:
Introducing When the Sparrow Falls, the Debut Novel From Neil Sharpson - tor.com

Many, many waves.

This Coronavirus Apocalypse will end soon, I feel, or at least when those cowering indoors, reading scientific journals etc. find their passports and remember they arent 80-years-old. A misplaced passport is certainly a troubling thing. Haunting even if no imminent trip is planned.

It will end soon and the under-80s will get back to livin. Back to dreamin. Back to surfin.

Of course, it may be difficult to travel for surf in the near future. Airline bankruptcies, social distancing rules, worldwide economic collapse will likely put a damper on the whole shootin match but thankfully the worlds greatest surfer, Kelly Slater, has gifted humanity artificial wave technology and we will all soon be surf tripping to near-ish by industrial parks to play the Pastime of Kings.

Kellys team is busy now in Australia, bulldozing koalas in the most environmentally friendly way, but what about Surf Lakes there in Yeppoon. Do you recall?

It was my favorite of all the Surf Ranches due its dystopian design and how much better will that rusty plunger look now that our world actually is a dystopia?

Phenomenal.

It is still my favorite because, as revealed today, the Mad Max-esque machine is being tooled to hundreds of millions of waves a year for decades.

Shall we read?

Development of the system was commissioned by Surf Lakes, an Australian company that now has a full-scale functioning prototype operating in the town of Yeppoon, Queensland. A number of groups are reportedly interested in licensing the technology, which should happen once its creators have ensured that its ready for commercialization.

We need to ensure the wave machine can deliver hundreds of millions of waves every year for decades for people to enjoy, and for surf park owners to confidently build businesses and developments around, says Dr. Chris Hawley, managing director of Engenuity Solutions. The data from the prototype testing is also being used to optimize the performance of the machine further, ensure ease of construction, improve power efficiencies and bring the highest standard of safety in design to every element.

Amazing.

But how many waves a day?

I have been helping my young daughter with her first grade math in quarantine so let me run the numbers.

Lets go on the low side of hundreds of millions and say 300,000,000.

That would be:

25,000,000 waves a month.

833,333 waves a day.

34,7222 waves an hour.

578 waves a minute.

9 waves a second.

I dont even know if a jackhammer can run that hot.

Brilliant.

The rest is here:
Quaint Bay Area town turned into Coronavirus Hellhole as countless "toxic, disgusting, likely-infected surfers" descend en masse! -...

Watch | Abu Dhabi launches world's first dedicated artificial intelligence university

Over the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has started dominating all courses of human lives, and now, a transhumanist thinker has predicted that robots powered with AI could complete all human tasks by 2050. As artificial intelligence will dominate the world in the future, humans will be allowed to move to post-compulsory work society.

The vitality of artificial general intelligence

These remarks were made by David Wood, president of the London Futurists, and treasurer of the Transhumanist Party in the United Kingdom. Wood believes that humans should use the advantages offered by artificial intelligence to improve their biological capabilities.

Researchers have trained an artificial intelligence to create a black metal album.Public Domain Pictures

"I believe there's a 50 percent chance of artificial general intelligence, and hence the possibility of robots doing all human tasks, by the middle of the century and I've said there's about a 10 percent chance we might have this by 2025," Wood told Express.co.uk.

It should be noted that artificial general intelligence is a point in time when AI matches or surpasses human intelligence in any particular area. Several top experts including Stephen Hawking believed that this could happen in the future, and the repercussions of this development are unpredictable.

AI to revolutionize the world

Wood believes that wise usage of artificial intelligencein areas of gene editing could revolutionize the future, and people can solve various problems like aging effectively.

"I think we can solve aging and death and that we can allow people to truly live better lives by enhancing not just their physical wellbeing but their mental, emotional, we might even say spiritual wellbeing and that more of us will be able to live in ways that occasionally we only glimpse today. With these technologies we could become a lot more like the sages, the gurus, the mystics," added Wood.

Future humans will be hybrids

A few months back, Professor David J Gunkel, a top expert in robot ethics at Northern Illinois University, Chicago had suggested that future humans could be a mix of organics and technology. He also predicted the actual legal standing of robotscould emerge as the hottest point of debate in the future.

As per Gunkel, future humans will augment themselves with artificial devices in the future, and thus physical and mental capabilities of human beings can be extended beyond limits.

Excerpt from:
AI-powered robots will complete all human tasks by this year, reveals transhumanist thinker - International Business Times, India Edition

Amid our ever-increasing worry about climate change, the clear-cutting of forests, fracking, and the extractionist economic imperium that threatens our survival, it was a pleasure to encounter the beguiling exhibition The Trees, Light Green: Landscape PaintingPast and Present, curated by Theodor Ringborg, which paired contemporary Swedish nature painting with the genres development in Sweden at the time of the second Industrial Revolution; that is, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The exhibition implicitly proposed that Swedish landscape painting in this crucial period, diverging from the romantic nationalism of the era, could be seen as a response to the rapaciousness of capital and how it subjugates the earth. To this end, Ringborg assembled a whos who of modernist paintersincluding Vera Nilsson (18881979), Evert Lundquist (19041994), and Albin Amelin (19021975)who made work in the wake of two linked historical phenomena: the countrys creation in 1848 of limited liability companies, which made it possible to raise capital to modernize its timber and mining industries, and the designation in 1909 of Swedens first national parks.

Most of the historical theorizing was left to the exhibition didacts, as the works shown rarely directly acknowledged industry or pollution in their imagery. Viewers were instead invited to do a bit of forest bathing amid endless images of mountains, rivers, and woods, presented in a dense, salon-style hang. That something more lurked beyond the frame, though, was hinted at by the inclusion of Amelins less familiar nature paintings, instead of his well-known expressionist depictions of working-class culture and, particularly, of miners.

Even the contemporary works, made at a time when the costs of our exploitation of the earth have become more evident, seemed to consider not nature itself but its transcendental potential. The most successful of these pieces were five ethereal works in tempera on panel from Isak Halls Tempelserien (Temple Series), 2019, showing celestial bodies floating in the void of space and conjuring a chance encounter between Hilma af Klint and the anonymous pop sci-fi street painters in New York who used to trace, for instance, stars hovering above ancient pyramids in spray paint. Equally trippy were six gouaches by Olle Nors, which depicted highly abstract swirls echoing slime molds and mosses in a fashion recalling the transhumanist cyberpunk metamorphoses in the 1988 Japanese anime Akira. Ann Bttchers chillingly hyperrealistic pencil drawings of botanical forms oddly complemented these more interpretative works through their eerie detail.

Just outside the main body of the show hung a strange painting showing a couple of ships near an idyllic island. This undated work, by Arnold Plagemann (18261862), was titled Utsigt vid S. Barthlemy (View of St. Barthlemy), and depicted the Caribbean island, now part of France, that was during Plagemanns lifetime Swedens only overseas colony. The reference to it here served, deliberately or not, as a reminder that the current climate crisis is inexorably tied to European colonial history through the multinational corporations that are its potent progeny. With such specters hovering inconspicuously in the background, the shows atmosphere was as uncanny as it was bucolic. The forest is haunted, but that lupine howling in the distance might be the echo of your own imagination.

Adam Kleinman

More:
Adam Kleinman on The Trees, Light Green: Landscape PaintingPast and Present - Artforum

When I think back on the most thrilling experiences of my life as theatergoer, an inordinate number can be traced to a common source: Austins Fusebox Festival. For those who have never attended Fusebox, its hard to succinctly describe whats so special about the annual five-day, multivenue gathering of theater and dance creators from around the world. A given day might include a robotics-based dance piece, an opera cobbled together out of Lionel Richie songs, a heartfelt monologue based on snippets of home videos, a choral reading of the sexual biographies of a half-dozen elderly volunteers, a sunset orchestral performance atop a Highland Lakes dam, and a late-night dance party where drag meets hip-hop meets elaborate trans-human costumes.

At its best, Fusebox is an ongoing inquiry into the furthest and deepest possibilities of live artistic performance. So what happens when, thanks to COVID-19, in-person experiences of all sorts are suddenly against the rules? That was the rather depressing question last Friday, when Fusebox executive and artistic director Ron Berry took to the internet, broadcasting from his home to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms to introduce a shrunken and virtual edition of Fusebox Festival 2020.

Berry began his opening toast by referencing the wave of cancellations that waylaid Austins cultural sector beginning in early March with South by Southwest. We felt like we were in a position to respond creatively, and there was meaning in that, Berry said. That wave of cancellations did not have to totally define us. We felt like, Hey, we still have our imaginations, and our imaginations have a role to play right now.

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A typical Fusebox Festival, according to associate artistic director and curator Anna Gallagher-Ross, takes two years to program and develop. This virtual version was thrown together in just four weeks, both to meet the moment Berry described and to provide a much-needed platform and paid gig for artists. I can attest that the virtual festival felt just as necessary as an audience member, providing a welcome change after weeks stuck at home with Netflix and other prerecorded fare.

The virtual festival was conceived and presented as a riff on public-access TV, with a single-channel stream featuring a few dozen consecutive virtual performances over the course of three days. A few of these shows felt pitch-perfect for the current social distancing moment, speaking to our cloistered and anxious lives under COVID-19 shutdown. For instance, Alexa Caparedas solo piece Alexa featured the performer, a ballet master, as an embodiment of the Amazon artificial intelligence of the same name. Wearing a futuristic gray skullcap, black clothing, and blue lipstick, Capareda acted the automaton as audience members were invited to ask her questions and give her instructions, with results ranging from Swiffer the floor with your head to Dance the dying swan. Flitting around a too-small enclosure, performing lonely physical acts both absurd and sublime, Capareda spoke not only to the undertone of captivity in the voice of technology circa 2020, but also to our present digitally abetted confinement.

A small number of festival performances took place on Zoom and other platforms according to the interactive needs of the piece. Perhaps the most topical such performance was Erica Nixs Sweet Dreams. This Zoom experience offered participants the chance to fall asleep while quietly gazing into each others eyes. Most of those who signed on were single people sheltering alone. There was something so sweet and honest about staring at complete strangers in bed, Gallagher-Ross wrote in an email afterward. It kind of felt like everyone needed a little human contact and a hug, and this felt close to that.

Other pandemic-themed artworks were more lighthearted. In Fuseboxs take on a cooking show, chef Fiore Tedesco of Austin restaurant LOca dOro offered LETS MAKE MEATLOAF! : An Existential Crisis and Tutorial. Tedesco, better known for his culinary creations for refined palates, appeared onscreen in his bathrobe to instruct the locked-down masses in how to make a rustic yet delightful lump of cheesy baked meat.

Despite these and other inspiringly creative responses to the shutdown, there was no escaping a sense of loss around this virtual Fuseboxin particular, the important stage shows that proved too challenging to adapt into virtual space. One such sorely missed production was Is This a Room, a docudrama by Tina Satter drawn from a verbatim transcript of the FBI interrogation of former U.S. intelligence contractor Reality Winner. Winner, who grew up in Kingsville, was arrested in 2017 after leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Satter, Winners mother Billie Winner-Davis, and Winners attorney joined the virtual edition of Fusebox for a discussion of the case, though Texas audiences will sadly have to wait to catch the play, which earned rave reviews in New York. Its a missed opportunity. Winner-Davis clearly hoped that the plays Texas debut could galvanize local activism on behalf of her daughter, who remains incarcerated in the longest-ever sentence for a government leaker.

Two of the best performances of the weekendSongs at the End of the World, by Dutch collective Wunderbaum, and NO BOUNDARIES: The Journey to Embody and Archive the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers by Gesel Mason Performance Projectshad been filmed from staged productions mounted in the pre-COVID-19 era. These professionally shot and edited videos might not have looked out of place on PBS. The fact that these two entries in the virtual Fusebox lineup stood out so much only underlined the limitations of performances made from home during the shutdown, such as grainy cameras, bad lighting, and a lack of audience reactions. As lip-synch artist Dickie Beau put it in his livestreamed-from-home festival workshop, As many of you are awareif indeed anyone is watchingits so strange to have no feedback.

Some of the most poignant moments of the virtual Fusebox Festival came at moments like that one, when performers stopped trying to put on a show and instead simply bared their souls about the present predicament. Playwright, performer, and erstwhile Austinite Daniel Alexander Jones brought to the festival a live solo reading of his in-progress play about the quasi-friendship between first lady Mary Todd Lincoln and her formerly enslaved dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckleyan intriguing project. But what stuck with me most, and what might finally sum up the ethos of this strange and compelling virtual festival, is something Jones said during a livestreamed, impromptu conversation on the topic of theater artists mourning canceled projects and closed venues.

I grew up on a street where people sang as they were walking down the street, cause they had to sing it, and there was a transmission in that, Jones said. Im not minimizing the loss of income and the loss of opportunity and the tremendous grief that people are feeling But I am saying: We are in an urgent time. It was already urgent, and now its more urgent, and things are falling apart. And so, am I gonna wait for those things to return which may not return? Or am I gonna sing on the street?

The rest is here:
Boxed in by Social Distancing, an Endlessly Inventive Theater Festival Powers on Online - Texas Monthly