Transhumanism: Building a Better Reincarnation

In this blog I’ve expressed skepticism about transhumanism despite being something of a transhumanist myself. I’ve been skeptical about ideas of immortality, about the risks, and that some transhumanism is really just a hope for a kind of techno-secular heaven.

My concern roughly is that transhumanism too often becomes a race to preserve a limited sense of identity, when that limited sense of identity may actually be what we need to transcend. I take this inspiration both from observation, and my studies of oft-referred-to, little-understood thinking by Buddhists and Taoists.

Or to be blunt, a lot of deep thought about human identity is that the human identity, that is identifying with a transitory mind and ego, is the core of most of our problems, and maybe we ought to seek to deal with that first. Uploading our brains to computers and such can kind of wait because this “us” we want to preserve is part of the problem.

The ultimate question of transhumanism is one of identity – and how we deal with that.

Read more

Facebook’s New Data Center Collides With Atmospheric Science

It rained inside a Facebook Data Center.

It was due to high humidity and a chiller-less air conditioning system coming together to produce a high concentration of irony and obvious cloud computing jokes.

Having worked in data centers before, I collect stories like this for use.  It’s a good reminder of things people never think of.

You have a favorite crazy technology story?

– Steve