Juan Enriquez: Take twenty minutes to listen to this man talk.

FHWP: Juan Enriquez was the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. His work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Science, and the The New York Times. He is the author of As the Future Catches You and The Untied States of America. He works in business, science, and domestic/international politics.
Juan Enriquez is recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the economic and political impacts of life sciences. He is currently Chairman and CEO of Biotechonomy LLC, a life sciences research and investment firm.

Juan Enriquez is on the short list of people that when they speak I shut up and listen. His prior TED talks have been interesting, this is no exception. Ideally, you should watch all of them, but in a pinch this will do.

PZ Myers slammed the part of his talk where he JE discusses speciation of humans, but personally I think PZ was losing the forest for the trees. JE's point wasn't that we will literally be another species, but rather that the very rules governing what a selective pressure is is going to entirely change- and then continue to change at an exponential rate.

BSG & Transhumanism

While watching last week's episode of BSG (warning, small spoilers ahead) I commented that the Transhumanists must have been masturbating over one of Cavil's lines... well sure enough: It was fascinating to see human enhancement issues addressed so directly while learning more about John Cavil’s character and ambitions in this episode of Battlestar Galactica. In spite of his misguided clinging to petty jealousy and revenge, I found a lot to sympathize with in John Cavil’s character. He wanted both to overcome the belief in a single God he derived from early Cylon models, and reach beyond his limited human emotions and senses. He powerfully expressed the desire to more fully experience the universe in all its beauty and perceive supernovas via novel sensations:

“I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language. But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine and I could know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way.”

The article is here. I'm not super interested in transhumanism but if you're interested in the future, you have to sit through a lot of talk about transhumanism to get to anything interesting about AI/AGI. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all saw Gattaca, you know what else we saw? Monty Python, Get on with it!) Nominally I am a transhumanist but I care so very little about their issues compared to the more pressing and immediate issue of what will become of us and our economy when we become an Automated Nation.