The human desire to acquire new capacities is as ancient as our species itself. We have always sought to expand the boundaries of our existence, be it socially, geographically, or mentally. There is a tendency in at least some individuals always to search for a way around every obstacle and limitation to human life and happiness.

Emerging developments in communications and computing technology may transform the nature of human identity, in the process rendering obsolete the traditional philosophical and scientific frameworks for understanding the nature of individuals and groups. Progress toward an evaluation of this possibility and an appropriate conceptual basis for analyzing it may be derived from two very different but ultimately connected social movements that promote this radical change. One is the governmentally supported exploration of Converging Technologies, based in the unification of nanoscience, biology, (...) information science and cognitive science. The other is the Transhumanist movement, which has been criticized as excessively radical yet is primarily conducted as a dignified intellectual discussion within a new school of philosophy about human enhancement. Together, NBIC and Transhumanism suggest the immense transformative power of today’s technologies, through which individuals may explore multiple identities by means of online avatars, semi-autonomous intelligent agents, and other identity expansions. (shrink)

This is a commentary on Andrea Lavazza and Murilo Vilaça's article "Human Extinction and AI: What We Can Learn from the Ultimate Threat" (Lavazza & Vilaça, 2024). I discuss the potential concern that their proposal to create artificial successors to "insure" against the tragedy of human extinction might mean being too quick to accept that catastrophic prospect as inevitable, rather than single-mindedly focusing on avoiding it. I also consider the question of the value that we might reasonably assign to such (...) a future of artificial successors under the assumption that they do not enjoy phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that – in order to avoid trivializations – a Philosophy of Birth needs to elaborate a precise concept of transformation and distinguish it carefully from that of adaptation. While transformation goes beyond the limited self-referential perspective of an individual and, on the social level, of the gregarious identity, adaptation aims at strengthening or preserving the old self-referential equilibrium. Transformation is driven by what Zambrano has called, with an exceptionally happy expression, the “hunger to be (...) born completely”. Such a hunger pushes one to continue one’s own birth through the encounter with the Other. Transformation has a creative feature that is made possible by two factors: the surplus of the effect over the cause, and the priority of the real over the possible. These premises lead to a radical questioning of the primacy of the possible on the real, at least as it has been conceived so far in mainstream Western philosophy, with few exceptions, such as Schelling, Bergson and Scheler. In the first part of this text, I shall consider a new Philosophy of Birth in the light of the concept of transformation and in this regard deal with several core themes such as the hunger to be born completely, the new beginning, creative time, the priority of the real over the possible, the limits of finalism, the surplus of effect over cause, and the creative force that expresses itself in the act of ideation. In the second part, I shall analyze the relation between birth and death and focus especially on their intimate and reciprocal connection by referring to the image of the seed that, after falling on the ground, germinates and breaks its own integument. (shrink)

The belief that computers will soon become transcendently intelligent and that human beings will “upload” their minds into machines has become ubiquitous in public discussions of robotics and artificial intelligence in Western cultures. Such beliefs are the result of pervasive Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic beliefs, and they have rapidly spread through modern pop and technological culture, including such varied and influential sources as Rolling Stone, the IEEE Spectrum, and official United States government reports. They have gained sufficient credibility to enable the construction (...) of Singularity University in California. While different approaches are possible (and, indeed, are common in Japan and possibly elsewhere), this particular vision of artificial intelligence and robotics has gained ground in the West through the influence of figures such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil. Because pop-science books help frame public discussion of new sciences and technologies for individuals, corporations, and governments alike, the integration of religious and technoscientific claims made by their authors should be clear and open for public and scientific debate. As we move forward into an increasingly robotic future, we should do so aware of the ways in which a group's religious environment can help set the tone for public acceptance and use of robotic technologies. (shrink)

Systems evolve in order to adjust and survive. The paper’s contribution is that this evolvement is inadequate without an evolutionary telos. It is argued that without the presence of self-destruction in multiple levels of our existence and surroundings, our survival would have been impossible. This paper recognises an appreciation of auto-catastrophe at the cell level, in human attitudes (both as an individual and in societies), and extended to Earth and out to galaxies. Auto-Catastrophic Theory combines evolution with auto-catastrophic behaviours and (...) innovative machinery by offering new themes of understanding their merging such as (a) protogenic and deuterogenic auto-catastrophic processes, (b) protogenic and deuterogenic survival processes, and (c) ‘alive’, partially ‘alive’, and non-‘alive’ systems. The value of self-destruction relies on a numerical stability within a system and correlational relationships between systems. Auto-Catastrophic Theory provides novel justifications why artificial intelligence: (a) is crucial to overcome the extinction of humanity (via H+), (b) is crucial to offer indirect survival of humanity (by saving its history), and (c) is at the same time a threat for humanity. These novel justifications and themes, developed by combining evolution with catastrophe as well as innovative machinery, expand our knowledge of how best to handle fresh challenges ahead. (shrink)

In considering how to best deploy robotic systems in public and private sectors, we must consider what individuals will expect from the robots with which they interact. Public awareness of robotics—as both military machines and domestic helpers—emerges out of a braided stream composed of science fiction and popular science. These two genres influence news media, government and corporate spending, and public expectations. In the Euro-American West, both science fiction and popular science are ambivalent about the military applications for robotics, and (...) thus we can expect their readers to fear the dangers posed by advanced robotics while still eagerly anticipating the benefits to be accrued through them. The chief pop science authors in robotics and artificial intelligence have a decidedly apocalyptic bent and have thus been described as leaders in a social movement called "Apocalyptic AI." In one form or another, such authors look forward to a transcendent future in which machine life succeeds human life, thanks to the march of evolutionary progress. The apocalyptic promises of popular robotics presume that presently exponential growth in computing will continue indefinitely, producing a "Singularity." During the Singularity, technological progress will be so rapid that undreamt of changes will take place on earth, the most important of which will be the evolutionary succession of human beings by massively intelligent robots and the "uploading" of human consciousness into computer bodies. This supposedly inevitable transition into post-biological life looms across the entire scope of pop robotics and artificial intelligence, and it is from beneath that shadow that all popular books engage the military and the ethics of warfare. Creating a just future will require that we transcend the apocalyptic discourse of pop science and establish an ethical approach to researching and deploying robots, one that emphasizes human rather than robot welfare; doing so will require the collaboration of social scientists, humanists, and scientists. (shrink)

The transcience of existence, the fragility of life and human transcience do nothing but remind each of us of the imminence of death, now experienced as an unparalleled tragedy, accompanied, often, by the anguish of witnessing a slow and gradual ageing of the body. In the post-modern era characterized by pervasive technology, a new religion is emerging that aims to halt the ageing process and defeat death once and for all. But what is the price to be paid: according to (...) some, we will witness the dissolution of the human being’s soul; according to others, the world will be populated by humanoids with severe psychic problems. (shrink)