Are you a Transhumanist?
Chances are you’re not a Transhumanist. Neither am I. But close to 5000 people from more than 100 countries are. They are members of WTA or the World Transhumanist Association, which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capabilities.
Reading through the list of FAQ’s on their web site www.transhumanism.org makes you say “WOW, this can’t be real!” For example, a posthuman is “a future being whose basic capabilities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards”.
Most transhumanists believe nanotechnology will develop rapidly within the next 25 years, to an extent that we will be able to rearrange atoms and make coal into diamonds if we wanted to. And maybe remove tumors from healthy tissue.
According to Moore’s Law, computing power doubles every two years as chip manufacturers figure out how to squeeze more components onto a chip. There will soon be a point in time when computers will compute as fast as our human brains do, at about 1014 instructions per second. Add to this some software that uses a progressed version of computational neuroscience and creates a brain-computer interface, and the result is superintelligence.
The potential of the combination of nanotechnology and superintelligence is what transhumanists are all excited about, because then you will have the tools to make yourself mentally and physically far, far stronger than you are now, live disease free and not age if you did’nt want to. Whether it will happen or not, we don’t know. But if it does, there is a chance that by the year 2050, the WTA membership numbers will increase by say, a billion?
