The subject of this book is the philosophy of Stanisław Lem. The first part contains an analysis and interpretation of one of his early works, The Dialogues. The author tries to show how Lem used the terminology of cybernetics to create a project of sociology and anthropology. The second part examines Lem’s essay Summa technologiae, which is considered as the project of human autoevolution. The term «autoevolution» is a neologism for the concept of humans taking control over their own biological evolution and form in order to improve the conditions of their being. In this interpretation, Summa is an example of a liberal utopia, based on the assumption that all human problems can be resolved by science. Various social theories, which can be linked to the project of autoevolution, are presented in the final part.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Should people hardwire computers into their brains, enabling their minds to directly access cyberspace? What advantages and risks would this represent? Would this create a new humanity? These questions have been considered and discussed in science fiction for decades, but technology is beginning to make such developments seem remarkably plausible. This book examines what is currently taking place in this fast-developing sector of society while looking at future prospects. In so doing it seeks to integrate technological and scientific developments, political debate as well as philosophical interrogation while involving ethicists, policy makers, journalists, and practitioners. It is the first extensive study on a topic that is certain to significantly impact the 21st century and beyond. It opens the first door to this important debate.
This book is made open access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched KU Select 2017: Front list Collection

Listed by Unglue.it.

Should people hardwire computers into their brains, enabling their minds to directly access cyberspace? What advantages and risks would this represent? Would this create a new humanity? These questions have been considered and discussed in science fiction for decades, but technology is beginning to make such developments seem remarkably plausible. This book examines what is currently taking place in this fast-developing sector of society while looking at future prospects. In so doing it seeks to integrate technological and scientific developments, political debate as well as philosophical interrogation while involving ethicists, policy makers, journalists, and practitioners. It is the first extensive study on a topic that is certain to significantly impact the 21st century and beyond. It opens the first door to this important debate.
This book is made open access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched KU Select 2017: Front list Collection

Listed by Unglue.it.

It is becoming increasingly possible to fundamentally intervene into human life using disruptive biotechnologies. On the other side, artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly. In this twofold development, the boundaries between human nature and technology are being blurred. This has provoked fundamental questions about what it is to be human, with which this volume engages interdisciplinarily.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Das Verhältnis zwischen der irdischen Umwelt und menschlichen Gesellschaften ist heute massiv gestört. Klimawandel, Artensterben und das Versagen von Ökosystemen prägen die planetare Realität im sogenannten Zeitalter des Menschen, dem Anthropozän. Diese multiplen Krisen stellen auch unsere gewohnten Kategorien von Natur, Kultur und Handlungsmacht infrage. Insbesondere für die Soziologie und die modernen Geisteswissenschaften ist eine Revision des Konzepts der sozialen Wirklichkeit notwendig, das nun auch mehr-als-menschliche Entitäten umfassen muss. Justus Pötzsch zeigt, wie Trans- und Posthumanismen dieser Herausforderung begegnen und unser Verständnis möglicher geologischer und gesellschaftlicher Zukünfte erweitern.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This open access book reviews the effects of the twenty-first century scientific-technological and social developments on the educational theory. The first part handles the subject, focusing on technology and educational philosophy. In the second part, the implications of new human and social conceptions towards the education paradigms are examined. In the chapters of the last part of the book, more practical dimensions of education are discussed. Transforming school designs, school management, learning-teaching approaches and teacher competencies are discussed in the context of broader social, cultural and technological changes.

Listed by Unglue.it.

What does human enhancement technology (HET) and artificial intelligence (AI) have to do with religion? This book explores, specifically, the intersection of HET and AI with spiritual health, Christianity, and ethics. The exploration strengthens an emergent, robust body of publications about human enhancement ethics. What does it mean to make us “better” must also address the potential spiritual implications. Concern for spiritual health promises to make the study of religion and human enhancement ethics increasingly pressing in the public sphere. Some of the most significant possible and probable spiritual impacts of HET and AI are probed. Topics include warfare, robots, chatbots, moral bioenhancement, spiritual psychotherapy, superintelligence, ecology, fasting, and psychedelics. Two sections comprise this book: one addresses spirituality in relation to HETs and AI, and one addresses Christianity in relation to HETs and AI.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This volume examines the specifics of Plessner's philosophy in comparison with the conceptions of Dewey, Freud, Habermas, Heidegger, Jaspers, Kant, Nietzsche, v. Uexküll and today's brain, cognition and behavioral research. It shows how philosophical anthropology overcomes the speciesism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism of modernity in favour of a common and open future of personal life forms.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This volume examines the specifics of Plessner's philosophy in comparison with the conceptions of Dewey, Freud, Habermas, Heidegger, Jaspers, Kant, Nietzsche, v. Uexküll and today's brain, cognition and behavioral research. It shows how philosophical anthropology overcomes the speciesism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism of modernity in favour of a common and open future of personal life forms.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Based on current and projected breakthroughs in biological, genetic, and digital technologies—and their possible convergences—contemporary transhumanism confronts the Christian faith with the question: can finite beings be saved from suffering, illness and death? Transhumanists emphatically embrace this possibility as they offer their concrete visions of a future self-redemption through science, medicine, and technology. Transhumanism aims to take control of the evolutionary process and to steer it into a better future for humanity, or rather, their artificial successors. This book is a comprehensive and constructive critique of the transhumanist agenda and its underlying sociotechnical imaginary, worldview, and anthropology. For this task, it draws on theological resources of Christian tradition(s) in novel ways that serve to render the Christian faith plausible in a digital age. In developing a theology that explores the creative potential of “perfected finitude” (Vollendlichkeit) from an eschatological perspective, it contributes to a “theology of technology”.

Listed by Unglue.it.

The evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley (1887–1975) attempted to promote a “religion for the future,” which he would come to refer to as Transhumanism. Transhumanism was an attempt to unite a more traditional humanistic view of the human as containing some form of core essence or potential with an evolutionary point of view of humans as a work in progress. Before humans, natural selection had been responsible for the transformation of life. Through its ordering principles and through chance, it had given rise to humankind, which had ushered in a new phase of evolution. Humanity stood on the threshold of yet another critical point in evolution: The consciously purposive phase of evolution. This open access book explores the history of transhumanism by analyzing how Julian Huxley’s transhumanism develops and why it does at this particular point in time, by placing it firmly within the context of his specific scientific and sociopolitical milieu, starting roughly in the interwar years and stretching over the Second World War to the 1970s. Continuing, the study then focuses on the new transhumanists of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and investigates continuity in mode of thinking, contributing to a more coherent understanding of transhumanism, its history and of modern projects of human enhancement. The book captures how scientific and technological development in relation to society and social order shapes images and expectations of the future and of what future is desirable.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty is the first in a series of novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking. A storyline, or genealogy, tinted a shade of RGB blue, is fashioned by thinking through the felt unthought of this between space. A fabulation, an anarchive of what passes through. Lucid dreaming of this type is rife with allusions to conceptual and material goings-on, manifesting in awkward imaginaries. The dream personas are rendered as complex character amalgams with nomadic ages, sexes, genders and phenotypes. Occurrences of lived “fact” elide with a hallucinatory real as speculation. In A Novelty, Bette B, an ageing quasi-academic artist researcher, and BØB, attuned urban rodent, are palindromic variants of a generic cast of Betty’s and Bob’s. The happenstance of their meeting on the super slick POMOC (PostOffice MotionCorridor) affects a trans-special contagion. These are the facts of the matter. The matters that come to concern both B’s are more slippery and elusive.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Adventure is the second in a series of three novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking. A storyline, or genealogy, tinted a shade of RGB red, is fashioned by thinking through the felt unthought of this between space — a fabulation, an anarchive of what passes through. Lucid dreaming of this type is rife with allusions to conceptual and material goings-on, manifesting in awkward imaginaries. The dream personas are rendered as complex character amalgams with nomadic ages, sexes, genders, and phenotypes. Occurrences of lived “fact” elide with a hallucinatory real as speculation. In An Adventure, a feral feminist artist collective, The Bettys, inhabit a timeless Arcades Project. This is their experiment in wild hypo-consumerism. The event of Red Betty’s fall generates the advent of a turn. A cleaving. The intra-play of personal politics and activist artistic practices is surreally suffused with attention to color, to life and death, to lightness and heaviness.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This open access book explores machine learning and its impact on how we make sense of the world. It does so by bringing together two ‘revolutions’ in a surprising analogy: the revolution of machine learning, which has placed computing on the path to artificial intelligence, and the revolution in thinking about the law that was spurred by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr in the last two decades of the 19th century. Holmes reconceived law as prophecy based on experience, prefiguring the buzzwords of the machine learning age—prediction based on datasets. On the path to AI introduces readers to the key concepts of machine learning, discusses the potential applications and limitations of predictions generated by machines using data, and informs current debates amongst scholars, lawyers and policy makers on how it should be used and regulated wisely. Technologists will also find useful lessons learned from the last 120 years of legal grappling with accountability, explainability, and biased data.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rarely out of the news or the public imagination. Images of red-eyed Terminators illustrate press accounts of incremental advances in medical diagnosis, facial recognition, natural language processing, and robotics. Such advances are transforming society through measurable impacts on people’s decisions and opportunities. Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction explores an emerging field with a religious studies approach, drawing on cultural and digital anthropological methods to demonstrate the entanglements of religion and AI, our imaginaries of these objects and our ideas about their utopian or dystopian futures. It addresses key topics, including the following: What AI is and is not. How religions are reacting to AI with examples of rejection, adoption, and adaptation. How established religions understand creation and place human-like AI within that. How overtly secular and even ‘new atheist’ groups understand AI as a tool for liberation from human evolution and religion. Religious visions of superintelligent AI. This engaging book is essential for anyone considering the relationship between religion, science and technology, and interested in the questions raised by transhumanism, posthumanism, and new religious movements.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rarely out of the news or the public imagination. Images of red-eyed Terminators illustrate press accounts of incremental advances in medical diagnosis, facial recognition, natural language processing, and robotics. Such advances are transforming society through measurable impacts on people’s decisions and opportunities. Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction explores an emerging field with a religious studies approach, drawing on cultural and digital anthropological methods to demonstrate the entanglements of religion and AI, our imaginaries of these objects and our ideas about their utopian or dystopian futures. It addresses key topics, including the following: What AI is and is not. How religions are reacting to AI with examples of rejection, adoption, and adaptation. How established religions understand creation and place human-like AI within that. How overtly secular and even ‘new atheist’ groups understand AI as a tool for liberation from human evolution and religion. Religious visions of superintelligent AI. This engaging book is essential for anyone considering the relationship between religion, science and technology, and interested in the questions raised by transhumanism, posthumanism, and new religious movements. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under A creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Listed by Unglue.it.

In April 2000, Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist at Sun Microsystems published a controversial article entitled "Why the Future Does not Need Us." Joy called for a moratorium on research in three new technological fields—artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering. He noted that, while we were poised to make rapid technological advances in each of these areas, our understanding of the ethical questions these technologies would inevitably raise was lagging far behind. The intervening years since Joy’s warning have indeed brought significant advances in each of these fields, advancements that have huge implications for how human life will unfold. Each holds great promise—for new medical cures, for new materials and machines, and for new insights into our world. However, each of these technologies also brings the possibility of great peril. For good or ill, these technologies will change the way we work, live, think, and love. Thus, it makes sense to approach them from a religious perspective. How do these new technologies change our understanding of ourselves, our place in the world, our relationships to one another, the way we face death, or our relationship to God?

Listed by Unglue.it.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence Transhumanism is a philosophy which advocates for the use of technology to radically enhance human capacities. This book interrogates the promises of transhumanism, arguing that it is deeply entwined with capitalist ideology. In an era of escalating crisis and soaring inequality, it casts doubt on a utopian techno-capitalist narrative of unending progress. In critiquing the transhumanist project, the book offers an alternative ethical framework for the future of life on the planet. As the debates around the advancement of AI and corporate-led digital technologies intensify, this is an important read for academics as well as policy makers .

Listed by Unglue.it.

Digitalisation, digital networks, and artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing our lives! We must understand the various developments and assess how they interact and how they affect our regular, analogue lives. What are the consequences of such changes for me personally and for our society? Digital networks and artificial intelligence are seminal innovations that are going to permeate all areas of society and trigger a comprehensive, disruptive structural change that will evoke numerous new advances in research and development in the coming years. Even though there are numerous books on this subject matter, most of them cover only specific aspects of the profound and multifaceted effects of the digital transformation. An overarching assessment is missing. In 2016, the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) has founded a study group to assess the technological impacts of digitalisation holistically. Now we present this compendium to you. We address the interrelations and feedbacks of digital innovation on policy, law, economics, science, and society from various scientific perspectives. Please consider this book as an invitation to contemplate with other people and with us, what kind of world we want to live in!

Listed by Unglue.it.

Wie verändern sich Mensch und Körper durch Technik? Und welches Menschenverständnis vertritt der Transhumanismus? Anna Puzio befasst sich in der ersten philosophischen Studie zur Anthropologie des Transhumanismus mit führenden Personen des Feldes, u. a. mit Nick Bostrom, David Pearce und Natasha Vita-More. Neben Körperoptimierung und Medizintechnologien beleuchtet sie auch Alltagstechnologien wie Wearables. Dabei entwickelt sie einen neuen Ansatz zur Technikanthropologie und ein neues inklusives Menschen- und Körperverständnis im Anschluss an Donna Haraway und den Kritischen Posthumanismus im amerikanischen Raum.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Utopian Variations is a comparative critical study of a variety of kinds of utopia and utopian discourse. Rather than focusing on more familiar forms of utopia, the book considers utopia in relation to a range of topics that have received less attention within utopian studies, including literary modernism, postsecularism, transhumanism, antihumanism, xenofeminism, the Covid-19 pandemic, recent speculation about postcapitalism, and utopianism since the 2007–8 financial crisis. The book also makes an entirely original argument for a re-evaluation of the concept of the utopian blueprint that breaks with academic orthodoxy in this area. As well as drawing on literature, film, and popular culture, there is extensive engagement with social theory, cultural theory, and queer theory, resulting in a rich, wide-ranging study. A small book on very big ideas. The title tells us there’ll be variety, and Sean Seeger delivers that variety not just in terms of the forms discussed but of the texts explored too. Utopian Variations is both accessible and interesting. The writing is clear and to the point but there’s no sacrificing on the detail. Seeger focuses his attention on the forms of utopia and utopianism that have received less attention in academic work to date, and his chronological approach makes it easy to track the evolution of the central ideas explored. I learnt a lot reading this book and have been introduced to a great many new texts. – Matthew Leggatt, University of Winchester

Listed by Unglue.it.