Transhuman - Part 1

I wanna talk about transhumanism for a minute.

Wait. What? Not politics? Not health care?

No. Those are urgent and important, but I want to take a minute and look over the horizon - to stare at the oncoming singularity.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, transhumanism is the study of the various avenues humans might seek (blindly or knowingly) that would change us so greatly as to no longer be homo sapiens sapiens anymore; rapid, self-driven evolution, if you will.

Mark my words: assuming our present world does not literally come completely crashing down upon our ears in the next century, the question of transhuman evolution is not a matter of "if" but "when" and "how". We had best be deliberating on the answers we want to find at the other end.

Here's the trouble, though: the singularity. It's a concept used in technology to describe a point at which innovation skyrockets exponentially, making it impossible for us to forecast what life would be like beyond that moment. It actually derives from a black hole - there's the event horizon, the last point at which light is able to escape the massive pull of gravity, and then there's the singularity. You cannot see into the singularity because not even a single photon gets out to illuminate what is beyond.
Scary, no? Good. It should be scary - awesome events should inspire awe, terrific events should involve some amount of terror.

Here's the REALLY scary thing: there's not one singularity approaching, but dozens of them. That's why I say this is inevitable on our current course; one of the options will come to fruition sooner or later. Probably several will merge into one another to create an uber-event greater than the sum of its parts. Yet this also won't be a sudden shift; it will be a growing storm that builds into a larger maelstrom. There will probably not be a literal moment entitled "THE SINGULARITY", although we will no doubt look back from beyond it and label one arbitrary point as such. We like to do that with our history, after all, even when it's rarely so easy.

There are three main avenues of singularity that I want to explore: computing, cybernetic, and biological. Then I want to explore how these three threads are most likely to fold together and morph each other over time. Needless to say, that's way too much for one Facebook post so I'll be breaking it up into several over the next couple of weeks.

One way or another I hope you will *not* be bored.