What’s up guys, my name is Selim Chehimi and today we’re going to talk about Transhumanism.
Transhumanism is a movement that aims to revolutionize what it means to be human.
So, what it means exactly? Well, it means upgrading your body and mind with technological advancement to live better and longer.
Humanity has managed to extend life expectancy greatly. 2000 years ago,
you could expect to live between 18 and 21 years, by the
1900′s we had increased that to 30 years and by 1980′s we had reached a world average life expectancy of 62 years.
However, this figure varies hugely across the globe.
Nowadays, one hundred thousand (100.000) people dies every day from diseases caused by aging.
However,
However, no one really treats aging as a global priority and even worse it is seen as
Justified unlike any other killer of this magnitude like malaria.
I really think that we can do something about it. And I will show you how it’s possible to do so. But first,
What’s really aging?
Well, aging is a really simple concept…  it’s
just the lifelong accumulation of damage to the body. In fact, the body can tolerate some damage,
but too much of it causes diseases and disability.
In my opinion, defeating aging is tremendously important.
We need to break this horrible relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year.
I really want you to consider that most infectious diseases have been easily prevented (vaccines, antibiotics…).
So why not age related diseases?
As Longevity
Technology becomes available and safe, people will realize the benefits and principle objections will quickly disappears.
Just ask the person who is about to die if she would like another year of high-quality living and
Most of us will say yes to extra time.
This is the first step of Super Longevity: getting a relatively modest amount of life extension.
Let's say 30 years. All those people who will benefit from those therapies will in fact be able to survive long enough to receive improved
treatments that will give them 30 or
50 more years to live. And who knows, if we repeat this process over and over, maybe humans will be immortal.
Now, we will see how can we actually live longer.
Science doesn’t know exactly why we age,
but it has made progress in beginning to understand the process. Scientist in a variety of fields
have found that a large number of gene sequences play a role in the process of aging.
So the first way to increase life expectancy
is gene therapy. It’s an experimental technique that is used to prevent or treat certain diseases.
Here’s an overview of the possibilities:
Replace a mutated gene with a healthy copy of that gene
Deactivate bad gene that is malfunctioning
Introduce a new gene to fight a disease
In other word, that’s trying to rewrite genetics to increase our life expectancy. For the moment,
it’s obviously a risky technique,
But it will have a great impact in the future. The second way to increase life expectancy is
Cybernetics. The idea of it is really simple: “Anything that fails in our body can be fixed or replaced.
And, if nothing can be fixed, it can be 10 times better”.
Anything can be replaced, legs that never get tired or eyes that can see in the dark!
For me, Cybernetics is really promising. For example, Stan Larkin lived 18 months with a prosthetic heart that he carried around in a backpack
Another example would be Hugh Herr, a champion mountain climber that lost his legs at 17 years old.
So, he built his own legs to be able to climb again. He became passionate by bionics and took his studies seriously.
It’s interesting because his biological body gets worse and worse, but the artificial part of his body gets better and better.
At 80 years old, his balance will be better than an 18-year-old!
 
 
Perhaps the most dramatic way transhumanists believe that technology will transform the human
condition is the idea that someone's mind could be converted into digital data and 'uploaded' into an immensely powerful
computer.
This would allow you to live in a world of unbounded virtual experiences and effectively achieve Immortality.
Yet transhumanists seem
to ignore the fact that this kind of mind-uploading has some
insurmountable obstacles.
To start with, here is the practical issue: our brains each have trillions of connections between
86 billion or so neurons. To replicate the mind digitally we would have to map each of these connections,
something that is far beyond our abilities.
Also, computational capacity is the second challenge, and it is another big one.
Current computers aren’t powerful enough to hold human's digital brain.
Transhumanism is more than just creating “cyborgs”.
it would be an entirely new species that people have yet to imagine: a being that's
developed beyond the current human state to enjoy a higher level of reasoning, culture and physical capabilities.
Thanks so much for watching guys, I hope that you’ve liked this video.
Don’t forget to like it and also to subscribe.
Follow me on social media and have a look at all my Articles about AI and Technology on my blog selimchehimi.com.
