Citizen Cyborg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Cyborg - This 2004 book written by James Hughes provides an overview of future technologies related to medicine which mostly still belong to the realm of utopia now, more than twenty years later. As I wrote in https://prudentia-club.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-misery-of-transhumanism.html there has been little progress in implementing these ideas. But as you can read in https://prudentia-club.blogspot.com/2024/10/longevity-medicine-state-of-art-2024.html longevity medicine has developed a little since Aubrey de Grey published his “strategies for engineered negligible senescence” (SENS) in 2005.

Claus D. Volko 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A note about Mensa

The page about Mensa on German Wikipedia ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_in_Deutschland ) contains an interesting passage: The criterion for membership in Mensa is an intelligence quotient that is higher than that of 98% of the population. In the intelligence tests commonly used in Germany (mean 100, standard deviation 15), this corresponds to a score of 130 or higher. Mensa offers its own intelligence test for this purpose, which is evaluated by a psychologist. This test is approved for persons aged fourteen and older. External assessments, e.g. from registered psychologists, can also be accepted; for children under the age of fourteen, this is the only option. Almost half of new members submit external assessments. High IQ scores are often first achieved in tests independent of Mensa, which then draws attention to the topic of giftedness and Mensa. That means that almost half of the Mensa members have probably practiced dozens of intelligence tests until they once reached a sc...
Read more

Beyond IQ: Why We Should Measure the Intelligence of Expression

Abstract Traditional intelligence testing focuses almost exclusively on internal cognitive processing. Yet in real intellectual life—science, philosophy, leadership, and increasingly artificial intelligence—what ultimately matters is not merely having understanding, but expressing it. This article argues that intelligence assessment systematically neglects output quality and proposes a new complementary construct: the Externalization Quotient (EOQ) . 1. The Hidden Assumption Behind IQ Tests Modern intelligence tests are built on an implicit assumption: Intelligence is something that happens inside the mind. Input (perception, memory) and processing (reasoning, abstraction) are carefully operationalized and measured. Output—language, explanation, communication—is treated as a contaminant variable rather than an object of study. This design choice made sense historically. Psychometrics aimed to be: language-minimal culture-fair objectively scorable Expression, by...
Read more

The Technological Republic

In April 2026, the media reported about a manifesto which Alex Karp, one of the founders of the software company Palantir, had posted to X. Many of these reports were negative and considered the manifesto a threat. When I learned that the manifesto was essentially a summary of a book published a year ago, The Technological Republic, I decided to get hold of the book to learn the message Karp wants to spread.   The central message of this book is that the software industry should support the state and be closely aligned with the government to combine "a pursuit of innovation with the objectives of the nation". The authors speak of a "national plan" to which every citizen should be committed, which should involve research and development in space travel, medicine, and military. The military is especially important. The adversaries of the West, most notably China and Russia, will invest in upgrading their military with artificial intelligence, the authors are su...
Read more