Transhumanists are the ones who ultimately have an openly admitted agenda to see the world's population systematically reduced by 80-95%. See our eugenics section, as well as the movie Endgame, for more.
With that said, I don't think a man-machine merger is necessarily a bad thing. I found Ray Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines to be exciting and promising. -- KM
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A group of experts from around the world will Thursday hold a first of its kind conference on global catastrophic risks.
They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on earth as we know it.
Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.
On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.
"Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species."
Bostrom is a philosopher and a leading thinker of transhumanism -- a movement that advocates not only the study of the potential threats and promises that future technologies could pose to human life but also the ways in which emergent technologies could be used to make the very act of living better.
"We want to preserve the best of what it is to be human and maybe even amplify that," Bostrom told CNN.
Transhumanists, according to Bostrom, anticipate a coming era where biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools will be used to amplify our intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even enhance our emotional well-being.
The end result would be a new form of "posthuman" life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans.
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