Tomorrow's People: The Challenges of Technologies for Life Extension and Enhancement

The subject of the recent Forum 2006 at Said Business School, complete with archived webcasts and active discussion board.

Educating Generation-E; The New Extropians

Having experienced the unimpressive results of my own kid's participation in experimental hippie freedom forms of education, I'm skeptical at best about the idea that More Fidgeting will improve student outcomes; either physically or academically. These are human subjects of experiments that could have every bit as much of an adverse outcome as any experiment. To my mind, it's perfectly astounding to observe the degree of whimsical toying that goes on in public education. How about this: instead making kids Stand Up In Class, go back to having Daily Physical Education requirements. Nah, that would make too much sense; besides, everyone knows that New Ways are always better than Old Ways.

Comment overheard from a fictional 20 year old: "It's irrelevant whether Old provide better outcomes because Old Sucks, you stupid phuktard; New Rocks, period, the end. We rule, you suck. Everyone over 35, or maybe 28, should shutup and die; but first give us all your money so we can buy weed and toys and stay permanently baked."

If you think it doesn't matter, these are the people who are most likely to become extropian; they are also the humans that you hope will help take care of YOU, should you ever become debilitated in your 90's or 190's. Unless, of course, you expect to be the first human to stay 24 in every way, forever. Even the most reckless extropian thinkers are not that naiive. The longer our lives, the more important early character development becomes to leading a happy and productive existence.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Another simply brilliant BookTV episode on the subject of supernatural selection and scientific approaches to understand How And Why We Got Religion, as a species.

What is Extropianism?

That is the question posed on the Talk page for the definition of Extropianism on Wikipedia. That provoked me to venture a response.

Personally, I understand Extropianism to describe a fulfillment of the human condition anticipated by transhumanism; a consummating consilience of a rich history of transhuman work and thought, rather than a splintered sect within that tradition. When I call myself an extropian, I am not evangelizing for a transhuman denomination, I am not advancing a doctrine; rather, I mean that I Am Part of Making the Posthuman Condition Happen, Right Now. I am careful to say "a" fulfillment rather than "the" fulfillment, because beyond the extropians there will be stages of evolution that we cannot yet imagine; regardless of how intimidating one's endowment in the frontal lobe.

Responsible futurists understand that We Just Can't Know how transhumanism will actually play out. We can, however, express an abiding confidence in the fact that it will play, indeed is playing out, and within that merry happenstance we are committed to Being Ever Present; maintaining engaged minds, productive imaginations, and transcendent hopes aligned with the best case scenarios for human longevity and evolution.

An important difference between transhuman theory and extropian practice, as I understand it, is the active commitment to Being There and Making It Happen. Personally, I do not believe we are merely theorizing as earlier transhumanists, of necessity, were resource-bound to do. Forty years ago, when F.M. Esfandiary introduced the idea of transitional humans, even those who agreed with him rightly suspected that they would not survive quite long enough to make the transition. As extropians, we expect to be part of the transhuman migration and are in one sense self-selecting guinea pigs saying "pick me" for the implants, the neuroprosthetics, the gangly first-generation meat-machine interfaces that the average risk-averse human would actually eschew in favor of death.