Episode description

George Dvorsky (futurist and ethicist) is our featured guest.

Topics: the importance of studying history in order to extrapolate the future; how democratic transhumanism differs from other flavours of transhumanism; why he is a technogaian environmentalist and how that relates to Bright Green Environmentalism; the abolition of suffering in all species; political problems of putting a thermostat on the earth; as well as the good and bad of living an engineered blissful existence permanently.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 22, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 62 minutes]. This is the first third of an interview recorded using Skype on February 17, 2012.

George Dvorsky is a Canadian futurist and ethicist. He has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He is the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons program.

News Item: Your host's most transhumanist novel is now available for purchase through Amazon's Kindle program. All the main characters in Plague at Redhook have augmentations which transhumanists look forward to possessing. Computers implanted in their bodies and hardwired into their brains, for example, such that they can share with one another their verbal thoughts, as well as images of what they are currently looking at, or what they remember seeing in the past. These augmentations are not new to them, this is how they live their normal lives. The plot is an action-adventure story combined with a medical-mystery story combined with an exploring-an-alien-world story.

And remember: you don't need a Kindle to purchase and read Kindle books. There is a free app that turns most smart phones into a Kindle reader. And there is a free downloadable program which will turn a PC or a Mac into a Kindle reader as well. So if you have $3.99 to burn, and want to see what your host thinks the future might be like in story form, consider buying a copy of Plague at Redhook.