I ran across this CNN event/feature just now - an ongoing thing called the CNN Future Summit. It opened with a television event and continues with a series of stories every week. There is also a tangentially-related site called CNN Future Summit Challenge, where people can submit their hopes and fears about the future and “build your own robot” using a sketchy-looking flash interface. Seems like the submissions ended on June 15th. What I like about the overall tone of the stories is that they aren’t overoptimistic, as one might worry, but actually discuss a variety of existential risks that could stem from these technologies.

The thing that’s interesting about both sites is that they’re blatantly transhumanistic, and Ray Kurzweil is featured right on the front page of the first. A poll question asks if people are interested in using technology to enhance their bodies:

Tens of thousands of people must have participated in this poll. Of course it’s probably biased in favor of people who watched the show and were interested enough to visit the site, but 82% is a huge number in favor. I’ve seen similar polls on MSNBC in the last year and the results were actually similar.

What is great is that this is free publicity for transhumanism and transhumanist philosophies. The series of stories focuses on scientific and engineering disciplines with the potential to enhance our bodies and minds - robotics, cybernetics, genetics, and stem cells. The possibility of a ‘Heaven’ created by vast improvements in quality of life due to these technologies is discussed. Joel Garreau, author of “Radical Evolution” is also mentioned. It seems that the excitement surrounding Garreau and Kurzweil’s recent books has culminated in this CNN feature, which is an example of “exposure events” catalyzing even greater exposure events.

Here is a dialogue, which I think is relevant in light of this, that appeared on the wta-talk mailing list shortly after the recent Human Enhancement and Human Rights conference:

A man walks into a bar…

“I just came from the craziest conference!” he says to the bartender.

“Really?” says the bartender. “What was it about?”

“Well” the man says “these crazy people who call themselves Transhumanists
believe we should use futuristic technology to get rid of diseases and make
people more intelligent and happy and stuff.”

“Really?” says the bartender.

“Yeah” the man says. “And these Transhumanists want to use robots and
something called nanotechnology so we don’t have to work so hard and we can
all be rich.”

“Really?” says the bartender.

“Yeah” the man says. “And these Transhumanists want to use biotechnology to
keep people young and let them live almost forever.”

“Wow! I just realized something” says the bartender.

“What’s that?” the man asks.

“I’m a Transhumanist!” says the bartender.