J. Hughes's Page

Lutheran theologian Ted Peters is the author of the sixth and last of the generally hostile articles on transhumanism in the June 2008 issue of The Global Spiral .

Vertical farms finally make the move from cybergreen fantasy to the pages of the New York Times. The logic is seductive: urban towers, filled not with more offices and apartments, but with food crops.

I just finished the first draft of my next book, now tentatively called “Life Incorporated” (and before that called “Corporatized.”)

It is argued that the “generic” evolutionary pathway of advanced technological civilizations is more likely to be optimization-driven than expansion-driven, in contrast to the prevailing opinions and attitudes in both future studies on one side and astrobiology/SETI studies on the other. Two toy-models of postbiological evolution of advanced technological civilizations are considered and several arguments supporting the optimization-driven, spatially compact model are briefly discussed. In addition, it is pointed out that there is a subtle contradiction in most of the tech-optimist and transhumanist accounts of future human/alien civilizations’ motivations in its postbiological stages. This may have important ramifications for both practical SETI projects and the future (of humanity) studies.  Download the PDF

CNN’s piece on the upcoming conference on global catastrophic risks at Oxford, organized by IEET Chair Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, was extraordinarily warm.

I’m nearing the end of my current blog project of commenting on each of the six articles in June’s edition of The Global Spiral , which is devoted to a critique of transhumanism. This time, I will discuss Andrew Pickering’s, “Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics”, in some ways the strangest of the five articles that I have read so far. We’ll come to why, but let me step back for a moment to survey the overall terrain.

I’ll start this essay by leading with my conclusion: do we make it through this century? Yeah, but not all of us, and it’s neither as spectacular nor as horrific as many people imagine.

Just as technology has the capacity to create, it can also destroy. It is crucial lived concepts like scarcity is identified so a life of abundance can fill destructive voids left behind. With enough collaborative expertise drawn to conclude that “giving gives more giving” and that “taking takes more taking,” the capacity to harmonize between these spheres can ensure that all of us have greater potential to live more preferred lives while limiting the causes of harm to oneself and others.

“At any moment the Yellowstone caldera could blow up, wipe out 99% of the life on the surface of the planet, and probably all humans, and in our last minutes the degree of equanimity with which we face that prospect is the test of our dharmic fortitude and wisdom.” - James Hughes

In our final episode with professor James Hughes we tackle the less rosy side of Transhumanism, which has to do with massive existential threats and risks. Though there are many natural risks that could threaten humanity as a whole, including large asteriod collisions, gamma bursts, and super volcanoes, the Transhumanist recognize a whole host of other ways that we could threaten ourselves with advanced technologies.

In addition to discussing these threats and all of the possible side traps on the way toward a more techno-utopian future, James ties these together with our understanding of the dharma. He argues that even in a techno-utopian future (assuming we make it), we will still have to deal with annica—the ever changing flow of reality. 

(MP3)

Why we avoid thinking about catastrophic risks, asteroid impacts, and tech politics in the Presidential race.