Mark Stevenson

An Optimist's Tour of the Future

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One curious man's journey to find out 'what's next?'

Mark Stevenson has been to the future a few years ahead of the rest of us – and reckons it has a lot going for it. His voyage of discovery takes him to Oxford to meet Transhumanists (they intend to live forever), to Boston where he confronts a robot with mood swings, to an underwater cabinet meeting in the Indian Ocean, and Australia to question the Outback's smartest farmer. He clambers around space planes in the Mojave desert, gets to grips with the potential of nanotechnology, delves deep into the possibilities of biotech, sees an energy renaissance on a printer, a revolution in communications, has his genome profiled, and glimpses the next stage of human evolution … and tries to make sense of what's in store.
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Quotes

  • Cesar Garcia Valdeshas quoted9 years ago
    had less cancer.’
    This is my lightbulb moment when I ‘get’ the transhumanist view of the future and why they think it’s inevitable. Ask someone ‘Do you think we should live for ever?’ and they’ll probably say no. Ask the same person if we should continue to battle disease, they’ll almost certainly say yes, me included. Transhumanism won’t arrive in a revolution, it’ll arrive one therapy at a time. Fading eyesight? Try large print. Now these spectacles. Now contact lenses. Now laser eye surgery. Now stem cell therapy to return your eye to its former youth. (In fact Italian researchers have been using stem cells to cure corneal blindness for over ten years.) Bad hearing? Have a large cone to stick in your ear. Now a bulky hearing aid. Now an in-ear hearing bud. Now a cochlear implant …
    I realise, like it or not, we’re already embracing the transhumanist project, we’re just still calling it ‘medicine.’ We’ve inevitably blurred the line between ‘therapy’ and ‘enhancement
  • Cesar Garcia Valdeshas quoted9 years ago
    I challenge Nick with the opposite scenario – one where there is equal access to enhancement technologies. Is it possible this could slowly eradicate diversity? ‘For instance,’ I say, ‘we’re very aware of homophobia. Could we “enhance” somebody to become straight? So, rather than fight prejudice, why not just have a “straightening” therapy?’
    Then Bostrom says something that turns a key inside me. ‘I think we need to distinguish between good and bad forms of diversity. If nobody had lung cancer, there would be slightly less difference in the world. That’s less diversity. But most people think it would be a good thing if we
  • Cesar Garcia Valdeshas quoted9 years ago
    .
    They go on to argue that the potential for inter-species genocide makes the transhumanist agenda one of potential mass destruction. This is on the apocalyptic end of the criticisms of transhumanism

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