GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Downloading happiness

domingo, 2 de junio de 2019

BioEdge: Downloading happiness

Downloading happiness

by Michael Cook | 2 Jun 2019 |

America’s leading transhumanist is back! In the news, that is. Zoltan Istvan, the transhumanist candidate for president in 2016, has been keeping a low profile recently. But he returned to the headlines in an interview on “Good Morning Britain”.

His vision of transhumanist future includes the standard predictions of ultra-longevity, highr IQ, improved health and so on.

But he also believes that by the year 2042 we will be able to upload our consciousness to the cloud. It could be a bit confusing. “"Maybe you don't just upload one version of yourself. Maybe there's 100 versions of yourself. You can create other versions of yourself. Some people want to have a thousand copies of themselves in different ways."

It will be a kind of heaven, according to Istvan: “"We're going to live in a world where you can download happiness, download fulfilment, download the things you really want in life and make it a utopic existence. People are going to find themselves in a new world where they can reach all the possibilities they've only dreamt of.”

It won’t be all beer and skittles, though. "Getting hacked when you have a bionic heart or robotic eyes is going to be incredibly dangerous."

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

An interesting group within the American pro-life movement is African-Americans who oppose abortion. The Rev Clenard Childress Jr, for instance, is a New Jersey pastor who runs a website called Black Genocide. Groups like his highlight the fact that African-American women account for a third of abortions in the US.

This might have been remained a factoid about the US abortion wars, but it was unexpectedly placed on centre stage this week with the Supreme Court's decision in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky. Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African-American on the bench, was seething with anger when he reflected on the fate of black babies (see our story below):

abortion in the United States is also marked by a considerable racial disparity. The reported nationwide abortion ratio— the number of abortions per 1,000 live births—among black women is nearly 3.5 times the ratio for white women. And there are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area.

Journalists who bothered to report his remarks shook their heads and described him as loopy. He's not. That abortion has a disproportionate impact on the poor and disenfranchised is a blot on American society. For a touching comment on this, check out this rap song from a group called Flipsyde, Happy Birthday.