The Patriots

[A 2014 article from transhumanist Amon Twyman who is an advocate of radical social and technological change leading to a zero state, no gender, no individuality, no freedom, where the majority are nothing more than engineered man-machines comprising the vast part of a one world community under autocratic control.  His statement; ".. direct democratic action to circumvent obsolete political institutions." promotes the 'social justice' of Aldous Huxley's eugenics world dream via 'mob rule' anarchy  - ED ]

Interview with Zero State founder and transhumanist Dr. Amon Twyman. [Emphasis DNI]

Rapid advances in technology are paving the way for new ideas about the future, including those of the communities we live in. I had a chance to catch up with transhumanist, Zero State founder, and cognitive scientist Dr. Amon Twyman, who is a leader of one such community that is exploring new directions for the betterment of humanity. 

Dr. Amon Twyman

Q. Dr. Twyman, What is Zero State?

A. Zero State (ZS) is a community that grew out of the transhumanist movement back in 2011. It’s now part of a broad coalition of groups and movements that we call WAVE, referring to a coming wave of radical technological and social change. The basic ZS idea is to create networks of people and resources which could evolve into a distributed, virtual State. Right now there are only a few thousand ZSers (albeit well connected to much larger networks), but in a hypothetical full-blown Zero State there would be tens of millions or more, all supporting each other and being part of a single nation no matter where they live in the world. Our motto is "positive social change through technology."

 Q. How does transhumanism relate to ZS?

A. Our core principles and ideas are deliberately compatible with transhumanism. That comes naturally, as ZS grew out of transhumanism and our most active “citizens” tend to self-identify as Transhumanists. That said, it’s important to stress that people don’t have to be transhumanists to join ZS. More generally, we consider ourselves to be a “Social Futurist” community, which is to say that we believe technological breakthroughs don’t happen in a social vacuum. There are social, economic, and political issues which not only stubbornly continue to exist in the face of techno-optimism, but which are sometimes greatly exacerbated by technological change. In short, we believe that technology should be applied to improving the human condition on both physiological and societal levels.

Q. How can ZS help the world?

A. In the first instance, we are focused on helping ZS’ citizens, or more accurately, helping them to help each other. An increasing number of people are finding themselves in need of help of one type or another these days, and we would like to demonstrate that mutual support is made more achievable than ever before thanks to the power of cutting-edge technologies. We tend to focus on bringing together people and ways to access current technologies such as meshnets, cryptocurrency, Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, while exploring ideas such as longevity, super-intelligence & wellbeing, accelerating change, and direct democratic action to circumvent obsolete political institutions. Beyond working to help our own people, we actively work to support the wider network of like-minded groups and believe that compassionately, intelligently applied technology has the potential to improve the lives of everybody in the world.

 Q. How did you come to be the founder of ZS?

A. My background is in a combination of psychological research (consciousness and decision making, Artificial Intelligence) and digital & performing arts. Although I’d read my fair share of science fiction as a kid, I decided I was a transhumanist while studying at university, after reading “Mind Children” by Hans Moravec. Over time, my various interests in art, science, transhumanism, and contemporary social/political issues coalesced into a coherent worldview, and I eventually decided to form an organization to pursue these ideas. The result, Zero State, was heavily informed by my experience as a co-founder of the UK Transhumanist Association, which has since evolved into Humanity+ UK. I started building WAVE, the broader network ZS is part of, two years later. That was once we’d had time to realize that there was a bigger picture emerging; a large number of like-minded groups forming to address a vast array of specific issues with a common outlook. That common outlook is characterized by technological savvy, distaste for old thinking and limits, and a keen awareness of social issues.

A. What does the future hold for ZS?

Q. ZS-affiliated project groups continue to work on developing tools for our members. A lot of these projects are collaborative and many have a distinctly transhumanist flavor, such as experimentation with Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (using electrical charge to help concentration—work being done in collaboration with Dirk Bruere and Andrew Vladimirov). Some of the projects seem more like simple fun than serious experimentation at first glance—such as the ZSers building Minecraft environments in which to test their AI software—but that’s half the point; For people to do something useful and have fun at the same time. Our most vigorous efforts are currently going into WAVE, expanding the wider, networked context in which ZS operates, doing what we can to help out like-minded groups. We’ve been establishing connections with large networks, such as The Zeitgeist Movement and an emerging coalition of online transhumanist organizations. We live in extremely exciting times, with lots of rapid change both good and bad, and it looks like Zero State will soon get its chance to help people help each other in that brave new world. If you believe in the promise of technology, the importance of social justice, and the power of community building then feel free to jump in and join the fun!

Zoltan Istvan is an award-winning journalist, philosopher, and activist. You can find him on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Zoltan is also the author of the recently published #1 Philosophical bestseller novel The Transhumanist Wager. Available in ebook or paperback, the controversial novel is a revolutionary reading experience. You can check it out here

by Kenrick Vezina

Illustration by Yan Liang, via MIT News.

A team at MIT has combined techniques from synthetic biology and materials engineering to create hybrid “living materials”: bacteria engineered to take up functional nanoparticles and grow into thin layers with usable properties, like electrical conduction or light emission. This achievement is a perfect follow-up to news from earlier this month that another group at MIT had successfully created bionic plants   [Emphasis Others] (Read our Gene-ius post on the news here.)

Anne Trafton, writing for MIT News, reports: 

These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells, which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales, with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light. 

The organic analog of choice is bone. As Amina Kahn at the Los Angeles Times puts it:

 Our bones are remarkable feats of engineering; strong and yet light, shot through with holes and yet able to bear incredible loads. This super-strong natural material is built as cells incorporate hard minerals like calcium into living tissue. 

The MIT team, led by assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering Timothy Lu, was inspired by this interplay of living cells with nonliving components.

The process Lu and his team used begins with the bacteria E. coli and genetic engineering. They chose E. coli because it naturally produces thin, slimy films that adhere to surfaces — it’s this adhesion that’s key. In order to adhere to surfaces, E. coli produces “curli fibers”, comprised of repeating protein chains.

The MIT team replaced the bacteria’s ability to produce curli fibers with an engineered genetic circuit that only produces curli fibers if given a certain molecule. Now the team essentially has an on-off switch for the bacteria and can control the formation of biofilms: supply the bacteria with the trigger molecule and they produce curli fibers and form biofilms.

On top of this, the team engineered another set of E. coli with a similar on-off switch but based on a different molecular trigger. And these bacteria were modified one step further: researchers altered the genes coding for the creation of curli fibers so that the protein chains would grab on to gold nanoparticles. 

So they had two varieties of engineered bacteria, both controllable via distinct molecule of their choosing, and one of the two’s ability to latch onto its environment with curli fibers has been co-opted to make the bacteria gather tiny bits of gold from its environment. 

Take both varieties, grow them together; manage their growth relative to one another with the two on-off molecules; and supply some nanoscale bits of gold. The researchers did just this and managed to coax the bacteria to build a tiny film laced through with gold nanowires: a conductive surface comprised of living cells. 

And the conductive biofilm is just one of several proofs-of-concept to come out of this project. 

The team was also able to embed quantum dots — semiconductor nanoparticles that glow a particular color after being illuminated by light — in their biofilm through a similar technique.

The potential applications for these living materials include batteries and solar cells, diagnostic devices and scaffolds for tissue engineering. According to Trafton, “The researchers are also interested in coating the biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose, which could be useful for converting agricultural waste to biofuels.”

This latest breakthrough is sure to be one of many similar efforts that blurs the perceived boundaries between living and nonliving, artificial and organic. We’re increasingly able, as Lu and his team demonstrate, to manipulate our world at the level of molecules and atoms — whether those are DNA molecules or gold nanowiring.

• “Engineers design ‘living materials’,” Anne Trafton | MIT News
• “Scientists build man-made ‘living-materials’ inside bacterial cells,” Amina Khan | LA Times
• “MIT scientists engineer ‘cells that talk to each other’,” Sudeshna Chowdhury | Christian Science Monitor
• “Synthesis and patterning of tunable multiscale materials with engineered cells,” Nature Materials

Additional Resources:

• “Bionic plants developed at MIT focus on the “tech” half of biotech,” Genetic Literacy Project (Anne Trafton | MIT News)
• “Living Materials Respond to the Environment and Communicate With Each Other,” Dexter Johnson | IEEE Spectrum

by 2045.com

International Manifesto of the "2045" Strategic Social Initiative

Mankind has turned into a consumer society standing at the edge of a total loss of the conceptual guidelines necessary for further evolution. The majority of people are almost exclusively absorbed  in merely maintaining their own comfortable lives.

Modern civilization, with its space stations, nuclear submarines, iPhones and Segways cannot save mankind from the limitations in the physical abilities of our bodies, nor from diseases and death.

We are not satisfied with modern achievements of scientific and technical progress. Science working for the satisfaction of consumer needs will not be able to ensure a technological breakthrough towards a radically different way of life.

We believe that the world needs a different ideological paradigm. Within its framework it is necessary to form a major objective  capable of pointing out a new direction for the development of all mankind and ensuring the achievement of a scientific and technical revolution.  The new ideology should assert, as one of its priorities, the necessity of using breakthrough technology for an improvement of man himself and not only of his environment.

We believe that it is possible and necessary to eliminate aging and even death, and to overcome the fundamental limits of the physical and mental capabilities currently set by the restrictions of the physical body.

Scientists from various countries in the world are already developing technology that ensures the creation of an artificial human body prototype within the next decade. We believe the biggest technological project of our times will become the creation of such artificial human body and a subsequent transfer of individual human consciousness to such a body.

Implementation of this technological project will inevitably result in an explosive development of innovations and global changes in our civilization and will improve human life.

We believe that before 2045 an artificial body will be created that will not only surpass the existing body in terms of functionality, but will achieve perfection of form and be no less attractive than the human body. People will make independent decisions about the extension of their lives and the possibilities for personal development in a new body after the resources of the biological body have been exhausted.

The new human being will receive a huge range of abilities and will be capable of withstanding extreme external conditions easily: high temperatures, pressure, radiation, lack of oxygen, etc. Using a neural-interface humans will be able to operate several bodies of various forms and sizes remotely.

We suggest the implementation of not just a mechanistic project to create an artificial body, but a whole system of views, values and technology which will render assistance to humankind in intellectual, moral, physical, mental and spiritual development.

We invite all interested specialists: scientists, politicians, mass media personalities, philosophers, futurologists and businessmen to join the "2045" strategic social initiative. We welcome all who share our vision of the future and are ready to make the next jump.

THE AVATAR R&D NETWORK OF THE 2045 INITIATIVE

[To the right of the main page, click on “Immortality Button”:  “Click this button to start the development of your personalized immortal Avatar”]

The main objectives of our movement are:

1. To achieve the support of the International community and create conditions for international co-operation of interested specialists around the "2045" Initiative.  

2. To create an international research center for cybernetic immortality to advance practical implementations of the main technical project – the creation of the artificial body and the preparation for subsequent transfer of individual human consciousness to such a body. 
 
3. To engage experts in the selection and support of the most interesting projects in the quest to ensure technological breakthroughs.

4. To support innovative industries and create special scientific education programs for schools and institutes of higher education.

5. To create educational programs for television, radio and internet, to hold forums, conferences, congresses and exhibitions, and to establish awards and produce books, movies and computer games with the view of raising the profile of the initiative and spreading its ideas.

6. To form a culture connected with the ideology of the future, promoting technical progress, artificial intellect, “multi-body”, immortality, and cyborgization.

REQUIREMENTS:

For the registration of your pre-order, please answer the following questions:

Are you 18 or older?

Are you of sound mind so as to bear legal responsibility for your actions?

Do you personally -- yourself or as legal representative -- dispose of the funds required for the development (> $3M) for your avatar?

Have you decided to commission the development of your custom-made immortal avatar?

If you answer “no” to a question, you cannot proceed further 

[Note:  Guess this is yet another way to de-populate the world -- Russian-style.  Note that the Russians charge in U.S. dollars! -- DNI]

by Jessica Cussins

In 1998, a UCLA conference called "Engineering the Human Germline" brought together more than 1,000 people to discuss various emerging technologies and the challenges they faced. Gregory Stock, a co-organizer of the conference, told Nature at the time that, really, the goal of the event was to make the inheritable genetic modification (IGM) of humans “acceptable” to the public. 

Over forty countries, and multiple international treaties, prohibit IGM due to the profound safety, social, and ethical implications of making permanent changes to the human germline. Opposition to IGM is widespread; the Center for Genetics and Society, for example, has long argued that “the case for allowing it is not compelling, and the potential harms of doing so are immense.” 

Disturbingly, 2013 has seen a deluge of new efforts, more explicit than any since 1998, to ease public opinion towards allowing human germline engineering. 

The big one for 2013, which I have written about before, is mitochondrial replacement. This is a technology that would in theory allow a woman with a particular kind of severe mitochondrial disease the chance to have a non-affected and mostly genetically related child. It would extract the nucleus from one of her eggs and insert it into an enucleated egg from a second woman, and then allow the resulting egg, containing nuclear DNA from the intended mother and mitochondrial DNA from a donor woman, to be fertilized. This crude technique poses severe risks to any resulting child, yet, with both the United Kingdom and the United States currently considering policy changes to allow clinical trials, it seems to be the world’s current forerunner for violating the international consensus against IGM.

But there are other developments worth keeping an eye on. One, a gene editing technique known as CRIPSR, has gotten a lot of attention recently because of its potential for permitting much more specific genetic alterations than can be accomplished with currently used methods. Researchers have had some success in mice and human stem cells, and a company called Editas that just launched intends to investigate and commercialize its human possibilities. Fortunately, the focus of CRIPSR is likely to dwell in the realm of gene therapy for critically ill consenting persons. Unfortunately, some scientists are also touting the possibilities of applying CRISPR to IVF embryos – in other words, of moving ahead to full-fledged inheritable genetic modification.  

It is still too early to know how effective and safe CRISPR could be; so called “off-target mutations” caused by its high mutagenic efficiency could mean that the technique would fix one problem, but introduce others. Furthermore, epigenetic changes caused by this technique seem inevitable, and yet would be very difficult to understand or predict ahead of time. However, if it is found to be safe and effective, it would be the most powerful tool for producing “designer babies” the world has seen to date. Unlike mitochondrial replacement, with its crude wholesale swap of one woman’s mitochondrial DNA for another’s, CRISPR could make it possible at least to try to alter specific genes for specific purposes.

Another procedure that was recently in the news is a method to genetically modify sperm. Scientists from the Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom used a viral vector to insert genetic material into mouse spermatozoa and found that it was still functional three generations later. However, while this technique introduces another method for creating transgenic animals, it seems that any human applications are vague and hypothetical at this point.

All of these techniques are biologically extreme processes that carry unknown impacts. But it’s important to remember that, even if they can be made to work, none of them alleviate the illnesses of people alive today. Instead, they are proposals for creating new people. They are often justified as a way to help couples who desperately want a genetically related child, but are concerned about passing on a debilitating illness to their children.  ...

It remains to be seen how the policy cards will fall on these novel attempts at IGM, and whether technical limitations or the impressive outpouring of criticism from varied sources around the world this year could be enough to fight back this particular wave of enthusiasm.

Previously on Biopolitical Times:

• Scientists Warn Against “Three-Parent IVF” Experiment
• FDA to Hold Public Meeting about a Form of Human Germline Modification
• Crispr Goes Commercial
• Human Germline Hype Pings around the Globe

[Note:  Again, what is rarely mentioned in terms of the injected genes and resultant damaged immunology of the future children involved, it is not just the foreign “desired” genes that are passed down through the generations, but also the foreign genes from the viral or bacterial vectors used, the genes that produce the transcription factors used (e.g., Oct4), and actually any other foreign genes the researchers might “desire” for experimental purposes.   What about all those genes and how they might function in future generations of human beings?  How do those foreign genes interact with the future children’s normal genes?  Where do those foreign genes end up after they’re injected?  They don’t know.  The current epidemic in scientific fraud is finally being met by calls even within the various scientific fields for turning such cases over for police work and jail time.  Perhaps researchers in genetic engineering/synthetic biology/nanotechnology who damage future generations of human beings because of their fraud and lack of professional credentials should also be held to legal accountability for their actions.  See: 

--  [Junk DNA] Never-Seen-Before Secret DNA Code And An 'Unusual Meaning'-Scientists Find, at: http://www.designntrend.com/articles/9627/20131214/never-seen-before-secret-dna-code-unusual-meaning-scientists-find.htm  

--  Richard Smith: Should scientific fraud be a criminal offence?, at:  http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2013/12/09/richard-smith-should-scientific-fraud-be-a-criminal-offence/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bmj%2Fblogs+(Latest+BMJ+blogs)  

--  Call the cops;  The long arm of the law has reached into an investigation of alleged scientific misconduct, at:  http://www.nature.com/news/call-the-cops-1.14288

See also: 

-- 'Designer Sperm' Inserts Custom Genes Into Offspring, at:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131202171926.htm

--  Scientist create 'robotic sperm' to help with fertilisation and drug delivery, at:  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientist-create-robotic-sperm-to-help-with-fertilisation-and-drug-delivery-8999796.html;  Abstract at:  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201302544/abstract .

--  News from Abroad: EPO Clarifies Extent to which Methods Involving Use of Human Embryos Are Excluded from Patentability, at:  http://www.patentdocs.org/2013/12/news-from-abroad-epo-clarifies-extent-to-which-methods-involving-use-of-human-embryos-are-excluded-f.htmlThe article first appeare

The article first appeared here. --  DNI]