CNN’s piece on the upcoming conference on global catastrophic risks at Oxford, organized by IEET Chair Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, was extraordinarily warm.

I’m nearing the end of my current blog project of commenting on each of the six articles in June’s edition of The Global Spiral , which is devoted to a critique of transhumanism. This time, I will discuss Andrew Pickering’s, “Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics”, in some ways the strangest of the five articles that I have read so far. We’ll come to why, but let me step back for a moment to survey the overall terrain.

I’ll start this essay by leading with my conclusion: do we make it through this century? Yeah, but not all of us, and it’s neither as spectacular nor as horrific as many people imagine.

Just as technology has the capacity to create, it can also destroy. It is crucial lived concepts like scarcity is identified so a life of abundance can fill destructive voids left behind. With enough collaborative expertise drawn to conclude that “giving gives more giving” and that “taking takes more taking,” the capacity to harmonize between these spheres can ensure that all of us have greater potential to live more preferred lives while limiting the causes of harm to oneself and others.

The fourth of the six articles in the special anti-transhumanism issue of The Global Spiral (June 2008) is “Wrestling with Transhumanism” by well-known critic Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor of English and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

The Singularity concept remains inescapable these days, although rarely well-understood.  Both are unfortunate developments, for essentially the same reason: the popularity of the term “Singularity” has undermined its narrative value. Its use in a discussion is almost guaranteed to become the focus of a debate, one that rarely changes minds. This is especially unfortunate because the underlying idea is, in my view, a useful tool for thinking about how we’ll face the challenges of the 21st century.