I'd like to thank John for the glowing praise (I'm blushing), and he and everyone else here at FoolishPeople for this wonderful opportunity to help out with the Ruined Steel project. I've been exceptionally quiet online regarding my own views about Transhumanism, if not cryptically vague when I've taken the rare moment to publicly speak up about anything. It stems mostly from fear. Fear of seeming too 'out there'. Fear of being misunderstood, misread, misquoted, and overall...wrong. I've come to the realisation that being wrong is impossible in speculation. If you're 'wrong', in the end it either means you weren't inspiring, not read by the right people, or technology hasn't yet met with your estimation. Maybe, just maybe, you want to be wrong on purpose, like George Orwell. Unfortunately, he was too damned spot-on for his own good. For our own good. Then there's Phil Dick. All these years of being an underdog science fiction author, and now we've bred two generations of mutants who actually get Phil Dick and are molding surreality to their own approximation of his writing. Aleister Crowley should be so lucky. If only they had our Internet when they were alive.
Immortality. It's a key element in the periodic table of Transhumanism. The Internet can be seen as a limited means of reaching this goal, yet the alchemy required to turn it into virtual gold lies in the occulted regions of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Dumping your brain onto the Internet in textual form, you're fashioning a crude personality construct. How accurate or tailored this online persona is to that which exists as flesh and bone, is up to you, the creator. Long after you're dead and gone, if not sooner, your LiveJournal emoting, political screeds, MeFi and /. posts... even your drunken party pictures may lie dormant in a digital archive, awaiting the day it's ultimately devoured by a growing AI that's coming to grips with its own existence. The world's leading governments and corporations may already have virtual personality constructs for some of you, awaiting the day when computers are inexpensive and powerful enough to model each and every person from birth to death, in an attempt to simulate reality in the achievement of elusive (inter)National Security objectives. In the charge to preserve the perceived systems of existence, our random and unpredictable humanity may be destroyed. This form of Transhumanism is an inevitable conclusion of sufficiently funded bureaucratic paranoia. It's up to free-thinking individuals to ensure the system remains full of exploitable holes. What fun is immortality if you're stuck in someone else's idea of Heaven?
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