At the moment, I am confined to doing research-related work. Confined because the docs think this is better for my health than being engaged in some "other stuff". I am happy to take the medicine and find it invigorating and exciting! Good stuff.
So, along with the fun (???) of writing research applications and bid proposals and having meetings left right and centre, I am trying to focus on reading some of those books which I have had piling up while running around doing that 'other stuff'. I'm intrigued by transhumanism - see my mentions in the past of Amped and Robopocalypse, of Cory Doctorow's Rapture of the Nerds and Little Brother (available free from link) and Baroness Greenfield's (awful) 2121.
So, I'm really enjoiying the articles in The Transhumanist Reader. It's good. And the articles are relatively short with large bibliographies! This just ends up in being an exercise in hyperreading in that you shoot off to explore something else. But I am enjoying it all the same. The one today was by Natasha Vita-More (see here for more of her stuff) on "Art and Transhumanism" - so much potential about what the human essence is - is it contained in body or visualised in art - are we what we are made of or could we exist if we were made in something else. Is Michaelangelo's David only real if it is made in marble - is it as real in gold, or silicon, or electricity? What's the essence of things?
After a heads up from Bex, (@drbexl) I've also been watching a new Youtube series, H+ - not Bible Society's hermeneutics course, but rather Humanity+ - an exploration of transhumanism - it involves the injection of a nanocomputer, and viruses, and lots of dystopia - but I'll let you find out for yourself. But what I would give for some utopia or extropia!!! Nobody seems to like where we are going. Dystopia everywhere!
And on that theme, my friend Seymour (@seeingmore) asked if I had seen the tube map future trends thing - I did a search and found this brilliant map from What's Next. It is great fun - if a little dystopic (as usual). It does some good thinking although I do wonder at how technology seems to do nothing but compexify everything and make things worse and worse and worse. I thought technological advances were supposed to make things better.
Here is the map:
Have fun!
Pete
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