Category Archives: Transhuman

Aarkhaven Comics publisher Vox Day recently explained why he believes numerous media outlets, so-called Tolkien academics, Tolkien influencers, and others are attacking J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tyroe Muhafidin as Theo and Nazanin Boniadi as Bronwyn in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

There are numerous pieces of evidence of media outlets, so-called Tolkien academics, and others attacking J.R.R. Tolkien. Most recently, Deakin University Lecturer Helen Young accused Tolkien of racism, anti-Semitism, and orientalism in The Conversation.

She would accuse him of orientalism writing, Good species and races in Middle-Earth are constructed through references to European cultures (especially northwestern Europe), and the bad races are constructed through orientalist stereotypes.

Ema Horvath as Erien and Leon Wadham Kemen in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

RELATED: J.R.R. Tolkien Torched A Lord Of The Rings Film Treatment For Being Treated Carelessly, Recklessly And Showing No Evident Signs Of Any Appreciation Of What It Is All About

Young would go on to claim he pushes anti-Semitism writing, Tolkiens letters show the ways that real-world ideas about race influenced Middle-Earth. He wrote I do think of the Dwarves like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations.

She made it clear she believes this is anti-Semitism, There is evidence that he revised his representation of Dwarves between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to try move away from anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Robert Aramayo as Elrond and Owain Arthur as Prince Durin IV in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

A self-described Tolkien fansite TheOneRing.net, not to be confused with TheOneRing.com, described Tolkien as woke writing on Twitter, If you still think Ian McKellen is the worst & that Catholic Tolkien would have never approved, I beg you to read more of Tolkiens books and letters. He was woke, stood against hate, embraced all cultures in life & fiction. Its why his books are translated in every language.

Source: The One Ring Twitter

RELATED: Lord Of The Rings Fan Site Implies That J.R.R. Tolkien, As A Catholic, Would Celebrate LGBTQ

The website, which recognizes Tolkien as Catholic, also claimed that Tolkien would celebrate LGBTQ because the church celebrates LGBTQ.

They wrote on Twitter, Tolkien followed the church, and the church celebrates LGBTQ, so I think the surprise is on you.

Source: TheOneRing.net Twitter

The Gamer Features Editor Ben Sledge wrote in an article for the website accusing Tolkien of using anti-Semitic tropes.

He wrote, Tolkiens works arent free from criticism themselves. The anti-Semitic stereotypes in his depiction of dwarves may have been written with good intentions, but calling Jewish people gifted does not atone for the stereotypes he perpetuated.

Ismael Cruz Crdova as Arondir and Nazanin Boniadi Bronwyn in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

RELATED: Harper Collins And Prime Video Compared To Bacteria Attaching Itself To Healthy Tissue After Revealing New Rings of Power Themed Covers For J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings

Needless to say there are numerous examples of media outlets, personalities, so-called scholars, and more attacking Tolkien and his work.

Day succinctly explains why this is happening on his website, Its easy to understand why the Prometheans hate Tolkien so much and why they want to destroy his legacy. He knew. Heabsolutelyknew.

Day continued, He knew about them, their evil, and the source of that evil, as evidenced bythe Dark Heralds review of the third episode of The Rangz.

Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Lloyd Owen as Elendil in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

The Dark Herald then briefly summarizes the rise of Ar-Pharazn to the throne of Nmenr, his capture of Sauron, Saurons further corruption of Ar-Pharazn that leads to private worship of Melkor and eventual public worship of Melkor that involves human sacrifice, Ar-Pharazn leading the forces of Nmenr against Valinor, and Illuvatars eventual intercession that completely wipes out the Nmenrean fleet and a massive tidal wave that destroys Nmenr.

He specifically paraphrases Tolkiens description of the human sacrifice, which read in actuality, The power of Sauron daily increased, and in that temple, with spilling of blood and tormentand great wickedness, men made sacrifice to Melkor that he should release them from Death. And most often from among the Faithful they chose their victims; yet never openly on the charge that they would not worship Melkor, the Giver of Freedom, rather was cause sought against them that they hated the King and were his rebels, or that they plotted against their kin, devising lies and poisons. These charges were for the most part false; yet those were bitter days, and hate brings forth hate.

Trystan Gravelle as Pharazn and Leon Wadham as Kemenin The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

RELATED: Morfydd Clark Attempts To Defend Radical Changes To J.R.R. Tolkiens Work In The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power

The Dark Herald paraphrased this writing, A cult of Morgoth was established complete with human sacrifice of the Elf Faithful humans with the goal of achieving immortality.

The idea of achieving immortality is mentioned by Tolkien when he talks broadly of the Nmenreans in a letter to Milton Waldman that is included with The Silmarillion.

He wrote They became thus in appearance, and even in powers of mind, hardly distinguishable from the Elves but they remained mortal, even though rewarded by a triple, or more than a triple, span of years. Their reward is their undoing or the means of their temptation.

LONDON, ENGLAND AUGUST 30: (L-R) JD Payne, Lindsey Weber and Patrick McKay attends The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power World Premiere at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on August 30, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Prime Video)

Tolkien later wrote, Foreseeing this in part, the gods laid a Ban on the Nmenreans from the beginning: they must never sail to Eressa, nor westward out of sight of their own land. In all other directions they could go as they would. They must not set foot on immortal lands, and so become enamoured of an immortality (within the world), which was against their law, the special doom or gift of Ilvatar (God), and which their nature could not in fact endure.

He also writes in The Silmarillion, For a wind arose in the east and it wafted them away; and they broke the Ban of the Valar, and sailed into forbidden seas, going up with war against the Deathless, to wrest from them everlasting life within the Circles of the World.

Cynthia Addai-Robinson as Queen Regent Mriel and Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

The Arkhaven Comics Publisher then reacted to this summary of Tolkien writing, Fascinating, is it not, that a high fantasy writer could foresee todays transhuman global technocrats in the 1940s? Its because their goals are no different than they were back before the dawn of recorded human history: to be like God.

Indeed Tolkien saw that evil because he also wrote in The Silmarillion, Sauron with many arguments gainsaid all that the Valar had taught; and he bade men think that in the world, in the east and even in the west, there lay yet many seas and many lands for their winning, wherein was wealth uncounted. And still, if they should at the last come to the end of those lands and seas, beyond all lay the Ancient Darkness. And out of it the world was made. For Darkness alone is worshipful, and the Lord thereof may yet make other worlds to be gifts to those that serve him, so that the increase of their power shall find no end.

He continued, And Ar-Pharazn said: Who is the Lord of the Darkness? Then behind locked doors Sauron spoke to the King, and he lied, saying: It is he whose name is not now spoken; for the Valar have deceived you concerning him, putting forward the name of Eru, a phantom devised in the folly of their hearts, seeking to enchain Men in servitude to themselves. For they are the oracle of this Eru, which speaks only what they will. But he that is their master shall yet prevail, and he will deliver you from this phantom; and his name is Melkor, Lord of All, Giver of Freedom, and he shall make you stronger than they.

Morfydd Clark as Galadriel, Lloyd Owen as Elendil, and Cynthia Addai-Robinson as Queen Regent Mriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

What do you make of Vox Days explanation for the attacks on Tolkien and the subversion of his work?

NEXT: YouTuber Eviscerates Latest The Rings Of Power Trailer: Doesnt Resemble Anything J.R.R. Tolkien Wrote, To Say Otherwise Is A Lie

More:
Arkhaven Comics Publisher Vox Day Explains Why Media Apparatus Is Attacking J.R.R. Tolkien And Why 'The Rings Of Power' Appears To Intentionally...

If you happen to be reading this a million years from now, maybe a movement called effective altruism really took off. Perhaps it protected the lives of the 80 trillion human beings between our generation and yours, who managed to stave off ravaging poverty, man-made pathogens, and nuclear war.

More likely, youre reading this in 2022. If so, chances are that eight years ago, you or some close friends dumped an entire bucket of ice water over your head and shared the footage on Facebook, with a $10 donation to the ALS Association. The research group reported that, in total, the 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge raised $115 million for ALS, the deadly progressive neurodegenerative disease, also called Lou Gehrigs disease. That sounds like a lot of people doing a lot of good.

But if youre an effective altruist, you would probably say that it was funding cannibalism. It was ineffective giving because it pumped millions into a cause that isnt a high priority since it already has sufficient attention, and the research required for a cure will be slow and expensiveessentially depriving more worthy diseases of donations. At the time, the founder of effective altruism (EA), Scottish philosopher William MacAskill, wrote: If someone donates $100 to the ALS Association, he or she will likely donate less to other charities. So, he said, the Ice Bucket Challenge did more harm than good.

This kind of rational pragmatism is a central tenet of EA. The phrase itself was coined in 2011; and the movement, which lies at the junction of philosophy and philanthropy, burgeoned in the halls of the University of Oxford, and has now permeated the world of the ultrarich. By leaving the safe collegial confines of the academy, however, EA has been allowed to grow, attracting a broader range of adherents, often incorporating their own more elaborate ideas. Even when those are promoted by the founding members, theyre easily transformed into even further fantasy by acolytes far detached from the movements core creedsbut wealthy enough to push them.

The grounds of the philosophy are as follows: We should give to the charities that alleviate the worlds biggest problems, and do so with the most effective use of dollars. That premise seems hard to dispute, but theres more. To help achieve that, the movement dictates a narrow set of valuable causes: those committed to alleviating global poverty, investing in biomedical research, and ending factory farmingrigorously selected with empirical evidence to compute cost-effectiveness. Natural disaster relief doesnt pass the test because its oversubscribed. Donating to the treatment of intestinal worms may be more advisable than to tuberculosis, for example, because even though the parasitic disease causes relatively milder illness, its more neglected and more easily remediable at scale.

Sam Bankman-Fried [Photo: Lam Yik/Bloomberg/Getty Images]Now, EA is evolving from obscurity, delving into political spheres, and unfastening the wallets of billionaires. When I talk to William MacAskill on Zoom, he estimates the total of inner-circle EAs at 10,000, up from 100 in 2009. Included in that 10,000 is cryptocurrency-exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who rubs shoulders with Tom Brady and Gisele Bndchen, having thrusted them onto a $20 million Super Bowl ad this year for his company, FTX. And, perhaps theres now a new endorser of the movement: Elon Musk, the fifth most-followed person on Twitterranking between Rihanna and Ronaldowho tweeted his support for MacAskills newest book. This has all formed heavyweight momentum for the rollout of the title, What We Owe the Future, which would be the envy for any product launch.

Much of the newfound enchantment with EA springs from a shake-up of the doctrine in favor of a philosophical concept called longtermism. Between MacAskills first book, 2015s Doing Good Better, and this years, weve suffered a nightmarish pandemic, climate change has spiraled, and tech has produced disquieting side effects. Developed to take on those new threats, EAs now argue that its essential to protect not only our population, but also hundreds of coming generations, millions of years into the future, whose well-being is just as important as ours. That requires even more methodical consideration: calculating not only the cost-effectiveness of philanthropic strategies, but their estimated value for millions of humans, millions of years into the future.

Now embraced, and financed, by some of the worlds richest and most powerful, EA has gone from a simple argument for better allocation of charitable dollars to part of elite discussions about space colonies and digital human enhancement. Which could mean not just eschewing things like the Ice Bucket Challenge, but also constituting a free pass for the wealthy class to abrogate responsibility for addressing todays societal ills while cloaking themselves in a presumably enlightened outlook.

Dont Follow Your Passion, MacAskill titles a chapter in Doing Good Better. To wit, fledgling EAs commit to embarking on career paths where theyre either working for impactful nonprofits or earning to giveworking in well-paid industries, like finance or software engineering, that allow them the luxury of setting aside heaps of cash for donations, typically at least 10% of their total earnings. Theyd say that anyone reading this should be doing the same because theyre privileged to. MacAskill, 35, who says he lives on 26,000 pounds ($31,000) after donating half of his income to charity, is still in the top 3% of the worlds richesteven with his two housemates, lack of a car, and a leaky shower.

The philanthropic causes to which EAs contribute are said to be ones that are relatively neglected, easily solvable, and affect enough people in the world to be impactful if solved. Global poverty has long ranked near the top of lists; other priorities include climate action, criminal justice reform, and animal welfare. To not attend to animals would be to practice speciesism: All creatures are sentient beings capable of pain, and widespread factory farming subjects animals to a lifetime of extreme suffering.

To decide how to tackle those issues, they analyze the causes impacts with randomized control trials. They determine cost-effectiveness using quality-adjusted life years, or QALYs, a numerical measure of the relationship between the predicted quantity of years a person has left to live, and the quality of those years. This should help givers weigh the value of saving a life versus improving the quality of one: Would it be more effective to prevent 10 people from suffering from AIDS or 100 from severe arthritis? EA-aligned organizations, such as GiveWell, prescribe the best routes for charitable giving. For alleviating poverty, the recommended paths are funding parasitic-deworming medicines and bed nets, which respectively cure intestinal parasites and protect against malaria-bearing mosquitos; also, making direct cash transfers to people in developed countries via charities like GiveDirectly.

This validation of prioritizing causes is compellingly novel, says Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. Throughout American philanthropic history, theres been ultimately a deference and nonjudgmental attitude toward the ways that people give, he says, fueled by individuals identities, priorities, and prerogatives. EA has opened a space for the community to scrutinize the often-self-indulgent philanthropic choices of the wealthy (and to a much more scrupulous extent than past one-off instances of criticism, such as when hotelier Leona Helmsley left $12 million to her dog, a Maltese, named Trouble). Previously, people wouldnt want to [push] back on gifts to Harvard and Stanford and Princeton as a waste of money, he says, despite their relative ineffectiveness.

But a common concern is that the movements rational assessment of causes removes emotion from givingthat it has an unfeeling, robotic, utilitarian calculus, Soskis says. (EA is explicitly based in Utilitarianism, a British economic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries that preached that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority.) But emotion may be the most important factor when deciding where people give: When Michael Bloomberg gives billions to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins, it may not be the most effective use of the funds, but he feels a genuine sense of connection to the school. And the Ice Bucket Challenge had a shared sense of community of friends and familyit s an example of what Jennifer Rubenstein, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia and an EA critic, calls intimate donating, like how shed feel pleased to donate to her nieces dance-a-thon for cancer research. But cancer may not pass the prioritization test because its not neglected enough.

I think the emotion is still there, says MacAskill, on the Zoom call. Its just channeled particularly in one way rather than another. In practice, there needs to be some detachment in order to do the most good. Take ER doctors: How much emotion are they feeling day to day? he asks. It might be a fair amount, but if someone dies under their watch, its not the same amount of emotion as if a friend or family member of theirs dies. If you were intensely emotionally resonating with every single person you were interacting with, you just wouldnt be able to do your job.

MacAskill is clearly not devoid of emotion; he opens up about his Eureka moments that sparked the movement, one of which was his visceral reaction as a teenager to learning about the broad neglect of the global AIDS crisis. I was just like, thats fucked up, he says. I cannot believe that people arent talking about this. But rather than emotion, he speaks in terms of ethics. His work stems from a deep, moral desire to make the world better. (In the intervening years, AIDS has become a more prominent global cause, so EAs tend to focus more on malaria and parasitic diseases, though some advocate for funding AIDS interventions.)

MacAskill wants to build a collective movement that effects large-scale moral change, in the way that abolitionists and suffragettes did. Those movements take time, but hes patient; the first public statement against slavery was released in 1688, but it wasnt fully abolished globally for another 300 years (Mauritania was the holdout, until 1981). He envisions, in 100 years, a cultural shift whereby it becomes normal for everyone to consider how theyll make the world a better place. And, naturally, theyll design their plans of action using high-quality evidence and careful reasoning.

The moral underpinnings of EA come from the work of Australian philosopher Peter Singer, specifically his drowning child analogy from 1972. If you walked by a pond, so it goes, and saw a child submerged, the moral obligation to save them would clearly outweigh the small cost of dirtying your clothes and being late for your obligations. Just as critically, this extends to if the child were in a far-flung place across the globe, and you could still save them at a small cost. Thats the rationale for contributing money to relieve world poverty.

But more recently, the understanding of where the drowning child could exist has become more expansive in the eyes of EA thinkers. Now some in the movement advocate that theres no distinction between caring about the spatial versus the temporal. Just as we want to help people in other geographic areas, we should be as concerned about people in the futurepeople who dont exist, and wont for centuries, or millennia, or even millions of years. Homo-sapiens history thus far is minuscule; there will be infinitely many more humans in the future than have ever lived, so preserving that majority should be the priority. When the child is drowning is equally important to where it is.

The effective altruism movement has absolutely evolved, MacAskill says. Ive definitely shifted in a more longtermist direction. Longtermism is rooted in the notion of existential risk, promulgated in 2013 by another Oxford philosopher, Nick Bostrom. Its a more important moral priority to reduce the risks of future extinction over any other global public good. The human race needs to improve our ability to deal with those risks to our species continued existence, so we should generously fund mitigation strategies.

Various extinction scenarios preoccupy EAs: still global poverty and climate change, but also pandemics (natural and engineered), nuclear war, and potentially the takeover of malevolent artificial intelligencea worry that Elon Musk expressed long before his more overt championship of EA. Vastly more risk than North Korea, he tweeted in 2017. (Though, EAs would say that stable dictatorshipsundemocratic governments that stand firm against the international orderare also a high-importance risk.)

So EA is now in the business of catastrophes. But its still informed by empiricism; EAs say theres a risk of between 1% and 3% that an engineered pandemic could kill off the entire human race this century, or a 20% risk of a third world war by 2070. Again, the rationale can feel cold. Derek Parfit, a philosophy professor who mentored MacAskill at Oxford, once wrote that there is a much greater difference between a nuclear war that kills 99% and 100% of the worlds population, than between a nuclear war that kills 99% and complete peacebecause, in the former scenario, humanity is able to regather and rebuild civilization. And future people need the resources with which to do that.

Some of those resources may be fossil fuels. Theyre more tried and tested than renewable sources, MacAskill writes in his book, and solar panels and wind turbines degrade over time. Future people would need a reserve if they had to come back from the brink of a cataclysm, so we shouldnt deplete them now. We have 200 billion tonnes of carbon left in surface coal, and that stockpile would be easy to access using technology as simple as a shovel, he writesand enough to produce the energy we used from 1800 to 1980.

To many critics, these arithmetic predictions for scenarios so far into the future seem absurd; one called them Pascalian probabilities. EAs unemotionally commit to shut up and multiply: to enumerate the expected utility of an intervention aeons into the future by multiplying the value of an outcome by the probability that it will happen. Even the population figures of future people are vague and varying. Some say humanity could exist one million years into the future, based on other mammals survival rates, but because were more developed, it may be closer to 50 million. Or, millions, billions, trillions of years, suggested Nick Beckstead,yet another ex-Oxforder. What matters, Bostrom has said, is not the exact numbers, but the fact that they are huge.

Evangelizing that future people matter just as much could create an injustice to people who are currently living, including the 1.3 billion people in global poverty, says Ted Lechterman, assistant professor of philosophy at IE University in Madrid, previously a research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, whos written extensive criticisms of EA. Those trade-offs with present and near-term concerns . . . are difficult to justify. He appreciates the way the movement challenges common-sense morality, and that its generally open to debating its ideas, but thinks theyre overvaluing the future.

They also run the risk of overfunding some far-flung, sci-fi, oddball causes, such as asteroid collisions and robot apocalypse, Lechterman says. Some causes do feel outlandish; the EA forums host animated debates about the importance of reducing insect pain. MacAskill defends those discussionsnot because he imagines that saving the ants will become a defining cause, but because the dismissal of weird moral ideas has a very bad track record, he says, again citing early abolitionists, whose beliefs were peculiar to the 19th-century majority. Thrashing out insect welfare, he says, helps us mull over morality, and apply that thought to other concepts.

Lately, EAs pocketbooks have become more plentiful, as two tech billionaires have infused the movement with funds. Along with his wife, Cari Tuna, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, whos worth a reported $15.7 billion, launched the nonprofit Open Philanthropy, which a spokesperson told me committed more than $450 million in grants last year, and $500 million so far this year, to a variety of EA causes, including vaccine development, criminal justice reform, the welfare of carp, tilapia, and shrimp, and adversarial robustness research.

(One leading cause is growing effective altruism itself, through grants to the Effective Altruism Foundation, and MacAskills nonprofit, 80,000 Hours, named for the timespan an average person works in their lifetime. On the 80,000 Hours website, promoting effective altruism receives five-out-of-five scores on importance and neglectedness, and a four on solvability, totaling to a high score among causes of a whopping 14/15.)

Sam Bankman-Fried is probably the most prominent example of the EA earning-to-give model, that you can donate the most by working lucrative jobsa course of action reportedly influenced by MacAskill himself, whom he met in 2012 as an MIT undergraduate. The CEO of FTX has granted $130 million since February from his Future Fund, which is dedicated to solving longtermist problems. The fund welcomes petitions for grants from anyone working on projects, such as better PPE, advocacy for high-skilled immigration, biological weapons shelters, dealing with population decline, and the ability to rapidly scale food production in case of nuclear winter.

The donors have plunged the movement into politics. Moskovitz and Tuna donated $20 million to Democrats in 2016, making them the third-largest donors of the cycle. This year, Bankman-Fried bankrolled the Democratic primary campaign of Oregon House candidate Carrick Flynn, who ran on an EA platform; he lost, receiving 19% of the vote. EA has long been for political spendingand votingfor achieving better policies to improve the world; MacAskill has been a policy advisor to 10 Downing Street. But $11 million on a failed campaign suggests squandering money, the antithesis of EAs dogma of effective expenditure. Looking back, I think that was too much, MacAskill says (though, he wasnt involved in the spending).

Still, Bankman-Fried has since said he will contribute more than $100 million to the 2024 election. Perhaps north of $1 billion, if he has to stop Donald Trump from winning again. Speaking on the podcast Whats Your Problem, he said: I would hate to say [a billion is a] hard ceiling because who knows whats going to happen between now and then. (Fast Company reached out to Bankman-Fried for an interview but did not receive a response. Moskovitz politely declined.) Even Lechterman, the critic, says political spending may be justified in this case, for preventing the horrible candidate from coming to power. He says denying not only Trump, but also other recently elected global leaders, by funding opposition candidates could have saved a dramatic number of lives, while also improving standards of life and reducing social injustices, which are moral improvements in the EA mold.

The substantial involvement of the wealthy has kindled fears that they could start to drive the movement. Soskis, the philanthropy expertwho is partly funded by Open Philanthropythinks theres enough insulation in the movement to keep a mega-donor takeover at bay. There are a lot of people, like himself, who dont label themselves as EAs but are involved in the discourse, intrigued by the novel philanthropic ideas, and willing to steer them in the right directions. He thinks the number of those people is certainly more significant than their numbers would suggest.

Nor is MacAskill overly concerned. His book discusses value lock-in, the notion that some very niche groups tend to define what the worlds values are, for good or evil, and can change the trajectory of the future forever. He runs through the prominent value influencers of the pastJesus, Confucius, Hitlerconcluding, I really dont think its the rich that systematically determined the values of the future. (Hitler, though, was thought to have amassed vast wealth in the sum of more than $6 billion in todays money.) One of the earliest pivotal abolitionists, he says, was Benjamin Lay, a modest Quaker who lived in a cave. The modern environmentalist movement grew to success from the ground up, all along opposed to corporate interests.

But another billionaire might be the source of some unease. Elon Musk has been effusive about EA, asserting that it aligns closely with his ideology. Maybe more than anyone else in the world, Elon has a worldview, MacAskill says. If [longtermism] were wedded to any one particular person, I think it would be a real shame. Musk, who didnt respond to a request for comment, has reportedly not yet donated to causes based on EA, though hes charged Igor Kurganov, a pro-poker player and EA follower, with guiding his philanthropy plan. (An interesting six-degrees-of-EA-separation tidbit: Kurganovs partner, Liv Boeree, is a former housemate of MacAskills.)

MacAskill says that Musk seems to believe in the uncontroversial aspects of EA, but also has his own cause priorities, such as starting Martian civilizations. Some reports suggest hes fixated on transhumanism, or using technology to enhance our natural human states and transcend biological evolution, to achieve greater intelligence and super longevity. He has discussed the importance of keeping the Earth populated; Musk himself might be playing a first-person role in that procreation program. Theres a worry in general: as ideas get more popular, that they get twisted, MacAskill says.

Elon Musk [Photo: Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images]In his book, MacAskill does endorse reproduction, he says to counter an expanding worldview that its immoral to have kids because of your carbon impact. He stops short of recommending it for everyone because he respects personal reproductive choices, but he believes failing to breed could cause future technological stagnation. Even if the generations ahead dont face a calamitous extinction event, they could go through another Dark Ages, deprived of tech innovation, and an existential brain-drain could exacerbate those sluggish eras and collapse society.

But the transhumanism obsession began inside the Oxford halls, particularly from the mind of Nick Bostrom. He has researched genetic enhancement of intelligence via embryo selection, to engineer designer babies with high IQs, which he has acknowledged is reminiscent of eugenics. Transhumanism goes further, in changing the very substrate of persons from carbon-based biological beings to persons based in silicon computers, wrote philosopher Mark Walker. Bostrom has suggested that if we venture into transhumanism, we could create vastly huge numbers of fugture people. He is also a fan of space expansion, claiming in his Astronomical Waste paper, retweeted by Musk, that we waste 100 trillion human lives for each second that we do not colonize space.

The stagnation concern raises some worry about the fate of the future global poorinitially the very individuals that the EAs deemed most worthy of our help. Beckstead, who is now CEO of the FTX Foundation, wrote in 2013 that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country because wealthy nations have more potential to innovate. For Lechterman, the critic, the main source of EA disapproval is that the movement has power over the poor, with a heroic, elitist mentality that our global problems are things that smart, wealthy people can solve on their own.

Deciding whats right for poorer countries creates a dangerous power dynamic, he says. Cash transfers may be better than bed nets and deworming drugs because theyre less paternalistic, and allow people autonomy to spend money as they see fit, but theyre still incentives for societies to put off addressing the root causes of poverty. He says the movement should prioritize investing in advocacy groups and grassroots movements, to put resources in the hands of the people suffering the most, and give them the power to effect long-lasting systemic change.

It can be terribly hubristic for an elite few to make important decisions on the worlds behalf, Lechterman says, even if their motivations are, in fact, pure, and their beliefs are correct. Thats paramount now, as billionaires are flocking to the operation without the same philosophical introspection as the Oxfordian thinkers. Thats where things can especially go awry.

Excerpt from:
The truth about Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, and effective altruism - Fast Company

Moral guidelines that help us distinguish between right and wrong are a part of ethics. AI ethics is a set of rules that advise how to make AI and what it should do. People have all kinds of cognitive biases, like recency and confirmation biases. These biases appear in our actions and, as a result, in our data.

Several books focus on ethics and bias in AI so people can learn more about them and understand AI better.

AI Ethics - Mark Coeckelbergh

Mark Coeckelbergh talks about important stories about AI, such as transhumanism and technological singularity. He looks at critical philosophical debates, such as questions about the fundamental differences between humans and machines and arguments about the moral status of AI. He talks about the different ways AI can be used and focuses on machine learning and data science. He gives an overview of critical ethical issues, such as privacy concerns, responsibility and the delegation of decision-making, transparency, and bias at all stages of the data science process. He also thinks about how work will change in an AI economy. Lastly, he looks at various policy ideas and discusses policymakers' problems. He argues for ethical practices that include a vision of the good life and the good society and builds values into the design process.

This book in the Essential Knowledge series from MIT Press summarises these issues. AI Ethics, written by a tech philosopher, goes beyond the usual hype and nightmare scenarios to answer fundamental questions.

Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximise Machines (2016) - John C Havens

The ideas in this book are economics, new technologies, and positive psychology. The book gives the first values-driven approach to algorithmic living. It is a definitive plan to help people live in the present and define their future in a good way. Each chapter starts with a made-up story to help readers imagine how they would react in different AI situations. The book shows a vivid picture of what our lives might be like in a dystopia where robots and corporations rule or in a utopia where people use technology to improve their natural skills and become a long-lived, super-smart, and kind species.

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence - Max Tegmark

The book starts by imagining a world where AI is so intelligent that it has surpassed human intelligence and is everywhere. Then, Tegmark talks about the different stages of human life from the beginning. He calls the biological origins of humans "Life 1.0," cultural changes "Life 2.0," and the technological age of humans "Life 3.0." The book is mostly about "Life 3.0" and new technologies like artificial general intelligence, which may be able to learn and change its hardware and internal structure in the future.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era - James Barrat

James Barrat weaves together explanations of AI ideas, the history of AI, and interviews with well-known AI researchers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ray Kurzweil. The book describes how artificial general intelligence could improve itself repeatedly to become an artificial superintelligence. Furthermore, Barrat uses a warning tone throughout the book, focusing on the dangers that artificial superintelligence poses to human life. Barrat stresses how hard it would be to control or even predict the actions of something that could become many times smarter than the most intelligent humans.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World - Meredith Broussard

This book helps us understand how technology works and what its limits are. It also explains why we shouldn't always assume that computers are suitable. The writer does a great job of bringing up the issues of algorithmic bias, accountability, and representation in a tech field where men are the majority. The book gives a detailed look at AI's social, legal, and cultural effects on the public, along with a call to design and use technologies that help everyone.

Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong - Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen

The book's authors argue that moral judgment must be programmed into robots to ensure our safety. The authors say that even though full moral agency for machines is still a ways off, it is already necessary to develop a functional morality in which artificial moral agents have some essential ethical sensitivity. They do this by taking a quick tour of philosophical ethics and AI. However, the conventional ethical theories appear insufficient, necessitating the development of more socially conscious and exciting robots. Finally, the authors demonstrate that efforts are underway to create machines that can distinguish between right and wrong.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford, wrote the 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies. It says that if machine brains are more intelligent than human brains, this new superintelligence could replace humans as the most intelligent species on Earth. Moreover, smart machines could improve their abilities faster than human computer scientists, which could be a disaster for humans on a fundamental level.

Furthermore, no one knows if AI on par with humans will come in a few years, later this century, or not until the 21st or 22nd century. No matter how long it takes, once a machine has human-level intelligence, a "superintelligent" system in almost all domains of interest" would come along surprisingly quickly, if not immediately. A superintelligence like this would be hard to control or stop.

Ethical Machines: Your Concise Guide to Totally Unbiased, Transparent, and Respectful AI - Reid Blackman

Reid Blackman tells you everything you need to know about AI ethics as a risk management challenge in his book Ethical Machines. He will help you build, buy, and use AI ethically and safely for your company's reputation, legal standing, and compliance with rules. And he will help you do this at scale. Don't worry, though. The book's purpose is to help you get work done, not to make you think about deep, existential questions about ethics and technology. Blackman's writing is clear and easy to understand, which makes it easy to understand a complicated and often misunderstood idea like ethics.

Most importantly, Blackman makes ethics doable by addressing AI's three most significant ethical risksbias, explainability, and privacyand telling you what to do (and what not to do) to deal with them. Ethical Machines is the only book you need to ensure your AI helps your company reach its goals instead of hurting them. It shows you how to write a strong statement of AI ethics principles and build teams that can evaluate ethical risks well.

Originally posted here:
Eight best books on AI ethics and bias - INDIAai

For the time being, it seems that far more dangerous than artificial intelligence itself are the people who manage it and are already using it, for example, to invigilate society or to control peoples moods, preferences, even opinions, says Father Dr Micha Zikowski MI.

TVP WEEKLY: Ilya Samoylenko, one of the commanders of the Azov battalion, is called a Cyborg by the Ukrainian media. In 2015, he lost his left arm, which was replaced with a titanium prosthesis, and his right eye in the fight against the Russians, so he uses an artificial one. Can we consider this as an example of transhumanism?

FR. DR MICHA ZIKOWSKI: In order to judge whether a particular intervention in the biological structure of the human being is transhumanist, it must be assessed against the overall perspective of this ideology. Transhumanists write a lot about the cyborgisation of the human being, but it should be remembered that in transhumanism the whole sphere of science is subordinated to a certain neo-Gnostic, techno-spiritualist vision. Transhumanism in its futuristic projects ultimately wants to free the human mind (consciousness) from the body. The body is therefore an obstacle to divinity, which transhumanists identify with the abiological post-human stage. This is why transhumanism nurtures one might say a deep hatred of the body.

So the aim of transhumanism is not to help human beings on the basis of therapeutic intervention?

No. Endo or exoprosthesis (cyborgisation) is not in itself transhumanist, unless the person undergoing it wishes to no longer be human and has done so for that very purpose. The nature of transhumanism is a disagreement with remaining in a biological body. We can call the enhancement of the body by various kinds of technology transhumanism if it is strictly subordinated to the expectation of the arrival of such technology that will make it possible to leave the corporeal dimension, e.g. by transferring the mind to cyberspace.

Is transhumanism characterised by an extreme instrumentalisation of human existence?

Of course. It is not difficult to see in it a technological substitute for an anti-Christian religious system. Such conceptual creations found in transhumanism as technotranscendence, techno-gnosis, the technological singularity, super-intelligence or the post-human are in fact parareligious concepts, merely dressed up in a technological robe. Transhumanism is judged by the representatives of this movement themselves to be a neo-Gnostic system. History shows that the doctrine of Gnostic sects has been fought against by Christian intellectuals, if only because of the glorification of the figure of Satan by some Gnostics. We can also find similar examples in transhumanism, e.g. in one text by leading transhumanist Max More we find a manifesto entitled In Praise of the Devil.

Click here to read the full article.

By Tomasz Plaskota

Translated by jz

source:WEEKLY.TVP.PL

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The fruit of the transhumanist project will not be a better human being - TVP World

The unelected globalists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) are envisioning an augmented society ruled by digital identity and transhumanism via the Internet of Bodies.

Digital identity has long been on the Davos agenda and has been gaining speed ever since the official launch of the great reset in June, 2020.

On August 17, 2022, the WEF published a story by Callsign CEO Zia Hayat on its Agenda blog claiming, Digital identity is vital element of building trust both online and in our wider economies to everyones benefit.

According to Hayat, If we dont know for certain who we are interacting with online, we cannot have trust. Digital identity must therefore be the foundational element to our digital economy.

But its not just for our digital economy that the unelected globalists want to usher-in digital identity for all.

They want that digital identity be embedded into every aspect of our lives even under our skin!

This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access or, conversely, what is closed off to us World Economic Forum, 2018

Technology will become more intertwined with the body in the form of implants Kathleen Philips, WEF Agenda, 2022

For years, the WEF and its partners have been pushing digital ID for a number of reasons including:

Digital identity is also a foundational element for building a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-style system of social credit where access to goods and services are based on a citizens behavioral score.

When trust is broken in one area, a citizen may be locked out of participating in just about every aspect of society.

As scary as chip implants may sound, they form part of a natural evolution that wearables once underwent Kathleen Philips, WEF Agenda, 2022

Going hand-in-hand with digital identity and subsequent digital ID is the push for a transhumanist future.

The WEF published another blog post in August, this time exploring how merging humans with technology will create an augmented society and that stakeholders in society will need to agree on how to ethically make these amazing technologies a part of our lives.

Written by imec VP of R&D Kathleen Philips, the article describes augmentation as going beyond rehabilitative healthcare whereby the extension of rehabilitation where technological aids such as glasses, cochlear implants or prosthetics are designed to restore a lost or impaired function.

Philips goes on to say that when the merging of humans and technology is added to completely healthy individuals, then what you get is augmentation.

Welcome to the Internet of Bodies (IoB).

The WEF is fully behind widespread adoption of the IoB despite recognizing the enormous ethical concerns that come with having an unprecedented number of sensors attached to, implanted within, or ingested into human bodiesto monitor, analyze, and even modify human bodies and behavior.

The Internet of Bodies might trigger breakthroughs in medical knowledge []Or it might enable a surveillance state of unprecedented intrusion and consequence RAND Corporation, 2020

Increased IoB adoption might also increase global geopolitical risks, because surveillance states can use IoB data to enforce authoritarian regimes RAND Corporation, 2020

As acknowledged by Philips herself, the idea of augmenting a perfectly healthy human being with technology carries many ethical concerns.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in 2020, National Academy of Medicine presidentVictor Dzautold the Davos elites that augmenting humans beyond their natural capabilities was crossing the ethical line.

I think youre in pretty safe ground when you use these technologies for the purpose of curing disease, treating disease, or at least addressing impairment, he said.

I do think you start crossing the line when you think about enhancement and augmentation.

Fast forward two years and nine months, and the Davos Agenda blog is saying, As scary as chip implants may sound, they form part of a natural evolution that wearables once underwent.

I do think you start crossing the line when you think about enhancement and augmentation Victor Dzau, WEF Annual Meeting, 2020

Should you implant a tracking chip in your child? There are solid, rational reasons for it, like safety. Would you actually do it? Is it a bridge too far? Kathleen Philips, WEF Agenda, 2022

The unelected globalists are even seeding the idea of implanting children with tracking chips while claiming to be concerned about the ethical concerns.

The limits on implants are going to be set by ethical arguments rather than scientific capacity, Philips wrote, adding, For example, should you implant a tracking chip in your child? There are solid, rational reasons for it, like safety. Would you actually do it? Is it a bridge too far?

While children were used as a use case for digitally tagging, tracking, and tracing people like cattle, the same concept can be applied to the rest of humanity for our safety of course!

This is what the so-called fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is really all about in the words of WEF founder and executive chair Klaus Schwab, What the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities.

Another way of looking at the 4IR is the merger of humans beings with technology while simultaneously creating a control grid to monitor and enforce compliance.

What the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities Klaus Schwab, WEF, 2019

Brain implants take us one step further and allow us to tap straight into the bodys operating system Kathleen Philips, WEF Agenda, 2022

Going back to Philipss blog post on an augmented society, she acknowledges that the brain is part of our human operating system, stating, Brain implants take us one step further and allow us to tap straight into the bodys operating system.'

But what does it mean to tap into someones operating system?

Historian Yuval Noah Harari has already answered this question on several occasions.

When you tap into a persons operating system, what you get is the ability to hack human beings.

This means governments and corporations would know more about you than you know about yourself.

When humans become hackable, they risk losing all their free will. They will be able to be manipulated in seemingly unconceivable ways.

We are no longer mysterious souls; we are now hackable animals Yuval Noah Harari, WEF, 2020

Ethics will advise us Kathleen Philips, WEF Agenda, 2022

In her WEF blog post, Philips asks, When do we enter the grey zone?

The answer is simple. Weve already entered that grey zone.

To give one recent example, a Pentagon-sponsoredRAND report publishedin November, 2021 outlined the technological potentials of this controversial transhumanist research, which includes potentially adding reptilian genes that provide the ability to see in infrared, and making humans stronger, more intelligent, or more adapted to extreme environments.

This means that governments are already fundamentally altering what it means to be human, funding research into creating super humans that are smarter, faster, and stronger through human performance enhancement.

Its happening now, but not to worry!

Philips assures, Ethics will advise us.

Authoritarianism is easier in a world of total visibility and traceability, while democracy may turn out to be more difficult World Economic Forum, 2019

It all starts with digital identity, and the agenda continues to move toward an augmented society.

Those who control the data and the technology are poised to rule the world, but the future doesnt have to be this way.

We all have choices.

You can choose to trust that your digital overlords are doing whats best for society, or you may use common sense and reason to see through their agendas and therefore feel compelled to speak out to friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, or anyone else who will listen.

Of course, there are many people whose minds are already made up, choose not to see, or are too busy just trying to get by that they dont have the time to look into these things.

Knowledge is power.

What will you do with the knowledge youve acquired?

Excerpt from:
WEF agenda envisions an augmented society ruled by Internet of Bodies, digital ID - The Sociable

The Proms, Printworks, and multimedia mayhem. Created and co-produced by award winning counter tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, Philip Glass's meditative Minimalism and Handel's Baroque elegance crash together in a cacophony of artistic media.

It certainly wants to be more than just a musical conversation between two composers. But its ambition is often its own worst enemy.

Performed at Printworks, which usually houses DJ sets and raves, it's an artistic free-for-all with everything thrown at the wall. The Handel and Glass combinations are taken from Roth's Grammy award winning album ARC. Karen Kamensek conducts the English National Opera Orchestra alongside a variety of films projected overhead, artist Glenn Brown produces live painting, there are dancers darting around, and Jason Singh's "nature beatboxing."

Everything clamours for attention; moments of coherence are few and far between. When the different media do fuse its the psycology of Glass's brooding repetition leading the charge in carving the fraught emotional landscape. The visuals add colour afterwards. The Prom sees first performances of extracts from Songs from Liquid Days, Monsters of Grace, and The Fall of the House of Usher, alongside a world premiere of 'No more, you petty spirits' from Cymbeline.

It's the opposite with the Handel whose music is sadly relegated secondary to the visuals. His 'Vivi, tiranno' from Rodelinda is juxtaposed with a loud satirical collage of videos from Toiletpaper Magazine's Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari; brash and surreal inversions of adverts and dadaesque visual puns are projected onto the venue's walls.

The films are vaguely linked by a theme of evolution. Starting with Handel's Rinaldo, medieval knights wander green and pleasant lands. It then morphs into a clunky 90's video game before it mutates into a futuristic cityscape with humanoid robots wandering around contemplating their trans-human existence. The narrative, as ambiguous as it is, chimes with Glass' undecorated and precise emotional language, but the overstuffed visuals become too bombastic and too distracting alongside the rich complexity of Handel's music.

Naturally some of it does veer into pretentiousness. Costanzo strides through the crowd guided by assistants brandishing blinding lights to split them as if he is the messiah descending from Heaven. It's a little bit silly, but it is undeniably exhilarating to be so close to Costanzo's blisteringly melancholic performance as lights, colours, and sounds swirl around above.

The experience is only possible because of Printworks. The space is entirely democratic. There is no hierarchy as in other venues; there is no best seat in the house. The audience can and do move around the space engendering a sense of conceptual freedom to engage in the artistic anarchy unravelling around them. But there are some trade-offs: the orchestra rely on microphones giving their timbre a distinctly metallic quality. Whilst fitting for the industrial ambiance, Printworks is an old printing plant clad in concrete and metal, it leaves the orchestra feeling cold.

But maybe it is something that is best enjoyed without overthinking. Picking one thing and focusing on one's own narrative is the way to engage in this, not letting everything battle for attention. It's a bit like an art gallery in that sense: you can't give every painting the time it deserves so best to pick out a handful to savour.

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Review: BBC PROMS AND THE ENO at Printworks London - Broadway World