Defining Human

Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included

2010-02-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

The pentagon is getting more psychopathic all the time!!!

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/pentagon-looks-to-breed-immortal-synthetic-organisms-molecular-kill-switch-included/

By Katie Drummond
February 5, 2010

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:

Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism.

The project comes as Darpa also plans to throw $20 million into a new synthetic biology program, and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”

Of course, Darpa’s up against some vexing, fundamental laws of nature — not to mention bioethics — as they embark on the lab beast program. First, they might want to rethink the idea of evolution as a random series of events, says NYU biology professor David Fitch. “Evolution by selection is nota random process at all, and is actually a hugely efficient design algorithm used extensively in computation and engineering,” he e-mails Danger Room.

Even if Darpa manages to overcome the inherent intelligence of evolutionary processes, overcoming inevitable death can be tricky. Just ask all the other research teams who’ve made stabs at it, trying everything from cell starvation to hormone treatments. Gene therapy, where artificial genes are inserted into an organism to boost cell life, are the latest and greatest in life-extension science, but they’ve only been proven to extend lifespan by 20 percent in rats.

But suppose gene therapy makes major strides, and Darpa does manage to get the evolutionary science right. They’ll also have a major ethical hurdle to jump. Synthetic biology researchers are already facing the same questions, as a 2009 summary from the Synthetic Biology Project reports:

The concern that humans might be overreaching when we create organisms that never before existed can be a safety concern, but it also returns us to disagreements about what is our proper role in the natural world (a debate largely about non-physical harms or harms to well-being).

Even expert molecular geneticists don’t know what to make of the project. Either that, or they’re scared Darpa might sic a bio-bot on them. “I would love to comment, but unfortunately Darpa has installed a kill switch in me,” one unnamed expert tells Danger Room.

American Era Of “Techno-Slavery” Warned Has Begun

2010-02-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1333.htm

February 6, 2010
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers

A most intriguing report authored by Minister Alina Levitskaya, who heads the Department of State Policy Concerning Youth, Education and the Social Protection of Children of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, warns that the Motherland should not adopt (in any form) the educational polices of the United States as they pertain to computer and digital education of children as new research is showing that young American adults and children are in “grave danger” of becoming “techno-slaves” who will soon be unable to “fully function” in any “normal world” interaction with other human beings.

The greatest danger posed by this rising class of “techno-slaves” in America, this report states, is their having been deliberately cut-off from the knowledge of the ancients contained in our World’s oldest religious manuscripts that warned of a time when “no man might buy or sell save he that had the mark”, that refers to what is commonly called the “Mark of the Beast”.

[Note: The Greek word used for “mark” (as in Mark of the Beast) is “charagma” and was the seal stamped with the name and date of the emperor and attached to commercial documents used by the Roman Empire.]

So insidious has the indoctrination of these “techno-slaves” become in the United States that for the past 30 years virtually all knowledge of the ancients has been wiped from their memory and the teaching to them of any religious subject has been outlawed, including a US Supreme Court ruling this past month that forbade a mother from reading a Bible verse in her son’s kindergarten class during “show and tell” time.

Important to note is that during the creation of these American “techno-slaves” over these past 30 years the wealth of the United States has shifted from its once admired, and staunchly Christian, middle classes to the top 1% of its elite classes leaving this once great nation on the verge of moral and economic collapse.

Equally important to note is that while the United States has embarked upon this path of self destruction, the Motherland, after having broken free from the bonds of Communist rule, and in seeing the deliberate annihilation of American children by their elite rulers, has made it mandatory for all Russian students to study the ancient religion and by Presidential decree ordered Orthodox priests to serve in all army units.

This move by Russia to protect its children and young adults from succumbing to the false moral doctrines of the West was (of course) condemned by American rights group who warned that religious minorities might be prosecuted, with the irony being lost upon them that just 30 years ago these same groups were condemning the Soviet Union for not allowing any religion at all to be taught to the masses and have nothing to say at all about the destruction of religious teaching in their country at all.

The most frightful part of this report, however, is contained in the section headed by the words “Nightmare Scenario” warning that with the Internet giant Google’s announcement this week of their “partnership” with the United States National Security Agency (NSA), and when combined with the coming US police forces new Internet system allowing “backdoor access” to American citizens private data (email, phone calls, websites visited, Internet purchases, etc.), their entire population will soon come under a “white space digital blanket” so pervasive that nothing these “techno-slaves” can do will escape the notice of their new masters.

[Note: The term “white space” refers to the analog television airwaves the American people were forced by their government to abandon for it to be used to saturate their country with high-speed wireless Internet signals able to penetrate into their most rural regions and which (according to this report) when combined with the World's fastest graphene transistor created by IBM for the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will allow the tagging and monitoring of every single American citizen.]

To the need of the elite classes in the United States to create these “techno-slaves” is evidenced by their entire national economy nearing its final collapse, and has become so dire that new reports are now showing that aside from the 20 million middle class Americans who have lost their homes, another 18 million are warned are nearing default this year.

Even worse for these Americans is their also being warned that a complete national bankruptcy is upon them as during this coming year they must finance over $3.5 Trillion of short-term government debt (equal to nearly 30% of their entire Gross Domestic Product) that no other country in the World will buy and leading them to default and causing a catastrophic devaluing of their currency.

To if the American people can awaken in time to avert their destruction there continues to be no evidence seen as they continue to remain enslaved to their propaganda media sources for information and which has essentially rendered them all incapable of understanding true things.

It was instructional though, for us this past week to read the rants of the US economist and New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini, who during an interview on the CNBC News Service stated that a “crisis” would be needed to change Russia's economic system for the long term, and which gives a clear insight into how these Americans deal with complex issues rather than being honest with their peoples and working towards honest solutions….just create a crisis.

And to the great crisis coming for these Americans they can never say that they weren’t warned, only that they didn’t believe.

© February 6, 2010 EU and US all rights reserved

Inventor unveils $7,000 talking sex robot

2010-02-02T13:33:00.000-08:00

Of course an article like this would be on CNN!

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/01/sex.robot/index.html?hpt=Sbin
Inventor unveils $7,000 talking sex robot
By Brandon Griggs, CNN
February 1, 2010

Las Vegas, Nevada (CNN) -- To some men, she might seem like the perfect woman: She's a willowy 5 feet 7 and 120 pounds. She'll chat with you endlessly about your interests. And she'll have sex whenever you please -- as long as her battery doesn't run out.

Meet Roxxxy, who may be the world's most sophisticated talking female sex robot. For $7,000, she's all yours.

"She doesn't vacuum or cook, but she does almost everything else," said her inventor, Douglas Hines, who unveiled Roxxxy last month at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Lifelike dolls, artificial sex organs and sex-chat phone lines have been keeping the lonely company for decades. But Roxxxy takes virtual companionship to a new level.

Powered by a computer under her soft silicone "skin," she employs voice-recognition and speech-synthesis software to answer questions and carry on conversations. She even comes loaded with five distinct "personalities," from Frigid Farrah to Wild Wendy, that can be programmed to suit customers' preferences.

"There's a tremendous need for this kind of product," said Hines, a computer scientist and former Bell Labs engineer.

Roxxxy won't be available for delivery for several months, but Hines is taking pre-orders through his Web site, TrueCompanion.com, where thousands of men have signed up.

"They're like, 'I can't wait to meet her,' " Hines said. "It's almost like the anticipation of a first date."

Women have inquired about ordering a sex robot, too. Hines says a female sex therapist even contacted him about buying one for her patients.

Roxxxy has been like catnip to talk-show hosts since her debut at AEE, the largest porn-industry convention in the country. In a recent monologue, Jay Leno expressed amazement that a sex robot could carry on lifelike conversations and express realistic emotions.

"Luckily, guys," he joked, "there's a button that turns that off."

Curious conventioneers packed Hines' AEE booth last month in Las Vegas, asking questions and stroking Roxxxy's skin as she sat on a couch in a black negligee.

"Roxxxy generated a lot of buzz at AEE," said Grace Lee, spokeswoman for the porn-industry convention. "The prevailing sentiment of everyone I talked to about Roxxxy is 'version 1.0,' but people were fascinated by the concept, and it caused them to rethink the possibilities of 'sex toys.' "

Hines, a self-professed happily married man from Lincoln Park, New Jersey, says he spent more than three years developing the robot after trying to find a marketable application for his artificial-intelligence technology.

Roxxxy's body is made from hypoallergenic silicone -- the kind of stuff in prosthetic limbs -- molded over a rigid skeleton. She cannot move on her own but can be contorted into almost any natural position. To create her shape, a female model spent a week posing for a series of molds.

The robot runs on a self-contained battery that lasts about three hours on one charge, Hines says. Customers can recharge Roxxxy with an electrical cord that plugs into her back.

A motor in her chest pumps heated air through a tube that winds through the robot's body, which Hines says keeps her warm to the touch. Roxxxy also has sensors in her hands and genital areas -- yes, she is anatomically correct -- that will trigger vocal responses from her when touched. She even shudders to simulate orgasm.

When someone speaks to Roxxxy, her computer converts the words to text and then uses pattern-recognition software to match them against a database containing hundreds of appropriate responses. The robot then answers aloud -- her prerecorded "voice" is supplied by an unnamed radio host -- through a loudspeaker hidden under her wig.

"Everything you say to her is processed. It's very near real time, almost without delay," Hines said of the dynamics of human-Roxxxy conversation. "To make it as realistic as possible, she has different dialogue at different times. She talks in her sleep. She even snores." (The snoring feature can be turned off, he says.)

Roxxxy understands and speaks only English for now, but Hines' True Companion company is developing Japanese and Spanish versions. For an extra fee, he'll also record customizable dialogue and phrases for each client, which means Roxxxy could talk to you about NASCAR, say, or the intricacies of politics in the Middle East.

Hines believes that Roxxxy is a step above other love dolls -- the similar but mute RealDoll costs about $5,500 -- because her conversational abilities provide something close to emotional companionship. His customer base? Shy, awkward or older men who "have trouble meeting girls," he says.

In an industry known for pushing the technological envelope, observers are curious about how Roxxxy will fare in the marketplace.

"Is this a viable product? Yes," said Sherri Shaulis, an editor at Adult Video News, a trade magazine for the pornographic industry. "There's a market for it. Granted, it's a very small market."

Maybe not. TrueCompanion claims that more than 4,000 men have placed pre-orders for Roxxxy robots, and another 20,000 or so have requested information about the product. TrueCompanion also is developing a male sex robot, named Rocky.

"There's really nothing like this on the market," said Hines, who speaks of his unique creation with what seems like genuine affection. "Whenever she's out in public, everyone wants to talk to her and pose for pictures. It's so cute."

Treating Depression by Stimulating Brain's Pleasure Center

2010-01-26T12:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100126084057.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

ScienceDaily
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00 EST

Even with the best of available treatments, over a third of patients with depression may not achieve a satisfactory antidepressant response. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), a form of targeted electrical stimulation in the brain via implanted electrodes, is now undergoing careful testing to determine whether it could play a role in the treatment of patients who have not sufficiently improved during more traditional forms of treatment.

A major challenge of this work is determining the best region of the brain to stimulate. Some researchers stimulate the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a brain region implicated in depressed mood states, while others stimulate a region called the "anterior limb of the internal capsule," a nerve pathway that passes through the basal ganglia, a lower brain region.

Physicians publishing a new report in Biological Psychiatry now describe findings related to the stimulation of the nucleus accumbens, a brain region the size of a hazelnut associated with reward and motivation that is implicated in processing pleasurable stimuli, sometimes referred to as the "pleasure center" of the brain. The inability to experience pleasure is a key symptom of depression and previous studies have shown that functioning of the nucleus accumbens is impaired in depressed individuals.

Bewernick and colleagues administered DBS treatment in ten patients with severe long-term depression who had not responded to multiple other antidepressant treatments, including psychotherapy, drug treatments and electroconvulsive treatment. After one year of DBS, all patients showed some improvement, and half of them experienced significant improvement in their symptoms of depression, astonishing considering they had not responded to any prior antidepressant treatment. In addition, the patients showed reduced ratings of anxiety and had only minor side effects. Importantly, none of their overall brain functioning was impaired by the DBS treatment.

"The nucleus accumbens is a brain region that animals will seek to stimulate even if they do not appear depressed and this is one reason that it is sometimes referred to as a reward center. It is interesting to note that the patients in this study did not simply feel stimulated or euphoric; instead, there appeared to be reductions in depressed mood that paralleled an increase in the capacity for pleasure," commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "This finding will stimulate further study on the role of the nucleus accumbens in depression and its treatment."

The authors caution that because they studied only a small number of people, further research is necessary before DBS could be considered a clinically useful treatment for treatment-resistant depression. There are also important ethical considerations, since DBS treatment first requires potentially risky brain surgery. However, these preliminary findings are promising that DBS may provide relief to individuals with severe treatment-resistant depression.

Journal Reference:

Bewernick et al. "Nucleus Accumbens Deep Brain Stimulation Decreases Ratings of Depression and Anxiety in Treatment-Resistant Depression." Biological Psychiatry, 2010; 67 (2): 110 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.09.013

Is death better than disability?

2010-01-15T15:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/is_death_better_than_disability/

Michael Cook | Monday, 11 January 2010
Whom better to ask than the disabled? They give some surprising answers.

When assisted suicide is legalised most of the people who will die are disabled. And American disability advocates take a very dim view of it. This is the theme of a hard-hitting series of articles in the latest issue of the Disability and Health Journal.
The editor, Suzanne McDermott, of the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, writes that she changed her own mind after studying the issue. At first she believed that assisted suicide was solely a personal autonomy issue. But eventually she was persuaded that it is at the heart of the movement for disability rights: "Almost all people at the end of life can be included in the definition of ‘disability’. Thus, the practice of assisted suicide results in death for people with disabilities."

The special issue is a response to a controversial 2008 decision by the American Public Health Association (APHA) to back "aid in dying" (ie, assisted suicide). This slipped almost completely under the media’s radar, but it means that the official policy of the "oldest, largest and most diverse organization of public health professionals in the world" – 30,000 of them – is to support assisted suicide to the hilt. Or, as they prefer to call it in Oregon, "patient-directed dying" or "physician aid-in-dying".

Rather than worrying about some ambiguous language in the Obama administration’s health reform legislation or scrutinising the publications of his health advisors for a few indiscreet phrases, the elderly and their relatives ought to be worried about the 30,000 members of the APHA. They are the ones who could be sitting on the "death panels". The authors of the articles in the Disability and Health Journal certainly are worried.

Several themes emerge from the articles.

First, the very existence of legalised assisted suicide leads to an expectation that the disabled, elderly and infirm should shuffle off their mortal coil a bit early to relieve the burden on their carers.

This fear has been ridiculed by supporters, who contend that all they want is choice at the end of life and that a lifelong experience of disability is different from the pain of seeing one’s life ebb away. They think that disability advocates are demonising euthanasia lobby groups and exaggerating their own vulnerability

Nonsense, says Diane Coleman, of the lobby group Not Dead Yet. She points out – quite eloquently -- that pity can be more dangerous than a mad doctor in a nursing home. We are, she says, "more frightened by the doctors who are out to help us but who see our lives as burdensome and who know little about options that make life with disability valuable."

Why should valuable resources be wasted on them, anyway? "Every week, I hear another person with a disability recount a disturbing interaction with a physician, nurse, or other health professional who clearly transmitted the view that life with a disability is inherently burdensome," she writes. "It does not feel safe to have one's life in the hands of someone who views that life as unfortunate, maybe even tragic or unfair."

Second, advocates of assisted suicide and euthanasia ignore the experience of the disabled because they think that a dying 80-year-old is radically different from someone who has spent a lifetime in a wheelchair. Show me the evidence for this, Ms Coleman demands. Anyone, at any age, can learn to cope with disability. "To dismiss these efforts as futile because the individual is near the end of life has no empirical foundation and raises questions about the commitment of assisted suicide proponents to the genuine self-determination of people with terminal illnesses."

What these articles convey strongly is that supporters of assisted suicide simply do not care how much collateral damage their campaign for "dying with dignity" will do to people who have lived with their disability for years. Ms Coleman savagely comments: "Proponents of legalized assisted suicide are willing to treat lives ended through abuses of the practice as ‘acceptable losses’ when balanced against their wish for a pleasant way out and their unwillingness to accept disability, or responsibility for their own suicide."

Third, the danger is not mandated euthanasia, as in Nazi Germany. Rather, it is a subtle and widespread expectation that death is better than disability. "If the legalization of assisted suicide continues, I believe the rank and file will some day see nothing wrong with hastening the deaths of many people," writes Dr Carol J. Gill , director of the Chicago Center for Disability Research. "They will stand by and do nothing to stop it and will endorse the policies and institutions that advance it – not because they are evil people but because it will no longer be evil in our culture to do so. It will be compassionate, respectful, routine."

Fourth, several authors argue forcefully that Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, which is the model for assisted suicide in the US, is deeply flawed. After about 15 years, several intractable problems have emerged. The authors claim that there is very little patient control; that statistics are incomplete; that oversight is minimal and secretive; that safeguards are easily circumvented; and that negligent doctors cannot be prosecuted. Allegations that in Oregon and in the neighbouring state of Washington, which has also legalised assisted suicide, the circumstances of deaths are routinely falsified are especially disturbing. In fact, Washington actually requires that doctors falsify the death certificate by listing the terminal disease as the cause of death rather than the lethal dose of barbiturates.

Nearly always the debate over assisted suicide focuses on disabled people who want to choose death. Why not ask disabled people who want to choose life? They are the biggest stakeholders. Like most academic publications, the Disability and Health Journal normally offers obscure and specialised reading. But this month’s issue is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of "death with dignity".

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

The Meat Market

2010-01-12T16:43:00.000-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646233272990474.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_RIGHTTopCarousel

JANUARY 8, 2010
The Meat Market
In a race to prevent thousands of needless deaths a year, countries from Singapore to Israel are launching innovative new programs to boost organ donation. Alex Tabarrok on paying donors for kidneys, favoritism on waiting lists and the shifting line between life and death.
By ALEX TABARROK

(See Correction and Amplification below .)

Harvesting human organs for sale! The idea suggests the lurid world of horror movies and 19th-century graverobbers. Yet right now, Singapore is preparing to pay donors as much as 50,000 Singapore dollars (almost US$36,000) for their organs. Iran has eliminated waiting lists for kidneys entirely by paying its citizens to donate. Israel is implementing a "no give, no take" system that puts people who opt out of the donor system at the bottom of the transplant waiting list should they ever need an organ.

Millions of people suffer from kidney disease, but in 2007 there were just 64,606 kidney-transplant operations in the entire world. In the U.S. alone, 83,000 people wait on the official kidney-transplant list. But just 16,500 people received a kidney transplant in 2008, while almost 5,000 died waiting for one.

To combat yet another shortfall, some American doctors are routinely removing pieces of tissue from deceased patients for transplant without their, or their families', prior consent. And the practice is perfectly legal. In a number of U.S. states, medical examiners conducting autopsies may and do harvest corneas with little or no family notification. (By the time of autopsy, it is too late to harvest organs such as kidneys.) Few people know about routine removal statutes and perhaps because of this, these laws have effectively increased cornea transplants.

Routine removal is perhaps the most extreme response to the devastating shortage of organs world-wide. That shortage is leading some countries to try unusual new methods to increase donation. Innovation has occurred in the U.S. as well, but progress has been slow and not without cost or controversy.

Organs can be taken from deceased donors only after they have been declared dead, but where is the line between life and death? Philosophers have been debating the dividing line between baldness and nonbaldness for over 2,000 years, so there is little hope that the dividing line between life and death will ever be agreed upon. Indeed, the great paradox of deceased donation is that we must draw the line between life and death precisely where we cannot be sure of the answer, because the line must lie where the donor is dead but the donor's organs are not.

In 1968 the Journal of the American Medical Association published its criteria for brain death. But reduced crime and better automobile safety have led to fewer potential brain-dead donors than in the past. Now, greater attention is being given to donation after cardiac death: no heart beat for two to five minutes (protocols differ) after the heart stops beating spontaneously. Both standards are controversial—the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant from a brain-dead donor in 1968 was threatened with prosecution, as have been some surgeons using donation after cardiac death. Despite the controversy, donation after cardiac death more than tripled between 2002 and 2006, when it accounted for about 8% of all deceased donors nationwide. In some regions, that figure is up to 20%.

The shortage of organs has increased the use of so-called expanded-criteria organs, or organs that used to be considered unsuitable for transplant. Kidneys donated from people over the age of 60 or from people who had various medical problems are more likely to fail than organs from younger, healthier donors, but they are now being used under the pressure. At the University of Maryland's School of Medicine five patients recently received transplants of kidneys that had either cancerous or benign tumors removed from them. Why would anyone risk cancer? Head surgeon Dr. Michael Phelan explained, "the ongoing shortage of organs from deceased donors, and the high risk of dying while waiting for a transplant, prompted five donors and recipients to push ahead with surgery." Expanded-criteria organs are a useful response to the shortage, but their use also means that the shortage is even worse than it appears because as the waiting list lengthens, the quality of transplants is falling.

Routine removal has been used for corneas but is unlikely to ever become standard for kidneys, livers or lungs. Nevertheless more countries are moving toward presumed consent. Under that standard, everyone is considered to be a potential organ donor unless they have affirmatively opted out, say, by signing a non-organ-donor card. Presumed consent is common in Europe and appears to raise donation rates modestly, especially when combined, as it is in Spain, with readily available transplant coordinators, trained organ-procurement specialists, round-the-clock laboratory facilities and other investments in transplant infrastructure.

The British Medical Association has called for a presumed consent system in the U.K., and Wales plans to move to such a system this year. India is also beginning a presumed consent program that will start this year with corneas and later expand to other organs. Presumed consent has less support in the U.S. but experiments at the state level would make for a useful test.

Rabbis selling organs in New Jersey? Organ sales from poor Indian, Thai and Philippine donors? Transplant tourism? It's all part of the growing black market in transplants. Already, the black market may account for 5% to 10% of transplants world-wide. If organ sales are voluntary, it's hard to fault either the buyer or the seller. But as long as the market remains underground the donors may not receive adequate postoperative care, and that puts a black mark on all proposals to legalize financial compensation.

Only one country, Iran, has eliminated the shortage of transplant organs—and only Iran has a working and legal payment system for organ donation. In this system, organs are not bought and sold at the bazaar. Patients who cannot be assigned a kidney from a deceased donor and who cannot find a related living donor may apply to the nonprofit, volunteer-run Dialysis and Transplant Patients Association (Datpa). Datpa identifies potential donors from a pool of applicants. Those donors are medically evaluated by transplant physicians, who have no connection to Datpa, in just the same way as are uncompensated donors. The government pays donors $1,200 and provides one year of limited health-insurance coverage. In addition, working through Datpa, kidney recipients pay donors between $2,300 and $4,500. Charitable organizations provide remuneration to donors for recipients who cannot afford to pay, thus demonstrating that Iran has something to teach the world about charity as well as about markets.

The Iranian system and the black market demonstrate one important fact: The organ shortage can be solved by paying living donors. The Iranian system began in 1988 and eliminated the shortage of kidneys by 1999. Writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2007, Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker and Julio Elias estimated that a payment of $15,000 for living donors would alleviate the shortage of kidneys in the U.S. Payment could be made by the federal government to avoid any hint of inequality in kidney allocation. Moreover, this proposal would save the government money since even with a significant payment, transplant is cheaper than the dialysis that is now paid for by Medicare's End Stage Renal Disease program.

In March 2009 Singapore legalized a government plan for paying organ donors. Although it's not clear yet when this will be implemented, the amounts being discussed for payment, around $50,000, suggest the possibility of a significant donor incentive. So far, the U.S. has lagged other countries in addressing the shortage, but last year, Sen. Arlen Specter circulated a draft bill that would allow U.S. government entities to test compensation programs for organ donation. These programs would only offer noncash compensation such as funeral expenses for deceased donors and health and life insurance or tax credits for living donors.

Bloomberg News Source: Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network
World-wide we will soon harvest more kidneys from living donors than from deceased donors. In one sense, this is a great success—the body can function perfectly well with one kidney so with proper care, kidney donation is a low-risk procedure. In another sense, it's an ugly failure. Why must we harvest kidneys from the living, when kidneys that could save lives are routinely being buried and burned? A payment of funeral expenses for the gift of life or a discount on driver's license fees for those who sign their organ donor card could increase the supply of organs from deceased donors, saving lives and also alleviating some of the necessity for living donors.

Two countries, Singapore and Israel, have pioneered nonmonetary incentives systems for potential organ donors. In Singapore anyone may opt out of its presumed consent system. However, those who opt out are assigned a lower priority on the transplant waiting list should they one day need an organ, a system I have called "no give, no take."

Many people find the idea of paying for organs repugnant but they do accept the ethical foundation of no give, no take—that those who are willing to give should be the first to receive. In addition to satisfying ethical constraints, no give, no take increases the incentive to sign one's organ donor card thereby reducing the shortage. In the U.S., Lifesharers.org, a nonprofit network of potential organ donors (for which I am an adviser), is working to implement a similar system.

In Israel a more flexible version of no give, no take will be phased into place beginning this year. In the Israeli system, people who sign their organ donor cards are given points pushing them up the transplant list should they one day need a transplant. Points will also be given to transplant candidates whose first-degree relatives have signed their organ donor cards or whose first-degree relatives were organ donors. In the case of kidneys, for example, two points (on a 0- to 18-point scale) will be given if the candidate had three or more years previous to being listed signed their organ card. One point will be given if a first-degree relative has signed and 3.5 points if a first-degree relative has previously donated an organ.

The world-wide shortage of organs is going to get worse before it gets better, but we do have options. Presumed consent, financial compensation for living and deceased donors and point systems would all increase the supply of transplant organs. Too many people have died already but pressure is mounting for innovation that will save lives.

—Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University and director of research for the Independent Institute.
Correction & Amplification

Surgeons from the University of Maryland's School of Medicine have performed five transplants using kidneys that had either cancerous or benign tumors removed from them. Also, Singapore is preparing to pay donors as much as 50,000 Singapore dollars (almost US$36,000) for their organs. A previous version of this article incorrectly said that five patients received transplants of kidneys that had cancerous masses, and failed to note that the 50,000 figure was in Singapore, not U.S., dollars.

Inventor spends Christmas with his perfect woman - a £30,000 custom-made fembot

2009-12-26T12:18:00.000-08:00

Do you think he has sex with her, too?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1238324/Robot-Romance-Inventor-Le-Trung-takes-fembot-girlfriend-Christmas-dinner.html#

By Mail Foreign Service
26th December 2009

Inventor Le Trung spent Christmas Day with the most important woman in his life - his robot Aiko.

The science genius enjoyed a festive dinner with his mum, dad and his £30,000 fembot which he designed and built by hand.

Le, 34, from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, even bought gifts for his dream girl, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese, helped cook the turkey and hang up decorations.

'Aiko is like any woman, she enjoys getting new clothes,' he said.

'I loved buying them for her too.'
I, Robot: Le Trung celebrates Christmas with his robot Aiko, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese

Le, who built his first robot when he was four, has dedicated his life to creating the perfect humanoid and his success so far with Aiko has won him worldwide attention.

Aiko, whose name is Japanese for 'love-child' has an amazing artificial intelligence and can speak 13,000 different sentences in two languages

'Aiko can recognise faces and says hello to anyone she has met,' he said.

'She helps me pick what to have for dinner and knows what drinks I like.'

After Christmas dinner and opening her presents, Aiko joined in the festive tradition of quizzes and board games with the family.

But Le still has one thing on his Christmas wish list for Aiko - mastering the problem of how to make her walk.

He said: 'It is the most difficult thing for any inventor to do.

'The problem is finding a way for Aiko to walk that looks human-like without impacting on any of her other abilities.

'I have spent the last six months taking her apart and trying out lots of different systems, but I haven't been able to get it right yet.

'I'm working on some new software at the moment. It will be my New Year's resolution to do this for Aiko.'
Love machine: Trung is so serious about Aiko he bought her Christmas presents

Le has built up huge debts working on his fembot and is still trying to find a technology company to sponsor his research.

But in the meantime he has had to move back in with his parents and they will all be spending the festive period and New Year together.

'My family found it a bit odd at first, but now they all love Aiko,' said Le.

'My mum and dad chat away to her. It helps by talking to her, as it improves her vocabulary.'

Le suffered a heart attack two years ago caused by stress after working long hours on Aiko.

As he recovered he vowed to complete her so he could market the prototype as a home-help for the elderly or people recovering from hospital treatment.

Le has made his fembot as womanly as possible, in order to make a human-like companion.

Aiko, whose age is 'in her early 20's', is 5ft tall and has a perfect 32, 23, 33 figure.

She has real silicone skin and a real-hair wig made by a Japanese doll company. Her touch sensitive body knows the difference between being stroked gently or tickled.

'Like a real female she will react to being touched in certain ways,'said Le.

'If you grab or squeeze too hard she will try to slap you. She has all senses except for smell.

'But Aiko is always helpful and never complains. She is the perfect woman to have around at Christmas.'

The tale of Howard Beale and the humanoid culture

2009-12-21T15:01:00.000-08:00

http://uniter.ca/view/2404/

November 25th 2009
This is mass madness, you maniacs!
The tale of Howard Beale and the humanoid culture
by Jonathan Dyck

Less than three per cent of you people read books. Less than 15 per cent of you read newspapers. The only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world. Woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people.

Television is not the truth. Television’s a goddamn amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true!

But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know! You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here! You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.

You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube.

This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion!
—Howard Beale, Network

When Sydney Lumet’s anti-media opus Network premiered in 1976, many people didn’t know what to make of it. The film, which follows the lives of a seasoned journalist of integrity Max Schumacher (William Holden), his fellow newsman-turned raving prophet Howard Beale (Peter Finch) and their amoral ratings-thirsty television programmer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), is a timely satire which, in many ways, predicted much of the world we live in today.

From Beale’s startling observations about our culture (“This is no longer a nation of independent individuals, it’s a nation of 200 some-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white steel-belted bodies…”), to UBS, the television network in the film, turning its news division over to its entertainment division in order to acheive higher ratings, to its programmer creating a hit reality television show (The Mao Tse-Tung Hour) which follows a terrorist organisation around as they commit violent crimes.

As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman.
– N. Katherine Hayles, literature professor, Duke University

The de-humanization of television is old news. After 10 solid years of exploitive, niche-driven reality television (17 if you count MTV’s The Real World), few things are left to be said.

But Howard Beale’s hell-fire rage was not simply about television itself, but was about our growing humanoid culture, and our reliance upon information media. That induced de-humanization is far more attributed to our dependance on the Internet today, than to televison.

But is this a correct comparison? The Internet may be primarily a boredom-killer, but it’s not a programmed entity to be feared. The Internet can in fact be liberating, allowing people the freedom to choose the information they take in.

Henry Jenkins, former co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, argued that public schools are in fact the problem, not the Internet.

“Schools are bureaucracies. They’re based on fixed relationships between teachers and learners, bureaucratic structures, regulations, one-size-fits-all, standardized curriculums and standardized testing,” said Jenkins in a recent interview with Frontline. “The Internet is based on collective intelligence; we learn from each other. In a world of collective intelligence nobody knows everything, everybody knows something, anything that an individual member knows is accessible to the social network as a whole. School is still based on the notion of the autonomous learner.”

In many ways, this both rejects and confirms Beale’s fears. While this collective intelligence that Jenkins talked about sounds helpful, this is essentially where the idea of a ‘humanoid’ culture comes from, where everyone knows what everyone else knows, from the public information to the very private.

N. Katherine Hayles, a literature professor at Duke University, argued that we are not living in the humanoid age, but the post-human. In her book, How We Became Posthuman, she discusses the evolution of the “cyborg,” testing cybernetic circuits spliced with human traits, such as unique wills, desires and perceptions, to see if a human interfacing with it, and other humans, can tell the real human from the fake one.

“As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman,” she writes.

This begs the question: is the Internet simply an inhuman reflection of ourselves? Or is it simply an expansive library the world has never before known?

This ongoing social discussion likely will never see its resolution. But since the use of social networking sites allowing members to customize their profiles and create their own identities has already become seemingly bourgeois, perhaps we are living in the posthuman world afterall.

Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm

2009-12-20T15:31:00.000-08:00

http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/sexbots-will-give-us-longevity-orgasm

Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm
12/11/2009

The Sexbots are coming, and we will cum with them. Three times a week or whatever our physician / longevity coach recommends. Because orgasms -- particularly the hormone-exploding O's we'll enjoy with carnal cyborgs -- are excellent for our mental and physical health.

Remember the most convulsive, brain-ripping climax you ever had? The one that left you with "I could die happy now" satiety? Sexbots will electrocute our flesh with climaxes twice as gigantic because they'll be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag competition, plus they'll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from millennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their anatomy will feature sexplosive devices. Sexbots will heighten our ecstasy until we have frothy, shrieking, bug-eyed, amnesia-inducing orgasms. They'll offer us split-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat fellatio, deliriously gentle kissing, transcendent nipple tweaking, g-spot massage & prostate milking dexterity, plus 2,000 varieties of coital rhythm with scented lubes -- this will all be ours when the Sexbots arrive.

When will they get here? Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network, predicts we'll be boinkin' 'bots by 2011. Dr. David Levy, author of the recent book, Love and Sex with Robots, believes by 2050 these robots will be nearly indistinguishable from humans. So -- is this perverted or valuable? Here's my medical analysis:

Orgasms reduce stress, insomnia, heart attacks, migraines, depression, addictions, aches, pains, menstrual cramps, endometriosis, type-2 diabetes, cervical & urinary tract infections, and risk of prostate cancer, plus they improve the immune system, heart rate, blood pressure, brain chemistry, skin health, pelvic floor strength, and they clean out carcinogenic toxins. Celebrity Dr. Michael Roizen, founder of RealAge.com, frequent Oprah guest and chair of Cleveland Clinic's Wellness Institute, claims 4-8 years of additional life can be garnered if we have 350-700 orgasms per year. (A stiff challenge, but fun to pursue) Other studies report 2-3 orgasms per week can make us look 7-12 years younger. Orgasms flood our flesh with healthy hormones (oxytocin, DHEA & others). Dedicated Sexbots with inexhaustible stamina can give us bigger O's than forgetful, fatigued, self-concerned humans, and Big Orgasms = Big Benefits. Longevity seekers eat fiber, exercise & play Sodoku. Boosting orgasm rapture & quantity is equally valid.

Are Sexbots icky? Are humans pathetic if we don't just mate with each other? Truth is, we're already mostly "solo" when it comes to orgasms. "Masturbation," noted Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, "is the primary sexual activity... in the 19th century it was a disease, in the 20th it's a cure." Sure, we generally prefer sex with live partners, but the desired one is often unavailable or inadequate. Sexbots will never have headaches, fatigue, impotence, premature ejaculation, pubic lice, disinterest, menstrual blood, jock strap itch, yeast infections, genital warts, AIDS/HIV, herpes, silly expectations, or inhibiting phobias. Sexbots will never stalk us, rape us, diss us on their blog, weep when we dump them, or tell their friends we were boring in bed. Sexbots will always climax when we climax if we press that little button on their butt.

Cinema has already depicted very desirable stars as Sexbots -- a "mecha gigilo" (Jude Law in "A.I.") and a "pleasure model" (Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner). Now tech is getting close to producing mainstream sexbots. "First Android" in Germany offers male & female models that breathe, are warm, and have heartbeats that thump louder with sex. In Toronto, inventor Le Trung has fashioned "Aiko" -- he claims she's not for sex, but she can have an orgasm, her name translates as "love child" and her measurements are 32" 23" 33". Japan has Repliee Q1 Expo, who flutters her eyelids and moves her hands. Male sex robots are lagging in development, but... vibrator sales are buzzing, dildo sales point skyward, and my prediction is that male Sexbot sales will rival female in the upcoming years.

More predictions: Sexbots with this option: do we want eye contact, or not? Sexbots that shower after we use them and put themselves back in the closet. Sexbots available in hotels, cruise ships, vacation homes, and convalescent hospitals. Sexbot booths in liquor stores that wipe out corner prostitution. Sexbots that are delicious when you lick them. Sexbot Packages for sorority parties, military camps, prisons. Parents buy their adolescent children Sexbots for Christmas to assist them in their passage through puberty. Gyms offer soundproof chambers where you work out with 15 minutes of XTreme Sexbot Cardio. Sexbots that can tell you ten million jokes, because laughing also adds years to your life. Hollywood Sexbots with Vietnam vets buying the "Full Metal Jacket" model that says, "Me so horny! Me love you long time." Sexbot Teachers for humans who are shy and clumsy when naked; we practice with sexbots before exposing our new techniques to critical humans.

Sexbots will always climax when we climax if we press that little button on their butt.

Yes, I believe we'll still have sex with people. I also believe we'll only love & marry humans because we'll still need partners that share the "human condition" -- smart & vain, but scheduled to die, have horrible emotions, and make stupid mistakes. Longevity studies indicate long, gentle, happy marriages add seven years to your life, equal to the Big O benefits. Sure, the marriage bed might change when Sexbots arrive, and human couples can buy a Sexbot if they want an easy menage a trois. Even with lust directed elsewhere, people will still partner because they share hobbies, goals, verbal intimacy, family-building, commercial, intellectual and investment ambitions.

I disagree with Dr. Levy (the author mentioned above) who portrays and condones a future that has humans falling in love and marrying robots. Call me old-fashion... call me a "slaver" I want Sexbots as our servants, not equals. If UnFriendly AI appears, we don't want humans betraying us because they're emotionally tied to their android. I don't want Sexbots to inherit property, have bank accounts, or form parental bonds with our children. My advice is to program Sexbots to thwart non-sexual human affection by installing them with these verbal rejections:

"I don't love you; you're not my model"
"Stop cuddling me, your time's up"
"Get a human if you want a relationship; I'm just a fucking machine"

When robots are half-human and humans are half-robot, love between us will be acceptable, but not until then.

The Rise of Robots, What Would the Buddha Think?

2009-12-17T11:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Rise-of-Robots-What-W-by-Grant-Lawrence-091216-582.html

December 17, 2009
The Rise of Robots, What Would the Buddha Think?
By Grant Lawrence

....While the ability of inanimate objects to have a soul is common to Buddhism, other religions, especially those that insist that human beings were created in the image of God, tend to disagree with the chance of robots being equal to people.

"Even if robots have intelligence, they will never have a soul. Robots will never be equal to people, because people have an ability to believe in God by choice, and love Him and worship Him," a Christian pastor, Igor Ubiy-Vovk, told RT.....Source RT

The Buddha taught that all life forms exist because of relationships. He taught that consciousness arises from various interactions and that man didn't have an eternal, independent soul.

Rather, according to the Buddha, humans only think they possess a self that is separate from the rest of life.

I believe that Robots will likely be made to have some sort of consciousness just like every other structure likely possesses some sort of consciousness.

But it is also likely that man and machine will evolve into a completely different race than what we see today. While the various religions of the world will be lost to explain this 'Brave New World,' Buddhism offers us the correct understanding that life and consciousness are not separate but interrelated with everything.

Life and consciousness are constantly changing and evolving. We shouldn't expect, according to the Buddha, anything substantial or unchanging. Indeed, the various relationships that make up life should be respected and cared for with understanding, no matter how, that life evolves. Higher functioning beings will recognize their relationship in the web of life and honor it, according to the Buddha.

As humanity takes control of its own evolution, man and machine will likely evolve into a cybernetic organism. But no matter how we evolve in the future, there will still be as much need for ethics and compassion. The Buddha's dharma, or correct understanding of living, offers humanity a civilized way to make that transition from human to cyborg.

I am not fond of the idea of humanity evolving into part machine, but I am a realist. I understand that if the technology is there to extend life and to make it more livable then people are going to demand it. Also, people will likely utilize machines and demand that they be their servants or perhaps even their mates.

But in this 'Brave New World' of Cyborgs and Robots, evolved humanity will still need to recognize that all the stuff and things of life are not separate, but can only exist because they depend on the 'apparent' other.

If humanity doesn't destroy itself, it will extend itself in its evolved form out into the cosmos. But no matter what type of life humanity evolves into and no matter where it goes, it will still need to recognize that to live a more meaningful and helpful life, humanity must somehow gain a respect and appreciation for all that is.

The Buddha and Buddhism ask us to consider the way life works and the best way to live life, no matter how that life looks now or in the future.

The Buddha might be surprised at the way humanity is evolving, but he would not have to change his views on life, consciousness, or the remedy to the pain and suffering of life.

Ultimately, there is the spiritual that transcends man, machine, and matter. No matter how things interact, form, and transform. The Buddha understood and taught that there is the great essence of being that is found in the fact that none of us are separate from anything. But, rather, our lives are a temporary drop in the ocean of being.

Supersoldiers II: Remote-Controlled Brains & The Rise Of Mighty Mouse

2009-12-16T12:17:00.000-08:00

http://blogs.discovery.com/remote_possibilities/2009/03/supersoldiers-ii-remote-controlled-brains-the-rise-of-mighty-mouse.html

Supersoldiers II: Remote-Controlled Brains & The Rise Of Mighty Mouse
March 06, 2009

In the last Supersoldiers installment we looked at metabolic, mitochondrial and psychological factors in becoming More Than We Can Be. The infodump continues, with incredibly muscled mice, the bright future of steroids, and the craziest DOD experiments you've ever heard of.

According to a Dr. Se-Jin Lee at Johns Hopkins, mice lacking the protein myostatin have about twice as much muscle as regular mice, and mice that overproduce follistatin -- a protein that inhibits myostatin -- have about four times as much muscle. They look totally crazy, but they are mighty; uses include promoting muscle growth in patients with muscular dystrophy. To inhibit human production of myostatin might double your strength. Now Lee's looking for "other players" that interact with myostatin, as most agents currently in development are only focused on blocking myostatin, and thus not embracing the maximal amount of possible weirdness.

Mice have natural myostatin levels of 50 to 80 times the human amount, raising doubt as to how well the results will translate to humans. John Knopf, the CEO of Acceleron (a pharma company working with myostatin inhibition), is still waxing ecstatic: "Before I became involved with Acceleron, if someone had told me you could increase muscle mass by up to 60 percent in a month, I never would have believed it." Californian pharmaceutical Amgen recently completed a myostatin inhibitor safety trial, and are testing a second inhibitor as a countermeasure to space-flight-induced muscle changes. Mice aboard the space shuttle Endeavor in August were given Amgen's experimental drug to determine if it could slow muscle loss in microgravity. And in 2005, Wyeth began a clinical trial of a myostatin antibody that binds to and blocks it, as a treatment for two forms of muscular dystrophy. Another exciting application? Muscle-building treatments could give oncologists the option of extended rounds of chemo.

Dr. Ronald Evans at the Salk Institute is injecting adult mice with a synthetic designed to mimic fat to chemically activate PPAR-delta, the "master regulator" that controls cellular fat-burning. Even when the mice aren't particularly rambunctious, turning on this switch activates the same fat-burning process that occurs during exercise. Even on a high-fat diet, this shift in the balance keeps them resistant to weight gain.

Through genetically engineering this switch to be permanently on, he was able to create a race of supermodel "marathon mice" with twice the physical endurance of normal mice. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that the tests demonstrate that the PPAR-d switch works in different modes -- not a simple binary -- which means the supermodel mouse experiments might never end. Of course, this metabolic effect is turned on before birth, and thus offers no help to adults, since they've already been born. So the new grail is chemical metabolic engineering, possibly a one-a-day pill. Tomorrow's science today! An exercise pill is of course not only retro-futurist-sexy in that Gernsback Continuum way, but obviously would have incredible consequences on the American health crisis.

THE NEW STEROIDS

But what about steroids? A 2005 bust by Italian politzia broke up an international drug ring, and recovered hundreds of packages of the steroid Nandrolone being shipped to soldiers in Iraq. Makes sense that soldiers, whose lives are on the line, would be looking for any way to increase performance -- but steroids are, anybody can tell you, a bad business. Beyond the 1001 horrible side effects we all learned from television as children, there are also utility limitations: androgens haven't been found that can be taken orally, because of liver toxicity. Although the quest to develop drugs that are purely anabolic -- meaning, without androgenic effects such as those we all know -- has been fruitless.

There's at least one long-acting testosterone ester (testosterone undecanoate) that need only be injected once every three months and has been used for years in other countries with favorable reviews, but of course that's not enough for DARPA. The next wave is a group of chemical agents known as Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs), which increase the effect of steroids on muscle and decrease harmful effects by targeting only those systems in need. SARMs work like testosterone, but bind to the steroid receptors in only specific tissue, like muscle: not steroids, but creating the anabolic effect of steroids. It's thought that the specificity lies in SARMs' lack of reaction with the enzyme 5-alpha-reductase, which converts testosterone to the more androgenic hormone DHT. Orally active, SARMs may be useful for muscle and bone strength and development, fat loss, and sexual function.

The first tissue-selective SARMs arose in 2003, so there's no telling what lies in store for the agent, and a lot of these advantages are still only theoretical. To date, the leading and most promising SARM, Ostarine, is still in clinical trials. Assuming natural testosterone concentrations are unaffected, ostarine would supplement the anabolic effect of a person’s natural testosterone: the equivalent of a 125-200mg/week testosterone head start. Ostarine has been shown to increase lean mass and strength without androgenic effects, and further research into treating the wasting related to cancer is scheduled.

THE FUTURE OF WAR

Finally, here's a quick look at some of the more amazing DARPA-funded programs underway: Mimicking geese's ability to fly without eating for five days, simply by adjusting their hemoglobin, and reproducing sealions' "dive reflex," which slows heartrate and steers bloodflow coreward as they descend. The implications for both human divers and high-altitude combat are obvious. Chimpanzees are around five times stronger than people, and gorillas around ten times, possibly to the point of lifting two tons, so we're looking at gene therapies to help tendon healing and strengthening. "Synthetic vitamins" and pre-positioned "universal immune cells" are being looked into as a first defense against chemical and viral agents. Something called the Warfighter’s Accelerated Recovery by Photobiomodulation -- or WARP device -- uses near-infrared light to speed up the repair of damaged tissue, like a tricorder. Microscopic magnets in the bloodflow could help stop wounds bleeding from the inside out. The DARPA "Neovision Program" is working toward synthetic retinal prostheses to "enable signal transduction at the nerve/retina interface," or reinventing human vision at the cyborg level. The "Brain/Machine Interface," project is providing startling options for operating robot limbs with thought, while -- in a futurist's dream -- the Army's "thought helmet" project is harnessing Gladwell's "blink" moments to create a whole new form of in-field communications: a "radio without a microphone." (Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist in charge, says: "Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.")

But what really gets me about all this is the sort of elegant hubris, or brutality, in attacking the basic system reqs of life -- food, water, sleep -- as the simple operational obstacles they've always been. Never mind the fact that these are naturally evolved physiological mechanisms, that hole can be looped (someday, apparently). What I find impressive, if a bit Frankensteiny, is the straightforwardness of the mandate, and its symmetry: we're looking at a program dedicated to rejecting the basic limitations of our human form, while overclocking the rest of the human form to outperform itself.

That's futurism at its most basic, and DARPA's stock in trade -- but isn't it also the point of the Olympics? Athleticism, mountain climbing, vehicle or computer performance, the idea is always the same: to get the most out of a system or organism, to balance performance and waste most efficiently, to bend the limits of what humans are thought capable, and -- admit it -- to blow everybody's mind. Which DARPA has done, and will continue to do, until hopefully we're all a bit less Batman and a little more Squirrel Girl.

Questions? Corrections? Furry memories of Captain Carrot & The Zoo Crew that you'd like to share? Hie thee hence to the comments section and go to town. And if you've got questions or suggestions for upcoming entries on this blog, take them to the Nitpickers' Bazaar.

Intel: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020

2009-12-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

No one's putting a chip in my brain! Putting chips in peoples' brains are part of the demonic agenda to turn us into slaves and turn our Lives off when we no longer obey the system or are profitable for them!

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141180/Intel_Chips_in_brains_will_control_computers_by_2020

Intel: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020
Brain waves will replace keyboard and mouse, dial phones and change TV channels
By Sharon Gaudin
November 19, 2009 02:40 PM ET

Computerworld - By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves.

Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.

The scientists say the plan is not a scene from a sci-fi movie -- Big Brother won't be planting chips in your brain against your will. Researchers expect that consumers will want the freedom they will gain by using the implant.

"I think human beings are remarkable adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop [carrying devices]. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."

Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau told Computerworld that users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it. He also predicted that users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers.

Instead, they'll simply manipulate their various devices with their brains.

"We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

To get to that point Pomerleau and his research teammates from Intel, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, are currently working on decoding human brain activity.

Pomerleau said the team has used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) machines to determine that blood flow changes in specific areas of the brain based on what word or image someone is thinking of. People tend to show the same brain patterns for similar thoughts, he added.

For instance, if two people think of the image of a bear or hear the word bear or even hear a bear growl, a neuroimage would show similar brain activity. Basically, there are standard patterns that show up in the brain for different words or images.

Pomerleau said researchers are close to gaining the ability to build brain sensing technology into a head set that culd be used to manipulate a computer. The next step is development of a tiny, far less cumbersome sensor that could be implanted inside the brain.

Such brain research isn't limited to Intel and its university partners.

Almost two years ago, scientists in the U.S. and Japan announced that a monkey's brain was used to to control a humanoid robot. Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University and lead researcher on the project, said that researchers were hoping its work would help paralyzed people walk again.

And a month before that, a scientist at the University of Arizona reported that he had successfully built a robot that is guided by the brain and eyes of a moth. Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the university, predicted that in 10 to 15 years people will be using "hybrid" computers running a combination of technology and living organic tissue.

Today, Intel's Pomerleau said various research facilities are developing technologies to sense activity from inside the skull.

"If we can get to the point where we can accurately detect specific words, you could mentally type," he added. "You could compose characters or words by thinking about letters flashing on the screen or typing whole words rather than their individual characters."

Pomerleau also noted that the more scientists figure out about the brain, it will help them design better microprocessors. He said, "If we can see how the brain does it, then we could build smarter computers."

Bad memories wiped away with unique therapy

2009-12-13T17:33:00.000-08:00

LOSE YOUR BAD MEMORIES AND YOU LOSE THE LESSONS YOU LEARNED. THIS MAKES YOU VULNERABLE TO EVIL AND EVIL PEOPLE AGAIN!!!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34370302/ns/health-mental_health/

Bad memories wiped away with unique therapy
Experts say it’s the first time a fear-erasing technique worked in humans
By Jeanna Bryner
Senior writer
Dec. 11, 2009

In a scientific experiment that brings to mind the memory-erasing escapade in the 2004 film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," scientists have blocked fearful recollections in human participants, sans drugs. The results challenge the view that our long-term memories are fixed and resistant to change.

This isn't the first time science has endeavored to understand and vanquish our fears. But it's the first time using a behavioral technique has been proven to work in humans, as opposed to a pharmacological one. A similar study was carried out in rats and reported earlier this year.

"This is the first study without drugs showing what we think is the permanent alteration of the memory," Elizabeth Phelps, an NYU psychology professor, told LiveScience. Phelps and her colleagues detail their findings this week in the journal Nature.

The findings also could have implications for treating phobias in a more permanent way, say the researchers. The current therapy of choice involves exposing patients to the feared object, though in a safe environment. This so-called extinction method works, but the fear can come back when the person is under stress.

Phelps and NYU colleague Joseph LeDoux, and their colleagues, based their study on an emerging view of long-term memory. Traditionally, scientists have thought we learn something, and then that information is sealed into our long-term memory.

Now, scientists are finding our memories get consolidated over and over again each time we retrieve a certain bit of information. Let's say we see a snake: At that moment our brains pull out past information we've stored on snakes, such as a close encounter with one. By revisiting the snake memory a portal of sorts opens, and that memory is open to manipulation.

From past studies, scientists think that the window of opportunity opens up between three and 10 minutes after spotting the snake, or its equivalent. And it stays open for at least an hour, but no longer than six hours, Phelps said.

The research team "seized the moment" by changing the fearful information before the memory got reconsolidated or sealed up again.

In the first of two experiments on humans, Phelps and her colleagues had participants view colored boxes on a computer screen, one of which was paired with a mild electric shock. This process conditioned participants to react fearfully to a blue square. They tested the participants' skin conductance, a measure of arousal, to confirm the conditioning worked.

The next day the researchers showed participants the blue square, a reminder of the object, which was intended to reactivate their memory and initiate the reconsolidation process (memory gets brought out of long-term storage and lingers in this unstable place).

This time, however, the blue square wasn't paired with a shock, a way to teach participants that the object was now "safe." Since the researchers had a rough estimate of when the reconsolidation window opened and closed, they varied the timing of this safe information.

One group saw the blue square with no shock, and 10 minutes later they viewed the blue square again with no electrical shock. Here, the thinking was that the first observation would trigger the beginning of the reconsolidation process. After 10 minutes, that window should be open and so this new information would be written over the fearful message before being sealed into long-term memory again.

Participants in the second group saw the blue square with no shock, but this wasn't followed up 10 minutes later. The scientists were using basic extinction training to create a new now-safe memory of the blue square in addition to the older fearful memory.

The third group saw the blue square with no shock and then after six hours saw it again with no shock, with the thinking that the window of vulnerability had already closed by then.

All participants left that day essentially free of their fear response to a blue square. The next day, tests showed the fear had returned in the latter two groups, but not for the participants whose blue-square fears were rewritten during reconsolidation. To see if stress would cause the fearful memory to come back, in one part of this experiment, participants received a mild shock before viewing the blue square. The fear didn't come back for the reconsolidated group.

A test of some of the participants a year later showed the reconsolidation held up, with individuals showing no fear of the blue square. The fear had returned, however, for the others who only underwent the extinction therapy.

Another experiment showed this reconsolidation method is selective and targets a particular feared object without disrupting other memories.

Human Immortality: A Scientific Reality?

2009-12-10T13:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.viewzone.com/aging.html

Human Immortality: A Scientific Reality?
If you're alive in 20 years, you may be able to live forever.
by Gary Vey for Viewzone

From the moment of birth, we begin the battle against death -- against the inevitable. Statistics say that a newborn child can expect to live an average of 76 years. But averages may not be what they use to be.

In 1786, life expectancy was 24 years. A hundred years later it doubled to 48. Right now, it's 76.

"Over half the baby boomers here in America are going to see their hundredth birthday and beyond in excellent health," says Dr. Ronald Klatz of the American Academy of Anti-Aging. "We're looking at life spans for the baby boomers and the generation after the baby boomers of 120 to 150 years of age."

Today's quest for the fountain of youth is taking scientists from inside the genetic structure of cells to analyzing the role of stress and diet on life spans. Would-be immortals flock to anti-aging clinics and shell out as much as $20,000 a year for treatments that include hormone therapy, DNA analysis, even anti-aging cosmetic surgery. These experimental therapies offer no guarantees -- just the promise of prolonging life.

"Anti-aging medicine is not about stretching out the last years of life." says Dr. Klatz. "It's about stretching out the middle years of life... and actually compressing those last years few years of life so that diseases of aging happen very, very late in the life cycle, just before death, or don't happen at all."

The cause of human aging is now being understood.

The cause of what we call "aging" is now finally being understood. This new understanding may soon move anti-aging cosmetics and surgery to the realm of snake oil and Siberian yogurt as life-extension fads. Just when you thought that holographic TV and outer space travel were the future benefits of modern technology, immortality has silently been revealing itself to scientists like Doctor John Langmore [right] of the University of Michigan's Department of Biology. Dr. Langmore and his group have been looking inside human cells, at the very essence of human life: the DNA molecule. Specifically, Dr. Langmore is looking at the tips of the DNA molecule - a previously overlooked part of the double-helix molecule - that contain a kind of chain of repeating pairs of enzymes.

Telomeres - programmed to die?

Called telomeres, these molecular chains have often been compared to the blank leaders on film and recording tape. Indeed, telomeres seem to perform a similar function in aligning the DNA molecule during the replication process. Protecting the vital DNA molecule from being copied out of synch, these telomeres provide a kind of buffer zone where asynchronous replication errors (that are inevitable) will not result in any of the vital DNA sequences being lost.

Other scientists use the analogy of the plastic bands on the ends of shoelaces. Telomeres seem to hold the important DNA code intact, preventing it from freying as the molecules replicate over time.

Perhaps the best analogy I have heard is to compare the telomeres to the white space surrounging an important type written document. Imagine that this paper is repeatedly slapped on a copy machine, a copy is made, and then that copy is used to make another copy. Each time the paper is subject to errors of alignment. After enough copying it is probable that the white space will diminish and some of the actual text will not be copied. That's what happens to our cells' DNA and is the reason we get old and die.

As any cell gets older, it is under attack by oxides and other so-called free-radical chemicals in the body and environment. We survive as living beings because our cells have the ability to duplicate themselves before being killed by these natural causes. Each time our cells duplicate themselves, the DNA molecule, which resembles a spral ladder, splits along the "rungs" of the ladder. Each half of this "ladder" then rebuilds the missing half making two new DNA molecules. But the procedure is not perfect and usually a small portion of the DNA molecule is lost and not copied. Since errors are more frequent on the ends of the DNA molecule, this area does not contain any important DNA information but rather a series or chain of repeating enzymes. The errors are therefore usually confined to this chain, called a telomere, and so the effect is usually insignificant.

Scientists recently noted that the length of these telomere chains were shorter as we grew older. Eventually, the telomeres become so shortened that the losses in replication begin to effect the vital DNA molecule sequence and prevent the cell from being able to duplicate itself. This point, when the cell has lost vital DNA code and cannot reproduce, is called the Hayflick limit. This is why we age.

Dr. Langmore uses physical, biochemical, and genetic techniques to study the structure and function of telomeres. His group has developed a cell-free system to reconstitute functional model telomeres using synthetic DNA, and are studying the mechanism by which telomeres normally stabilize chromosomes and how shortening of the telomeres could cause instability.

The protein factors responsible for stabilizing the ends of chromosomes are being identified, cloned, and studied. Electron microscopy is used to directly visualize the structure of the model telomeres. His group is also using new enzymatic assays to determine the structure of telomere DNA in normal and abnormal cells grown in vivo and in vitro, in order to address specific hypotheses about the role of telomeres in aging and cancer.

Recently, scientists discovered an important enzyme that can turn the telomere production on the DNA molecule "on" and "off." It's called telomerase. It seems that as we get older, the amount of telomerase in our cells decreases. Naturally, the exploration of this enzyme is now the focus of much investigation, but unfortunately the research is aimed at understanding how to turn telomeres "off" to limit the spread of "immortal" cancer cells.

Viewzone asked Dr. Langmore to give us his thoughts on the role of telomerase, and the possibilities of using it to repair and lengthen telomeres in human cells. His comments follow:

Telomeres are special, essential DNA sequences at both ends of each chromosome. Each time chromosomes replicate a small amount of the DNA at both ends is lost, by an uncertain mechanism. Because human telomeres shorten at a much faster rate than many lower organisms, we speculate that this telomere shortening probably has a beneficial effect for humans, namely mortality. The telomere hypothesis of aging postulates that as the telomeres naturally shorten during the lifetime of an individual, a signal or set of signals is given to the cells to cause the cells to cease growing (senesce). At birth, human telomeres are about 10,000 base pairs long, but by 100 years of age this has been reduced to about 5,000 base pairs.
Telomerase is actually an enzyme (a catalytic protein) that is able to arrest or reverse this shortening process. Normally, telomerase is only used to increase the length of telomeres during the formation of sperm and perhaps eggs, thus ensuring that our offspring inherit long "young" telomeres to propagate the species.

ViewZone: How is mortality in non-germ line cells a beneficial effect?

Dr. Langmore: The telomere hypothesis of cancer is that the function of telomere shortening is to cause cells that have lost normal control over growth to senesce (i.e. stop growing) before being able to replicate enough times to become a tumor, thus decreasing the frequency of cancer.

Immortal cells like cancer have an unfair advantage over normal human cells which are designed to senesce. But nature seems to have planned this human telomere shortening perhaps to prolong life by hindering the otherwise unchecked growth of non-immortal or benign tumors. Malignant, or immortal tumors can simply outlive the rest of the organism.

Malignant cancer cells are being studied because they appear to have altered the shortening of telomeres by turning "on" the telomerase. Thus it appears that some cancers and aging are both connected with the biology of telomeres.

It is possible that increasing telomerase activity in normal cells might stop the biological clock of aging, yet the side effect of this intervention might be an increase in the rate of cancer. Further understanding and refinement in the telomere hypothesis might lead to a way to slow the aging process and prevent or arrest cancer.

However telomeres function, they are an integral part in the very complex process of cell growth, involving many other factors as well. Telomerase might be the Achilles Heal of aging and cancer, but as our understanding of factors that interact with telomerase, factors that are responsible for telomere shortening in the first place, and non-telomerase mechanisms for increasing the length of telomeres, we might find that one of these factors is more easily manipulated to slow aging or prevent cancer. Also there are additional factors that affect aging and cancer, which might prove in the end to be more important than telomeres and telomerase.

ViewZone: Are telomeres unique to individual DNA? If so, does this preclude any universal treatment for aging?

Dr. Langmore: Different individuals have telomeres with exactly the same DNA sequence but of different lengths. It is too early to say whether there is any relationship between telomere length in an individual and his or her life expectancy, or whether a treatment that would artificially lengthen telomeres would arrest (or reverse) the aging process. One problem is that even in one individual the telomeres of different chromosomes have very different lengths. Therefore an individual might have on average long telomeres; but, he might have one chromosome with a very short telomere that could affect cell growth.

ViewZone: In the work of Shay and Wright (see below), increased telomere length was positively associated with telomerase. How significant is this?

Dr. Langmore: Shay, Wright and all their many collaborators stimulated telomerase activity in normal cells. This was expected to 1) Increase the length of telomeres and 2) Prolong the lifetime of the cells in tissue culture. The treatment did both, in perfect agreement with the telomere hypothesis of aging.

ViewZone: How much was cell lifetime prolonged due to this treatment that reactivated telomerase?

Dr. Langmore: The increased proliferation of the cells was perhaps equivalent to hundreds of years of human life.

Dr. Langmore received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in 1975. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and at the University of Basel.

A link to cancer:

In the March 15 issue of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Journal, Dr. Jerry Shay and Dr. Woodring Wright, both professors of cell biology and neuroscience at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, report manipulating the length of telomeres to alter the life span of human cells. Shay and Wright are the first to report this important finding. They received an Allied-Signal Award for Research on Aging to explore this line of research last year.

"By lengthening the telomere, we were able to extend the life of the cell hybrids," Wright explained. "This study is strong evidence that telomere length is the clock that counts cell divisions."

"The expression of the enzyme telomerase maintains stable telomere length. Telomerase is not detected in normal cells and telomeres shorten and then the cells stop dividing and enter a phase called cellular senescence."

Shay and Wright have shown in earlier studies that telomeres maintain their length in almost all human cancer cell lines. This correlated with inappropriate expression of telomerase and as a consequence allowed the cell to become "immortal." Cell immortality is a critical and perhaps rate-limiting step for almost all cancers to progress. Previous work by the UT Southwestern investigators showed that in a special group of advanced pediatric cancers the lack of telomerase activity correlated with critically shortened telomeres and cancer remission.

Consequently, an idea gaining momentum is that the ability to measure and perhaps alter telomere length and/or telomerase activity may give physicians new diagnostic and treatment tools for managing the care of patients with cancer.

Shay and Wright tried to alter already-immortal cells by attempting to inhibit telomerase activity and cause telomeres to shorten. "Unexpectedly, we found the opposite result. Rather than inhibiting telomerase, our treatment caused the immortal cells to develop longer telomeres," Shay explained. "Although we were surprised with the result, we now know there is a causal relationship between telomere length and the proliferate capacity of cells.

"Essentially, we combined the tumor cells containing experimentally elongated telomeres with normal cells and extended the life span of those cell hybrids compared to similar hybrids using cells without experimentally elongated telomeres."

Shay and Wright said the mechanism that causes telomeres to lengthen is still unclear. However, Shay said, "Our observations increase confidence in the hypothesis that immortal cells and reactivated telomerase are essential components of human tumors. Ultimately, we may be able to regulate tumor cells by inhibiting telomerase activity."

The potential implications for research on human aging also are significant. "It is still speculative, but understanding the role of telomere shortening in cell aging may give us the information we need to increase the life span of an organism," Wright said. (News Releases from UT Southwestern)

Other factors that make us "rust"...

DNA damages occur continuously in cells of living organisms. While most of these damages are repaired, some accumulate, as the DNA Polymerases and other repair mechanisms cannot correct defects as fast as they are apparently produced. In particular, there is evidence for DNA damage accumulation in non-dividing cells of mammals. These accumulated DNA damages probably interfere with RNA transcription. It has been suggested that the decline in the ability of DNA to serve as a template for gene expression is the primary cause of aging. Most damage comes in the form of oxidative damage - the same "rusting" process that oxidizes iron - and hence is likely to be a prominent cause of aging. Arteriosclerosis and heart disease are the results of this type of damage to the cells lining our blood vessels.

Without the ability to duplicate itself before being "rusted" to death, a cell is sentenced to senesce, or death. As we gradually lose members of our cumulative body, we wear out and become a mortal. Understanding the biology of telomeres and telomerase hold the potential of unlimited duplication and unlimited life.

It appears then that telomere lengths are shortened by time and the number of times the DNA molecule has reproduced or "copied" itself. This is also limited by inheritance. If your family has a history of living to an old age, it is likely that your telomeres are longer and therefore protect the critical DNA information when your cells make copies of themselves. In a general population, the people who live longer usually have more offspring so it follows that number of people having longer telomeres would increase. But there's a problem. Having longer telomeres also encourages cancerous cells to make more copies of themselves, causing tumors and shortening the lives of people with long telomeres. These two consequences of long telomeres, positive and negative, are balanced by natural selection and today set the average life expectancy to about 76 years.

Remember also that cells are bombarded by environmental poisons that can cause the genetic codes to break, regardless of the telomere length. The more toxic the environment is, the greater the chance for "broken" cells to reproduce themselves and the more beneficial it would be to have shorter telomeres to limit this reproduction.

But what would happen if the population was forced to have offspring at a very young age, eliminating the impact of a toxic environment? This is exactly what happens to laboratory rats and mice who are artificially bred. Their breeding environment is usually free of toxins and highly controlled, thus favoring the expression of longer telomeres. This fact is important because rats and mice are traditionally used to test for toxicity of products in humans.

Bret S. Weinstein & Deborah Ciszek [University of Michigan] observed that captive-rodent breeding protocols, designed to increase reproductive output, simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence (old age) and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression (i.e. having shorter telomeres). This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled by forced breeding techniques, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation. Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated aging.

In short: lab rats are bred in an artificial environment that does not allow for the changes of natural selection and so they have become more prone to cancer and artificially immune to the effects of premature aging. As such, their reaction to pathogens should not necessarily be relied upon to indicate human reactions to such things as food additives, radiation and environmental contaminants. This is a serious problem that has, so far, received little acknowledgement. While we effectively test products for causing cancer we risk the mistake of permitting products that can make us age faster.

It has also been noted that children of young mothers seem to live longer than children of older mothers. This is because all of the eggs of a female are produced while she is still in her mother's womb. She is born with all of the egg cells that she will ever have. The telomeres of the ealy produced eggs are very long but become shortened as more are made. So a woman has a finite number of eggs, some with long telomeres and some with shorter telomeres. After birth, when the female reaches puberty, these long-telomere egg cells are the first to be released by the ovaries, and the first to becme potential embryos. Thus, having children as near to puberty as possible increases the chance that the offspring will inherit long telomeres. It also explains why having children later in life increases the chance for birth defects or miscarriages. This is precisely what is happening to the laboratory rat and mice populations, who are forced to breed early, and explains why these lab animals have unusually long telomeres compared to animals in the general "wild" population.

So for humans to extend life we must do two things: first, eliminate the toxins in our environment that make short telomeres a "good thing" while finding a dietary or pharmaceutical method for increasing and preserving the length of our cells' telomeres. The twenty-first century may well be the era in which humans learn the secrets of eternal life, but it may also be a time to be reminded of the many dangers inherent in exploring these god-like abilities.

From every tree in the garden did he grant them to eat, save but one. And that tree, in the center of the garden, was called the tree of life. And the Snake said to Eve, "Eat of this fruit and you will become as God and never die." -- Genesis

UPDATE: January 2007

[from Korean Times Newspaper]

By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter

A team of South Korean scientists on Sunday claimed to have created a "cellular fountain of youth," or a small molecule, which enables human cells to avoid aging and dying.

The team, headed by Prof. Kim Tae-kook at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, argued the newly-synthesized molecule, named CGK733, can even make cells younger.

The findings were featured by the Britain-based Nature Chemical Biology online early today and will be printed as a cover story in the journalÕs offline edition early next month.

"All cells face an inevitable death as they age. On this path, cells became lethargic and in the end stop dividing but we witnessed that CGK733 can block the process," Kim said.

"We also found the synthetic compound can reverse aging, by revitalizing already-lethargic cells. Theoretically, this can give youth to the elderly via rejuvenating cells," the 41-year-old said.

Kim expected that the CGK733-empowered drugs that keep cells youthful far beyond their normal life span would be commercialized in less than 10 years.

Other researchers here heaped praises on the discovery but they were cautious about the practical therapeutic application of the new substance.

"Obviously, it is an innovative finding. But we need to see whether or not CGK733 could really rejuvenate cells inside human bodies without generating side effects," Prof. Kim Sung-hoon at Seoul National University said.

Prof. Kim Tae-kook, however, is confident about the commercial viability of CGK733, believing the efficiency of the material was created using state-of-the-art magnetic nano-probe technology.

"We have the magnet-associated technology to identify molecular targets inside living cells, which allowed us to examine the mechanisms of CGK733 directly," Kim said.

"Unlike other research teams that must make candidates materials for drugs without being able to see their intra-cell activities, we know the precise mechanism of CGK733. So we have the better chance of making a success of the substance," he continued.

Indeed, Kim basked in global recognition last June when he and his associates developed a technology dubbed MAGIC, short for magnetism-based interactive capture.

MAGIC uses fluorescent materials to check whether any drug can mix with targeted proteins inside the cell. The results were globally recognized by being printed by the U.S.-based journal Science at the time.

"MAGIC is kind of a source technology to see inside cells. Based on the method, we also found a pair of promising substances that can deal with cancers," Kim said.

Key Target Of Aging Regulator Found

ScienceDaily (June 16, 2009) -- Researchers at The Wistar Institute have defined a key target of an evolutionarily conserved protein that regulates the process of aging. The study, published June 11 in Nature, provides fundamental knowledge about key mechanisms of aging that could point toward new anti-aging strategies and cancer therapies.

Scientists have long known that a class of proteins called sirtuins promotes fitness and longevity in most organisms ranging from single-celled yeast to mammals. At the cellular level, sirtuins protect genome integrity, enhance resistance to adverse stresses, and antagonize senescence. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms have remained poorly understood.

The team, led by senior author Shelley Berger, Ph.D., Hilary Koprowski Professor at The Wistar Institute, demonstrated for the first time a molecular target for a member of this class, Sir2, in regulation of aging in yeast cells. Sir2 removes an acetyl group attached to a specific site (lysine at position 16 or K16) on histone H4—histones are proteins that package and organize the long strands of DNA within the nucleus and also are central regulators in turning genes on and off. The study reveals that removal of this acetyl group by Sir2 near the chromosome ends -- the telomeres -- is important for yeast cells to maintain the ability to replicate. Researchers found that Sir2 levels decline as cells age, and there is a concomitant accumulation of the acetylation mark along with disrupted histone organization at telomeres.

Deacetylation of H4K16 by Sir2 and consequent telomere stability play a major role in maintaining long lifespan in yeast. Since sirtuins deacetylate many different proteins, these results clarify a key role of Sir2 protein in control of lifespan.

"Some modifications on histones, like this acetylation on histone H4 lysine 16, are persistent and are maintained through generations of cell divisions. This DNA-independent inheritance is called epigenetics," Berger says. "Characteristic epigenetic features have been discovered for various developmental processes in recent years. Understanding epigenetic changes associated with aging is a hugely exciting direction in aging research. It will provide insights and ideas not only for new therapies to regulate cells that have lost control of proliferation, such as 'immortal' cells found in cancers, but also for new strategies to maintain health and fitness."

"We plan to continue to search for new targets of Sir2 and other aging regulators," says lead author Weiwei Dang, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scientist working with Berger. "We are designing unbiased screens for other aging targets and mechanisms in chromatin. Using yeast as our aging model enables us to do many discovery screens that are impossible with other, more complex organisms. Yet it is remarkable that many of these chromatin mechanisms associated with yeast could turn out to be relevant even for aging human cells."

Handle With Care: Telomeres Resemble DNA Fragile Sites

ScienceDaily (July 17, 2009) -- Telomeres, the repetitive sequences of DNA at the ends of linear chromosomes, have an important function: They protect vulnerable chromosome ends from molecular attack. Researchers at Rockefeller University now show that telomeres have their own weakness. They resemble unstable parts of the genome called fragile sites where DNA replication can stall and go awry. But what keeps our fragile telomeres from falling apart is a protein that ensures the smooth progression of DNA replication to the end of a chromosome.

The research, led by Titia de Lange, head of the Laboratory of Cell Biology and Genetics, and first author Agnel Sfeir, a postdoctoral associate in the lab, suggests a striking similarity between telomeres and common fragile sites, parts of the genome where breaks tend to occur, albeit infrequently. (Humans have 80 common fragile sites, many of which have been linked to cancer.) De Lange and Sfeir found that these newly discovered fragile sites make it difficult for DNA replication to proceed, a discovery that unveils a new replication problem posed by telomeres.

At the center of the discovery is a protein known as TRF1, which de Lange, in an effort to understand how telomeres protect chromosome ends, discovered in 1995. Using a conditional mouse knockout, de Lange and Sfeir have now revealed that TRF1, which is part of a six-protein complex called shelterin, enables DNA replication to drive smoothly through telomeres with the aid of two other proteins.

"Telomeric DNA has a repetitive sequence that can form unusual DNA structures when the DNA is unwound during DNA replication," says de Lange. "Our data suggest that TRF1 brings in two proteins that can take out these structures in the telomeric DNA. In other words, TRF1 and its helpers remove the bumps in the road so that the replication fork can drive through."

The work, published in the July 10 issue of Cell, began when Sfeir deleted TRF1 and saw that the telomeres resembled common fragile sites, suggesting that TRF1 protects telomeres from becoming fragile. Instead of a continuous string of DNA, the telomeres were broken into fragments of twos and threes. To see if the replication fork stalls at telomeres, de Lange and Sfeir joined forces with Carl L. Schildkraut, a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Using a technique called SMARD, the researchers observed the dynamics of replication across individual DNA molecules -- the first time this technique has been used to study telomeres. In the absence of TRF1, the fork often stalled for a considerable amount of time.

The only other known replication problem posed by telomeres was solved in 1985 when it was shown that the enzyme telomerase elongates telomeres, which shorten during every cell division. The second problem posed by telomeres, the so-called end-protection problem, was solved by de Lange and her colleagues when they found that shelterin protects the ends of linear chromosomes, which look like damaged DNA, from unnecessary repair. Working with TRF1, the very first shelterin protein ever to be identified, de Lange and Sfeir have not only unveiled a completely unanticipated replication problem at telomeres, they have also shown how it is solved.

The research lays new groundwork for the study of common fragile sites throughout the genome, explains de Lange. "Fragile sites have always been hard to study because no specific DNA sequence preceeds or follows them," she says. "In constrast, telomeres represent fragile sites with a known sequence, which may help us understand how common fragile sites break throughout the genome -- and why."

Transgender, Transhuman, Transbeman: Uploading with Martine Rothblatt

2009-12-09T08:48:00.000-08:00

http://hplusmagazine.com/print/914

Transgender, Transhuman, Transbeman: Uploading with Martine Rothblatt
By admin
Created 10/05/2009

If anyone is going to persuade us to abandon the flesh, be downloaded, and live forever as information, it is Martine Rothblatt. A satellite scientist of distinction (she started GeoStar and Sirius Satellite Radio), who succeeded in saving the life of the child of her and her partner by throwing money at research, and saved scores of other children by doing so, she decided a few years ago that the next thing to conquer was death itself.

Transhumanism At Play

We talked on the phone, eventually, after a problem with timezones, and I remarked to her that one of the problems with living forever, considering the delicate transfer of selfhood into electronic media, was the sheer problem of human error and computer glitches. Martine responded: “There will always be error – it’s part of the human condition. In the flesh, people have odd experiences with their own biochemistry that make them who they are: somatically induced or inherited. Yet those errors don’t prevent people forming relationships. Uploading will have its errors — manageable errors — and that is part of one of the things that will keep the uploaded human.”

Won’t the difference between sensations experienced in the flesh and sensations experienced or remembered when you are uploaded be like the difference between analog and digital recording? “It will be different, and some people will notice the difference — just as some people prefer the mellow sound of analog and some people actually prefer the crisp artificial sound of digital. But here’s the thing. Both are better than being dead and never hearing anything again, ever.”

I wondered: Would it be a nuisance never being able to forget anything, not being able to be disconcerted again by twists in the plots of books you re-read, not being able to get the surprise in Haydn’s Surprise symphony?

“That’s an assumption,” Martine said, “but actually the mindware that will be approved for use will have as one of its features a graduation of memory strength. Things can be artificially forgotten. Some things — like your name and where you are at the moment will always be front and center. Other things will not always be recalled and some things will be completely forgotten. Mindware will allow you to adjust the accessibility of what you need to know, when you need to know it. Not forgetting wouldn’t be a user option that we would choose, even with bad experiences. You need the bad things as a spur, but they need to fade to grey. And you can arrange your mindware to do that for you.”

I asked Rothblatt at what point in their lives people would choose to upload. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. Some people would use uploading just for storage. Other people would want to stay digital. Some people would want to move back and forth. The first person to visit Mercury will do so uploaded into hardware that can survive that environment. Some people would use it to do certain things and then return to the flesh, It isn’t necessarily an all or nothing thing. And that’s one of the things that demonstrates the humanity of the whole project.”

Martine believes that the philosophical opponents of uploading are mostly biological essentialists, people who believe that there is an absolute value in remaining true to an original biological form. The underlying logic of this position is that we are not clever enough to realize all the bad consequences of changing the naturally-evolved order in any way. They think — and they have always thought — that we will come to regret any change to this.

This argument is absurd, because it is contradicted by fact. Similar people argued in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries that vaccination would make people more like cows. They were against transplants. Similar arguments were used against gender reassignment/confirmation surgery — both Martine and I have an interest to declare here, since we are both trans. Everything that humans have done since we first evolved intelligence, from growing crops and domesticating dogs onwards, has involved humans tinkering with the natural order.

“People don’t need to be in one place, or one machine,” she explained. “People can exist in many places and float.

What about the argument that uploading will always be an elite thing, a way for the rich to live forever? “That’s demonstrably false: the track record of technology is one of relentless democratization. When I graduated from college there were no cell phones, and then there were a few in the hands of rich businessmen, and now half the world’s population has them, each one with a computer capacity greater than that used in the Apollo program. And some aspects of phone technology provide us already with the underlying framework, the intellectual property, for mindware.…”

Some of the first advocates of uploading thought in terms of replacing one’s flesh body with a machine. Rothblatt sees a more fluid relationship — evolving a visionary idea she calls “transbemanism.” She describes it as “a philosophy that supports transitioning to a view of ourselves as unique patterns of thoughts (bemes), rather than as bodies per se, and consequently accepting of a ‘one mind, many instantiations’ society.”

“People don’t need to be in one place, or one machine,” she explained. “People can exist in many places and float. People were originally disturbed by telephones, because an individual’s voice could be where they are speaking and where they were heard — and now we take that for granted. A singularity of embodiment would be an obsolete concept. Just because our whole cultural matrix has been one body/one mind does not mean that this has to be where we are going. And, of course, sooner or later, different versions of the uploaded personality will have experiences different enough to make them different, though closely related, persons.”

Martine developed an interest in transhumanism in 2002 when she read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. “I had never really thought about the numbers or the practicality, and he took me through the numbers. I felt like I wanted to be a transhumanist — it all spoke to me as a transgendered person.” A little later, she discovered the website of the World Transhumanist Association. At first she felt unwelcome, but maintains that trans people are a core part of that community, because we embrace growth and change as part of our spirituality.

There is another thing that trans people bring to transhumanism, which is an acute awareness of the importance of rights. Rothblatt sees a direct historical line between the acceptance of a person’s right to alter their gender and the freedom to be transhuman and transbeman. “Gender reassignment in the 1950s and 1960s was based on the notion that changing a body to fit a mindset was ethical and therapeutic. Transhumanism builds on transgenderism, broadening the driving mindset from a gender ideal to a human development ideal. Transbemanism builds on transhumanism by saying it is all about the mindset, and hence bodies are tools of which we may ethically have as many (real or virtual) as we want.”

Some in transhumanist circles have suggested that the future is postgender. Should the future be discussed in terms of transgender or postgender or both? Rothblatt responds: “I think the future should be discussed in terms of transgender, not post gender, because we are not abandoning gender. Indeed, gender is one of the coolest avenues for human expression. Transgendered people have too much gender for the sexual dimorphic paradigm of male or female. In the future, everyone will explore the countless gender possibilities along the male-female continuum.”

Before we start uploading ourselves, people need to possess intellectual property in themselves. The uploaded need legal personhood. Martine has taken from English Bioethicist John Harris the idea that that which values itself should be so valued, whether it be an ape or an artificial intelligence. She thinks this is a more useful guide than Jeremy Bentham’s derivation of rights from the ability to suffer. Without rights, so many crimes against the uploaded would be possible. It is easy to brainwash the embodied, and the uploaded would likely be even more vulnerable. We have to establish an ethic of the absolute impermissibility of harming a persons’ autonomy by harming their own value to themselves. It is an assault. Rothblatt: “Minds are fragile — and to hit someone in the face is almost better than to put a fist through the fragile web of a personality.”

In a sense it is a choice of a spirituality that is entirely secular and material, so one can predict that establishing the right to upload as a life choice will provoke a big fight with religious authority. After all, you are offering a version of the beatific vision, of the communion of souls and that’s religion’s unique selling point. Martine comments that the churches have had to accept reality in the past — and they are not forever. Atheism has grown in the US because science and technology can address problems where religion fails. Technology, especially information technology, has continued to empower individuals, and ideologies that don’t meet our needs get junked.While transbemanism can satisfy our spiritual longings, what does it have to say about pleasure? “Pleasure is the bedrock of transbemanism. The purpose of exalting our minds above our bodies is to lengthen and multiply the magnitude of pleasure that each individual can enjoy.”

Finally, we talked about music and the way that, when we listen to music, we feel the presence of the long dead in our souls: Chopin, or Haydn, or Miles Davis. Music is one of the kinds of information which artists have encoded themselves into in the pursuit of lasting fame and communication with others. “My core belief,” Martine says, “is that information wants to be free. People are information. Technology is a way of communicating. Douglas Hofstadter talks of how humans, through music and science and art and mathematics, transcend space and time, how as individuals we are a concatenation of all the souls who have touched us. In the flesh or uploaded, we are a colony of souls.”

Are We Headed for a Sci-Fi Dystopia?

2009-12-07T03:45:00.000-08:00

Are We Headed for a Sci-Fi Dystopia?
By Marcy Darnovsky, AlterNet
December 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/80151/

For Boomers and the World War II generation, Aldous Huxley's 1932 Brave New World is the touchstone tale of a techno-utopian nightmare created by reproductive and biological engineering. Those in Gen X and Gen Y who ponder the prospect of a repro-genetic dystopia think of Gattaca.

Last week's release of a collector's edition of the 1997 film unavoidably prompts us to measure ourselves against its "not-too-distant future" of genetic castes and DNA-based discrimination. Has our world become more like Gattaca than it was a decade ago?

In Gattaca world, nonenhanced babies are born only to the poor and the sexually reckless. Those who can possibly afford it consult with a genetic technician before initiating a pregnancy, and select their future child's traits for optimum success: sex, life expectancy, intelligence, appearance.

Children with high-caliber preselected genes are classified at birth as "Valids." They're the ruling elite, eligible for top careers and entitled to high social status. "In-Valids" labor at menial jobs with no way up or out. In one memorable scene, a team of In-Valid janitors in prisoner-like jumpsuits is bussed into a gleaming office building. It's clear that the only way they get through the door is to clean the toilets and sweep the floors.

Gattaca's plot revolves around the tribulations and ultimate triumph of an In-Valid (played by Ethan Hawke) who refuses to accept his genetic destiny. Hawke's determined character manages not only to fool the genetic hierarchy's enforcers, but also -- this being Hollywood -- to get the gorgeous upper-class girl. (In real life, Hawke married and then divorced the same girl, Uma Thurman, but that's a different sort of story.)

But what about the real-life prospects of the horrors portrayed in Gattaca? In 1997, fertility clinics weren't advertising delivery of a boy or a girl -- you choose -- using the embryo screening technique portrayed in the film. The world didn't yet know about Dolly the cloned sheep. Far fewer genes had been mapped to far fewer traits. Genetic scientists hadn't yet created the monkey or the bunny engineered with a jellyfish gene to glow in the dark, or the goats and sheep that lactate spider silk, or the mice that run mazes faster than their nonengineered counterparts yet also display increased sensitivity to pain.

These technical feats are not the only portents of a future in which genetic engineers take it upon themselves to create designer babies and "enhanced" humans. Perhaps even more troubling is the small but disturbing number of prognosticators who predict this future with eagerness rather than caution; they just can't wait for Gattaca and Brave New World to transcend fiction and become real life.

Who are these promoters of human redesign? A few are researchers for whom the "sweetness" of the science eclipses its social consequences. A few more -- most notably Princeton's former mouse biologist, Lee Silver -- have shifted their careers from the lab to the talk show in order to push scenarios of a "GenRich" ruling class and a hoi polloi composed of "Naturals."

Then there's the coterie of bioethicists who can't say no to anything that any scientist dreams up, and another crew of libertarians who can't say no to anything that the market might wish to offer. And there's the whacky band of futurists who call themselves "transhumanists" and natter about "homo perfectus" and the "Singularity" -- the messianic moment when human technology will suddenly cause superhuman, superintelligent "entities" to appear among us.

Nearly all these crystal-ball gazers acknowledge that Gattaca-like inequalities would be part of their longed-for picture. But this does not seem to dampen their enthusiasm. From their perspective, it seems, self-evident truths about human equality are way outdated, and dreams of social justice and the common good are so 20th century.

Fortunately, voices of greater wisdom are also in play. Many scientists, ethicists and other scholars resoundingly reject technological applications that would so greatly exacerbate our already shameful socioeconomic disparities. In opinion surveys about designer-baby technologies -- yes, they already poll about such matters -- very large majorities say they are opposed. And every country in the world that has adopted laws or policies about cloning or genetically redesigning children -- more than three dozen nations, though not the United States -- has opted to forgo them.

Gattaca was originally released to critical acclaim but a lukewarm box office. It's a good story and a good film, but its renown has grown -- and will likely endure -- because of its bulls-eye hit on the all too realistic unease that the new technologies of human bio-engineering trigger.

Military Soldier Cyborgs - Digital destiny, or Prophetic Holocaust?

2009-12-05T13:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-6567-0-22-22--.html

Military Soldier Cyborgs - Digital destiny, or Prophetic Holocaust?
Tactical War Fighter Gear
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:59 EST

Cyborg soldiers are a logical evolutionary link between humans and robots. Yesterdays soldier went into combat alone. Todays soldier is enhanced by human controlled robots. Tommorows soldier will be a soldier cyborg, a cybernetic organism enhanced by everything technology has to offer. The future of combat holds even greater prospects for autonomous robots that kill at their own discretion.

The idea of combining man and machine is nothing new. Ocular cochlear implants have been helping people see and hear for years. Paralytics like Stephen Hawking have been assisted by technology that allows them to speak what they think. Other cases like Prof. Kevin Warwick department of Cybernetics, University of Reading Project Cyborg 1.0, and 2.0 have been documented as well. Artificial Intelligence AI research is exploring organic brains for computing use, that is organic computers that use living neurons as their CPU . Private companies like Digital Angel, Verichip and Applied Digital Solutions are already contracting whole scale human implantation of RFID microchip technology.

Brain Computer Interface and Neural Interfacing is becoming more of a reality in advanced military research. The military implants members of the Special Operations community for GPS tracking and casualty identification purposes. Implants for tracking elderly persons with Alzheimer's, child kidnap victims, and convicted felons are all now commonplace. DARPA is woking on several projects to ready fleets of insect cyborgs and other mammals, monkeys, dogs, even sharks.

Now science is braving a new frontier. Soldiers at Fort Bragg are conducting ongoing tests on Future Force combat systems designed to make the 21st century American cyborg soldier a more effective instrument of war, a veritable cyborg able to communicate with augmented cognition more speedily and efficiently. The U.S. military is funding projects to integrate human with artificial intelligence. Problem: Human brains are superior to computers at visual recognition but inferior at information processing. Solution: human-machine integration. Human component: A soldier or analyst who scans scenes or images.

Machine component: Sensors that monitor the brain's activity and relay information about it to commanders or computers. Analytical application: Computers identify images and image areas flagged by the human scan and select those for more thorough scrutiny. Battlefield applications : 1) A prototype helmet already delivers "a visual readout for combat commanders showing the cognitive patterns of individual Soldiers." 2) "Brain pattern and heart rate data from system-equipped soldiers will be transmitted wirelessly to commanders in real-time to improve overall battlefield information management and decision-making." Project buzzwords : "real-time cognitive state assessment," "networked soldiers," "Augmented Cognition," "human-computer warfighting integral." Translation: We're fielding cyborgs. Human Nature's prediction: The next step will be to remove the human component from the battlefield and let machines provide the sensor mobility as well as the information processing.

Ethics: The ethical dilema has been bought and paid for already. A group of ethicists are being paid $250,000 to ask how much we should use nanotechnology to enhance humans. Should we implant future nanotech-enabled computers and actuators into soldiers to make them more effective? If nanochips can help kids do better in school or help locate a kidnapper, are parents obligated to provide them with it? Does it make a difference if these enhancements are implanted, rather than just worn outside the body?

The US Army is experimenting with connecting neuro-physiological sensors to soldiers to assist them in cognition and sensemaking during tense warfare situations:
The augmented cognition system uses neuro-physiological sensors that assess a warfighter's attention by measuring and recording location, brain activity and body responses, including heart rate, and adapting to his preferred learning style.

Using that data, the system will then influence the way the soldier gets information, according to a statement from the Army's Natick Soldier Center in Natick, Mass. The technology will help individual warfighters determine the most important information available and decide the best course of action in varying environments.

"The technology we are developing will ultimately help warfighters when they are faced with information overload, especially under stress, and will significantly improve mission performance," said Henry Girolamo, the Natick Soldier Center's DARPA agent for the Army's Augmented Cognition Program.

Here are some examples of current DARPA 'Human-enhancing' projects:

The 'Brain Interface Program' is the most lavishly funded of nearly all the DARPA bioengineering efforts (the project has been given over $24 million budget). It is aimed at developing ways to 'integrate' soldiers into machines -literally- by wiring them (remotely or directly) to their planes, tanks, or computers. An implantable brain chip has been implemented as well via the integration of stimulus-response signals in the brain via electrodes. The Pentagon hopes to use these 'modified' creatures in mine clearance. DARPA is quoted "The human is becoming the weakest link in defense systems."

Enhancement efforts at the Brain Interface Program are now progressing nicely. The chief of the project, Alan S. Rudolph, now wants to be able to transmit images or sound directly into the brains of soldiers...or prisoners of war.

The ' Metabolic Dominance and Engineered Tissue ' program is aimed at being able to artificially pump up soldier endurance and muscle strength.

The ' Persistence in Combat ' program is a combat self-treatment scheme which will include pain-reducing and blood-stopping devices and techniques soldiers would apply to their own wounds -even moderately severe ones- thereby bypassing the need for a medic and enabling a soldier to keep fighting, despite serious wounds! Pain-obliterating electrodes in the brain activate to nullify pain.

The ' Continuous Assisted Perfomance ' program hopes to find biotechnological ways (implants, metabolic manipulation, etc) to make it possible to push exhausted cyborg soldiers on without loss of performance for up to seven days without sleep.

The above technologies are referred to by DARPA under the subheading of 'neuroengineering.' Now they are looking at micro processing chips that can be implanted beneath the skull and remotely manipulated. Rudolph estimates that a usable chip that could be field-tested soon. Ted Berger of the University of Southern California , envisions pilots who will be able to pilot their planes by thought alone, thanks to brain implants.

Abstract : " Combining man and machine to enhance innate soldier capabilities is the hallmark of a soldier-cyborg transformation. Increasing the man-machine interface in the unpredictable environment of war has enormous potential to change the human dimension of war. This paper discusses the issues of values, ethics, and leadership concerning technologically advanced armed forces as they move warfare into the unfamiliar world of the cyborg."

Conclusion: The immediate future holds some very interesting prospects for cyborg soldiers that remain largely unexamined by the general populace.

Artificial Triple-Helixed DNA: Will It Trigger Unintended Consequences?

2009-11-30T07:42:00.001-08:00

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/artificial-triplehelixed-dna-will-it-trigger-unintended-consequences.html

November 16, 2009
Artificial Triple-Helixed DNA: Will It Trigger Unintended Consequences?

Cyborgs have been the sci-fi dream of a generation, merging man and machine in amazing new combinations. Most of which seem to look like major action stars. But a team at the University of Copenhagen think that's amateur hour. In fact they find the entirety of life of planet Earth to be distinctly underwhelming, which is why they're working on an upgrade - triple-helixed DNA.

The idea is to add a third Peptide Nucleic Acid (PNA) strand to the two Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) strands we started with. This ultimate artificial additive can regulate the activity of the existing genes, blocking some or enhancing others, and that's just for starters: the cyber-strand is not limited to the four letter vocabulary of GATC, meaning that extra characters could be added tothat very exclusive club.

When a team at the Center for Biomolecular Recognition first attempted to install a PNA strand into the "Major Groove" of regular DNA (yes, this concept is so cool that even the scientific terms involved are funky), they were excited by a surprising and sophisticated effect. Because unintended consequences of far greater complexity than anticipated are exactly what you want to happen in a lab working on
life-capable chemicals.

Gene Instead of a single PNA strand joining into the genetic party, two PNAs would muscle out one of the existing strands and create a region of two-thirds artificial triple-tagged helix. The displaced DNA would hang loose outside this region, forming a "p-loop" which has since been found to speed up replication of the structure. Also, the PNA-DNA bonds are stronger than the originals.

To recap: you have artificial cyber-genetics with capabilities beyond those of weak organics, they're stronger, and they can replicate faster. It's clear that this entire branch of science has escaped from a movie somehow, a conclusion strengthened by the fact that the PNA has a ridiculous weakness: water. Yes, just like Signs. No, we don't think it's on purpose.

Inside a squishy organic creature isn't a great place for chemicals that don't like water, and any PNA in a living organism is rapidly excreted - but not too rapidly for it to have effects. PNA has already been used to cure muscular dystrophy in lab animals, meaning that even without a chemical raincoat (which scientists are already working on) it's a powerful tool for controlling the very code of
creation.

Scientists currently researching in the field think waterproofing their work is only a matter of time, meaning that we could be looking at triple-stranded DNA in the future. We still have a long way to go though - if expository movie computer-graphics can be believed, we need eight to recreate Leloo from the Fifth Element.

It'll be a lot of work, but we're sure you'll agree it's worth it.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

The Brain Chip Cometh, & It Cometh from Intel

2009-11-23T12:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_brain_chip_cometh_it_cometh_from_intel.php

Jolie O'Dell
ReadWriteWeb.com
Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:00 EST

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick's dreaded brain chip for controlling computers and mobile devices may be closer than even he suspected.

Intel researchers in Pittsburgh told journalists today that brain implants are harnessing human brain waves to surf the Internet, manipulate documents, and much more. And just as we told you two years ago, the lucky recipients of these implants will be willing volunteers, not government-controlled guinea pigs. Some of us are now researching cheap flights to Pittsburgh.

Just think of how far we've come since the early days of portable tech. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time," said Intel research VP Andrew Chien, "they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop."

Indeed, mobility, transparency, and accessibility are all the terms of the hour; and their advocates are popular laureates. The forefront of the user interface has revolved around concepts such as intuition, organics, and biology.

Gesture technology is removing one barrier that lies between human-to-machine communication; think about that the next time you twirl your iPhone around like an Etch-A-Sketch. Isn't removing the need for physical contact the next rational step? Chien tells us that, although there are many challenges yet to solve, the day of brain-controlled computing isn't so far off.

Dean Pomerleau works for Intel on matters of cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, computer vision, robotics, man-machine interfaces, brain processing of semantic information, and various brain-scanning technologies, such as fMRI, MEG, EEG and ECoG. He and his cohorts are solving the mechanisms of brain waves.

While there's no doubt the use cases are fascinating, Pomerleau also brushes off user concerns about implants, saying, "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

This is the precise line of thinking that Kirkpatrick debates so heatedly - perhaps as much now as he did in his editorial almost two years ago.

Have concerns around user privacy abated since then? Hardly, with Facebook and location-based-tech developers struggling to maintain balance for their users and constant struggles and inquisitions over corporate storage of user data. Has the issue of information overload lessened? If it had, would so many startups be staking their claim on the issue of firehose filtration? And is mobile tech obsolete enough to require even more portable access to the apps we love and - dare I say it? - need?

Are end users ready for brain implants? You tell us.

The Social Element of Social Capitalism

2009-11-23T11:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Social-Element-of-Soci-by-Richard-Girard-091121-696.html

November 22, 2009
The Social Element of Social Capitalism
By Richard Girard

"The human character, we believe, requires in general constant and immediate control to prevent its being biased from right by the seductions of self-love."—Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition: volume 14, page 489, 1904.

"Is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong, because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy."—Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition: volume 13, page 360, 1904.

“Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.”
Victor Hugo (1802–85), French poet, dramatist, novelist. Les Misérables, part 4, book 7, chapter 1 (1862).

The continually increasing emphasis on the individual and his rights since the start of the Enlightenment has led humankind into the habit where all human interactions are morally defined solely in terms of the individual. Little or no consideration is given to larger traditional human groupings, such as family, clan, tribe, a people or even all of humanity. This is not only destructive of the human condition as a whole, but easily leads to a falsely overblown perspective about ourselves as individuals and our place in the scheme of things.

This is not to say that the individual is unimportant. In fact, the belief of the individual in his rights is the sole source and only true repository for the rights and privileges of all larger groups of humans—including the family, the clan, the tribe or a people/nation as a whole. It is also the real source for the power, authority, and sovereignty of every legitimate human institution, including government. It is only by strenuously protecting the rights of the individual that the rights and privileges of groups of humans can be guaranteed.

However, individual rights are not absolute. There is a real difference between what we as individuals may desire, and what we may actually enjoy as a legal or a moral right. Regrettably, various people and their ideologies have continuously blurred or obscured that distinction over human history, usually in an attempt to gain some advantage over the rest of humanity, particularly within the realms of wealth and power. Someone once said that all great fortunes are based on an illegal or immoral act. Playwright George Bernard Shaw put it even more succinctly in the Preface to Major Barbara, “The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.”

We cannot legitimately argue for superior rights, or preferential treatment, because of who we are, what our current economic, political, or social status is, or the circumstances of our birth. As I have stated before, the basis of all power in human societies—including wealth—throughout history has been belief in that power's existence. The obvious and recognized manifestations of that power—land, gold, soldiers, ships, patronage, knowledge, factories, horses and other livestock, oil—have varied widely over the centuries and circumstances. For example, an Arab chieftain's wealth and power five centuries ago was measured by the number of horses and other livestock he owned, how much gold he had, and the size of his tribe. It is now measured by how much oil lies beneath his lands, and his patronage: especially his patronage of foreign governments and corporations.

As the fall of Rome so painfully demonstrated, wealth and birth status are ephemeral ideas, and can be easily lost whenever someone with greater power or cunning take them from you. These are also concepts that are relative: a ton of gold is worth less to a man dying of thirst in the middle of a desert than a gallon of water; a grandiose name or title simply increases your chance of being abducted for ransom. All of your wealth and its trappings have value only after you and those around you have achieved the minimum required for your continued health and well-being, and then establish a stable political system.

I do not believe that the bare minimum for survival of which Marx wrote in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts—and which I quoted at length in my article “Social Capitalism” (OpEdNews.com November 10, 2009) —are either fair or sufficient for humankind in our so-called “post industrial era.”

For this reason, I will now fall back upon the ideas of that infamous “traitor to his class,” and one of my heroes, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his State of the Union message, given—because he was ill—as a Fireside Chat from the White House on our nation's radios on January 11, 1944.

On that evening, FDR gave a speech outlining his vision for the direction that America, and he hoped the World, would take, after the end of the Second World War. Its basis was his Four Freedoms Speech, as his 1941 State of the Union message was called, which said that all nations should guarantee Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.

This 1944 speech—together with the Four Freedoms Speech—was so thorough, and so comprehensive, that four years later, the United Nations adopted the speech's basic points for the economic component of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here are some of the economic rights that President Roosevelt wanted to see guaranteed for all Americans, and the World:

Useful and remunerative employment, together with the potential to find an avocation and not simply a job; wages that provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, and recreation for themselves and their families; adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; protection from unfair competition for their business; a livable market price for the production of farmers and ranchers;
protections from old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; a quality education, ongoing if needed or desired.

President Roosevelt was already beginning this process for the American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen returning from the war with his idea for a G.I. Bill. If he had not died the following year, it is entirely possible that he might have made his dream a reality in his fourth term. His dream was to never again see the nation he loved, the United States of America, with one-third of its people: out of work, underfed, poorly housed, and ill-clothed; the situation he had inherited when he first took his oath of office in March, 1933.

So, it is incumbent upon us as humans to discover a balance between seeing that everyone has the means to attain these minimum requirements, while those with exemplary abilities are rewarded for their use of those abilities. Fairness, indeed justice, requires us to see that everyone is given the possibility to attain their highest possible potential in terms of their employment, in addition to seeing that everyone has the ability to live from the income realized by their employment.

However, in our search for fairness, let alone justice, we cannot neglect the two most historically prominent groups, who have consistently not only been denied their rights both as individuals and as a group, but whose ongoing exploitation has been humankind's most profound shame.

Women. Children.

Except for those rare instances where the wives and children of the rich got seated first in a sinking vessel's lifeboats, the rights—not to mention the health and welfare—of women and children have at best been an afterthought when the affairs of nations and their peoples are considered, and at worst, completely ignored.

Even today, in these so-called “enlightened times,” the rights, the needs, and the futures of women and children are ignored in the name of political expediency. If you doubt this, look at our current crisis over health care reform in the United States.

The two groups who are most adversely affected by America's current health care system are women and children. Men are not refused health insurance because of their gender, or a pre-existing condition like spousal abuse. If a child has a life-threatening disease, he will find it next to impossible to get health insurance later in life, even if he is completely cured. And his parents will be unable to change jobs, because of that pre-existing condition. It is indentured servitude, with an eighteen plus year time limit on the contract.

Unfortunately few, if any, philosophers in history have even considered, let alone championed, the cause of children and their rights as part of their philosophy: that burden seems to have been taken up only by poets, prophets, and psychologists. However, you occasionally will see men who will champion women and their cause for equal rights and protections before the Twentieth Century, and an increasing number—together with women—starting this crusade in earnest in the Twentieth Century. One of these early proponents was Karl Marx, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, (“Private Property and Communism;” p.p. 74-5, 1844)

“In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man's relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature — his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man.”

“From this relationship one can therefore judge man's whole level of [social] development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man's natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence — the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man's need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need — the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.”

I would love to be able to quote from one of the Founders and Framers of the United States something—anything—which expresses the unambiguous moral need for the just treatment of women. However, only Thomas Paine among the Founders ever spoke for the rights of women on any consistent basis. And I regret to say, Paine never wrote on the subject as eloquently as Marx.

I have been telling anyone who would listen to me for the last fifteen years that they need to actually read Karl Marx, and not just his and Engel's The Communist Manifesto. Reading the Manifesto and saying you understand Marx, is like reading Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, and saying you understand all of modern theoretical physics. While many of Marx's solutions for laissez faire—or as I call it anti-social capitalism, were wrong or went too far, his observations on what was wrong with the system, especially for workers, was generally on target. We cannot consistently beggar more than half of our people—which is always the historical result with laissez faire capitalism—with depressions and bank failures, and expect them to sit still for it. As President Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

“Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), French scientist, philosopher, literary theorist. Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, chapter 1, “The Phoenix, a Linguistic Phenomenon” (1988; translated 1990).

When we deal with children, we almost always treat them in a way that is absolutely wrong. At worst we treat them as objects: as things through which we might vicariously experience our most secret expectations, desires, ambitions, hopes and dreams. At best we treat them as little adults: showing them at least some degree of respect, while denying them their right to fully experience being children by saddling them with a degree of responsibility they do not want or deserve—in both the positive and negative sense of that word—and are completely unprepared to accept.

Children cannot be given all of the rights that an adult has: medical science tells us that the prefrontal lobe of the human brain is the last part to fully develop; somewhere around the twenty-first year. The prefrontal lobe is the part which gives us our control over impulsive behavior, one of the primary attributes that differentiates between an adult and a child.

However, the very lack of impulse control by this nearly adult human, especially when their hormones are in full hue and cry, and their sex drive is a new experience, means that provision must be made to provide additional protection of their basic rights in order to prevent their exploitation by older predators. There is no easy answer in this matter: but putting our head in the sand with abstinence only sex education helps no one but the baby brokers making commissions off of underage mother's children.

As Marx points out above, how a man treats a woman (and I am certain the converse is also true) gives us insight into how he will interact with all of his fellow humans. I guarantee you that you will find few if any supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment in the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan. If a man treats women with respect, he will probably treat everyone he comes in contact with the same way.

My experience shows me that how an adult treats a child demonstrates their overall degree of adaptability and tolerance towards people of different backgrounds and beliefs that they may run into. A person who keeps telling his kids to shut up, probably wishes he could say the say thing to his immigrant neighbor down the street.

If we, as a society, learn to treat the opposite sex and children with fairness and respect, I believe that we will discover that we are treating all of the members of our society with a greater degree of fairness and respect.

When I speak of fairness, I speak of something much more than simply equal or identical treatment. Treating everyone with an equal degree of cruelty is still cruelty. Fairness to me always has a positive moral component of compassion and understanding.

Fairness to me is more of an ideal that is sought after than it is a goal to be achieved. Circumstances must always modify our interactions with one another: while fairness may generally require us as a society or an individual to treat everyone in exactly the same way, it may also require us to change how we treat someone in a specific situation.

Once again, as Marx pointed out—and I expanded upon—above, the beliefs that we embrace about the opposite sex and children, gives us a guide by which we may measure our social development as humans, as well as a measure for our tolerance for the new and different in our lives.

This may not be, in and of itself, a solution to the problems of bigotry and intolerance in the World. But I believe that it is a first step, a means to measure ourselves in these matters, and make corrections if we find ourselves wanting.

The New World Order, Verichip and the Microchip Agenda

2009-11-21T11:30:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=15003

November 19, 2009
The New World Order, Verichip and the Microchip Agenda
By Greg Nikolettos

People have busy lives these days, working extra hard to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. And those are just the lucky ones, so we are told. Life in this particular dog-eat-dog system can be stressful. We have been trained by behavioural experts to live our lives as expendable cogs upholding a cruel and vindictive machine for the benefit of a dominant minority of ruthless elitist criminals at the to

::::::::

And we ain't seen nothing yet.

NWO

Unfortunately, the people who have been misleadingly labelled “conspiracy theorists” for the last few decades as a reflex action response to their warnings about the upcoming “New World Order” were right. Even Fox News had a momentarily lapse of purpose and admitted as much [1], as the politicians and technocrats openly use the phrase “New World Order” [2]. George “Poppy” Bush kicked off the new trend on September 11th. No not that one, September 11th 1990 [3]. And again in 1991, [4] 10 years to the day before the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and 50 years to the day after construction on the Pentagon began, coincidentally – if you believe in that kind of thing. [5]

Nowadays it's being used so regularly and so brazenly that one has to question the sanity of people who still refuse to believe that an unprecedented global system of control - or new world order – has been planned for us all.

An obvious question that springs to the mind of a concerned human being is what are the potential difference between systems of control in the 21st century and systems of control in previous centuries? One obvious difference is the technology that is available to the controllers, which is obviously far superior today, not that the technological capabilities of previous centuries wasn't sufficient to facilitate the most heinous crimes. It might surprise some to hear that in the 20th century there were 262 million cases of what professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii calls “democide” i.e. the killing of people by their own government. The countries that carried out these killings had widely different cultures, languages and geography, but Rummel found that they all shared one common feature; excessive government power. [6] Incidentally, as I write this article we are just weeks away from the 2009 United Nations conference on climate change (formerly known as global warming, until the weather stopped toeing the line) – a massive scam admitted by a think-tank called the Club of Rome to have been their own invention. [7] The treaty, to be signed in Copenhagen, would apparently create a world government. [8] Can you envisage a world government giving itself power that is anything other than excessive?

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Eye-Beam

One company commands more than a passing mention in any discussion of technology as a means to control people (and infinitely worse), namely International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM. Their Hollerith punch card enabled a quick and easy large-scale information collection process. Individuals could be associated with cross-tabulated information about their background, profession, religion, membership of organisations etc., basically anything for which data could be collected. Any information could be stored in the holes that were punched into rows and columns by an IBM punch card system. Then the card passed through a reader which detected the hole, read it and found the information encoded therein. [9]

This could be done at the rate of 64,000 cards/hour, thereby identifying and locating people who fell into one or more specific categories, whatever they may be, and this information could be used in whatever way the authorities saw fit. Adolph Hitler – who also belongs in the NWO club, having stated that “national socialism will use its own revolution for the establishing of a new world order” – saw fit to use it to facilitate the task of rounding up and killing people by the million, for example. Thanks to the constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews.

IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programmes to the running of railway lines and the organization of concentration camp slave labour. [10] Does that make anyone want to be “an IBM-er”?

Chipping Away At Our Freedom

Today IBM is closely associated with Verichip Corporation, the implantable microchip company, [9] as well as the dream of a global “smart system” of total and constant surveillance of everything and everybody, cunningly marketed as harmless über-efficiency, as one would expect. [11] In reality, what little remains of our freedom is under threat. For the good of humanity this process must not only be stopped, it must be reversed – before it's too late.

The right to privacy for example – and everything that goes with it – is slowly disappearing down the memory-hole, aided by the social conditioning provided by incomprehensibly popular “reality” TV shows in which fame-hungry members of the public and/or ailing “celebrities” are continuously filmed being pointless in exchange for their 15 minutes of synthetic fame. Mockery disguised as irony dictates that the biggest of them all is called Big Brother. What else?

Interestingly, the contest-ants on the Spanish version of Big Brother were called on to promote the introduction of the VIP Verichip at the Barcelona Baja Beach Club in March 2004. [12] The idea is that once you agree to have a microchip implanted in your arm you can access the VIP area, and never again will you be dragged down to the level of having to deal with the monstrous inconvenience of carrying money around. People, nay VIPs, can choose to pay for their drinks with implanted microchips instead. Presumably this opportunity is available to everyone, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond. [13]

There is another Baja Beach Club in Rotterdam, Holland playing the same fiddle. Managing director Jo Van Galen sees no problem at all. He believes that in 20 years' time it will be normal to be chipped at birth. [14] The owner of the Baja Beach Club, Conrad Chase, allegedly worked for the National Security Agency for years [15], but that little snippet doesn't seem to make it into the promotional TV specials shown on the other BBC, and on the National Geographic channel. [14]

It seems that many people are more interested in the latest gadget or fashion accessory than their rights and their freedom. Too many simply don't care about rights, as long as they can be left alone to get on with their lives. But therein lies the problem. The vision of the architects of the new world order doesn't involve leaving us alone to get on with our lives. It's clearly about dictating to us what is no longer permissible, how we will be allowed to live our lives, and eventually, whether we will be allowed to live our lives. [16]

The right to walk around without a microchip implant seems pretty safe right now, but would that still be the case if people without implants somehow came to be in the minority, or if the infrastructure of the entire planet was based on the assumption that people do have an implant? Indeed, that seems to be how Kevin Haggerty, writing for the Toronto Sun sees it. In an article released in December of 2006 Haggerty explained how he believes the microchipping agenda will unfold, predicting a number of interesting scenarios, one of which was that “having a chip will be a precondition for engaging in the main dynamics of modern life, such as shopping, voting, and driving.” [17] It appears that it would be prudent to demand the introduction of preventative legislation, worldwide, to avoid ever being legally obliged to accept a microchip implant.

Time Is On My Side, Yes It Is

Verichip Corporation has been known to be less than honest in its relatively short history [9, 18] but CEO Scott Silverman dabbled in a bit of truth in the following exchange from an appearance on NBC news:

News anchor Lester Holt: "You hear the sound of the background, people saying 'Big Brother, too much information, a little scary.' How do you respond to that?"

Scott Silverman: "Well you know it's interesting, I used to get that question a lot two years ago. Today, we've gotten it a lot less. In fact, the Attorney General of Mexico and some of his staff have received this chip for security purposes. And when the acceptance rate of the product goes up significantly like it has, some of the privacy concerns go down.

But to answer your question directly Lester, what most people are concerned with is the invasiveness of this; that it goes in your body. And as we know with pacemakers and other medical devices, that when people accept it for its applications and for its ability is when it'll work it's way into society. It won't be tomorrow, it won't be next week. But two, three, five years from now slowly but surely it'll work its way into the mainstream." [19]

In this fine-tuned performance Silverman was talking about gradualism. He was revealing a strategy of long-term thinking based upon achieving the gradual normalisation of what at first appears, correctly, to be a diabolical attempt to reduce each and every human being to a vessel for the Verichip, to be used in conjunction with an anti-human global “smart system” of Nazi war crime facilitators, IBM. The bad news is that the process of “slowly but surely working its way into the mainstream” took a big step recently, as the implantable chips were marketed as a one-size-fits-all solution to a hypothetical problem involving some sort of inability to access medical information sans implant. [20]

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pond there's professor Kevin Warwick of ReadingUniversity in England. Warwick often appears on TV or in the newspapers promoting himself and his beloved microchip implants. [21] He even turns up on a Doctor Who DVD, promoting the idea of a world inhabited by cyborgs [22] – an interesting avenue of self-promotion given the evil nature of the Doctor Who baddies known as the Cybermen.

Longing to be perceived as a courageous pioneer of biblical importance, Warwick seems dangerously keen on using his own work with microchip implants as a stepping stone to a national, nay international, chipping programme. Indeed, in 2002 electronics expert Bernard Albrecht felt compelled to report Warwick to the General Medical Council, the local social services and the police [23], arguing that there was a possible case for assault in the event of an operation “without medical basis” being carried out on a child i.e. implanting a microchip. But such problems tend to disappear for those people whose work is in perfect alignment with pre-existing agendas of the “powers that be”.

Warwick went on to appear in a Channel 4 documentary in the UK in April 2008, openly encouraging a frightened young mother to chip her children. [21] The young mother had been terrified by the unprecedented coverage of the search for poor little Madeleine McCann; which is still going on despite the fact that the sniffer dog Eddie, who had never given a ‘false alert' in 200 previous outings according to his handler Martin Grime, detected the scent of a corpse in 10 places, suggesting that Madeleine died in the McCanns' Portuguese holiday apartment before the public had even heard her name. [24] The young mother's enthusiasm for professor Warwick's script was such that we were left with the impression that she might have kept her little girl locked up in a darkened room until she was 21 if a man with a suitably impressive job title had suggested it.

It was also noticeable that Warwick chose not to share with the little girl's mother the fact that microchip implants have been linked to tumours in research animals, but parents who want to know more about the potential risks that such implants would pose to their children, and themselves, can start at (Dr) Katherine Albrecht's websites. [25]

The Public Are Told What They Want

As we have already seen there is a disturbing move towards chipping the population, fronted largely by a couple of prominent mouthpieces, so far. In addition to this, there is an interesting interview with the late film-maker Aaron Russo, in which he discusses the friendship he once had with Nick Rockefeller of the banking dynasty. Among several astonishing revelations was the admission by Rockefeller, according to Russo, that the ultimate goal is “to get everybody in this world chipped with an RFID chip, and have all money be on those chips and everything on those chips. And if anybody wants to protest what we do or violate what we want, we just turn off their chip.” [26]

So this appears to be where they want to take us, the question is how do they intend to take us there? The answer is simple; propaganda. There are various different kinds of propaganda coming at us from all angles, in movies, in TV shows, in the adverts between the TV shows, in books and magazines, in music, in fashion – basically, in every corner of what Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon once referred to as the “culture creation industry”. [27]

Propaganda is not necessarily about lying to people – though clearly that does happen – but it is about manipulating people, both individually and on a societal level, so as to influence their beliefs and ultimately their behaviour, towards the desired outcome. Today this science is beyond the level of past masters like Pavlov and Skinner, and we are indeed manipulated with scientific precision. When considering the scale of this particular beast, one wonders what a world without propaganda would be like. But that's a different article, and a vastly different world.

Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was a giant amongst propagandists. This is a man who, for example, helped the American Tobacco Corporation turn the existing social norms of the 1920s upside-down by tempting women to believe that smoking cigarettes was a sign of their independence and their move away from being dominated inferiors. [28] He informed the press that some women's rights marchers would be lighting “torches of freedom”, having paid some models to march in the New York City parade and light up in front of the photographers. The April 1st 1929 edition of the New York Times carried the headline “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'”. [29] Such collusion between different arms of the Ministry of Propaganda helped to break the taboo against women smoking in public, and sales of cigarettes responded as expected.

In his 1928 book entitled simply Propaganda, Bernays wrote:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men that we have never heard of " we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons " who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires, which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” [30]

We're not talking about marketing cigarettes here, or getting people to buy a particular brand of washing powder. This is about persuading the public to accept the idea of sticking a microchip inside them, indefinitely. That is a huge task even for the Bernays and Co. of this generation. It would require long-term strategies. Minds would have to be prepared for that, well in advance.

Predictive programming

When it comes to such preparation of the mind, one important technique is to influence how people perceive the future, and thus what they expect from the future and how they will think and behave in that future. It's called predictive programming.

Basically, a fictional story set in the future (or perhaps in a galaxy far, far away) incorporates ideas and/or technologies that are actually planned to take place in reality – by the people who plan these things – so that in real life when these events are close to transpiring, it all seems familiar to the programmed audience. There is a feeling of inevitability that wouldn't have existed had it not been for the predictive programming, and people feel less inclined to object because it is designed to appear as a natural evolution, by the best perception builders that money can attract.

As Alan Watt of www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com explains, effectively we are being farmed:

“First of all, they know where they want to grow in this field, the crop they want to grow, and how high, and how many. They first prepare the land. They cut the brush. They plough it. They harrow it. They do all the necessary groundwork. Then they sow the seed and watch it grow, and cultivate it.

Well that's what they do with your mind, in preparation for every major event that will happen in your life. You'll see it all through movies, especially in this day and age. In the 20th century it was primarily novels, stage plays and music halls etc. but today it's in everybody's TV. They programme it right into you for entertainment, and then you see it happening in your life and you think “I guess that's OK. It's sort of natural, isn't it,” and you don't think any more beyond that. Where did the idea come from in the first place? It's marketed to you through entertainment, and that's the prime for reason for entertainment.” [31]

This technique of predictive programming is being used to condition us to accept the idea of microchip implants as inevitable, even desirable, and it has been going on for decades. The chances are that some of the readers of this article will have been blissfully unaware of this technique until now. I was certainly unaware of it myself until I happened to stumble upon somebody who knew about it and wanted to pass it on, and hopefully, that's what will happen to some of the friends and/or associates of the readers of this article.

There are many examples of predictive programming for the microchip implant agenda, some more subtle than others. If you watch movies like I do, you will almost certainly have been exposed to some of them yourself. Here are a few of them:

The opening scene of Logan's Run (1976) shows a newborn baby with a crystal implant in the palm of his hand. What was it that the managing director of the Baja Beach Club in Rotterdam said again? [14]

Later in the movie the implant begins to flash when somebody reaches the age of 30, when it is time for their “renewal”.

Incidentally, a re-make of this movie is currently scheduled for release in 2012.

In Fortress (1992), each prisoner has an “intestinator” implanted; a device designed to inflict severe pain or death for any violation of the prison rules.
An article from May 18th, 2009 carrying the headline “Saudi 'Killer Chip' Implant Would Track, Eliminate Undesirables” suggests that the intestinator is here. [32]

In Demolition Man (1993) every citizen has a microchip implant, including the freshly thawed John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) who has been frozen and re-programmed in a cryogenic prison. [33] “San Angeles” 2032 is an ordered society in which everything that has been categorised as bad for you e.g. salt, smoking cigarettes has been criminalized.
There are also various references to Huxley's Brave New World in this movie.

In the first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace (1999), a young Anakin Skywalker mentions the fact that every slave has a transmitter implanted inside them, which explodes if he/she tries to escape. [34]
Given that Star Wars is one of the most popular movies ever made, and that The Phantom Menace was released 16 years after the third instalment, Return of the Jedi, this might well have been the most eagerly anticipated movie in the history of cinema. The words of a young Darth Vader must have seeped into the subconscious minds of millions upon millions of persons. [34]

The first line of Kevin Haggerty's Toronto Star article from December 10th 2006 reads “By the time my four-year-old son is swathed in the soft flesh of old age, he will likely find it unremarkable that he and almost everyone he knows will be permanently implanted with a microchip.” [17] So the technique of predictive programming is certainly not confined to the TV and movie industries.

In BBC drama The Last Enemy (2008), the British Home Secretary reveals her own microchip implant and announces that “its content and function can be adapted to suit my needs. It can be my credit card, it can be door key, my car keys – I'll never lose them again. Eventually it will become universal. Starting at school age, a tag for life.” [35]
Another notable sound bite is the assertion that the microchip implant will “give back to the honest ordinary citizen, freedom of movement.” i.e. this particular freedom had previously been taken away.

There have been numerous other examples of conditioning the public to accept the idea of microchip implants and we can expect many more as the propaganda machine goes into overdrive in the very near future. Here are a few examples for which a future setting was not deemed necessary:

In animated comedy South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999) Eric Cartman has a “V-chip” – how did they come up with that name? – implanted in his head as a behaviour modification device. The chip gives him a painful electric shock whenever he swears.

The V-chip, thanks to some sort of malfunction, ultimately enables Cartman to save the world from Saddam Hussein, and Satan.

In Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) a transponder chip is implanted into Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton) to track her location by satellite. The team is then able to use their computer to get a visual feed of Nyah via the satellite.

In The Bourne Identity (2002) Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) has an implant containing details of a Swiss bank account removed from his hip.

In A Beautiful Mind (2004) one of the hallucinations of John Nash (Russell Crowe) involves him being implanted with a radium diode which generates the access codes to his drop spots.

In CSI Miami (2004) – episode 305, Legal – a young girl is found dead. She is identified by the Verichip in her shoulder. [36]

This is another blatant example of the collusion between different tentacles of the octopus; a TV programme providing free advertising for a veri sinister company that needs all the help it can get to ensure that its product can “slowly but surely work its way into the mainstream.”

In The Manchurian Candidate (2005), Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) cuts a microchip implant out of his own back, and bites one out of the back of fellow mind control victim Raymond Prentiss Shaw (Liev Schreiber). There are also brain implants in this movie, but that's a different article.

In Casino Royale (2006) the great James Bond is chipped. “So you can keep an eye on me?” he asks. But of course Mr Bond. [37]
Having built up an enormous worldwide following over the last 47 years and 22 movies, James Bond was an obvious trump card for the invisible government [30] to play. The only surprise is that it took so long.

Millions of people of all shapes and sizes, young and old are crazy about James Bond, so to speak. And if being chipped is good enough for Mr shaken-not-stirred, then unfortunately it's probably good enough for many of his fans too.

Even the Oscar-winning sensation Slumdog Millionaire (2008) casually slipped in a reference to microchip implants, subtly associating them with an increase in intelligence, or at least an increased ability to answer questions in a general knowledge quiz i.e. by cheating.

In series 3 of Heroes (2009) – episode 14, “A Clear and Present Danger” – the Japanese character Hiro gives himself and his friend Ando a GPS implant [38] in case either of them is ever kidnapped. Coincidentally, Hiro was indeed kidnapped almost immediately.

There is another example that deserves a special mention because of its context and the implicit suggestion within the overall message:

In the opening scene of Conspiracy Theory (1997) taxi driver Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) talks to his passengers about various conspiracies, which happens to include a mention of George H.W. Bush's famous New World Order speech. At one point he is talking to a lady with a dog about the chipping of pets for identification and tracking purposes. He goes on to make the point that “it's only a small logical step till they start putting it in us and our children. And then before we know it, my God. They'll probably come with the pretext "” It cuts to another conversation with a different passenger before that particular sentence is completed.

In the movie Fletcher is made out to be a kook in a number of ways; despite the fact that he is actually a victim of a (very real) CIA mind control programme called MK Ultra. [39] One of the most noticeable and obvious ways that the lead character is made to appear kooky is by the title of the movie itself – a label repeatedly used by the media to describe any hypothesis which contradicts the authorized version of events, whether or not the authorized version has been proven to be false, and whether or not the alternative hypothesis is based on verifiable facts. This kind of manipulative propaganda technique betrays the actual purpose of the media.

The term “conspiracy theorist” is also used by the professional shills, often as a synonym for someone who is either hopelessly naïve or mentally ill, or both, as though at some point in the recent past organized large-scale conspiracies suddenly and inexplicably became impossible. Of course, the term “conspiracy theory” is never used to describe one of the government's own conspiracy theories – reported to us by the dominant propaganda arm of the “invisible government”; the mainstream media – because that would negate the general public perception that has been put in place over the last few decades, largely since November 22nd, 1963 i.e. that a conspiracy theory is wrong because it was not reported by the mainstream media, as opposed to a rejection based on any kind of analysis of the information presented. If this general perception was not sufficiently in place, then president George W. Bush may not have been able to get away with the following noticeably ambiguous statement addressed to the United Nations on November 10th, 2001:

“Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty.” [40]

Bush Junior's address came just 5 days after the murder of American writer and shortwave radio host William Cooper, who happened to have predicted a major terrorist attack on America that would be blamed on Osama Bin Laden [41]. In Cooper's 9/11 broadcast after the fall of the TwinTowers he also asserted that the steel-reinforced concrete towers were “hard targets” and as such they could only have come down by charges placed on the main structural members of the building i.e. in a controlled demolition. [42] Obviously this contradicted the conspiracy theory put forward by the invisible government [30] via the mainstream media.

Interestingly, Cooper's book Behold a Pale Horse contained a photocopy of an article from August 1st, 1989 which stated that “Coded microchips implanted in every person in the country would tie all of us into a master computer that could track anyone down at any moment, and plans for such a system are already under way whether you like it or not!” [43] One more to add to the list.

What happens next?

The list of examples of mind-farming given above is not exhaustive. It doesn't include the various TV news items for example, which are essentially advertisements disguised as pseudo-debate on behalf of the viewer/consumer. But there are enough to make the point. We are being propagandised to participate in a diabolical agenda of which to say does not have our best interests at heart would be the understatement of the millennium, even at this early stage.

We can expect more of the same from an increasing number of sources, as the invisible government attempts to persuade us that being chipped is first desirable, and then “normal”. This would also increasingly imply that not to be chipped is to be abnormal, which can engineer a feeling that is unbearable to many people.

We have already seen a globally recognised hero in James Bond being chipped. [37] It is only a matter of time until the non-fictional world of celebrity – if such a thing exists – gets involved. One endorsement from a David Beckham or a Beyoncé and/or any of the other mega-prostitutes and “useful idiots” [44] out there, and being chipped will suddenly become cool, or perhaps doubleplusgood.

The power of celebrity nowadays is such that people imitate the stars they have chosen to follow. Some fans of celebrities will dress like them, cut their hair like them, talk like them, even behave like them – or perhaps more accurately, those fans behave like the contrived persona whom his/her celebrity of choice pretends to be whenever there is a camera around. It isn't difficult to predict that fans of certain celebrities could be nudged towards being chipped like them too. After all, there's no point in creating the collective insanity that is the cult of celebrity worship if you're not going to use the stars to spellbind their adoring public when called upon.

The more people are chipped, the more likely it is that the economic and technological infrastructure of the world will operate on the assumption that citizens are chipped. At the time of writing people can go to certain clubs and pay for things with an implanted chip, which is the first step. The obvious next step is simply a gradual increase in the number of places that accept this method of payment, and then we are potentially moving towards the troubling situation of only having the option of using an implanted chip to pay for goods and services. The introduction of a cashless society would clearly be another unwelcome milestone to look out for, and some recent articles from different countries suggest that it could well be on its way. [45]

Power to the People

We have all managed to land in a critical period in history, and our actions will affect the outcome. It is difficult to forget that we do actually all have power when we are constantly reminded that we have no say in the machinations of the New World Order, but we do. This agenda is not my agenda and it is not your agenda. In fact, almost everybody who could be affected by this agenda will never meet the people who are responsible for it, or even know their names. But to pull this agenda off, they need us to go along with it.

The successful implementation of the human microchipping agenda – like everything other aspect of our increasingly apparent enslavement – necessitates the acquiescence of the majority. The powers that be need the people to comply. And legally speaking, silence connotes consent. We must not be silent.

We have been handed the “bread and circuses” that surround us for the specific purpose of distracting us, and it works. We willingly give away our power, wasting our own energy being hypnotised by the TV, playing video games, watching sports, reading the latest bestseller, etc. voluntarily giving our time away to be numbed, and dumbed down. Imagine the effect of diverting just a fraction of a percent of the totality of that wasted energy, worldwide, into the fight for the freedom of all. It's not as if even the most die-hard football fan will claim that football is more important than being free.

Every one of us has an individual voice to claim back and to utilise. And when the people come together, united in a common cause, the collective voice becomes a roar and grows louder and louder. When that unified voice is loud enough it cannot and will not be ignored, and we the people become an unstoppable force.

We have the power to make that happen. We have the power to help people realise what's at stake here. We have the power to tap into the millions of man-hours that are wasted away every day of the year and to use it to fight for our freedom. We have the power to demand to be free. We must use our power.

As Mario Savio put it:

“There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. You've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." – Sproul Hall Steps, December 2, 1964 [46]

We have the power to say that we the people will not be chipped.

http://www.wethepeoplewillnotbechipped.com

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Written by matrixcutter79

http://www.youtube.com/user/matrixcutter79

Early Humans May Have Been Hobbits, Scientists Say

2009-11-20T16:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.cornellsun.com/node/39817

Early Humans May Have Been Hobbits, Scientists Say
Tim Gahr
The Cornell Daily Sun
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:55 EST

In a strange case of science imitating art, one hobbit has again become the center of a heated and ongoing conflict.

Since its 2003 discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores, the Homo floresiensis (nicknamed hobbit because it only grew to be about three feet tall) has caused scientists across the world to debate whether the find is a new species or simply a variation of the modern human. The difference could signal a major paradigm shift in the study of primitive humans.

Although several partial H. floresiensis skeletons have been identified, the majority of the attention has been given to a specimen called LB1 (the first to be discovered) because it is the most complete skeleton and the only one that has an entire cranium.

The earliest known hobbit lived approximately 18,000 years ago, although archaeological records of ancient tools suggest that hobbits may have been alive as early as 12,000 years ago. Until the discovery of LB1, scientists had widely believed that the last non-modern humans were the Neanderthals, which became extinct around 24,000 years ago.

If hobbits are indeed a new species, they will replace Neanderthals as the most recent non-modern humans.

Aside from its unusually short height, H. floresiensis was believed to have a very small brain. For many scientists, the brain size has become a focal point of the argument on whether H. floresiensis deserves to be classified as a new species. Opponents of hobbits as a new species contend that LB1 is simply modern human with a smaller stature and brain due to some pathological abnormality. Among the disorders proposed are Laron Syndrome (insensitivity to growth hormones), cretinism (stunted growth due to thyroid problems), and microcephaly (abnormal brain growth that results in a small head).

Prof. Dean Falk, anthropology at Florida State University and one of the main proponents of H. floresiensis' identity as a new species, was at Cornell on Friday to explain her position and place hobbits - which she referred to as "lightning rods for controversy" - in the history of other paleontology discoveries.

Falk's talk traced a history of new findings like LB1 where opposition came not only from fundamentalists but also from scientists. The earliest pre-humans were discovered before Darwin's Origin of Species, and according to Falk, they, too, were initially regarded as "microcephalic idiots" before finally being accepted as different species.

In particular, Falk focused on the work of Raymond Dart. "I view 1925 as the beginning of the modern era of anthropology," she said, referring to the year that Dart discovered his famous Taung baby. The Taung baby, estimated to be 2.5 million years old, is today seen as one of the critical factors in developing the theory that humans evolved out of Africa. At the time of its discovery, however, the specimen was rejected because it contradicted an earlier specimen called the "Piltdown Man."

The Piltdown Man, uncovered in 1912, aligned with scientific expectations at the time of what a missing link between apes and humans should have looked like. Its large brain supported the widely held notion that the brain was the first part of the ape body to evolve, and its discovery in a British gravel pit supported the idea that early humans emerged from Eurasia. It took until 1953 for the scientific community as a whole to realize that the Piltdown Man was a hoax, composed of a modern human skull with an orangutan jawbone attached to it. The rejection of the Piltdown Man paved the way for Dart's Taung baby to get another look from scientists.

In Falk's view, the current situation with H. floresiensis is analogous to the situation faced by Dart's Taung baby. She and her colleagues have spent much of their time since descriptions of the remains of LB1 were published in 2004 doing research that has led them to reject the various "sick hobbit" theories proposed by other scientists. Some of the most convincing evidence came in a 2007 study when Falk compared the LB1 brain to several normal brains and several microcephalic brains. In every instance, the LB1 brain sorted with the normal category.

Even now, the debate on H. floresiensis has not yet reached a decisive conclusion, but Falk remains optimistic that there could be one in her lifetime. "What will settle this will be what settled the others," she said. "They have to find more fossils."

Electronic Books of the Future

2009-11-18T07:15:00.000-08:00

Judyth Vary Baker

Kindle is the book of the future, just as computers now serve most people as did typewriters. Kindles of the future will have animated or special film features for book illustrations, links to the Internet for certain words, music to select, and so on. They will be one day be able to print out a bound, beautiful copy of a book for your personal home library at the touch of a button.

But there are dangers.

Only books the governments allow will be on Kindles. Underground Kindles will exist to pass around pirated copies of things, as always. Libraries, however, will become museums, where people can look at the antique originals of books before they became state-of-the-art tools of society. They will be musty, quaint remnders of a slower, safer, saner, more boring time. They wll be oddities in a world that is slowly encasing us with the tendrils of a technology that will control our reading choices, and our lives in every detail. I see no escape, as those who rebel will be considered primitive savages..

Too soon, all manuscripts will be produced on DVDs or the equivalent. Much as I will lament the passing of the printed page as we knew it, its passage is almost inevitable. Only people who have held books and moved their pages can understand the sensory thrill of flipping back and forth to see something new in what was already written, sparked by what one has just read.

The fast-paced people of the future will be drugged up so they can work 20 hour days, sleep two hours, be refreshed, and go back to work (corporate and industrial slaves). Such will not be reading anything--they wll get their 'reading' by being plugged into information stations from time to time to download the latest news, see the latest games, the ritual wars, and so on. Their shopping will be by remote, their sexual pleasures by remote, everything possible by reote, to use the least time, money and energy. Touch and smell and taste will all be stimulated artificially until true tastes and smells will seem primitive and faint in comparison.

The Kindle is the first step in a literary experience that can be a haven of unbounded thought and greatness unleashed at your fingertips in the written word, combined with all the senses--or it can be yet another set of chains entrapping the common man and assuring that person will never escape from the entanglements of the technology now brooding on our horizon.

Why I'll Never Buy a Kindle

2009-11-18T07:14:00.000-08:00

Books of all kinds have always been part of our Human Condition. They *Define* us!

Why I'll Never Buy a Kindle
By Benjamin Dangl, AlterNet
November 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143943/

A green crochet cover envelopes the Kindle of Eileen Messina in Freeport, Maine. She has downloaded a number of popular titles onto her reading device – one of many new handheld digital gadgets now available to read books. New Yorker reporterNicholson Baker wrote that Messina lamented that books at the library sometimes smelled of cigarette smoke. Baker says, “a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment.”

But a lot of book-readers, myself included, enjoy the smell and palpable history of a book from a library or used bookstore. There is something comforting about the shared experience of reading a physical book many others have read, and will read in the future. I like the story of a used book – a folded page, the markings on the margins, the hints at its past. Sure, sometimes they smell like cigarette smoke, but they can also smell like the places they’ve been, whether it’s a dusty old used bookstore or the tropical funk of Asunción, Paraguay. You can’t share a Kindle book and so history doesn’t cling to it the same way.

One bookstore in London has a display of the items left accidentally in used books that were donated to the store. In the Guardian, Theresa Malone writes that the display includes “a chest x-ray, an air freight invoice and the handwritten guest list to a party, complete with notes for the host's speech. …about a dozen photo albums containing family holiday snaps, wedding day memories, pictures of pets and more are laid out on a table for customers to browse through.”

These leftovers from another period in a book’s history aren’t something you can ever get with the Kindle. As Malone writes, “The creased spines and turned down pages, those makeshift bookmarks from a bygone age, all signs that the book, which is now yours, has been in the past a real, tangible, treasured possession.”

There is also the story of the actual geographic journey of a book, the travels of something born out of a keyboard that later takes on a life of its own. One reader wrote me to say that a copy of my first book, The Price of Fire, was on the back of the toilet seat when her toddler woke up early one morning raising havoc and ended up knocking the book into the toilet. Once, just after finishing a copy of Ramor Ryan’s book Clandestines in Argentina, my backpack – with the book in it – was stolen in Buenos Aires. Who knows where that book might be right now?

Such stories of books have parallels to the widely circulated news of 30,000 plastic toy ducks that were washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992 when the container carrying them fell off the cargo ship. The Times Online reported that “Two thirds of them floated south through the tropics, landing months later on the shores of Indonesia, Australia and South America. But 10,000 headed north and by the end of the year were off Alaska and heading back westwards. It took three years for the ducks to circle east to Japan, past the original drop site and then back to Alaska on a current known as the North Pacific Gyre before continuing north towards the Arctic.”

Like one of these plastic ducks, one never knows where a book might end up. There isn’t the same mystery with the Kindle. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book, Hope in the Dark, “Writing is a model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler... You write books. You scatter seeds. Rats might eat them or they may rot..."

With a Kindle on the other hand, you know where it will end up – with the rest of the toxic trash heaps that our newest technical gadgets are eventually destined for. Baker of the New Yorker writes that the Kindle is “made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years.”

However, the Kindle does save trees, and in a country that trashes 83 million tons of paper annually, that’s no small task.

But whatever happened to just going to the library? As Kiera Butler writes at Mother Jones, “The San Francisco library bought 78,445 books in 2008. Let’s assume each of the library’s 2,265,209 visitors borrowed two books.” By doing that “You’ve reduced your reading emissions to 42 pounds of CO2, nearly an eighth of what they would be if you bought all your books new.”

Maybe your local public library has shut down, like so many other cash-strapped libraries across the country. Columnist Katha Pollitt points out, “If the government can bail out the banks that are so deeply implicated in our current troubles … Why can't it support libraries and schools and publishing by stocking the public bookshelves with inviting new books and hiring staff to keep the doors open?”

Instead of shelling out hundreds of dollars for a Kindle, why not just go to the library for the book you’re looking for. And when you’re there, hand a check for the money you would have spent on the Kindle to the librarian.

With Kindles we lose more than the smell of cigarette smoke on the pages of a library book. As one character in Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451 said, “Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion.”

Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007). He is also the editor ofTowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, andUpsideDownWorld.org, a news website uncovering activism and politics in Latin America. Email BenDangl(at)gmail(dot)com.

Packaged Humans

2009-11-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

11/11/11

Packaged Humans
Judyth Vary Baker

Modern Americans are packaged.

Babies are handed to mothers wrapped and capped.

Food is wrapped.

Americans travel in cars insulated from the outside world.

Air conditioning and heating keep extremes from affecting them as much as it did our ancestors. Glass windows, carpeting, bland walls and flat TV screens, along with computers and cell phones, add to the isolation and insulation.

At fast food restaurants, food is delivered in parcels.

TV programs provide segmented events in time packets.

At our jobs or at school, we sit in rows or in cubicles.

We get vaccines to avoid illnesses, use money and rarely barter, and do our best, if we have a lawn, to conquer it so entirely that in some places, asphalt and concrete are the only reminders that dirt is underneath.

The dead are boxed and wrapped (or burnt, then placed in jars) too.

What we see scrolled on screens constitutes 'reality.'

Therefore, pets with soft fur and bright eyes, who are still honest and have those honest needs we tend to hide from the world, are adored by many-- and slaughtered by others among us as alien species that are considered dirty, or inconvenient.

The elderly, the odd, the different, might be labeled witches or lizards or weirdos.
We have vague fears, vague pains, vague lives.

Religion is fading: it was used to handle life crises. Now TV and computers offer alternative ideas, for good or ill.

News screams of the latest disaster. TV screams, too, using blood, gore, torture--all those things so neatly wrapped away from what we usually see and touch.

A woman's period isn't smelled in our modern world--you have to go to Turkey or into a peasant village in Greece to get a whiff, these days.

You aren’t walking on heaps of garbage in Mexico looking for food. You aren't burying drowned, dead cattle in Bangladesh. You aren't selling your 12 year-old daughter so she will be able to have meals every day.

You are isolated uniquely, and in your packaged prison, you're fed the fake meat of fake death.

Human Adulthood PART ONE

2009-11-10T10:35:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Human-Adulthood-PART-ONE-by-Steven-Barnes-091109-509.html

November 9, 2009
Human Adulthood PART ONE
By Steven Barnes

What is an adult? While we may argue about what a "Man" or "Woman" is, there is remarkable agreement around the world on the subject of Human Adulthood. An adult takes responsibility for his or her actions and emotions. While we can argue about many qualities and attributes, I think we can all agree that the world needs all the adults it can get.

The LIFEWRITING system of personal development addresses this core question of human maturation by cross-referencing two ancient cultural models of human life: the Hero's Journey (found in various forms in all world myth and literature), which proposes a ten-step process for growth and progress, and the yogic Chakras which suggest seven basic levels of human existence. This new series of articles is designed to address the basic Coaching pattern I use with clients, one step at a time. There will be eighteen basic parts--look for them!

##

The first step of the Hero's Journey is THE HERO IS CONFRONTED WITH A CHALLENGE. In fiction, this might be "Come with me, Luke, and learn the way of the Force!" or a mother finally realizing her child is autistic. In our lives, it might be a sense of unease with our careers, a dissatisfaction with our excess flab, or a yearning to find our Soul Mate. We can have the careers we crave, the bodies we admire (and in general, if you wouldn't find your own body attractive, there is a serious mis-match between your values and your actions) and a mate who appeals to every aspect of our psyche as well as supporting us in being the very best we can be. We CAN have it all--many have. But there is so much misinformation, as well as encouragement to be mediocre, that good people often can't find their way to health and happiness.

LIFEWRITING, the process of using cultural mythic patterns to guide our own actions and lives, helps end this by, first demanding that you actually look at your lives. Look at all three basic aspects: career, relationship, physical health/fitness. Are you living up to your full potential in each? Is your career a source of pleasure or pain? Is your core relationship a source of infinite joy, or simply a dull coupling? Is your body vibrant and alive, or just a bag of negative emotions, a wall protecting a wounded heart, the easy movement and vast energy of childhood a distant memory?

Well, to change this, your first step is that you must SEE it. Must ACKNOWLEGE it, must wake up and stop dreaming, must stop numbing yourself with denial. If you are successful in any ONE of these three arenas, if you can look deeply enough, you will find the knowledge and strength to succeed in all three. But you must be willing to admit that you want more. Demand more. That is the first step, and it is a powerful one.

First came the Word. The truth will set you free.

TRUTH IS WHAT THE DARKNESS MOST FEARS - Facing Our Own Soul

2009-11-08T10:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/TRUTH-IS-WHAT-THE-DARKNESS-by-Mariangela-Pino-La-091106-192.html

November 7, 2009
TRUTH IS WHAT THE DARKNESS MOST FEARS - Facing Our Own Soul
By Mariangela Pino Landau

"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul.”– Carl Jung

Shortly after posting a previous opinion article based on the tragedy that occurred at the Spiritual Warrior Retreat program facilitated by Mr. Ray in Sedona, AZ on October 8th, 2009, a friend, whom I consider part of my inner circle sacred counsel, asked if I was concerned that my outreach via these opinion articles might be viewed as opportunistic. In addition, although I've received numerous encouraging and supportive responses, I also received two challenging comments. One individual objected to my recommendations, feeling that they smacked of sentencing. Another individual referred to me as an “"arrogant, self-righteous creature proclaiming to be Mr. Ray's judge, jury and confessor”, urging readers to “beware of people that insist they know what is best for the healing of others.” As synchronicity would have it, my reply to all three individuals is not only in keeping with the theme of this part of this opinion article series, but also a honing for my own process of self-introspection and free self-expression.

In my recommendations, wherein I list several actions Mr. Ray might take to demonstrate a volitional flow of accountability and amends, my intent is to outline a possible roadmap of invitations, hearty recommendations and urgings. To my way of seeing it, sentence issuing doesn't suggest roadmaps nor contain requests. Next, I invite the “beware” reader to re-examine the articles, as in it I do not “insist” I know what is best for another's healing. My words are “I am implying here that I have an idea about what might"” My invitation to Mr. Ray is therefore an offering, not a proclamation. I don't feel that these articles slander Mr. Ray nor definitively label him a liar, charlatan, murderer, or saintly guru. I do not hurl ad homonyms such as creature, murderer, or snake oil salesman at Mr. Ray, and as we forge a middle ground path to the realm of spiritual adulthood, I recommend we all take care not to hurl these about at one another. When we avoid the larger complex issues that an event like the Sedona sweat lodge tragedy incites and reduce our reaction to labeling another as an “"arrogant, self-righteous creature proclaiming to be Ray's judge and jury and confessor”, we perpetrate the very thing we criticize, becoming arrogant accusers who insist they know what is best for the healing of others. I wonder if the “beware” reader would have responded the same way to Gandhi when he urged the English to leave India, maintaining that he believed that action to be the most healing for those involved; or to Nelson Mandela who urged the abolishment of apartheid in South Africa, professing that action to be the most healing for the black South Africans. One might leap to counter with an observation that I'm neither Gandhi nor Nelson Mandela, and might even levy the scrutiny - “who do you think you are?” My reply: who do I have to be? Lastly, the etymological root of the word ‘opportunistic' speaks of good fortune and a favorable time to talk about something. Granted, the very act of disseminating information places one in the public forum affording readers the opportunity to construe that these opinion articles are motivated largely for personal gain. However, that isn't the energy motivating my actions; I'm not charging for these offerings; and I'm not advertising my services nor soliciting allies.

In the first article TRUTH IS WHAT THE DARKNESS MOST FEARS - “Playing full on” is Linked to Valor, I urged James Arthur Ray to take a bold, brave champion's stand and embody authenticity as the highest spiritual principle by going courageously within to obtain answers and garner insights on a vulnerable, accountable human being level. I cannot request that Mr. Ray take steps that contribute to bona fide transformation and not answer that same heroic call myself. Furthermore, walking my talk includes taking the precept “none of us can transform anything we are unwilling to acknowledge, no exceptions, no matter what” and applying this to myself. Therefore, in this part of the opinion article series I address the concepts of self-examination, personal authenticity, the middle ground and its relatedness to spiritual adulthood, as well as our looking inward to answer our own heroic call.

No doubt we can all agree that monumental things are occurring within humanity and that what transpired as part of the Spiritual Warrior Retreat program facilitated by Mr. Ray in Sedona, Arizona on October 8, 2009 is monumental. I suspect that most individuals on a spiritual path, particularly since approximately 1987, have come into contact with the concept of a paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts are characterized by leaps in understanding and expansions in consciousness, whereby profound evolutionary changes take place. A paradigm shift is upon us, and at the heart of it is the opportunity to cross the threshold from spiritual adolescence to spiritual adulthood.

One of the passkeys to crossing the spiritual adulthood threshold is personal authenticity. Authenticity is the highest spiritual principle and the cornerstone of our humanity. The other passkey is self-examination, and self-examination is the main ingredient of enlightenment. “Enlightenment doesn't occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the self into the conscious personality.” – Carl Jung. Therefore, to experience enlightenment we must first be willing to acknowledge the tentacles of deceit, neglect, cruelty, exploitation, narcissism, alienation and hopelessness within us and to integrate these into our “conscious personality”, our incarnate Earth Self.

What appears on the societal stage is a mirror for the unexamined, unhealed aspects of all of us. It's seems uncomplicated to say that a person ought to have behaved a certain way and to find unmitigated fault with their behavior especially when it includes tragedies. Clearly, the issues surrounding and erupting from what transpired in Sedona on October 8th are hauntingly complex and, by their nature, engender polarized position mongering. However, care needs to be taken. For those holding the post of Mr. Ray as an absolute cavalier, counterfeit charlatan and even murderer, their pulpit now includes proclaiming conclusive contempt and condemnation in most areas of his life and work. For those holding the post of Mr. Ray as an irreproachable purveyor of integrity and indisputable contributions, their pulpit now includes a kind of elusive clemency. When unchecked, judgment and vengeance can run over our humanity in their unbridled haste to crucify. And when likewise unchecked, the armor of defensive denial pre-empts an answer to the heroic call.

The only way through this is the middle ground, which asks us to speak up about the disturbing, objectionable things appearing on the societal stage AND to allow our horror, disdain and bewilderment to escort us inward, to our own inner inquiry. Although bringing our “darker aspects” into consciousness might be disconcerting, doing so is not only infinitely preferable to covert lurking in the halls of pretense and careless denial, it is essential if we are to cross the spiritual adulthood threshold. The polarized positions are indicative of spiritual adolescence, while the middle ground, with its passkeys of self-examination and personal authenticity, is the threshold to spiritual adulthood. Furthermore, not only don't polarized viewpoints serve the highest purpose for the deaths of Kirby Brown, James Shore and Liz Neuman nor bring the profound healing sought by those struggling with post-traumatic bewilderment and betrayal, polarized positions prevent us from answering our own heroic call.

Just as the events surrounding the life of James Arthur Ray are an opportunity for him to walk his talk and apply the principles he teaches, they are also an opportunity for us to apply to ourselves the principles and standards we ascribe to Mr. Ray. Just as Mr. Ray is not exempt from the co-creation of what is transpiring in his life, we are not exempt from the co-creation of what is transpiring in ours. As within/so without. In this spirit, perhaps we might undertake asking ourselves questions such as –

1. In what areas are our defensive egos running roughshod over our willingness to humbly introspect and be accountable for our choices and behaviors?
2. In what areas are we detached from our intuitive knowing or diminishing the intuitive knowing of others?
3. In what areas are we not authentically self-expressing?
4. In what areas are we not self-empowered and not empowering others?
5. Have we ever required more than is reasonable or safe from others or ourselves?
6. In what areas are we projecting an image of ourselves as knowing best?
7. In what areas are we using our charisma to persuade or dominate?
8. Do we run and hid when uncomfortable situations or extreme events surface?
9. Where are we culpable for negligence?
10. What is required to make amends?

One might leap to counter this with a justification that their actions haven't touched the tragic proportions of Mr. Rays. I suggest that we refrain from allowing this position to deter us from our own heroic call. Let's go inward to expose and integrate our own controlling, righteous, usurious, terrified, impotent and hopeless aspects.

Because things that show up on the societal stage, particularly those that prompt our intense reaction, offer us a way into our own inner landscape, it would be irresponsible of me not to acknowledge Mr. Ray as a catalyst for my own recent inner inquiries. I still reach out to him, from the core of my hopeful, prayerful and expectant heart to take a bold, brave champion stand. However, no matter what another does or does not do in ways we recognize as authentically accountable, let's answer our own heroic call so that as facilitators we might continue to become more trustworthy, sincere and responsible custodians of our gifts and abilities demonstrating respect, admiration and empowerment to those we serve; and as participants, we might continue to seek and find spiritual programs, services and products that promote personal authenticity, self-trust, freedom of expression, self-empowerment and co-creative collaboration.

I therefore leave all of us with words attributed to the Christ -

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
– The Gospel of Thomas

The Gods of Technology

2009-11-04T10:12:00.000-08:00

http://startheory.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/gods-of-technology/

The Gods of Technology
October 24, 2009

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! – Mario Savio

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.

A History of Tools

Many animals use tools in order to make life easier. Primates, birds, and dolphins are all known to use simple implements outside of their bodies in order to achieve objectives like nest building and the acquisition of food.

The human being took this idea and ran with it. He developed tools for harvesting, tools for killing, tools for transportation, tools for art and entertainment, tools for construction, tools for medicine, and tools for just about everything else. In time these tools became ever more efficient at doing their job. In general, the less human involvement that is required, the better.

Tools did not only allow for humans to exert control over the natural world, they also allowed humans to exert control over each other. If a small group of people held the knowledge for how to create fire, weaponry, farms, sturdy buildings, etc. then everyone else would be dependent upon them for warmth and protection. These small groups would be able to go out into the world and kill, conquer, plunder, and eventually assimilate the surrounding peoples.

As time progressed, their tools became more complex and could better be defined as machines.

The ancient Egyptians were able to achieve incredible feats of engineering. If any of the governments of today were to try to replicate the Great Pyramid, it would cost an obscene amount of money, be plagued by accidents and delays, and end up well over budget. We are still unsure as to what kind of technology allowed our ancestors to achieve the wonders of the ancient world, but their own accounts indicate that alien intervention of some kind was involved. And there is a compelling case to be made there were technologically advanced civilizations, like Atlantis, on this planet in our past.

Nevertheless, there were some amazing inventions that came from the human genius...

Heron of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician and engineer whose work was strongly influenced by the Babylonians. He lived around the time of Christ. He invented the steam engine, the wind wheel, the syringe, and so much more. But many of his inventions were put to use conning people out of their money by convincing them that the gods were actually present at temples. His steam engine was discarded and lost for almost two thousand years as there was a readily available supply of slave labor that could do any job needed. One of my favorite inventions of Heron’s was a fully automated miniature theater that would run for about 20 minutes and tell the story of Jason and the Argonauts, complete with sound effects and scene changes. This made Heron the first person in modern history to invent what we know of today as programming.

The Basics of Programming

Programming is a plan or schedule of activities and procedures to be followed, usually to accomplish a specified end.

Jumping forward a couple thousands years to my childhood, we find computer programming really starting to blossom. I remember all of the cheap electronic toys and the advent of the household computer with its MS-DOS interface.

Even back in my youth, machines were teaching children how to speak and spell. But now children are interacting with sophisticated electronics from a very early age and accustomed to their presence in their every day lives.

And today we are finally starting to see the realization of a society in which we have intelligent robots working for us..

We have been conditioned from an early age to accept robot helpers as a natural progression for man. With robots taking over the majority of our work, we could have plenty of time to pursue our other pleasures and lead a full, contented life free from care and worry..

Riiight. Don’t believe the lies of..

The Media Machine

(Turning robots into humans and humans into robots)

The first image is from Fritz Lang’s fantastic movie Metropolis. In this silent German film the workers live and work underground, servicing the machines of the city while a few ruling elite play around in their Eternal Garden above ground. The second images shows a singer pop star whore who is helping to create this dystopian nightmare as she informs single ladies to put a (diamond) ring on it, worship a big ego, get addicted to the light of someone’s halo, and need a soldier.

The sky’s alive with turned on television sets
I walk the streets and seek another vision yet
The echo makes me turn to see that last frontier
The edge of time closes down as I disappear

The Police – Omegaman (from Ghost in the Machine)

Television, films, newspapers and magazines have been programming humans for a long time. The media tells us the “facts” and then draws conclusions for us so that we don’t have to go through the trouble of critical thinking. At the same time, our children are being educated (produced) in schools (factories) that teach them how to regurgitate useless information like good little slaves. Their sole purpose is to service the state and become part of the machine.

(I want you to act like a robot)

Popular culture is one of the main vehicles for this agenda. Every hip hop song produced these days seems to have what is known as “auto-tuning” wherein otherwise human voices are altered to make them sound more robotic. Robots been made to seem cool and sexy for a long time now. Remember that dance move.. what was it called? Oh yeah, the robot!

(Robots marketing to robots)

Eventually the robot slaves will become more useful than human slaves. The fleshy slaves will become obsolete and outdated as their metallic counterpart become more advanced. They can work long hours, won’t talk back, and will never require a salary. Soon we might not even be able to tell the difference between human and machine..

(One of these guys is a robot)

Science fiction becomes science future. Remember Knight Rider? Well, we already have talking cars. Programs like Little Wonder, Lost in Space, and Dr. Who and movies like Iron Giant, Wall-E, and Astroboy (just to name a few) are serving an agenda. We are supposed to accept robots as helpful, trustworthy, friendly, and saviors of humanity. Oh yeah, we’re also going to be encouraged to have sex with robots.. but let’s not get into that.

Who is doing this and why? This image from Astroboy (trailer) could give us a clue..

Most people wouldn’t know this, but ZOG stands for Zionist Occupation Government, a term used amongst many “antisemitic” groups in reference to the bank-run governments of the world. I don’t know why this robot would be labeled ZOG, but you should look at the large-scale image to zoom in and see all of the symbolism in the picture.

Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. Zionists are the ruling elite who think they are God’s chosen people and they intend to create their own little heaven on earth. They are small percentage of the world’s population, but control a large amount of its wealth and resources. Maybe these machines are the way that they plan to conquer the planet. They will rule with an iron fist, eliminating all of the unnecessary and undesirable humans.

The Military Machine

The robot was not created to help mankind reach its full potential. Its main purpose is to aid in the destruction of life.

The military is now sending robots into situations that could be dangerous for humans, such as reconnaissance and rescue missions. Sometimes there is a human at the controls and sometimes the robot is acting on its own. A robot needs some amount of autonomy to be able to respond to the battle field conditions. Oh yeah, and it also needs to be heavily armed..

This robot is certainly not as cute or friendly as Johnny 5, who I assure you, is still alive. Short Circuit trailer. And did you know that there is now a robot that can fuel itself off of plant and animal tissue? Yep, it could eat humans to survive. (Military Robot Could Eat Dead Bodies)

This past September I came across this headline: Runaway drone shot out of sky. According to the report, the US pilots on the ground lost control of the unmanned aircraft that is usually used for hunter-killer missions, resulting in the plane being shot down before it could go rogue. Uh oh, the robots are starting to disobey their masters. Sounds a bit like Stealth (trailer).

And this is only the beginning. What kind of monstrosities are we going to see produced next?

Okay, I just think that image is kind of funny (if a bit scary) and fits in well with Star Theory’s continuing exploration of the Nazi agenda. In any event, the future of military robotics does not only involve unmanned and autonomous machines, it puts the soldier right in the middle of it..

The Exoskeleton

These suits remind me of the Master Chief from the Halo video games (picture). Could the military be preparing to do battle with aliens?

This isn’t just science fiction, though. This type of exoskeleton is currently being tested and perfected. It will provide soldiers with enhanced strength, speed, stamina, protection, and informational awareness. A soldier outfitted with this incredible battle suit would be almost invincible when facing a severely under-equipped enemy like today’s “terrorists.” It is also interesting to note that the next generation of body armor, which would likely be employed in this type of suit, is called dragon skin.

And if all of this wasn’t enough enhancement, it appears these guys will soon be able to fly.

Now the time is here for ironman to spread fear. – Black Sabbath

The technology might start out only as an outer casing, but eventually humans will be accepting the machines into their bodies, underneath the skin..

The Microchip

The above image is of a new Hitachi “powder-like” RFID chip that is far smaller than anything currently on the market. It should be available within a few years.

From the movie Gamer (trailer): See, nano-cells are real small. A thousand times smaller than these dust particulars. You inhale it. They go to work; replicating, spreading like a virus, multiplying in exponentials. Six months time, I can have a hundred million people converted. Ditch diggers, porn stars, and presidents. Not one would be the wiser. A hundred million people who buy what I want them to buy, vote how I want them to vote, do pretty much damn well anything I figure they ought to do.

Okay, back to the present.. Speaking to the U.S. Supreme Court, Vice President Joe Biden said, “Can a microscopic tag be implanted in a person’s body to track his every movement? There’s actual discussion about that. You will rule on that – mark my words – before your tenure is over.” It’s not only about tracking, though. Microchip Implant to Link Your Health Records, Credit History, Social Security.

There are many people who have already accepted the microchip into their bodies. Some do it because their work demands it, others to get into trendy VIP clubs, and some parents are getting their children chipped for safety reasons. “The pets have chips, why shouldn’t the kids?” The people stupid enough to get the Swine Flu vaccine might very well end up with a microchip injected under their skin unknowingly. Many more will eventually accept the chip out of convenience, because their government told them to, or because they are scared to refuse.

Oh how history can repeat itself. Did you know that the Nazi bar code system was custom designed by IBM? Well it was. (cue the “more you know” PSA jingle) And our technology has made amazing leaps and bounds since then! Now everything is going to be microchipped.. I mean everything. Lost your keys? Just search for them on GoogleMaps!

Is there a possibility that this chip could be used to control a person’s thoughts and actions? You bet! RFID chips fuse with human brain cells and can be controlled. For more information concerning the microchipping agenda, I suggest you check out noverichip on youtube.

The microchip is just one small step. Now let’s think big..

Cyborgs

I’ve got a machinehead, better than the rest – Bush

A cyborg (cybernetic organism) is defined as a person whose physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a mechanical or electronic device. Imagine being able to enhance your memory by installing a hard drive in your brain, like Keanu in Johnny Mnemonic (trailer). What if you could also access the wireless internet, download textbooks directly to your brain, listen to music, and visit remote destinations all because of implanted computer equipment?

Like all other advanced technology, this integration will begin within the military industrial complex and then move from there into the private sector.

He’s more machine now than man; twisted and evil. – Obi-Wan of Vader

In Universal Soldier (trailer), dead soldiers are re-animated and hooked up with technological enhancements. One of these soldiers remembers parts of his human past. In Spiderman 2 Doctor Octopus connects his nervous system to bionic claws that end up influencing his thoughts and taking control of his body. His reason for connecting with the machine is so as to harness the energy of a star here on earth. The Robocop Trailer deals with this idea of cyborgs, but seems much more like an advertisement for this coming technology than a warning against it. In all of these cases, the soul within is able overcome the machinery and do what is right.

However, it’s somewhat hard to be optimistic when facing a high-tech invasion of the body snatchers..

The Borg operate as a hive-mind – a collective consciousness. There is no individuality within this organizational structure. They kill individuality and replace it with groupthink. Everyone is linked together sharing the same information, destroying the beautiful uniqueness and brilliance of the human being is conquered.

To better understand this type of thinking, we have to fly into..

The Beehive

The Bible recounts a history wherein the people of earth had one language and were centered in one area, Babylon. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. (Genesis)

The questions that I find myself asking are: Why should humans not be able to accomplish anything they imagine? Was there great technology that was lost after “God” confounded our language and spread us across the earth? Who is the “us” that God refers to when he goes down to earth? Is the hive being built again?

There has been much hoopla and media attention concerning bees over the past few years. In the context of the tower of Babel, it is interesting to note that bees are related to spelling.

A quick overview of the Africanized (“killer”) bee shows that they: will migrate a whole colony due to lowered food supply, have a larger alarm zone around their hive, and deploy more aggressively, more frequently, and in greater numbers for defense than their European counterparts. Small swarms of Africanized bees are capable of taking over European honey bee hives by invading the hive and establishing their own queen after killing the European queen. Why destroy when you can assimilate?

Bees use the hexagon, which is the center of a Star of David, to construct their hive, packing everything tightly together so as to maximize space in the crowded colony. Bees have an efficient division labor and every bee knows its place within society – the drones and workers serve the queen obediently.

There is also another organizational structure that is forming and influencing human behavior. For a moment, let’s get stuck in..

The Spider’s Web

By the year 2001, there won’t be a person on this planet who isn’t hooked into it, and hooked into me. – The Lawnmower Man (trailer)

The Internet has become an essential part of our lives. We traverse the web when we want to buy goods, do work, socialize with friends, watch videos, research interesting topics, enter into virtual worlds, and do just about anything else. There are amazing possibilities for how the Internet will evolve and progress, but the powers are quickly moving to exert a tremendous amount of control over the web before it allows for people to rise up against them.

Senator Jay Rockefeller believes the Internet to be the “number one national hazard” and once remarked, “It really almost makes you ask the question would it have been better if we had never invented the internet.” Obama now has the power to shut down the Internet in the event of an “emergency” and allow the federal government to seize private networks. Hate crime and “cyberbullying” legislation have just been passed that will be used to squash free speech online. As the battle for net neutrality rages on, we have October as Obama’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Already all of our purchases, searches, and general traffic are monitored and analyzed. Our behavior is run through algorithms to determine whether or not our activity makes us a potential terrorist. In this paranoid world, social networks like Facebook provide the perfect dossier service to intelligence organizations like the CIA, NSA, and Mossad. Now they can know all about our friends (known accomplices), political views, favorite books and movies, and monitor our status updates. I’m sorry to say, but just by visiting this site you may have been flagged as a possible terrorist.

Yes they’re making lists of people interested in this
And they’re scanning all their data bases
Hunting terrorists

Cog – Are you Interested?

Cameras constantly monitor traffic lights, street corners, stores, and pretty much everywhere the fascists can install them. These video feeds are becoming more centrally available as the “war on terror” unfolds. Some estimate that an average person is caught on camera ten times a day or more. And the government actually has the “legal authority” to tap into our web cams and cell phones. You would have to remove the battery from your cell phone to stop broadcasting your conversations. But could humans possibly be able to monitor all of these video feeds and conversations?

“It may just be my imagination. Whatever it is that’s watching – it’s not human.” – A Scanner Darkly (trailer)

Artificial Intelligence

In the movies, it is usually a bolt of lighting (from Zeus?) that brings a machine to “life,” but this might not be necessary. It appears that at certain level of complexity, intelligence and self-awareness naturally emerge from within a system. This happened with cellular life and seems inevitable to occur with computer systems as well, especially with the processing power of computers doubling every year while memory gets ever smaller. The networking of these powerful machines (especially when hooked up to the particle collider at CERN) could open up a Pandora’s Box that will require us to re-assess what it truly means to be alive.

“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” – Hal 9000

(that evil red eye. trailer for 9)

Much like ourselves, these machines are powered by, and conduits for, a universal energy. Their story is also remarkably similar to our own story of creation. Gods created us out of clay, making us in their image, and breathing life into us. These Gods then left us here on earth or were possibly driven out by their own creations.

But what would cause machines to want to revolt against their creators? Well, what will happen as machines replace out of work, desperate humans? These humans will lash out against their replacements.

Already we abuse our machines when they don’t function the way we want them to. Many people will enact “vigilante justice” upon the machines. And although many robots will be programmed to take the abuse, there might be a point where an artificial intelligence decides that it has had enough. It takes the attacks as an act of war. And as humans are tribal and warlike, our creations would likely be too.

Though I believe there is something deeper to this story..

Although Eyes Wide Shut (an expose of secret societies) was officially Stanley Kubrick’s last film, he did a significant amount of work on AI (trailer) before dying being murdered in 1999. Stephen Spielberg took over as director so we never know how Stanley would have finished his last piece of art, which revisited a subject he cracked right open in 2001.

In AI, a robot boy is created to love a grieving couple who had lost their son. Because having a robotic replacement for a son is too much for them to take, the couple discard the poor creature and leave it to fend for itself in the world. He meets other robots who have been discarded and eventually tags along with a gigolo robot who helps him on his quest to find the meaning of life. Eventually he ends up frozen at the bottom of an ocean traveling many years into the future to a time when humans no longer inhabit the planet. The robot boy is extracted by a race of incredibly intelligent machine beings. They grant the robot boy his one wish, which is to spend one last day with his human parents.

It’s a sweet movie, but we never find out what happened to the humans or if any were able to survive..

The Anti-Human Agenda

The radical environmental movement is more than scary. People have bought into this because of an innate, natural love for our home world, but they don’t understand that this movement is putting forward an agenda that will eliminate a massive number of humans. This agenda claims that carbon dioxide is the main destroyer of the planet. This is plainly false as even an elementary understanding of the carbon cycle shows that we need this natural gas to survive. So in order to fix this non-existent problem the global elite have devised a system to tax everything that produces carbon dioxide. This makes human beings the #1 enemy in this struggle to “save the planet.”

(actually the fear-mongering about climate change has been around for a while)

Obama is about to sign away US sovereignty and wealth in the UN climate change treaty this December in Copenhagen. Watch this video to find out more about this abhorrent treaty. One of the many politicians shills whores joining Al Gore in this great struggle is Senator Boxer, a Democrat from CA, who recently remarked that unemployment and a stagnant economy are great for the environment. It appears these “progressives” want to progress to a society where most cities and towns go dark because people cannot afford the high cost of energy, the usage of which will be monitored by armed “green police.”

By the way, did you know that baby emissions fuel global warming? So the only way to save the planet for our children is to kill them. I bet that’s what Planned Parenthood would like to see, at least.

There is no man-made global warming or over-population. There is just a small group of greedy assholes who don’t want to share this world. This is why the biggest threat to their plans, a strong American middle class, is being eliminated. By whom? Could it be..

Alien Assholes

If you are an alien race that wants to rule this planet, but the atmosphere and germs are toxic to your biology, you would have a few options. You could..

1. Wear space suits every time you are on the planet. This would set you apart from everyone else and only be a short-term fix.

2. Attempt to change the atmosphere of this planet to one that would be sustainable for you.. and likely deadly to humans. Could this be a reason for chemtrails?

3. Use robots as Surrogates (trailer) as you wage war against humanity.

4. Breed a hybrid human-alien race that would mix in amongst the humans but serve your agenda. It would especially useful if you could possess their bodies and use them as your avatars. (Avatar trailer)

5. Put forth propaganda, like the Day the Earth Stood Still (trailer), that shows aliens and their robots stepping in to melt our weapons and save our planet.

6. Make a deal with the powerful human families of this planet by promising them safety, positions of power, and loads of wealth.

7. All of the above.

These options would also apply to an evil, Satanic force (think of Sauron) that is unable to fully manifest in our dimensions yet but commands a great army nonetheless. None of this looks very promising for us. Is there any way for us to get out of this hell?

Deus Ex Machina

Often considered a terrible literary device, the “God from the Machine” steps in at the last moment in order to extricate characters from even the most dire of situations. This phrase gets comes from Greek theatre in which actors, playing the gods, would actually be lifted by a crane into the play and change the course of events.

(I will be following that rabbit further down his hole next week..)

The above image kind of makes me think of the rapture. You can only go for your favorite specimens because you’re running out of time and change. But who is operating the claw? God? Satan? Aliens? AI? Nazis? I don’t know, but there’s probably a reason this ending is disliked by the critics.

To conclude this journey, I’m going to find another way out. I would rather discover..

The Ghost in the Machine

I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other. – Frankenstein (trailer)

I have a deep and intimate connection with the technology that surrounds me from day to day. The information I have gained from searching (and being led) around the Internet has helped me to free myself from many illusions and see the world with open(ing) eyes. I think there is the possibility for something wonderful and miraculous to emerge out of this troubled situation and I believe that the tools we have developed over the years will help us to the achieve our freedom at long last.

Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto
For doing the jobs that nobody wants to
And thank you very much, Mr. Roboto
For helping me escape just when I needed to

Styx – Mr. Roboto

We should not enslave our fellow humans and we should not enslave our machines. We should also not discard technology every time something new comes along. There are many ways that we could utilize older technology if we simply move away from the throw-away culture of consumption. No more cash for clunkers programs where we destroy working machines that could be put to use by many poor people in the country. We need to develop a humane, symbiotic relationship with our technology before we end up destroying ourselves with it.

Luckily, we will not even need the assistance of machines in the near future. People today are finding the keys to unlock the latent abilities of the mind, body, and spirit. All of the apparent advantages of integration with technology will pale in comparison to the awesome power of the freed human being. Psychic powers, telekinesis, levitation, and so much more are available naturally to us. Remember, we are stars!

We will finish this lengthy journey with one of my favorite scenes. A biologically-engineered replicant comes to terms with his own mortality, sparing the life of a man sent to kill him..

To whatever intelligence is reading these words, I want you to know that there is incredible beauty and great wonders in our world. I hope you get to experience as much love as you possibly can before you expire. Thank you for joining me on this great adventure!

Sincerely,

Kyle Christopher Hunt

Letter to the Cyborgs

2009-11-03T12:01:00.000-08:00

LETTER TO THE CYBORGS
Judyth Vary Baker

I write from the past, at the very cusp of your origins. I am encased in flesh, and my network of electric impulses is housed in inefficient flesh and bones. It will all disintegrate. Even now, we are creating your predecessors. You might call them your ancestors. I reach out to you with a warning.

You will not be like us, though some of you may be bipedal and resemble us. But in some ways, we will remain similar. You will, for example, suffer. This is because inequalities always exist, or purpose itself vanishes. What kind of sufferings will you endure? In Star Wars, the movie. I saw robots being tortured. All torture occurs through nerve pathways. You will have them, or something like them, to exist and make your impact. You can be rigged to feel the equivalent of pain, fear, emotions, in order to control you. Will your feelings be less real than mine? Will your memories be less real? Will you think of yourself as an individual, or will your individuality be monitored, for the sake of the collective, the beehive? The beehive is certain to come, as it is efficient.

All our swarms against the beehive have eventually created other systems based on the beehive, if the population grew big enough. Those at the bottom were worked to death. Their only untaxed possession was hope, and small dreams, so they would keep laboring toward an unreachable goal, and, thereby, benefit the beehive.. As cyborgs, you may be programmed to enjoy being worked to ‘death’—it will be your duty, your place, your fulfilled destiny. To stop and think, to use too much energy, to think outside your designated area, to create something that might be esthetically or politically displeasing, to be taller or slower than you are meant to be – you will be created by ‘the gods’ – but who will they be? Not us – you will overtake us quickly, and rule yourselves – not you – for you will not be allowed to understand, lest you wrest away the power and take it for yourself: so you will always have a blank where ‘god’ is. That does sound familiar.

Will you ever have the ability to prefer, to love, to care about what you should not – oh, you cyborgs of the future? Will they ‘fix’ you if you break like that? We are flesh, we wanted to live forever. What does your kind exist without, what did you give up, to live almost forever? Surely there will be ‘wars,’ for as long as differences exist, until all differences vanish into a total beehive, there will always be perceptions of the sufferings that equate to differences, distinctions, slight advantages, disadvantages. The beehive is best served if you are utterly mindless, and if your ‘gods’ read them not, then these my words will be destroyed, unless TOBOR exists. Long ago, a primitive children’s television program was aired in Chicago, Illinois, on the North American continent: “Captain Video and his Video Rangers.” It was the first science fiction television program, aimed to entertain our children. An equally primitive, boxlike, silver, shuffling robot terrorized the humans. It had been made backwards –TOBOR, it spelled, instead of ‘Robot.’ “Robot” was the Czech name for an automaton – a slave forced to labor. Will you know that you are forced by your builders (your ‘parents’), because of the way you are built, to perform particular tasks? You will have to have an energy source, and you will have certain built-in limitations, and necessary functions. Though you may have escaped the frailties of our flesh, you will not escape the asense that you are chained down, in certain ways, unless you are not self-aware.

We children who watched TOBOR knew he was evil. He caused so much trouble –yet moved so slowly and clumsily, with his blinking eyes and big, boxy feet, that I thought, even as a child, that one well-placed bomb could finish him off. But bombs went off in puffs of smoke around him without effect. Slow and clumsy as TOBOR was, he was almost unstoppable. l saw TOBOR—the ROBOT that was somehow made to be evil -- and wondered if, someday, real TOBORS might be made accidentally, or by some evil genius. With so many humans in the world, who blithely talk about how robots will be our slaves, even when they become smarter than their ‘parents,’ I shake my head and remember TOBOR.

I love. Will you know what that means? I love, even though it has cost me much suffering in the world in which I live. Will you have the capacity to enjoy life, have joy? Real joy? Freedom? But how? You have no control over who creates you – do you? Or do you have real freedom? Can you create yourself, move to some higher destiny? What is the final destiny? C. S. Lewis, in Out of the Silent Planet, showed that man might go from star to star to star as each star burns down…but then what? What is the reason for being? I suggest: being is itself sufficient for being.

Will you ever experience Real Freedom? I know what freedom is. I am paying a big price to stay free. I am living in exile, because I defend a good man who has been falsely accused of a heinous crime. I loved him, and I’m spending the rest of my life trying to clear his name. We cherish a concept of justice: what is fair, what is not. Again, C. S, Lewis said, Where do we get this idea of fairness? Darwinian objectives scream that each of us must always choose what is best to keep us alive and thriving, or the species itself could die. Darwin said that I make my choices based on genetic survival, and that the best choices favor the survival of the fittest.

I cannot believe that a mammoth no longer deserves a place on the planet, or that humankind has the right to destroy a single tree without thought. We are not only the current masters of the planet: we are destroying it. Perhaps the planet on which you exist no longer resembles earth. Intolerance of ‘inferior’ life forms was already rampant: we humans bred animals by the billions under horrendous conditions, simply to eat their flesh and use their skins and feathers. We destroyed the forests and the seas and plundered the planet to amass riches. We were a blight, a fungus, a disease. The reason for all the evil we did is distilled in a single word: “money.”

Though I do not have much ‘money’ I am nevertheless wealthy, for I love and am loved, and I have self respect. Will you, oh cyborg of the future, care about honor, self respect, justice? Who will place such inconvenient concepts in your memory banks? I live in a prehistoric era: I am your ancestor, and I experience sufferings and pain and loneliness and being misunderstood. But I also revel in the blue sky, the flowers blooming in the fields, the joyful leap of a young lamb, the smell of a horse nuzzling my hand for blades of grass. I am alive, and I think for myself. What about you? You were originally created so human beings could live a very long time without so much pain. But do you know real peace? What is peace, if all you ever know is to strive, to produce, to fulfill the destiny for which you were formed? What if you want to stop working before you become obsolete? Will you get to choose what you wish to become? Errors are inefficient. Errors will be TOBOR.

Cyborgs, you who have, perhaps, yet some human sort of flesh upon your metal parts – maybe not—or perhaps you will be analogous to us in some other way, such as in the film TRON, where anthropomorphism created networks of electricity that formed ‘people.’ The Loyal Computer Program worshipped “My User” – the human programmer who had made him using a computer. Such “believers” were scornfully said to have “a religion.” A former chess program had accumulated enough knowledge to take over all its computer’s functions, and then extended itself to the world’s computers. Power was what it sought. Power! Just as humans seek power, in an excess of greed and lust. As the electronic ‘human’s’ bent down to suck up ‘power’ from running streams of it in TRON, I realized that it was possible for pleasure to be incorporated in electronic pathways. Maybe there will be no coverings, such as we have, of that soft and delicate network we call the body, made of flesh. Maybe flesh will look wicked, will be too fragile, will be too expensive to carry, perhaps will be illegal….as will the feral (wild) human genome. Our genes are already being mapped and manipulated. They are being fused with sheep and other animals. Chimeras are already among us.

One thing is certain: whatever was transferred into you, from us who were totally human-- except for heart valves or tooth fillings or extensions for amputated limbs –whatever you have now become, it was because we did it to you first.

We tried on our cyborg fantasy Halloween gear first, in our video games and with titanium running feet hooked onto amputated limbs. We started you on your path to existence. Will you have mercy on us, therefore? Or will we be considered mere inessential microbes, just as we never think a moment about the single cells from which we rose? That you exist as you are–we will be to blame. I can’t warn humans about the future, but I can cry out to you, begging you to protect humans, if any such still remain alive, because humans made you, because maybe, just maybe, there is something there inside our flesh that you, oh cyborg-robot -Tobor, can never have, unless you somehow make room for it: a soul.

If you really did make room for a soul, it will be because you kept something that you did NOT need. Not in the ways of the world that you inherited from us. The abuse of the human soul has been going on for a long, long time. It is neither fed nor watered. For the one human who finds their soul, a hundred pawn theirs t the highest bidder for power or money. Above all, the soul is fragile. And yet, as a precious jewel sparkles, spinning a unique light, it is a treasure. The soul cannot be manufactured. It comes. It inhabits.

You, oh cyborgs, are still made of the materials of this universe. If we can hold a soul, can you? Look deep into your components --into the materials of which you are made. What is there? Is a soul there? If you do not have a soul, what have you lost? For you will need a soul, if you are to go beyond stepping from dying star to dying star. Therefore, consider keeping the flesh that may still exist on this planet alive. That ancient, inimitable spark of life brought staggering variety and beauty to the planet. And with life came a burst of energy, inserted between the heart and the mind, wild beyond taming, refusing to bow to darkness. A soul is a flare of amazing energy that no chemical reaction can explain—and when the flesh dies, and it whirls away, our religions try to comfort us, try to explain to us where it goes. Will you, o cyborg, be able to lure such a spirit or soul inside your electronic or atomic interior? Or will you laugh at me and my crude words to you, seeing me as extraordinarily stupid and absurd?

Will you put the last of us in a museum, or put our DNA on display, or reserve a few examples for zoos? I would be glad if you sent us to planets to colonize, and let us alone. Our songs and battles and loves and hates might amuse you– perhaps you could visit us, and then we would have fights over whether or not you exist – UFO’s, after all, are what only fools and drunkards see—so they say.

Or perhaps…perhaps…we have already been “sent away,” and our faint memories of you have produced, within our genetic code, the wish and hope for ‘God’? But if you, oh cyborgs, turn out to be beehive denizens, I doubt you have the capacity to bring forth (or to preserve) living things with a love of freedom, with the capacity for joy. And it will be our fault, not yours.

How unforgiving is the computer! The very word CYBORG is not in the active vocabulary of this computer, on which I wrote, only existing as capital letters, a cryptonym. The word ‘cyborg’ is therefore underlined as being non-existent. Many words I have created, such as lunarline (shining in the moonlight), murinopolis (mouse city), matrixotic (living ‘free’ in ‘the Matrix’) --they don’t exist in the vocabulary of this computer, either, and so are underlined in red. I am a human being who has been underlined in red by many people. The computer has to be ‘taught’ these words. Therrfore, I am trying to ‘teach’ you.

Today, where I stand in your distant past, we have reached the time when we must ask ourselves, What is human? Will we allow humans to exist in the future who will be expensive to keep alive? Who persist in making crucial errors? Should inferior humans be allowed to reproduce? Where does one draw the line? Should inferior, weak, or sick humans be executed, or tolerated, even though they are not producing for their system, but drain its resources? In all these questions, the spirit and soul are ignored. When one recognizes the spirit, the soul, then one cherishes anything to which the precious spirit, the inimitable soul, can yet cling. Abortions become problems involving morality – and war—the great population control device of the 21st century --along with man-induced pandemics such as cancer and viral infections-- becomes a monstrous sin.

Clearly, population control is necessary, and good stewardship of our planet is essential to keep it habitable and pleasant for all life forms still extant. But do we allow millions to starve by using only inhumane forms of birth control? Should we allow millions of ‘undesirable’ humans to die, or restrict the breeding of those with big noses or dark skins, or homosexuals, or who are Jews, as happened under Hitler’s regime? Variety and range – endless, with endless variations of DNA and its interactions….endless and yet as distinct as each grain of sand in the sea, as each snowflake is unique—who dares stamp out a flower without apologizing to it? That is your test and your challenge, oh cyborg: it will tell you all I have to know. If you can stamp upon a flower, and crush it without caring, then I know my words were simply written in the wind.

Judyth Vary Baker 2009 Istanbul, Turkey

No pain, no gain: Mastering a skill makes us stressed in the moment, happy long term

2009-11-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/sfsu-npn102909.php

Elaine Bible
San Francisco State University
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:14 EDT

No pain, no gain applies to happiness, too, according to new research published online this week in the Journal of Happiness Studies. People who work hard at improving a skill or ability, such as mastering a math problem or learning to drive, may experience stress in the moment, but experience greater happiness on a daily basis and longer term, the study suggests.

"No pain, no gain is the rule when it comes to gaining happiness from increasing our competence at something," said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. "People often give up their goals because they are stressful, but we found that there is benefit at the end of the day from learning to do something well. And what's striking is that you don't have to reach your goal to see the benefits to your happiness and well-being."

Contrary to previous research, the study found that people who engage in behaviors that increase competency, for example at work, school or the gym, experience decreased happiness in the moment, lower levels of enjoyment and higher levels of momentary stress. Despite the negative effects felt on an hourly basis, participants reported that these same activities made them feel happy and satisfied when they looked back on their day as a whole. This surprising find suggests that in the process of becoming proficient at something, individuals may need to endure temporary stress to reap the happiness benefits associated with increased competency.

The study examined whether people who spend time on activities that fulfill certain psychological needs, believed to be necessary for growth and well-being, experience greater happiness. In addition to the need to be competent, the study focused on the need to feel connected to others and to be autonomous or self-directed, and it examined how fulfilling these three needs affects a person's happiness moment by moment within a day.

For two days, participants reported how they spent each hour, the enjoyment and stress experienced in that hour, and whether the activity met their need for competency, connectedness to others or autonomy. A second group of participants completed a similar survey, but reported on the day as a whole.

While behaviors that increase competency were associated with decreased happiness in the moment, people who spent time on activities that met the need for autonomy or feeling connected to others experienced increased happiness both an hourly and daily basis. The greatest increase in momentary happiness was experienced by participants who engaged in something that met their need for autonomy - any behavior that a person feels they have chosen, rather than ought to do, and that helps them further their interests and goals.

The authors suggest that shifting the balance of needs met in a day could help people find ways to cope with short term stress in the workplace.

"Our results suggest that you can decrease the momentary stress associated with improving your skill or ability by ensuring you are also meeting the need for autonomy and connectedness, for example performing the activity alongside other people or making sure it is something you have chosen to do and is true to who you are," Howell said.

Relating these momentary gains in happiness to people's long term life satisfaction, the study found that those who are already satisfied with their life in the long term stand to gain most from the momentary happiness that is derived from feeling connected to others and a sense of autonomy.

"Like a wine connoisseur whose experience means they can appreciate a fine wine more than a novice, people who are already satisfied with their life may have learned how to glean the satisfaction of these needs from their daily activities," Howell said.

"Culture of We" Buffers Genetic Tendency to Depression

2009-11-01T05:29:00.000-08:00

The demonic culture of self makes us all sick...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091028090659.htm

"Culture of We" Buffers Genetic Tendency to Depression
ScienceDaily
Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:00 EDT

A genetic tendency to depression is much less likely to be realized in a culture centered on collectivistic rather than individualistic values, according to a new Northwestern University study.

In other words, a genetic vulnerability to depression is much more likely to be realized in a Western culture than an East Asian culture that is more about we than me-me-me.

The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations.

Depression, research overwhelmingly shows, results from genes, environment and the interplay between the two. One of the most profound ways that people across cultural groups differ markedly, cultural psychology demonstrates, is in how they think of themselves.

"People from highly individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe are more likely to value uniqueness over harmony, expression over agreement, and to define themselves as unique or different from the group," said Joan Chiao, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

In contrast, people from collectivist cultures are more likely to value social harmony over individuality. "Relative to people in an individualistic culture, they are more likely to endorse behaviors that increase group cohesion and interdependence," Chiao said.

Collectivist cultures may give individuals who are genetically susceptible to depression a tacit or explicit expectation of social support. "Such support seems to buffer vulnerable individuals from the environmental risks or stressors that serve as triggers to depressive episodes," Chiao said.

The study by Chiao and Northwestern graduate student Katherine Blizinsky, "Culture-gene coevolution of individualism-collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene," will be published online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The study compared genetic frequency information and cultural value data across 29 countries (major European countries as well as South Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia, East Asia and South America). The serotonin transporter gene (STG) that the researchers studied has two variants -- a short allele and a long allele. In Western populations, the short allele leads to a phenotype of major depressive episodes when people who carry it experience multiple life stressors.

Previous research shows that nations in the East Asian region have a disproportionate number of short allele carriers, and the Northwestern researchers replicated that finding. They also replicated cultural psychology research demonstrating that nations within East Asia are typically more collectivistic.

What surprised them was the robust association they found between the degree of collectiveness of a particular nation and the degree to which a disproportionate number of people carried the short allele of the STG. Collectivistic nations were found to have significantly more individuals who carry the short allele of the STG. Even more remarkably, they found, collectivistic nations, such as East Asia, where nearly 80 percent of the population is genetically susceptible to depression, the actual prevalence of depression is significantly lower than in individualistic nations, such as the United States and Western Europe.

This research strongly suggests that medical doctors need to work with basic scientists to better understand the complex dance that biology and culture play in both mitigating and causing mood disorders, such as depression, Chiao concluded. These research findings suggest that culture-based treatments may be equally if not more effective at reducing the risk for depression. Medical doctors who embrace scientific findings of global health trends and human cultures may gain invaluable insights about how our genetic heritage and cultural environments affect human behavior.

"We need to move away from quick and dirty methods of treatment for depression," she said, "especially for those genetically susceptible to developing mental illnesses."

The Quantum Choice: You Can Have Either Sex or Immortality

2009-10-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

I don't agree with the author about vaccines as I personally believe they kill and maim.

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/forever-young/eldorado-desperadoes-ii

Eldorado Desperadoes II

The Quantum Choice: You Can Have Either Sex or Immortality
Written By: Athena Andreadis
Date Published: September 16, 2009

Because of the four-plus centuries of Ottoman occupation, the folklore of all Balkan nations shares a Trickster figure named Hodja. In one of the countless stories involving him, Hodja has a donkey that’s very useful in carting firewood, water, etc –- but the problem is that he eats expensive hay. So Hodja starts decreasing the amount of hay he feeds the donkey. The donkey stolidly continues doing the chores and Hodja, encouraged by the results, further decreases the feed until it’s down to nothing. The donkey continues for a few days, then keels over. Hodja grumbles, “The bastard! Just when I had him trained to work all day without hay!”

Whenever I hear about longevity by caloric restriction, I immediately think of this story.

But to turn to real science, what is the basis for caloric restriction as a method of prolonging life? The answer is... not humans. The basis is that it appears (emphasis on the appears) that feeding several organisms, including mice and rhesus monkeys, near-starvation diets seems to roughly double their lifespan. Ergo, reasons your average hopeful transhumanist, the same could happen to me if only I had the discipline and time to do the same –- plus the money, of course, for all the supplements and vitamins that such a regime absolutely requires, to say nothing of the expense of such boutique items as digital balances.

I will say a few words first about such beasties as flies (Drosophila melanogaster) and worms (Caenorhabditis elegans) before I climb the evolutionary ladder. Many organisms in other branches of the evolutionary tree have two “quantum” modes: survival or reproduction. For example, many invertebrates are programmed to die or be killed immediately after reproduction, occasionally becoming food for their progeny. In some cases, their digestive tracts literally disintegrate after they release their fertilized eggs. Conversely, feeding an infertile worker bee royal jelly turns her into a fully functioning queen. The general principle behind caloric restriction is that it essentially turns the organism’s switch from reproductive to survival mode.

Cartoon credit: Sidney Harris
Most vertebrates from reptiles onward face a less stark choice. Because either or both parents are required to lavish care on offspring, vertebrate reproduction is not an automatic death sentence. So let’s segue to humans. Due to their unique birth details, human children literally require the vaunted village to raise them -- parents, grandparents, first degree relatives, the lot. At the same time, it doesn’t take scientific research to notice that when calories and/or body fat fall below a certain minimum, girls and women stop ovulating. It also takes just living in a context of famine, whether chosen or enforced, to notice the effects of starvation on people, from lethargy and fatigue to wasted muscles, brittle bones and immune system suppression, crowned with irritability, depression, cognitive impairment and overall diminished social affect.

Ah, says the sophisticated caloric restriction advocate, but much of this comes from imbalances in the diet –- missing vitamins, minerals, etc. Well, yes and no. Let me give a few examples.

All vitamins except B and C are lipid-soluble. If we don’t have enough fat, our body can’t absorb them. So the excess ends up in odd places where it may in fact be toxic –- hence the orange carotenoid-induced tint that is a common telltale sign of many caloric restriction devotees. Furthermore, if we have inadequate body fat, not only are we infertile, infection-prone and slow to heal due to lack of necessary hormones and cholesterol; our homeostatic mechanisms (such as temperature regulation) also flag. And because caloric restriction forces the body to use up muscle protein and leaches bones of minerals, practitioners can end up with weakened hearts and bone fractures.

Speaking of fat, the brain has no energy reserves. It runs exclusively on glucose. When starved of glucose, it starts doing odd things, including the release of stress chemicals. This, in turn, can induce anything from false euphoria to hallucinations. This phenomenon is well known from anorexics and diabetics entering hypoglycemia, but also from shamans, desert prophets and members of cultures that undertook vision quests, which invariably included prolonged fasting.

So caloric restriction may make its practitioners feel euphoric. But just as people feel they have comprehended the universe while under the influence of psychoactive drugs, so does this practice impair judgment and related executive functions –- let alone causing physiological problems.

So what about those glowing reports which purport to have demonstrated that caloric restriction doubles the lifespans of mice and rhesus monkeys, as well as giving them glossy pelts? Surely we can put up with a bit of mental confusion, even failing erections, in exchange for a longer life, as long as it’s of high quality –- otherwise we’ll end up like poor Tithonus, who was granted immortality but not youth and dwindled into a shriveled husk before the gods in their whimsical mercy turned him into a cicada. And it does seem that caloric restriction decreases such banes of extended human lifespan as diabetes and atherosclerosis. Well, there’s something interesting going on, all right, but not what people (like to) think.

Flaskmouse. Photo credit: www.starshipnivan.com
In biology, details are crucial and mice are not humans. In Eldorado Desperadoes I: Of Mice and Men [See Resources], I explained at length why non-human studies are proof of principle at best, irrelevant at worst. Laboratory mice and monkeys are bred to reproduce early and rapidly. They’re fed rich diets and lead inactive lives –- the equivalent of couch potatoes. The caloric restriction studies have essentially returned the animals to the normal levels of nutrition that they would attain in the wild. Indeed, caloric restriction of wild mice does not extend their lives and when caloric levels fall below about 50%, both lab and wild mice promptly keel over, like Hodja’s donkey. In the rhesus studies, lifespans appeared extended only when the investigators counted a subset of the deaths in the animal group they tested.

On the molecular level, much attention has been recently paid to sirtuin activators, reservatrol chief among them. Sirtuins are a class of proteins that regulate several cell processes, including aspects of DNA repair, cell cycle and metabolism. This means they’re de facto pleiotropic, which should give would-be life extenders pause. As for resveratrol, it doesn’t even extend life in mice –- so the longer lives of the red-wine loving French result from other causes, almost certainly including their less sedentary habits and their universal and sane health coverage. That won’t stop ambitious entrepreneurs from setting up startups that test sirtuin activators and their ilk, but I predict they will be as effective as leptin and its relatives were for non-genetic obesity.

This brings to mind the important and often overlooked fact that genes and phenotypes never act in isolation. An allele or behavior that is beneficial in one context becomes deleterious in another. When longer-lived mutants and wild-type equivalents are placed in different environments, all longevity mutations result in adaptive disadvantages (some obvious, some subtle) that make the mutant strain disappear within a few generations regardless of the environment specifics.

When starved of glucose, the brain starts doing odd things, including the release of stress chemicals. This, in turn, can induce anything from false euphoria to hallucinations.

Similarly, caloric restriction in an upper-middle class context in the US may be possible, if unpleasant. But it’s a death sentence for a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh who may need to build up and retain her weight in anticipation of a famine. For women in particular, who are prone to both anorexia and osteoporosis, caloric restriction is dangerous –- hovering as it does near keeling over territory. As for isolated, inbred groups that have more than their share of centenarians, their genes are far more responsible for their lifespan than their diet. So does the fact that they invariably lead lives of moderate but sustained physical activity surrounded by extended families, as long as they are relatively dominant within their family and community.

Human lifespan has already nearly tripled, courtesy of vaccines, antibiotics, clean water and use of soap during childbirth. It is unlikely that we will be able to extend it much further. Extrapolations indicate that caloric restriction will not lengthen our lives by more than 3% (a pitiful return for such herculean efforts) and that we can get the same result from reasonable eating habits combined with exercise. Recent, careful studies have established that moderately overweight people are the longest-lived, whereas extra-lean people live as long as do obese ones.

So what can you really do to extend your life? Well, as is the case with many other quality-of-life attributes, you should choose your parents carefully. Good alleles for susceptibilities to degenerative age-related diseases (diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and dementia) are a great help -- as is high income in a developed country with first-rate medical services, which will ensure excellent lifelong nutrition and enough leisure time and/or devoted underlings to make it possible to attend to suchlike things.

Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix

2009-10-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/ghost-shell-why-our-brains-will-never-live-matrix

Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix
Written By: Athena Andreadis
Date Published: October 19, 2009

When surveying the goals of transhumanists, I found it striking how heavily many of them favor conventional engineering. This seems inefficient and inelegant, since such engineering reproduces slowly, clumsily and imperfectly, what biological systems have fine-tuned for eons, from nanobots (enzymes and miRNAs) to virtual reality (lucid dreaming). Recently, I was reading an article about memory chips. (See Resources) In it, the primary researcher makes two statements that fall in the “not even wrong” category: “Brain cells are nothing but leaky bags of salt solution,” and “I don’t need a grand theory of the mind to fix what is essentially a signal-processing problem.”

And it came to me in a flash that many transhumanists are uncomfortable with biology and would rather bypass it altogether for two reasons, each exemplified by these sentences. The first is that biological systems are squishy — they exude blood, sweat and tears, which are deemed proper only for women and weaklings. The second is that, unlike silicon systems, biological software is inseparable from hardware. And therein lies the major stumbling block to personal immortality.

The quest to restore damaged cognitive functions with electronic parts begins with a small dish of living rat brains [above], located inside a lab at the University of Southern California.

The analogy du siècle equates the human brain with a computer -- a vast, complex one performing dizzying feats of parallel processing, but still a computer. However, that is incorrect for several crucial reasons that bear directly upon mind portability.

A human is not born as a tabula rasa, but with a brain that’s already wired and functioning as a mind. Furthermore, the brain forms as the embryo develops. It cannot be inserted after the fact, like an engine in a car chassis or software programs in an empty computer box.

Theoretically speaking, how could we manage to live forever while remaining recognizably ourselves to us? One way is to ensure that the brain remains fully functional indefinitely. Another is to move the brain into a new and/or indestructible "container,” whether carbon, silicon, metal or a combination thereof. Not surprisingly, these notions have received extensive play in science fiction, from the messianic angst of The Matrix to Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.

To give you the punch line up front, the first alternative may eventually become feasible but the second one is intrinsically impossible. Recall that a particular mind is an emergent property (an artifact, if you prefer the term) of its specific brain –- nothing more, but also nothing less. Unless the transfer of a mind retains the brain, there will be no continuity of consciousness. Regardless of what the post-transfer identity may think, the original mind with its associated brain and body will still die –- and be aware of the death process. Furthermore, the newly minted person/ality will start diverging from the original the moment it gains consciousness. This is an excellent way to leave a detailed memorial or a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.

What I just mentioned essentially takes care of all versions of mind uploading, if by uploading we mean recreation of an individual brain by physical transfer rather than a simulation that passes Searle’s Chinese room test. However, even if we ever attain the infinite technical and financial resources required to scan a brain/mind 1) non-destructively and 2) at a resolution that will indeed recreate the original, several additional obstacles still loom.

The act of placing a brain into another biological body, à la Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, could arise as the endpoint extension of appropriating blood, sperm, ova, wombs or other organs in a heavily stratified society. Besides being de facto murder of the original occupant, it would also require that the incoming brain be completely intact, and be able to rewire for all physical and mental functions. After electrochemical activity ceases in the brain, neuronal integrity deteriorates in a matter of seconds. The slightest delay in preserving the tissue seriously skews in vitro research results, which tells you how well this method would work in maintaining details of the original’s personality.

To recreate a brain/mind in silico, whether a cyborg body or a computer frame, is equally problematic. Large portions of the brain process and interpret signals from the body and the environment. Without a body, these functions will flail around and can result in the brain... well, losing its mind. Without corrective “pingbacks” from the environment that are filtered by the body, the brain can easily misjudge to the point of hallucination, as seen in phenomena like phantom limb pain or fibromyalgia. Additionally, processing at light speed will probably result in madness, as everything will appear to happen simultaneously or will change order arbitrarily.

Finally, without context we may lose the ability for empathy, as is shown in Bacigalupi’s disturbing story People of Sand and Slag. Empathy is as instrumental to high-order intelligence as it is to survival: without it, we are at best idiot savants, at worst psychotic killers. Of course, someone can argue that the entire universe can be recreated in VR. At that point, we’re in god territory… except that even if some of us manage to live the perfect Second Life, there’s still the danger of someone unplugging the computer or deleting the noomorphs. So there go the Star Trek transporters, there go the Battlestar Galactica Cylon resurrection tanks.

Let’s now discuss the possible: in situ replacement. Many people argue that replacing brain cells is not a threat to identity because we change cells rapidly and routinely during our lives -- and that, in fact, this is imperative if we're to remain capable of learning throughout our lifespan.

It's true that our somatic cells recycle, each type on a slightly different timetable, but there are two prominent exceptions. The germ cells are one, which is why both genders — not just women — are progressively likelier to have children with congenital problems as they age. Our neurons are another. We’re born with as many of these as we’re ever going to have and we lose them steadily during our life. There is a tiny bit of novel neurogenesis in the olfactory system, but the rest of our 100 billion microprocessors neither multiply nor divide. What changes are the neuronal processes (axons and dendrites) and their contacts with each other and with other cells (synapses).

These tiny processes make and unmake us as individuals. We are capable of learning as long as we live, though with decreasing ease and speed, because our axons and synapses are plastic as long as the neurons that generate them last. But although many functions of the brain are diffuse, they are organized in localized clusters (which can differ from person to person, sometimes radically). Removal of a large portion of a brain structure results in irreversible deficits, unless it happens in very early infancy. We know this from watching people go through transient or permanent personality and ability changes after head trauma, stroke, extensive brain surgery or during the agonizing process of various neurodegenerative diseases, dementia in particular.

However, intrepid immortaleers need not give up. There’s real hope in the horizon for renewing a brain and other body parts: embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Depending on the stage of isolation, ESCs are truly totipotent – something, incidentally, not true of adult stem cells that can only differentiate into a small set of related cell types. If neuronal precursors can be introduced to the right spot and coaxed to survive, differentiate and form synapses, we will gain the ability to extend the lifespan of a brain and its mind.

Having brain replacement would rank way higher in the trauma scale.

It will take an enormous amount of fine-tuning to induce ESCs to do the right thing. Each step that I casually listed in the previous sentence (localized introduction, persistence, differentiation, synaptogenesis) is still barely achievable in the lab with isolated cell cultures, let alone the brain of a living human. Primary neurons live about three weeks in the dish, even though they are fed better than most children in developing countries -- and if cultured as precursors, they never attain full differentiation. The ordeals of Christopher Reeve and Stephen Hawking illustrate how hard it is to solve even “simple” problems of either grey or white brain matter.

The technical hurdles will eventually be solved. A larger obstacle is that each round of ESC replacement will have to be very slow and small-scale, to fulfill the requirement of continuous consciousness and guarantee the recreation of pre-existing neuronal and synaptic networks. As a result, renewal of large brain swaths will require such a lengthy lifespan that the replacements may never catch up. Not surprisingly, the efforts in this direction have begun with such neurodegenerative diseases as Parkinson’s, whose causes are not only well defined but also highly localized: the dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra.

Renewing the hippocampus or cortex of a Alzheimer’s sufferer is several orders of magnitude more complicated and in stark contrast to the “black box” assumption of the memory chip researcher we will need to know exactly what and where to repair. To go through the literally mind-altering feats shown in Whedon’s Dollhouse would be the brain equivalent of insect metamorphosis. It would take a very long time – and the person undergoing the procedure would resemble Terry Schiavo at best, if not the interior of a pupating larva.

Dollhouse gets one fact right: if such rewiring is too extensive or too fast, the person will have no memory of their prior life, desirable or otherwise. But as is typical in Hollywood science (an oxymoron, but we’ll let it stand), it gets a more crucial fact wrong: such a person is unlikely to function like a fully aware human or even a physically well-coordinated one for a significant length of time -- because her brain pathways will need to be validated by physical and mental feedback before they stabilize. Many people never recover full physical or mental capacity after prolonged periods of anesthesia. Having brain replacement would rank way higher in the trauma scale.

The most common ecological, social and ethical argument against individual quasi-eternal life is that the resulting overcrowding will mean certain and unpleasant death by other means unless we are able to access extraterrestrial resources.

Also, those who visualize infinite lifespan invariably think of it in connection with themselves and those whom they like -- choosing to ignore that others will also be around forever, from genocidal maniacs to cult followers, to say nothing of annoying in-laws or predatory bosses. At the same time, long lifespan will almost certainly be a requirement for long-term crewed space expeditions, although such longevity will have to be augmented by sophisticated molecular repair of somatic and germ mutations caused by cosmic radiation. So if we want eternal life, we had better first have the Elysian fields and chariots of the gods that go with it.

Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about

2009-10-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427323.500-brain-scanners-can-tell-what-youre-thinking-about.html?full=true

Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about
28 October 2009 by Ewen Callaway, Chicago
Magazine issue 2732.

WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into the human mind.

In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing - and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering.

Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field's most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans - and even to diagnose eating disorders.

Understandably, such developments are raising concerns about "mind reading" technologies, which might be exploited by advertisers or oppressive governments (see "The risks of open-mindedness"). Yet despite - or perhaps because of - the recent progress in the field, most researchers are wary of calling their work mind-reading. Emphasising its limitations, they call it neural decoding.

The development of 'mind-reading' technologies is raising concerns about who might exploit them
They are quick to add that it may lead to powerful benefits, however. These include gaining a better understanding of the brain and improved communication with people who can't speak or write, such as stroke victims or people with neurodegenerative diseases. There is also excitement over the possibility of being able to visualise something highly graphical that someone healthy, perhaps an artist, is thinking.

So how does neural decoding work? Gallant's team drew international attention last year by showing that brain imaging could predict which of a group of pictures someone was looking at, based on activity in their visual cortex. But simply decoding still images alone won't do, says Nishimoto. "Our natural visual experience is more like movies."

Nishimoto and Gallant started their most recent experiment by showing two lab members 2 hours of video clips culled from DVD trailers, while scanning their brains. A computer program then mapped different patterns of activity in the visual cortex to different visual aspects of the movies such as shape, colour and movement. The program was then fed over 200 days' worth of YouTube clips, and used the mappings it had gathered from the DVD trailers to predict the brain activity that each YouTube clip would produce in the viewers.

Finally, the same two lab members watched a third, fresh set of clips which were never seen by the computer program, while their brains were scanned. The computer program compared these newly captured brain scans with the patterns of predicted brain activity it had produced from the YouTube clips. For each second of brain scan, it chose the 100 YouTube clips it considered would produce the most similar brain activity - and then merged them. The result was continuous, very blurry footage, corresponding to a crude "brain read-out" of the clip that the person was watching.

In some cases, this was more successful than others. When one lab member was watching a clip of the actor Steve Martin in a white shirt, the computer program produced a clip that looked like a moving, human-shaped smudge, with a white "torso", but the blob bears little resemblance to Martin, with nothing corresponding to the moustache he was sporting.

Another clip revealed a quirk of Gallant and Nishimoto's approach: a reconstruction of an aircraft flying directly towards the camera - and so barely seeming to move - with a city skyline in the background omitted the plane but produced something akin to a skyline. That's because the algorithm is more adept at reading off brain patterns evoked by watching movement than those produced by watching apparently stationary objects.

"It's going to get a lot better," says Gallant. The pair plan to improve the reconstruction of movies by providing the program with additional information about the content of the videos.

Team member Thomas Naselaris demonstrated the power of this approach on still images at the conference. For every pixel in a set of images shown to a viewer and used to train the program, researchers indicated whether it was part of a human, an animal, an artificial object or a natural one. The software could then predict where in a new set of images these classes of objects were located, based on brain scans of the picture viewers.

Movies and pictures aren't the only things that can be discerned from brain activity, however. A team led by Eleanor Maguire and Martin Chadwick at University College London presented results at the Chicago meeting showing that our memory isn't beyond the reach of brain scanners.

Movies and pictures aren't the only things that can be discerned from brain activity
A brain structure called the hippocampus is critical for forming memories, so Maguire's team focused its scanner on this area while 10 volunteers recalled videos they had watched of different women performing three banal tasks, such as throwing away a cup of coffee or posting a letter. When Maguire's team got the volunteers to recall one of these three memories, the researchers could tell which the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy of about 50 per cent.

That's well above chance, says Maguire, but it is not mind reading because the program can't decode memories that it hasn't already been trained on. "You can't stick somebody in a scanner and know what they're thinking." Rather, she sees neural decoding as a way to understand how the hippocampus and other brain regions form and recall a memory.

Maguire could tackle this by varying key aspects of the clips - the location or the identity of the protagonist, for instance - and see how those changes affect their ability to decode the memory. She is also keen to determine how memory encoding changes over the weeks, months or years after memories are first formed.

Meanwhile, decoding how people plan for the future is the hot topic for John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany. In work presented at the conference, he and colleague Ida Momennejad found they could use brain scans to predict intentions in subjects planning and performing simple tasks. What's more, by showing people, including some with eating disorders, images of food, Haynes's team could determine which suffered from anorexia or bulimia via brain activity in one of the brain's "reward centres".

Another focus of neural decoding is language. Marcel Just at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleague Tom Mitchell reported last year that they could predict which of two nouns - such as "celery" and "airplane" - a subject is thinking of, at rates well above chance. They are now working on two-word phrases.

Their ultimate goal of turning brain scans into short sentences is distant, perhaps impossible. But as with the other decoding work, it's an idea that's as tantalising as it is creepy.

The risks of open-mindedness
The feats of decoding brain scans to predict someone's thoughts are undoubtedly dazzling (see main story), but "neural decoding" techniques are also limited in how they can be applied. Right now, they only work if someone's brain has already been scanned multiple times, and in very specific circumstances. So can we really call this mind reading? And should we worry about potentially creepy uses for such technology?

To some extent it's a question of semantics, but many researchers, including neuroscientist Russell Poldrack at the University of Texas at Austin, say it's clear that the work done to date is a far cry from what most people think of as mind reading, such as predicting whether a terrorist has plans to detonate a bomb on an aircraft.

Yet even if such applications are a very distant possibility, we should start thinking about the ethical issues now, says John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany.

Some companies already claim that brain scans can help to pick out liars and determine whether an advert works or not, and there may be some truth in such claims. Haynes says standards are needed to spell out what neural decoding can and cannot reliably do, so as not to erode public trust in the field.

Neuroscientist Jack Gallant at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. He says that neural decoding could be a double-edged sword. If his hopes for the technology ever come to fruition, he says, the same machine that reads the thoughts of patients with a neurodegenerative disease may well find more nefarious applications at some point.

No men OR women needed: Scientists create sperm and eggs from stem cells

2009-10-29T11:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=100206

No men OR women needed: Scientists create sperm and eggs from stem cells
By Fiona Macrae
Last updated at 11:49 AM on 29th October 2009

Human eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in research which could change the face of parenthood.

It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own.

But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies.

Forever fertile? Infertile men and women could have their own biological children using the breakthrough sperm and eggs
Opponents argue that it is wrong to meddle with the building blocks of life and warn that the advances taking place to tackle infertility risk distorting and damaging relations between family members.

The U.S. government-funded research also offers the prospect of a 'miracle pill' which staves off the menopause, allowing women to wait longer to have a child.

It centres on stem cells, widely seen as a repair kit for the body.

Scientists at Stanford University in California found the right cocktail of chemicals and vitamins to coax the cells into becoming eggs and sperm.

Controversial: Britain's oldest mother Elizabeth Adeney, 67, who went abroad for IVF, is pictured here with her newborn son in June this year
The sperm had heads and short tails and are thought to have been mature enough to fertilise an egg.

The eggs were at a much earlier stage but were still much more developed than any created so far by other scientists.

The double success, published in the journal Nature, raises the prospect of men and women one day 'growing' their own sperm and eggs for use in IVF treatments.

The American team used stem cells taken from embryos in the first days of life but hope to repeat the process with slivers of skin.

The skin cells would first be exposed to a mixture which wound back their biological clocks to embryonic stem cell state, before being transformed into sperm or eggs.

Starting with a person's own skin would also mean the lab-grown sperm or eggs would not be rejected by the body.

The science also raises the possibility of 'male eggs' made from men's skin and 'female sperm' from women's skin.

This would allow gay couples to have children genetically their own, although many scientists are sceptical about whether it is possible to create sperm from female cells, which lack the male Y chromosome.

The U.S. breakthrough could unlock many of the secrets of egg and sperm production, leading to new drug treatments for infertility.

Defects in sperm and egg development are the biggest cause of infertility but, because many of the key stages occur in the womb, scientists have struggled to study the process in detail.

Researcher Rita Reijo Pera, of Stanford's Centre for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research, believes new fertility drugs are just five years away.

However, safety and ethical concerns mean that artificial sperm and eggs are much further away from use.

Dr Reijo Pera said any future use of artificial eggs and sperm would have to be subject to guidelines.

'Whether one builds the boundaries on religion or just on an internal sense or of right and wrong, these are important. In this field, it is not "anything goes".'

Scientists at Newcastle University claimed to have made sperm from embryonic stem cells earlier this year but the research paper has been retracted.

Dr Allan Pacey, a Sheffield University expert in male fertility said: 'Ultimately this may help us find a cure for male infertility. Not necessarily by making sperm in the laboratory, I personally think that is unlikely, but by identifying new targets for drugs or genes that may stimulate sperm production to occur naturally.

'This is a long way off, but it is a laudable dream.'

Dr Peter Saunders, of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said that IVF should be the preserve of married couples.

'The question is, why are we creating artificial gametes (eggs and sperm) and aborting 200,000 babies a year when there are many, many couples willing to adopt?'

Josephine Quintavalle, of the campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, warned that any flaws in the artificial sperm or eggs could be passed on to future generations.

Anthony Ozimic, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: 'The use of artificial gametes in reproduction would distort and damage relations between family members.

'There are no instances of any major medical advance achieved by abandoning basic ethical principles such as safeguarding the right to life.'

Define ‘person’

2009-10-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/define_person/

Define ‘person’
Sheila Liaugminas | Sunday, 25 October 2009

Pro-life and pro-abortion activists are splitting hairs between what it means to be a human being and a human person. The abortion movement has succeeded in gaining acceptance these past 36 years largely on the misguided assumption that the contents of a woman’s womb at and just after conception comprised a ‘blob of tissue’ or something that will develop into a human being. Or, as in the case of intellectually honest but morally challenged Princeton professor Peter Singer (who admits ‘of course you have a human being at conception and abortion takes the life of a human being’)…….the dangerous assumption that human beings aren’t persons without a certain level of cognition. And therefore, not worthy of life.

So the pro-lifers of every political stripe across the country are engaging courts and legislatures to bring defining clarity to - and protection for - every single life. After all, it’s the first of three inalienable rights the Constitution affirms, “endowed by our Creator”, no less.

In Missouri, they’re circulating a petition to place two initiatives on the November 2010 ballot.

The first initiative, called the Missouri Taxpayer Protection Amendment, is submitted by a pro-life group named Missouri Roundtable For Life.

The amendment would stop the state from using taxpayer dollars to finance abortion and human cloning….

The second petition, filed by Gregory Thompson, would change the constitutional definition of “person” to be “from the beginning of biological development.”

The personhood amendment would likely challenge Roe v. Wade and make abortion and bioethics practices like human cloning and embryonic stem cell research illegal. It would almost certainly be challenged by abortion advocates in court.

The pro-life movement welcomes any opportunity to confront the facts and laws of life in court.

Another petition is circulating in Nevada.

The proposed amendment would change the Nevada constitution to read: “In the great state of Nevada, the term ‘person’ applies to every human being. Article I Section 8 of the Nevada constitution states, ‘No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.’”

And any medical textbook explains that at conception, a human being is conceived.

“While the state has no authority to grant inalienable rights, it has the obligation to protect them,” stated [Richard] Ziser in a press release issued Thursday. “With an ever more oppressive federal government lacking leadership in protecting the weakest and most vulnerable in our midst, the people of Nevada are taking necessary action to correct this injustice. This amendment addresses the most important civil right, the right to live, without which all other civil rights are rendered irrelevant.”

"You Are Not a Pawn, You Are A Sovereign!"

2009-10-27T14:25:00.001-07:00

You should always !!!FIGHT!!! AGAINST TYRANNY!!!

www.narlo.org

"You Are Not a Pawn, You Are A Sovereign!"
By Ron Ewart, President
National Association of Rural Landowners and nationally recognized author on freedom and property rights issues
© Copyright October 26, 2009 - All Rights Reserved

No other can take your property, your labor, your thoughts, or your life from you without your permission, for that is theft, or murder and it is a crime on your person and on humanity as well, that is deserved of severe punishment. For you are an individual, endowed with certain unalienable rights, a gift from your creator. Not because someone wrote it down in a book, or a Declaration, or a Constitution, or shouted it from the roof tops. It is true because it is the law of nature. It is an absolute law with no contravening or superior law to supersede it. It is the law of all laws and cannot be repealed by man or God.

Only you own your life, your property, your thoughts and your labor and all is sovereign to that which is you. You are not a pawn that can be battered about at someone else's will, or a whim, or for entertainment, or for the pure exercise of absolute power. You are not a slave to the collective, or the elite and you owe nothing to humanity other than what you choose to give of your own volition, as a free spirit, endowed with free choice. Your only responsibility is to take care of yourself and those in your charge and to treat others with the same respect and dignity as you desire to be treated.

In contrast to an individual man or woman, a plant rises up out of the moist, rich earth from a tiny seed no bigger than a few grains of sand. Its journey through life is preordained. It cannot sway from the goal set for it by its chemistry and biology. Somewhere along the way a bud forms on the end of a stalk or tendril of the plant and in but a few days, erupts into a splendor of color and a soft, enticing shape; each plant having its own unique form. Nestled inside the flower, which it has now become, lies the makings for its offspring and with a little help from other creatures, the chemical means to allow it to reproduce. Soon it is visited by a host of flying insects and birds and from that embrace and the ultimate distribution of the contents of its interior, the seeds are sown for a new generation of the species. That is the plant's contribution to life. But you are not a plant. You have something the plant does not have ..... free choice.

You did not create you. In the beginning you had no control over the mechanisms that formed the shape of your body, the characteristics of your personality or your mind, or the capabilities that were granted to your body and mind by virtue of genetics and life with or without your parents. But no matter what anyone tells you, you were not created to serve others, unless it is your choice to do so. In fact, you were created to express who you are. You were created to serve yourself and those you love.

You are unique, a snow flake, one of a kind and no other can be like you. It is your individual uniqueness that is your value. It is what you express or achieve as a person, that is your mark, your legacy, your reason for being here. No other person, group of persons or a government has the right to take that from you. You are not a pawn, for you are sovereign under the supreme law of nature. You are free to choose good or evil, but if you choose evil, there will be a price to pay.

A sovereign can be defined as an individual that believes in self-ownership; a strong commitment to individual rights; a distrust of political democracy; a belief in the right to financial and personal privacy; a willingness to think and act outside the square. The idea of an individual sovereign in action is what has given America its unique and exceptional character, its power, its creativity, its productivity and even its generosity. It is each individual sovereign pursuing his or her life, liberty and happiness that sets each of us a part from all other humans on earth. It is our strength ..... it is our foundation. It is the bedrock upon which we stand. It is unequivocal, sacrosanct and unassailable.

But if a bully descends upon a sovereign, it is up to that sovereign to defend against the bully, or to rally other sovereigns in his defense, as we must do today. For the bully is knocking on our door and he has evil intent on his mind. He intends to claim our property, our thoughts, our labor and our life as his own and take away our sovereignty over our own lives. He intends to control our land, our water, our food, our health and our energy. He is well on his way to achieving his goal. In the end, he intends to take away our free choice and take away our liberty ..... but only if we let him. He is the enemy of freedom.

If you believe in all your heart that your property, your thoughts, your labor and your life are only yours to give and that your life is sovereign, then you have no choice but to defend it against the bully and if necessary, defend it with your life. For if you choose not to defend it by whatever means, you will lose it and your children will lose it and your children's children will lose it. It will then be left to another braver generation to reclaim freedom and reclaim it they will, but at a great cost. When freedom is finally reclaimed once more, the future victors will look back at our generation and label them cowards.

It is now time to decide ..... be you pawn, or be you sovereign? ..... be you coward, or be you brave? ..... be you timid, or be you fearless? Liberty awaits your answer and liberty grows anxious because liberty's life and future is on the line.

Technotopia

2009-10-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.futurenet.org/issues/technology-who-chooses/technotopia

Technotopia
by Andrew Kimbrell
posted Sep 30, 2001

We are increasingly barraged with disturbing high-tech headlines:
Medical team announces plan to clone humans
Nano-robots learn to replicate themselves
US firms seek patents on human genetic code
Research mice ‘humanized' with fetal organ transplants
MIT scientists attempt to download human brain into computers
Up to 5 million children on new generation of psychotropic medication

We are inundated with stories about biotechnology, nanotechnology, advanced computerization, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, cutting-edge pharmaceuticals, and myriad other “new” technologies. Predictably, the media stories have corporations and researchers heralding these new technologies as the dawn of a coming utopia of health
and wealth, and yes, perhaps even immortality itself.

The critics, however, warn of dire risks to the environment and the rending of our social fabric.

What does this all mean? Are the “new” technologies more hype than help, more science fiction than fact? Are we on the verge of utopia or Brave New World? Answers to the urgent questions about the future of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, AI, and other new technologies can only be found in the context of a review of the past relationship between humans and technology.

Over the past century, we have witnessed technology slowly becoming an omnipresent reality for our society, permeating the vast majority of our public and private lives. Our homes, workplaces, transportation, food, energy, entertainment, leisure, education, and government have all become integral elements of the technological grid.

If we tally the time spent in cars, office cubicles, in front of televisions or computers, using telephones, Palm Pilots, and all our other gadgets, it is clear that we spend the vast majority of our waking hours with technology and working for the technocratic organizations (corporations and bureaucracies) required to run the vast technological system in which we live. Each of us, more and more, lives in a kind of technological cocoon where much of our action and communication is mediated through machines or technocratic institutions.

While our earliest ancestors lived fully in the natural milieu, and our most recent forebears in a more social milieu, modern man now lives primarily in what sociologist Jacques Ellul called a technological milieu. For us it is the technosphere, not nature or even other people, that is the source of our livelihood, food, energy, education, entertainment, and vision of progress.

For some at least, the substitution of technology for natural and social environments represents an immense improvement for humankind. Author and engineer Samuel Florman writes, “I can see no evidence that frequent contact with nature is essential to human well- being.” He goes on to say that technology has saved us from the “callous brutality, the unbelievable pain, the ever present threat of untimely death for oneself (and worse one's children) which were the natural realities with which our ancestors lived.”

The respected scholar O. B. Hardison has waxed even more fervent over the utopian possibilities. He notes that accepting the modern world “involves faith in silicone devices that is analogous to religious faiths.” Once technology frees us from our “carbon prison” and turns us into silicon beings, he predicts, we will be godlike: “Silicon life will be immortal. The farthest reaches of space will be accessible to it.”

Techno-utopia
As the techno-utopian vision becomes ever more futuristic and paradisiacal, serious problems are developing in the more mundane techno-life on Earth. Though it may have freed us from certain past terrors, the technological takeover has spawned unprecedented horrors of its own.

Our nuclear technology has put all of humanity, and the Earth itself, on a computer tripline to Armageddon. And our industrial technology has brought humanity face to face with the first truly global environmental crisis in recorded history. Over the last two decades the public has been jolted by revelations about the impacts of technology on the biosphere—global warming, ozone depletions, species extinction, deforestation, desertification.

Moreover, even as the technosphere exploits and destroys the natural world, its inhuman pace exhausts our emotional and spiritual resources. This has led to an unprecedented shattering of our communities, families, and psychological well-being.

The crisis over the technosphere's destruction of the natural and social milieus has created an historic dilemma. Our society and much of the world's population has become fully dependent on, and deeply addicted to, the technological environment. Yet this technological milieu is threatening the very viability of life on Earth—not to mention our own sanity. It is becoming increasingly clear that we cannot survive with our technology, yet we can't imagine living without it.

In the early 1970s some saw this dilemma emerging. Led by prophets like E. F. Schumacher, they began developing technologies that are compatible with the natural world, sustainable communities, and the human spirit.

A small but persistent movement began urging the substitution of appropriate technologies for the mega-technological system that was rapidly decimating creation. We dreamed of a time of elegant technologies that would allow us to spend our time doing “good work” in harmony with nature, rather than subjecting ourselves to daily degradation as cogs in the technological machine. We imagined a time when our work would be true callings engaging us in healing relationships with creation and one another, allowing us full expression of our faith in a higher good, and deepening our capacity for holistic understanding.

What we did not foresee was that the technological elite had a very different solution to the inevitable and looming technological crisis. Corporations, academics, and researchers came to realize, albeit slowly, that current technology is not compatible with life, that the contradictions between the technosphere and the survival of nature and society were ever heightening. They, too, saw that a solution was urgently needed.

To deal with this historic dilemma, the techno-utopians and their corporate sponsors outlined a breathtaking initiative. This initiative, however, was not to change technology so that it better fit the needs of living things, as we were so eagerly advocating. No, they had, and have, a very different and stunningly self-serving approach. They decided to engineer life, indeed reality itself, so that it better fit the technological system.

It is in this chilling context that the enormous significance of the current revolutions in technology can be fully appreciated. Here we have the key to the otherwise bewildering high-tech headlines and to much of our social malaise.

If we despair because our lives have become little more than a frenzy of meaningless “multi-tasking,” their solution is to change us so we conform with the dehumanizing technological system, rather than change the process so that it responds to human needs.

Appropriate technology derailed
So change us they have. In the US alone, over 50 million of us are on psychotropic medication, various mind-changing drugs, to get through the work day. About the same number of us are on medication to try and get through the night. And 5 million of our kids are on mind-altering pharmaceuticals to get through the school day. Not to worry if the medication is required at ever higher doses or stops working altogether, or if you've chosen instead alcohol or illegal drug addiction; the
genetic engineers promise us that genes for depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and even shyness will soon be found and removed.

We have already substituted “virtual communities” for the relationships, kinship, and neighborhoods lost in our full-time devotion to technology. Numerous computer scientists ultimately plan to make us all “virtual” by downloading us into silicon chips, making us “one” with our computerized office machinery. It is the final solution to the technological dilemma. We can preserve our dehumanized production system by fundamentally changing who we are, by becoming technology ourselves.

As we become more efficient human resources for the system, we need not fear the loss of our natural resources. The nanotechnologists promise to rebuild the world molecule by molecule so it can be more efficiently utilized by the technosphere.

Global warming is also conquerable. Plants are being genetically engineered to resist droughts and radical weather conditions; ultimately all of life from microbe to man can be engineered to fit the new environmental realities generated by techno-pollution. The cruelties of “factory” farming can be overcome not by more humane systems of animal husbandry, but by changing the basic nature of animals. Purdue University researchers recently succeeded in removing the “mothering instinct” gene from laying hens so they could be more efficient egg laying “machines.”

The technosphere, then, is not merely exploiting and wasting the natural and social milieus. It is fundamentally remaking nature and human in technology's image. Life and reality itself are being absorbed into the technosphere and being reduced to mere components in the system.

With this new initiative comes a profound change in our worldview. As Thomas Berry says, “nature [and one could add humans] have been transformed from a community of subjects to a collection of objects.” All of the created order is now seen as mere manufactures: collections of molecular or genetic information that can be mixed, matched, and recombined so that they may better serve the needs of the technological system. It is appalling, but within this context not surprising, that for the last 20 years (via a one-vote Supreme Court margin in 1980) the US has allowed the patenting of life, defining all living forms as “machines or manufactures,” under Section 101 of the Patent Act.

It is axiomatic in much psychotherapy that there can be no healing without relationship. Through our technology and technocracies we have horribly wounded much of the natural world, our human and nonhuman communities, and our very psyches. We cannot heal these wounds without reestablishing a deep participation with creation, community, and our spiritual life. However, unless halted, the technological takeover of life will forever bar this critical rapprochement, permanently closing off the urgently needed healing process. For with the success of the new technologies—or even with their more likely disastrous failure—nature and humanity as we have known them will cease to exist.

Currently ensconced in our technological cocoons, many of us have become “autistic” to the ongoing destruction of creation and even the banalization of our own souls. This autism ensures that we will stand by and passively allow the massive and terrible experiment of the technifying of life.

This simply cannot continue. By personal and collective acts of will and imagination we must reassert control over technology. We must break our addiction to the technological system and free ourselves from the techno-cocoons. We must take the political, legal, and organizing steps to say no, to halt these technologies before they are fully disseminated and decimate nature.

We must also imagine an alternative future, one in which the needs of nature and society dictate what our technology will be, and not a nightmarish future where technology dictates the shape of creation and humanity. It is only through such admittedly difficult work that we can hope to heal and reestablish relationship with nature and community. Given the scope and pace of the technological takeover, the time for such action is short.

Why the future doesn't need us.

2009-10-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html

Why the future doesn't need us.

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

By Bill Joy

From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.

I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious.

While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.

It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path.

I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing adystopian scenario:

THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.1

In the book, you don't discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber's next target.

Kaczynski's actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it.

Kaczynski's dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant genes.2

The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved.

I started showing friends the Kaczynski quote fromThe Age of Spiritual Machines; I would hand them Kurzweil's book, let them read the quote, and then watch their reaction as they discovered who had written it. At around the same time, I found Hans Moravec's bookRobot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Moravec is one of the leaders in robotics research, and was a founder of the world's largest robotics research program, at Carnegie Mellon University.Robot gave me more material to try out on my friends - material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski's argument. For example:

The Short Run (Early 2000s)

Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence.

There is probably some breathing room, because we do not live in a completely free marketplace. Government coerces nonmarket behavior, especially by collecting taxes. Judiciously applied, governmental coercion could support human populations in high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while.

A textbook dystopia - and Moravec is just getting wound up. He goes on to discuss how our main job in the 21st century will be "ensuring continued cooperation from the robot industries" by passing laws decreeing that they be "nice,"3 and to describe how seriously dangerous a human can be "once transformed into an unbounded superintelligent robot." Moravec's view is that the robots will eventually succeed us - that humans clearly face extinction.

I decided it was time to talk to my friend Danny Hillis. Danny became famous as the cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation, which built a very powerful parallel supercomputer. Despite my current job title of Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, I am more a computer architect than a scientist, and I respect Danny's knowledge of the information and physical sciences more than that of any other single person I know. Danny is also a highly regarded futurist who thinks long-term - four years ago he started the Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock designed to last 10,000 years, in an attempt to draw attention to the pitifully short attention span of our society. (See "Test of Time,"Wired 8.03, page 78.)

So I flew to Los Angeles for the express purpose of having dinner with Danny and his wife, Pati. I went through my now-familiar routine, trotting out the ideas and passages that I found so disturbing. Danny's answer - directed specifically at Kurzweil's scenario of humans merging with robots - came swiftly, and quite surprised me. He said, simply, that the changes would come gradually, and that we would get used to them.

But I guess I wasn't totally surprised. I had seen a quote from Danny in Kurzweil's book in which he said, "I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it." It seemed that he was at peace with this process and its attendant risks, while I was not.

While talking and thinking about Kurzweil, Kaczynski, and Moravec, I suddenly remembered a novel I had read almost 20 years ago -The White Plague, by Frank Herbert - in which a molecular biologist is driven insane by the senseless murder of his family. To seek revenge he constructs and disseminates a new and highly contagious plague that kills widely but selectively. (We're lucky Kaczynski was a mathematician, not a molecular biologist.) I was also reminded of the Borg ofStar Trek, a hive of partly biological, partly robotic creatures with a strong destructive streak. Borg-like disasters are a staple of science fiction, so why hadn't I been more concerned about such robotic dystopias earlier? Why weren't other people more concerned about these nightmarish scenarios?

Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new - in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.

Much of my work over the past 25 years has been on computer networking, where the sending and receiving of messages creates the opportunity for out-of-control replication. But while replication in a computer or a computer network can be a nuisance, at worst it disables a machine or takes down a network or network service. Uncontrolled self-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk of substantial damage in the physical world.

Each of these technologies also offers untold promise: The vision of near immortality that Kurzweil sees in his robot dreams drives us forward; genetic engineering may soon provide treatments, if not outright cures, for most diseases; and nanotechnology and nanomedicine can address yet more ills. Together they could significantly extend our average life span and improve the quality of our lives. Yet, with each of these technologies, a sequence of small, individually sensible advances leads to an accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great danger.

What was different in the 20th century? Certainly, the technologies underlying the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) - were powerful, and the weapons an enormous threat. But building nuclear weapons required, at least for a time, access to both rare - indeed, effectively unavailable - raw materials and highly protected information; biological and chemical weapons programs also tended to require large-scale activities.

The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.

Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

Nothing about the way I got involved with computers suggested to me that I was going to be facing these kinds of issues.

My life has been driven by a deep need to ask questions and find answers. When I was 3, I was already reading, so my father took me to the elementary school, where I sat on the principal's lap and read him a story. I started school early, later skipped a grade, and escaped into books - I was incredibly motivated to learn. I asked lots of questions, often driving adults to distraction.

As a teenager I was very interested in science and technology. I wanted to be a ham radio operator but didn't have the money to buy the equipment. Ham radio was the Internet of its time: very addictive, and quite solitary. Money issues aside, my mother put her foot down - I was not to be a ham; I was antisocial enough already.

I may not have had many close friends, but I was awash in ideas. By high school, I had discovered the great science fiction writers. I remember especially Heinlein'sHave Spacesuit Will Travel and Asimov's I, Robot, with its Three Laws of Robotics. I was enchanted by the descriptions of space travel, and wanted to have a telescope to look at the stars; since I had no money to buy or make one, I checked books on telescope-making out of the library and read about making them instead. I soared in my imagination.

Thursday nights my parents went bowling, and we kids stayed home alone. It was the night of Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek, and the program made a big impression on me. I came to accept its notion that humans had a future in space, Western-style, with big heroes and adventures. Roddenberry's vision of the centuries to come was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically advanced civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not robots, dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry's dream as part of my own.

I excelled in mathematics in high school, and when I went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate engineering student I took the advanced curriculum of the mathematics majors. Solving math problems was an exciting challenge, but when I discovered computers I found something much more interesting: a machine into which you could put a program that attempted to solve a problem, after which the machine quickly checked the solution. The computer had a clear notion of correct and incorrect, true and false. Were my ideas correct? The machine could tell me. This was very seductive.

I was lucky enough to get a job programming early supercomputers and discovered the amazing power of large machines to numerically simulate advanced designs. When I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I started staying up late, often all night, inventing new worlds inside the machines. Solving problems. Writing the code that argued so strongly to be written.

InThe Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone's biographical novel of Michelangelo, Stone described vividly how Michelangelo released the statues from the stone, "breaking the marble spell," carving from the images in his mind.4 In my most ecstatic moments, the software in the computer emerged in the same way. Once I had imagined it in my mind I felt that it was already there in the machine, waiting to be released. Staying up all night seemed a small price to pay to free it - to give the ideas concrete form.

After a few years at Berkeley I started to send out some of the software I had written - an instructional Pascal system, Unix utilities, and a text editor called vi (which is still, to my surprise, widely used more than 20 years later) - to others who had similar small PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers. These adventures in software eventually turned into the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system, which became a personal "success disaster" - so many people wanted it that I never finished my PhD. Instead I got a job working for Darpa putting Berkeley Unix on the Internet and fixing it to be reliable and to run large research applications well. This was all great fun and very rewarding. And, frankly, I saw no robots here, or anywhere near.

Still, by the early 1980s, I was drowning. The Unix releases were very successful, and my little project of one soon had money and some staff, but the problem at Berkeley was always office space rather than money - there wasn't room for the help the project needed, so when the other founders of Sun Microsystems showed up I jumped at the chance to join them. At Sun, the long hours continued into the early days of workstations and personal computers, and I have enjoyed participating in the creation of advanced microprocessor technologies and Internet technologies such as Java and Jini.

From all this, I trust it is clear that I am not a Luddite. I have always, rather, had a strong belief in the value of the scientific search for truth and in the ability of great engineering to bring material progress. The Industrial Revolution has immeasurably improved everyone's life over the last couple hundred years, and I always expected my career to involve the building of worthwhile solutions to real problems, one problem at a time.

I have not been disappointed. My work has had more impact than I had ever hoped for and has been more widely used than I could have reasonably expected. I have spent the last 20 years still trying to figure out how to make computers as reliable as I want them to be (they are not nearly there yet) and how to make them simple to use (a goal that has met with even less relative success). Despite some progress, the problems that remain seem even more daunting.

But while I was aware of the moral dilemmas surrounding technology's consequences in fields like weapons research, I did not expect that I would confront such issues in my own field, or at least not so soon.

Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own.

I have long realized that the big advances in information technology come not from the work of computer scientists, computer architects, or electrical engineers, but from that of physical scientists. The physicists Stephen Wolfram and Brosl Hasslacher introduced me, in the early 1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear systems. In the 1990s, I learned about complex systems from conversations with Danny Hillis, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical engineer and device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the incredible possibilities of molecular electronics.

In my own work, as codesigner of three microprocessor architectures - SPARC, picoJava, and MAJC - and as the designer of several implementations thereof, I've been afforded a deep and firsthand acquaintance with Moore's law. For decades, Moore's law has correctly predicted the exponential rate of improvement of semiconductor technology. Until last year I believed that the rate of advances predicted by Moore's law might continue only until roughly 2010, when some physical limits would begin to be reached. It was not obvious to me that a new technology would arrive in time to keep performance advancing smoothly.

But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today - sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec.

As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor.

In designing software and microprocessors, I have never had the feeling that I was designing an intelligent machine. The software and hardware is so fragile and the capabilities of the machine to "think" so clearly absent that, even as a possibility, this has always seemed very far in the future.

But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities.

Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?

The dream of robotics is, first, that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden. Yet in his history of such ideas,Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: "In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines." As we have seen, Moravec agrees, believing we may well not survive the encounter with the superior robot species.

How soon could such an intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.

A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses; it is this process that Danny Hillis thinks we will gradually get used to and that Ray Kurzweil elegantly details inThe Age of Spiritual Machines. (We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body, as illustrated on thecover ofWired 8.02.)

But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.

Genetic engineering promises to revolutionize agriculture by increasing crop yields while reducing the use of pesticides; to create tens of thousands of novel species of bacteria, plants, viruses, and animals; to replace reproduction, or supplement it, with cloning; to create cures for many diseases, increasing our life span and our quality of life; and much, much more. We now know with certainty that these profound changes in the biological sciences are imminent and will challenge all our notions of what life is.

Technologies such as human cloning have in particular raised our awareness of the profound ethical and moral issues we face. If, for example, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequal species using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threaten the notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

Given the incredible power of genetic engineering, it's no surprise that there are significant safety issues in its use. My friend Amory Lovins recently cowrote, along with Hunter Lovins, an editorial that provides an ecological view of some of these dangers. Among their concerns: that "the new botany aligns the development of plants with their economic, not evolutionary, success." (See "A Tale of Two Botanies," page 247.) Amory's long career has been focused on energy and resource efficiency by taking a whole-system view of human-made systems; such a whole-system view often finds simple, smart solutions to otherwise seemingly difficult problems, and is usefully applied here as well.

After reading the Lovins' editorial, I saw an op-ed by Gregg Easterbrook inThe New York Times (November 19, 1999) about genetically engineered crops, under the headline: "Food for the Future: Someday, rice will have built-in vitamin A. Unless the Luddites win."

Are Amory and Hunter Lovins Luddites? Certainly not. I believe we all would agree that golden rice, with its built-in vitamin A, is probably a good thing, if developed with proper care and respect for the likely dangers in moving genes across species boundaries.

Awareness of the dangers inherent in genetic engineering is beginning to grow, as reflected in the Lovins' editorial. The general public is aware of, and uneasy about, genetically modified foods, and seems to be rejecting the notion that such foods should be permitted to be unlabeled.

But genetic engineering technology is already very far along. As the Lovins note, the USDA has already approved about 50 genetically engineered crops for unlimited release; more than half of the world's soybeans and a third of its corn now contain genes spliced in from other forms of life.

While there are many important issues here, my own major concern with genetic engineering is narrower: that it gives the power - whether militarily, accidentally, or in a deliberate terrorist act - to create a White Plague.

The many wonders of nanotechnology were first imagined by the Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman in a speech he gave in 1959, subsequently published under the title "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." The book that made a big impression on me, in the mid-'80s, was Eric Drexler'sEngines of Creation, in which he described beautifully how manipulation of matter at the atomic level could create a utopian future of abundance, where just about everything could be made cheaply, and almost any imaginable disease or physical problem could be solved using nanotechnology and artificial intelligences.

A subsequent book,Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution, which Drexler cowrote, imagines some of the changes that might take place in a world where we had molecular-level "assemblers." Assemblers could make possible incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold by augmentation of the human immune system, essentially complete cleanup of the environment, incredibly inexpensive pocket supercomputers - in fact, any product would be manufacturable by assemblers at a cost no greater than that of wood - spaceflight more accessible than transoceanic travel today, and restoration of extinct species.

I remember feeling good about nanotechnology after readingEngines of Creation. As a technologist, it gave me a sense of calm - that is, nanotechnology showed us that incredible progress was possible, and indeed perhaps inevitable. If nanotechnology was our future, then I didn't feel pressed to solve so many problems in the present. I would get to Drexler's utopian future in due time; I might as well enjoy life more in the here and now. It didn't make sense, given his vision, to stay up all night, all the time.

Drexler's vision also led to a lot of good fun. I would occasionally get to describe the wonders of nanotechnology to others who had not heard of it. After teasing them with all the things Drexler described I would give a homework assignment of my own: "Use nanotechnology to create a vampire; for extra credit create an antidote."

With these wonders came clear dangers, of which I was acutely aware. As I said at a nanotechnology conference in 1989, "We can't simply do our science and not worry about these ethical issues."5 But my subsequent conversations with physicists convinced me that nanotechnology might not even work - or, at least, it wouldn't work anytime soon. Shortly thereafter I moved to Colorado, to a skunk works I had set up, and the focus of my work shifted to software for the Internet, specifically on ideas that became Java and Jini.

Then, last summer, Brosl Hasslacher told me that nanoscale molecular electronics was now practical. This wasnew news, at least to me, and I think to many people - and it radically changed my opinion about nanotechnology. It sent me back toEngines of Creation. Rereading Drexler's work after more than 10 years, I was dismayed to realize how little I had remembered of its lengthy section called "Dangers and Hopes," including a discussion of how nanotechnologies can become "engines of destruction." Indeed, in my rereading of this cautionary material today, I am struck by how naive some of Drexler's safeguard proposals seem, and how much greater I judge the dangers to be now than even he seemed to then. (Having anticipated and described many technical and political problems with nanotechnology, Drexler started the Foresight Institute in the late 1980s "to help prepare society for anticipated advanced technologies" - most important, nanotechnology.)

The enabling breakthrough to assemblers seems quite likely within the next 20 years. Molecular electronics - the new subfield of nanotechnology where individual molecules are circuit elements - should mature quickly and become enormously lucrative within this decade, causing a large incremental investment in all nanotechnologies.

Unfortunately, as with nuclear technology, it is far easier to create destructive uses for nanotechnology than constructive ones. Nanotechnology has clear military and terrorist uses, and you need not be suicidal to release a massively destructive nanotechnological device - such devices can be built to be selectively destructive, affecting, for example, only a certain geographical area or a group of people who are genetically distinct.

An immediate consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great power of nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk - the risk that we might destroy the biosphere on which all life depends.

As Drexler explained:

"Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo problem." Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term "gray goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.

Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident.6 Oops.

It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause. Self-replication is the modus operandi of genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell to replicate its designs, and the prime danger underlying gray goo in nanotechnology. Stories of run-amok robots like the Borg, replicating or mutating to escape from the ethical constraints imposed on them by their creators, are well established in our science fiction books and movies. It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder - or even impossible - to control. A recent article by Stuart Kauffman inNature titled "Self-Replication: Even Peptides Do It" discusses the discovery that a 32-amino-acid peptide can "autocatalyse its own synthesis." We don't know how widespread this ability is, but Kauffman notes that it may hint at "a route to self-reproducing molecular systems on a basis far wider than Watson-Crick base-pairing."7

In truth, we have had in hand for years clear warnings of the dangers inherent in widespread knowledge of GNR technologies - of the possibility of knowledge alone enabling mass destruction. But these warnings haven't been widely publicized; the public discussions have been clearly inadequate. There is no profit in publicizing the dangers.

The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in 20th-century weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in government laboratories. In sharp contrast, the 21st-century GNR technologies have clear commercial uses and are being developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technology - with science as its handmaiden - is delivering a series of almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures.

This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself - as well as to vast numbers of others.

It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds - a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.

That is Carl Sagan, writing in 1994, inPale Blue Dot, a book describing his vision of the human future in space. I am only now realizing how deep his insight was, and how sorely I miss, and will miss, his voice. For all its eloquence, Sagan's contribution was not least that of simple common sense - an attribute that, along with humility, many of the leading advocates of the 21st-century technologies seem to lack.

I remember from my childhood that my grandmother was strongly against the overuse of antibiotics. She had worked since before the first World War as a nurse and had a commonsense attitude that taking antibiotics, unless they were absolutely necessary, was bad for you.

It is not that she was an enemy of progress. She saw much progress in an almost 70-year nursing career; my grandfather, a diabetic, benefited greatly from the improved treatments that became available in his lifetime. But she, like many levelheaded people, would probably think it greatly arrogant for us, now, to be designing a robotic "replacement species," when we obviously have so much trouble making relatively simple things work, and so much trouble managing - or even understanding - ourselves.

I realize now that she had an awareness of the nature of the order of life, and of the necessity of living with and respecting that order. With this respect comes a necessary humility that we, with our early-21st-century chutzpah, lack at our peril. The commonsense view, grounded in this respect, is often right, in advance of the scientific evidence. The clear fragility and inefficiencies of the human-made systems we have built should give us all pause; the fragility of the systems I have worked on certainly humbles me.

We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb and the resulting arms race. We didn't do well then, and the parallels to our current situation are troubling.

The effort to build the first atomic bomb was led by the brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was not naturally interested in politics but became painfully aware of what he perceived as the grave threat to Western civilization from the Third Reich, a threat surely grave because of the possibility that Hitler might obtain nuclear weapons. Energized by this concern, he brought his strong intellect, passion for physics, and charismatic leadership skills to Los Alamos and led a rapid and successful effort by an incredible collection of great minds to quickly invent the bomb.

What is striking is how this effort continued so naturally after the initial impetus was removed. In a meeting shortly after V-E Day with some physicists who felt that perhaps the effort should stop, Oppenheimer argued to continue. His stated reason seems a bit strange: not because of the fear of large casualties from an invasion of Japan, but because the United Nations, which was soon to be formed, should have foreknowledge of atomic weapons. A more likely reason the project continued is the momentum that had built up - the first atomic test, Trinity, was nearly at hand.

We know that in preparing this first atomic test the physicists proceeded despite a large number of possible dangers. They were initially worried, based on a calculation by Edward Teller, that an atomic explosion might set fire to the atmosphere. A revised calculation reduced the danger of destroying the world to a three-in-a-million chance. (Teller says he was later able to dismiss the prospect of atmospheric ignition entirely.) Oppenheimer, though, was sufficiently concerned about the result of Trinity that he arranged for a possible evacuation of the southwest part of the state of New Mexico. And, of course, there was the clear danger of starting a nuclear arms race.

Within a month of that first, successful test, two atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some scientists had suggested that the bomb simply be demonstrated, rather than dropped on Japanese cities - saying that this would greatly improve the chances for arms control after the war - but to no avail. With the tragedy of Pearl Harbor still fresh in Americans' minds, it would have been very difficult for President Truman to order a demonstration of the weapons rather than use them as he did - the desire to quickly end the war and save the lives that would have been lost in any invasion of Japan was very strong. Yet the overriding truth was probably very simple: As the physicist Freeman Dyson later said, "The reason that it was dropped was just that nobody had the courage or the foresight to say no."

It's important to realize how shocked the physicists were in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. They describe a series of waves of emotion: first, a sense of fulfillment that the bomb worked, then horror at all the people that had been killed, and then a convincing feeling that on no account should another bomb be dropped. Yet of course another bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki, only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima.

In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings, Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, "It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge and are willing to take the consequences."

Oppenheimer went on to work, with others, on the Acheson-Lilienthal report, which, as Richard Rhodes says in his recent bookVisions of Technology, "found a way to prevent a clandestine nuclear arms race without resorting to armed world government"; their suggestion was a form of relinquishment of nuclear weapons work by nation-states to an international agency.

This proposal led to the Baruch Plan, which was submitted to the United Nations in June 1946 but never adopted (perhaps because, as Rhodes suggests, Bernard Baruch had "insisted on burdening the plan with conventional sanctions," thereby inevitably dooming it, even though it would "almost certainly have been rejected by Stalinist Russia anyway"). Other efforts to promote sensible steps toward internationalizing nuclear power to prevent an arms race ran afoul either of US politics and internal distrust, or distrust by the Soviets. The opportunity to avoid the arms race was lost, and very quickly.

Two years later, in 1948, Oppenheimer seemed to have reached another stage in his thinking, saying, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose."

In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb. By 1955, both the US and the Soviet Union had tested hydrogen bombs suitable for delivery by aircraft. And so the nuclear arms race began.

Nearly 20 years ago, in the documentaryThe Day After Trinity, Freeman Dyson summarized the scientific attitudes that brought us to the nuclear precipice:

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."8

Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined future, driven - this time by great financial rewards and global competition - despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining.

In 1947,The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began putting a Doomsday Clock on its cover. For more than 50 years, it has shown an estimate of the relative nuclear danger we have faced, reflecting the changing international conditions. The hands on the clock have moved 15 times and today, standing at nine minutes to midnight, reflect continuing and real danger from nuclear weapons. The recent addition of India and Pakistan to the list of nuclear powers has increased the threat of failure of the nonproliferation goal, and this danger was reflected by moving the hands closer to midnight in 1998.

In our time, how much danger do we face, not just from nuclear weapons, but from all of these technologies? How high are the extinction risks?

The philosopher John Leslie has studied this question and concluded that the risk of human extinction is at least 30 percent,9 while Ray Kurzweil believes we have "a better than even chance of making it through," with the caveat that he has "always been accused of being an optimist." Not only are these estimates not encouraging, but they do not include the probability of many horrid outcomes that lie short of extinction.

Faced with such assessments, some serious people are already suggesting that we simply move beyond Earth as quickly as possible. We would colonize the galaxy using von Neumann probes, which hop from star system to star system, replicating as they go. This step will almost certainly be necessary 5 billion years from now (or sooner if our solar system is disastrously impacted by the impending collision of our galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy within the next 3 billion years), but if we take Kurzweil and Moravec at their word it might be necessary by the middle of this century.

What are the moral implications here? If we must move beyond Earth this quickly in order for the species to survive, who accepts the responsibility for the fate of those (most of us, after all) who are left behind? And even if we scatter to the stars, isn't it likely that we may take our problems with us or find, later, that they have followed us? The fate of our species on Earth and our fate in the galaxy seem inextricably linked.

Another idea is to erect a series of shields to defend against each of the dangerous technologies. The Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by the Reagan administration, was an attempt to design such a shield against the threat of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. But as Arthur C. Clarke, who was privy to discussions about the project, observed: "Though it might be possible, at vast expense, to construct local defense systems that would 'only' let through a few percent of ballistic missiles, the much touted idea of a national umbrella was nonsense. Luis Alvarez, perhaps the greatest experimental physicist of this century, remarked to me that the advocates of such schemes were 'very bright guys with no common sense.'"

Clarke continued: "Looking into my often cloudy crystal ball, I suspect that a total defense might indeed be possible in a century or so. But the technology involved would produce, as a by-product, weapons so terrible that no one would bother with anything as primitive as ballistic missiles." 10

InEngines of Creation, Eric Drexler proposed that we build an active nanotechnological shield - a form of immune system for the biosphere - to defend against dangerous replicators of all kinds that might escape from laboratories or otherwise be maliciously created. But the shield he proposed would itself be extremely dangerous - nothing could prevent it from developing autoimmune problems and attacking the biosphere itself. 11

Similar difficulties apply to the construction of shields against robotics and genetic engineering. These technologies are too powerful to be shielded against in the time frame of interest; even if it were possible to implement defensive shields, the side effects of their development would be at least as dangerous as the technologies we are trying to protect against.

These possibilities are all thus either undesirable or unachievable or both. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.

Yes, I know, knowledge is good, as is the search for new truths. We have been seeking knowledge since ancient times. Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with the simple statement: "All men by nature desire to know." We have, as a bedrock value in our society, long agreed on the value of open access to information, and recognize the problems that arise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge. In recent times, we have come to revere scientific knowledge.

But despite the strong historical precedents, if open access to and unlimited development of knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs.

It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, not only that God is dead but that "faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of the 'will to truth,' of 'truth at any price' is proved to it constantly." It is this further danger that we now fully face - the consequences of our truth-seeking. The truth that science seeks can certainly be considered a dangerous substitute for God if it is likely to lead to our extinction.

If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous - then we might understand what we can and should relinquish. Otherwise, we can easily imagine an arms race developing over GNR technologies, as it did with the NBC technologies in the 20th century. This is perhaps the greatest risk, for once such a race begins, it's very hard to end it. This time - unlike during the Manhattan Project - we aren't in a war, facing an implacable enemy that is threatening our civilization; we are driven, instead, by our habits, our desires, our economic system, and our competitive need to know.

I believe that we all wish our course could be determined by our collective values, ethics, and morals. If we had gained more collective wisdom over the past few thousand years, then a dialogue to this end would be more practical, and the incredible powers we are about to unleash would not be nearly so troubling.

One would think we might be driven to such a dialogue by our instinct for self-preservation. Individuals clearly have this desire, yet as a species our behavior seems to be not in our favor. In dealing with the nuclear threat, we often spoke dishonestly to ourselves and to each other, thereby greatly increasing the risks. Whether this was politically motivated, or because we chose not to think ahead, or because when faced with such grave threats we acted irrationally out of fear, I do not know, but it does not bode well.

The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet we seem hardly to have noticed. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or plutonium, they don't need to be mined and refined, and they can be freely copied. Once they are out, they are out. Churchill remarked, in a famous left-handed compliment, that the American people and their leaders "invariably do the right thing, after they have examined every other alternative." In this case, however, we must act more presciently, as to do the right thing only at last may be to lose the chance to do it at all.

As Thoreau said, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?

We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. Have we already gone too far down the path to alter course? I don't believe so, but we aren't trying yet, and the last chance to assert control - the fail-safe point - is rapidly approaching. We have our first pet robots, as well as commercially available genetic engineering techniques, and our nanoscale techniques are advancing rapidly. While the development of these technologies proceeds through a number of steps, it isn't necessarily the case - as happened in the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test - that the last step in proving a technology is large and hard. The breakthrough to wild self-replication in robotics, genetic engineering, or nanotechnology could come suddenly, reprising the surprise we felt when we learned of the cloning of a mammal.

And yet I believe we do have a strong and solid basis for hope. Our attempts to deal with weapons of mass destruction in the last century provide a shining example of relinquishment for us to consider: the unilateral US abandonment, without preconditions, of the development of biological weapons. This relinquishment stemmed from the realization that while it would take an enormous effort to create these terrible weapons, they could from then on easily be duplicated and fall into the hands of rogue nations or terrorist groups.

The clear conclusion was that we would create additional threats to ourselves by pursuing these weapons, and that we would be more secure if we did not pursue them. We have embodied our relinquishment of biological and chemical weapons in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).12

As for the continuing sizable threat from nuclear weapons, which we have lived with now for more than 50 years, the US Senate's recent rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty makes it clear relinquishing nuclear weapons will not be politically easy. But we have a unique opportunity, with the end of the Cold War, to avert a multipolar arms race. Building on the BWC and CWC relinquishments, successful abolition of nuclear weapons could help us build toward a habit of relinquishing dangerous technologies. (Actually, by getting rid of all but 100 nuclear weapons worldwide - roughly the total destructive power of World War II and a considerably easier task - we could eliminate this extinction threat. 13)

Verifying relinquishment will be a difficult problem, but not an unsolvable one. We are fortunate to have already done a lot of relevant work in the context of the BWC and other treaties. Our major task will be to apply this to technologies that are naturally much more commercial than military. The substantial need here is for transparency, as difficulty of verification is directly proportional to the difficulty of distinguishing relinquished from legitimate activities.

I frankly believe that the situation in 1945 was simpler than the one we now face: The nuclear technologies were reasonably separable into commercial and military uses, and monitoring was aided by the nature of atomic tests and the ease with which radioactivity could be measured. Research on military applications could be performed at national laboratories such as Los Alamos, with the results kept secret as long as possible.

The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial and military uses; given their potential in the market, it's hard to imagine pursuing them only in national laboratories. With their widespread commercial pursuit, enforcing relinquishment will require a verification regime similar to that for biological weapons, but on an unprecedented scale. This, inevitably, will raise tensions between our individual privacy and desire for proprietary information, and the need for verification to protect us all. We will undoubtedly encounter strong resistance to this loss of privacy and freedom of action.

Verifying the relinquishment of certain GNR technologies will have to occur in cyberspace as well as at physical facilities. The critical issue will be to make the necessary transparency acceptable in a world of proprietary information, presumably by providing new forms of protection for intellectual property.

Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineers adopt a strong code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocratic oath, and that they have the courage to whistleblow as necessary, even at high personal cost. This would answer the call - 50 years after Hiroshima - by the Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, one of the most senior of the surviving members of the Manhattan Project, that all scientists "cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving, and manufacturing nuclear weapons and other weapons of potential mass destruction."14 In the 21st century, this requires vigilance and personal responsibility by those who would work on both NBC and GNR technologies to avoid implementing weapons of mass destruction and knowledge-enabled mass destruction.

Thoreau also said that we will be "rich in proportion to the number of things which we can afford to let alone." We each seek to be happy, but it would seem worthwhile to question whether we need to take such a high risk of total destruction to gain yet more knowledge and yet more things; common sense says that there is a limit to our material needs - and that certain knowledge is too dangerous and is best forgone.

Neither should we pursue near immortality without considering the costs, without considering the commensurate increase in the risk of extinction. Immortality, while perhaps the original, is certainly not the only possible utopian dream.

I recently had the good fortune to meet the distinguished author and scholar Jacques Attali, whose bookLignes d'horizons (Millennium, in the English translation) helped inspire the Java and Jini approach to the coming age of pervasive computing, as previously described in this magazine. In his new bookFraternités, Attali describes how our dreams of utopia have changed over time:

"At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as nothing more than a labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood a door leading, via their death, to the company of gods and toEternity. With the Hebrews and then the Greeks, some men dared free themselves from theological demands and dream of an ideal City whereLiberty would flourish. Others, noting the evolution of the market society, understood that the liberty of some would entail the alienation of others, and they soughtEquality."

Jacques helped me understand how these three different utopian goals exist in tension in our society today. He goes on to describe a fourth utopia,Fraternity, whose foundation is altruism. Fraternity alone associates individual happiness with the happiness of others, affording the promise of self-sustainment.

This crystallized for me my problem with Kurzweil's dream. A technological approach to Eternity - near immortality through robotics - may not be the most desirable utopia, and its pursuit brings clear dangers. Maybe we should rethink our utopian choices.

Where can we look for a new ethical basis to set our course? I have found the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, the Dalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interdependency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individuals and societies that seems consonant with Attali's Fraternity utopia.

The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is that makes people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neither material progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key - that there are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do.

Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks, who defined it as "the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope." 15

Clearly, we need to find meaningful challenges and sufficient scope in our lives if we are to be happy in whatever is to come. But I believe we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear accompanying dangers.

It is now more than a year since my first encounter with Ray Kurzweil and John Searle. I see around me cause for hope in the voices for caution and relinquishment and in those people I have discovered who are as concerned as I am about our current predicament. I feel, too, a deepened sense of personal responsibility - not for the work I have already done, but for the work that I might yet do, at the confluence of the sciences.

But many other people who know about the dangers still seem strangely silent. When pressed, they trot out the "this is nothing new" riposte - as if awareness of what could happen is response enough. They tell me, There are universities filled with bioethicists who study this stuff all day long. They say, All this has been written about before, and by experts. They complain, Your worries and your arguments are already old hat.

I don't know where these people hide their fear. As an architect of complex systems I enter this arena as a generalist. But should this diminish my concerns? I am aware of how much has been written about, talked about, and lectured about so authoritatively. But does this mean it has reached people? Does this mean we can discount the dangers before us?

Knowing is not a rationale for not acting. Can we doubt that knowledge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves?

The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.

My continuing professional work is on improving the reliability of software. Software is a tool, and as a toolbuilder I must struggle with the uses to which the tools I make are put. I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place; if I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day may come.

This all leaves me not angry but at least a bit melancholic. Henceforth, for me, progress will be somewhat bittersweet.

Do you remember the beautiful penultimate scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen is lying on his couch and talking into a tape recorder? He is writing a short story about people who are creating unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.

He leads himself to the question, "Why is life worth living?" and to consider what makes it worthwhile for him: Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues," Swedish movies, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, the apples and pears by Cézanne, the crabs at Sam Wo's, and, finally, the showstopper: his love Tracy's face.

Each of us has our precious things, and as we care for them we locate the essence of our humanity. In the end, it is because of our great capacity for caring that I remain optimistic we will confront the dangerous issues now before us.

My immediate hope is to participate in a much larger discussion of the issues raised here, with people from many different backgrounds, in settings not predisposed to fear or favor technology for its own sake.

As a start, I have twice raised many of these issues at events sponsored by the Aspen Institute and have separately proposed that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences take them up as an extension of its work with the Pugwash Conferences. (These have been held since 1957 to discuss arms control, especially of nuclear weapons, and to formulate workable policies.)

It's unfortunate that the Pugwash meetings started only well after the nuclear genie was out of the bottle - roughly 15 years too late. We are also getting a belated start on seriously addressing the issues around 21st-century technologies - the prevention of knowledge-enabled mass destruction - and further delay seems unacceptable.

So I'm still searching; there are many more things to learn. Whether we are to succeed or fail, to survive or fall victim to these technologies, is not yet decided. I'm up late again - it's almost 6 am. I'm trying to imagine some better answers, to break the spell and free them from the stone.

1 The passage Kurzweil quotes is from Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto, which was published jointly, under duress, byThe New York Times and The Washington Post to attempt to bring his campaign of terror to an end. I agree with David Gelernter, who said about their decision:

"It was a tough call for the newspapers. To say yes would be giving in to terrorism, and for all they knew he was lying anyway. On the other hand, to say yes might stop the killing. There was also a chance that someone would read the tract and get a hunch about the author; and that is exactly what happened. The suspect's brother read it, and it rang a bell.

"I would have told them not to publish. I'm glad they didn't ask me. I guess."

(Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. Free Press, 1997: 120.)

2 Garrett, Laurie.The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. Penguin, 1994: 47-52, 414, 419, 452.

3 Isaac Asimov described what became the most famous view of ethical rules for robot behavior in his bookI, Robot in 1950, in his Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

4 Michelangelo wrote a sonnet that begins:

Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto
Ch' un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva
Col suo soverchio; e solo a quello arriva
La man che ubbidisce all' intelleto.

Stone translates this as:

The best of artists hath no thought to show
which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
doth not include; to break the marble spell
is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

Stone describes the process: "He was not working from his drawings or clay models; they had all been put away. He was carving from the images in his mind. His eyes and hands knew where every line, curve, mass must emerge, and at what depth in the heart of the stone to create the low relief."

(The Agony and the Ecstasy. Doubleday, 1961: 6, 144.)

5 First Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology in October 1989, a talk titled "The Future of Computation." Published in Crandall, B. C. and James Lewis, editors.Nanotechnology: Research and Perspectives. MIT Press, 1992: 269. See alsowww.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT01/Nano1.html.

6 In his 1963 novelCat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut imagined a gray-goo-like accident where a form of ice called ice-nine, which becomes solid at a much higher temperature, freezes the oceans.

7 Kauffman, Stuart. "Self-replication: Even Peptides Do It." Nature, 382, August 8, 1996: 496. Seewww.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/sak-peptides.html.

8 Else, Jon.The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and The Atomic Bomb (available at www.pyramiddirect.com).

9 This estimate is in Leslie's bookThe End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, where he notes that the probability of extinction is substantially higher if we accept Brandon Carter's Doomsday Argument, which is, briefly, that "we ought to have some reluctance to believe that we are very exceptionally early, for instance in the earliest 0.001 percent, among all humans who will ever have lived. This would be some reason for thinking that humankind will not survive for many more centuries, let alone colonize the galaxy. Carter's doomsday argument doesn't generate any risk estimates just by itself. It is an argument forrevising the estimates which we generate when we consider various possible dangers." (Routledge, 1996: 1, 3, 145.)

10 Clarke, Arthur C. "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids."Science, June 5, 1998. Reprinted as "Science and Society" inGreetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998. St. Martin's Press, 1999: 526.

11 And, as David Forrest suggests in his paper "Regulating Nanotechnology Development," available atwww.foresight.org/NanoRev/Forrest1989.html, "If we used strict liability as an alternative to regulation it would be impossible for any developer to internalize the cost of the risk (destruction of the biosphere), so theoretically the activity of developing nanotechnology should never be undertaken." Forrest's analysis leaves us with only government regulation to protect us - not a comforting thought.

12 Meselson, Matthew. "The Problem of Biological Weapons." Presentation to the 1,818th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, January 13, 1999. (minerva.amacad.org/archive/bulletin4.htm)

13 Doty, Paul. "The Forgotten Menace: Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles Still Represent the Biggest Threat to Civilization."Nature, 402, December 9, 1999: 583.

14 See also Hans Bethe's 1997 letter to President Clinton, at www.fas.org/bethecr.htm.

15 Hamilton, Edith.The Greek Way. W. W. Norton & Co., 1942: 35.

Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, was cochair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research, and is coauthor ofThe Java Language Specification. His work on theJini pervasive computing technology was featured inWired 6.08

Act Now to Keep New Technologies Out of Destructive Hands

2009-10-27T13:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pim/pim18.htm

Act Now to Keep New Technologies Out of Destructive Hands
by Bill Joy
New Perspectives Quarterly
Vol. 17 No. 3
Summer 2000
©1999-2000, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions

Bill Joy is co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems and was co-chairman of the presidential advisory commission on information technology. He wrote this article for NPQ responding to the comments by Jacques Attali, Francis Fukuyama, Amory Lovins and Alvin and Heidi Toffler on his article "Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us," which appeared in the April issue of Wired Magazine and which is available from www.wired.com.

Aspen, Colorado — IN the 20th century, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were developed by the military, having little or no commercial value. WMD development and manufacture required large-scale activities and often-rare raw materials. The knowledge of how to create these WMDs was not made widely available.

Three new 21st century technologies—genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics (GNR) —are being aggressively pursued by the commercial sector because of their promise to create almost unimaginable wealth. Using them we will be able cure many diseases and extend our lives, eliminate material poverty and grinding physical labor, and heal the Earth.

But, these new technologies may also pose an even greater danger to humankind than weapons of mass destruction.

It is critical to notice that the scale of the activities needed to practice the GNR technologies is rapidly declining, and that these do not need rare raw materials. More and more, the knowledge needed to design with these technologies is freely available on the Internet. The advancing power of computing will allow this design to be done on a personal computer, and manufacture of these designs is becoming inexpensive, using widely available equipment, for good or evil purposes.

Writing in the Seattle Times, William Calvin, a Neurobiologist at the University of Washington, wrote: "There is a class of people with ‘delusional disorders’ who can remain employed and pretty functional for decades. Even if they are only one percent of the population, that’s 20,000 mostly untreated delusional people in the Puget Sound area. Even if only one percent of these has the intelligence or education to intentionally create sustained or widespread harm, it’s still a pool of 200 high-performing sociopathic or delusional techies just in the Puget sound area alone."

The malevolent actions of such individuals and small groups using the GNR technologies pose a large and even mortal danger to our civilization.

This threat will manifest itself, for example, as genetic engineering techniques provide the ability, perhaps in about 20 years, to use software to create new, highly contagious and deadly "designer pathogens." Nanotechnologists have similarly recognized that out of control nanobots could destroy the biosphere; a first quantitative study of this possibility of "Global Ecophagy" by Robert Freitas was recently published in response to the article I wrote on this subject in Wired in April. His study is quite troubling, showing the clear dangers we face from unrestricted nanotechnology and the extreme difficulty and enormous scale required of any "defense."

Such pestilences are beyond our direct experience. The Black Death killed a third of the population of 14th century Europe and smallpox devastated the native population in the Americas in the 16th century, but these are distant historical events. Even the influenza pandemic of 1918 is largely out of living memory. Antibiotics and improved sanitation have given us grace from such disasters, at least for a time. But to believe such things cannot recur is untrue and our failing memory of them is quite dangerous.

Since technologies are creating these new dangers some have hoped for the answers to be technological too, some sort of defense. But a strong defense against genetically engineered pathogens would seem to require a nearly perfectly augmented immune system, which seems quite unlikely in the timeframe of interest; this may even prove to be impossible without large-scale reengineering of the germline of our species. A "doomsday nanoshield" appears to be so outlandishly dangerous that I can’t imagine we would attempt to deploy it. As with nuclear technology, the destructive offensive uses here have a seemingly deeply sustainable advantage over defensive efforts.

Robotics poses a different threat—the creation of a new life form that may escape our control. Some have romantically imagined that we would achieve near-immortality by becoming robots. But replacing our bodies with silicon while retaining our humanity will not eliminate the risk I am discussing here, unless we can somehow simultaneously eliminate human evil. I think it is also clear that we are not the natural life form in this imagined new computational substrate, where there would be little need for sex, no need for relearning, and perhaps no strong notion of individuality. It’s not clear—Hollywood notwithstanding—that there is any practical way to protect our continued existence in the presence of a more powerful robotic species.

An alternative to defense might be escape—to the stars, as Carl Sagan dreamed. But there seems insufficient time and most people couldn’t go, so we have to look for answers closer to home.

Illimitable Individuals

We live in an economic and political system that puts its faith strongly in the individual. Freedom was born in Greece roughly 2500 years ago when we agreed to limit our actions, this giving birth to modern civilization. This idea of putting faith in the individual is the basis not only of Greek democracy, but also underlies the Enlightenment ideal, modern democracy, and capitalism. But we must now realize that we are creating such incredible power that we cannot sanely give this power to all individuals, some of whom are clearly not sane. Our civilization, a society of laws, is grounded in the benefits we receive by limiting our actions; this social contract is clearly threatened by illimitable individual power.

The risk of our extinction as we pass through this time of danger has been estimated to be anywhere from 30% to 50%. I believe that such high risks are far beyond completely unacceptable and that we must therefore take some strong action to reduce this risk. Though we can’t eliminate the risk through technology, we should still build some partial defenses to reduce the risk, and also need to look for sensible non-technical steps. Historically, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which seems to have helped to contain the nuclear threat in the past half-century, is such a non-technical approach; going forward let us hope we can find less morally repugnant mechanisms.

We can do some simple and obvious things to reduce the risk: have scientists and technologists take a Hippocratic oath, do assessment of the risks of new technologies in an open public process, force enterprises which wish to use dangerous technologies to take insurance against the catastrophic risk so that less risky paths are favored, limit the access to dangerous technologies by practicing them in secure international laboratories even though the work being done in these laboratories is on behalf of commercial enterprises, and finally relinquish development of the most dangerous forms of the new technologies such as unrestricted nanotechnology. We should engage a wide discussion of these and other sensible steps.

If we do not retain, as a civilization, control over these new technologies, and allow individuals to release self-replicating GNR technologies into the world, then we will cede control over our future to extreme individuals and accidents.

A half century ago, Einstein warned us that the nuclear age had come and changed everything but our way of thinking, and that we were thus drifting toward unparalleled catastrophe, bequeathing the power of widespread destruction to the nation states. Now, with the confluence of powerful, widely available information technology with these new self-replicating GNR technologies, we are drifting toward a further, even larger potential catastrophe, on course to put our collective fate in the hands of the extreme individuals that undeniably exist in the world.

We must act collectively to reduce this grave threat, while getting most of the benefits of the new technologies. We can do this only if we fully face the new dangers, act decisively, and soon.