There is not a lot of “value added” in this post, but I wanted to let people know about a project that I’m working on with Ian Lowrie, an anthropology/STI graduate student at Rice. We are co-editing a series for Platypus, the blog for the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing (or CASTAC), a committee of the American Anthropological Association. The series is called Anthropos Tomorrow: Transhumanism and Anthropology, and it’s more or less about what the title would suggest. In addition to our introductory essay, it has a wonderful piece by Grant Jun Otsuki on “human like” technology in Japan – human like meaning not resembling human (though some of it does, to an almost uncanny degree) but also meaning equipment such as LCD goggles or joysticks that are “human like” because they feel human.

It also includes an essay of mine on the Mormon Transhumanist Society, which I’ve mentioned before in this blog, and which gets plenty of press on its own; this piece is on how, for this group of religious transhumanists, speculation regarding human futures are also accounts of possible human pasts. It also addresses the Simulation Hypothesis, and how (when viewed through a certain metaphysics) this secular hypothesis can become something else entirely.

We’re expecting more posts in this series later on – we seem to be doing about one or two a month – so you should keep an eye on the CASTAC blog; but then again, I think that the CASTAC blog is always worth some attention.