Futurism

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Cryonics and fear of the future

To people who have made cryonics arrangements the biggest mystery remains why more people have not made the same decision. The most obvious answer remains that cryonics has not been proven to “work” yet. People who give this answer usually mean that proof of human suspended animation would lead to an increase in the popularity [...]

Peter Thiel: Utopian Pessimist

Peter Thiel, one of the few original minds in the life extension and accelerating-technological-change community, is featured in a short interview at Wired. Thiel seems to be aware of the limitations of extrapolation of trends: We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to [...]

The singularity is not near

Singularity skeptic Mark Plus drew my attention to the following blog post. The author writes that: Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to [...]

Max More on global warming

Max More, founder of the Extropy Institute, and one of the few futurist thinkers with a solid understanding of the philosophy of science, outlines his current views on the global warming controversy after being identified as a “denier” and “anti-science” by  some of his (transhumanist) critics: We skeptics (okay, “planetary traitors” if you prefer) actually [...]