Open Transcripts

Archive

Futures Podcast #1: Cyborg Experiments, with Professor Kevin Warwick

Humans, we’re pret­ty lim­it­ed in what we can do, let’s face it, men­tal­ly par­tic­u­lar­ly. We just have a bunch of brain cells. And the pos­si­bil­i­ty of enhanc­ing our brain, our men­tal capa­bil­i­ties, I think is enormous.

Biohackers Die

So grinders are a com­mu­ni­ty com­mit­ted to rad­i­cal­ly alter­ing the body. And so some­times it’s treat­ments like tran­scra­nial mag­net­ic, or direct cur­rent stim­u­la­tion. It could be through the use of pre­vi­ous­ly untest­ed chem­i­cals like VIP. Often it takes the form of implant­ed devices. All these approach­es come with risks. What I’m going to focus on today is why despite all the risks being tak­en, a grinder has­n’t died yet.

Biohacking: The Moral Imperative to Build a Better You

I think that we have a moral imper­a­tive to change the human being, giv­en the fact that we are built so flawed and built for a time that we no longer live in. There’s a pret­ty per­va­sive belief that we kind of stopped evolv­ing from the neck up. And that we don’t have behav­iors that are actu­al­ly stuck inside the human being, and ways in which we’re in this sort of evo­lu­tion­ary lock­step with what we used to be, and not what we are and what we’ve become.

Grinder Perspective on Gene Editing Tech

I think when you start using this tech­nol­o­gy for enhance­ment, that’s when you start to get into the domain of bio­hack­ing and kind of human aug­men­ta­tion. Well, I believe that this is a very fer­tile ground for peo­ple to explore, and I think that this involves will­ing par­tic­i­pants who are try­ing to find out more about the world around them and try­ing to enhance the human expe­ri­ence. And I think we need to allow that inno­va­tion to take place.

Mindful Cyborgs #55 — Magick & the Occult with­in the Internet and Corporations with Damien Williams

We can see the hid­den, occult oper­a­tions of pro­gram­mers, of peo­ple who are seek­ing to get very spe­cif­ic out­comes by oper­at­ing on very par­tic­u­lar com­po­nents, rit­u­al­ly oper­at­ing with­in very par­tic­u­lar sym­bol­ic frame­works. People who are using par­tic­u­lar cod­ing lan­guages, peo­ple who are using par­tic­u­lar setups of hard­ware because for their pur­pos­es, for their end goals, these are the things that get the job done. These are the things that have the res­o­nance and the capa­bil­i­ty, the pow­er, the effi­ca­cy, to do the work. 

Mindful Cyborgs #69 — Materials Science & Plastic-making Bees with Deb Chachra

Designers do spend a fair bit of time think­ing about what mate­ri­als to use, but they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think about why those mate­ri­als have the prop­er­ties that they have.

Common Tags

Internet Hall of Fame 2013 Internet history Geek of the Week Berkman Klein Center infrastructure politics artificial intelligence Internet New America algorithms technology Internet Hall of Fame 2014 open source privacy design art Internet Hall of Fame Histories of Violence Carl Malamud ethics Twitter religion education surveillance community