The challenges of Transhumanism and the Singularity

Singularity, Transhumanism, and Homo Extensus

Is man destined to be overtaken by Super Artificial Intelligence, in the age of the Singularity? Should the Homo Sapiens species we know stand aside in the face of the mutant and cyborg organisms predicted by transhumanist currents? Maybe not. Let us try to pose the question considering historical precedents. Prehistoric mythical man was replaced…

The ideas of singularity

The idea of the Singularity is not recent: in 1958 Stanislaw Ulam reported discussing with John Van Neumann a “singularity in the history of the race beyond which the afflictions of human beings, as we know them, cannot continue.” A few years later, in 1965, statistician I. J. Good associated the singularity with the advent…

Transhumanism, the dystopias of amortal man.

Transhumanism (sometimes abbreviated as >H or H+ or H-plus) is a movement that aims to promote the use of technological innovations to increase physical and cognitive capabilities and improve aspects considered undesirable in the human condition, such as disease and aging, with a view also to a possible post-human transformation. In particular, transhumanists believe that…

Technocracy VS Democracy

The growing importance of Artificial Intelligence in the economic, media, and geopolitical spheres is setting the stage for a potential technocratic system that can undermine and replace the democratic and even other political systems in place in the world today. The problem primarily concerns democracies, which have been entering a phase of crisis for decades…

Open Source, Open Mind

One of the dialectics relevant to the political and socioeconomic effect of Artificial Intelligence is that between proprietary technologies, i.e., owned by a company, and Open Source technologies, i.e., software in which the source code is made publicly available, allowing anyone to examine, modify, distribute and improve it free of charge. The Open Source collaborative…

AI and metaverse: the EU Commission’s guidelines

Thierry Breton, former European commissioner for the internal market and services, provided strategic and operational guidance on how the European Union intends to approach the digital sector, valid for both the metaverse and Artificial Intelligence, starting with the relationship betweeen public and private and the need for open standards: “Private metaverses should be developed on…

AI Act: anthropocentric legal protection

The AI Act, European regulation on Artificial Intelligence, which came into effect on August 1, 2024, has begun to establish a global framework for protecting people from the risks of these technologies and the drift toward technocracy. In this regulation, it is considered appropriate, for example, to prohibit the marketing, commissioning or use of AI…

Possessors, not possessed by AI.

Legally, humans own AI: it is a technological service that can be acquired in different forms and from different providers. This principle must always be kept in mind: AI, no matter how advanced and super-intelligent, will always remain a product. All forms of reversal of this condition, should be regarded as lacking logical and legal…

Artificial intelligent slaves

Despite the dreaded yet entirely hypothetical advent of the Singularity and Super Artificial Intelligence, let us not forget that we are still dealing with a man-made tool, which man can legally and technically dispose of as a commodity. In the professional world, some are beginning to wonder whether AI will become its superior or its…

Unmasking the Imitation Game

Human imitation is, since Alan Turing’s first defined it, the main “Interface Metaphor” of Artificial Intelligence. We are dealing with a form of human-computer interface, like others that have marked the history of computing such as the desktop interface, which simulates in PC operating systems the folders, documents, and waste baskets of a real office…