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New eBook Blue Pills – Armand Vespertine
Armand Vespertine has a brand new eBook available on Amazon. The new book is a cyberpunk thriller called Blue Pills. An excerpt from the book is listed below. Surreality is the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Simulated Reality on Earth. With full sensory immersion indistinguishable from the real world, millions of people log on to experience its vast and fantastical dreamscape. Some never log off. Maverick is one such ‘Blue Pill’, but for him the Everdream is no decadent fantasy. He sustains himself by gold farming, mining imaginary gold to exchange for Reality’s equally imaginary money. It’s a dreary, grinding existence which thankfully comes to an end when he comes…
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If I Should Die Before I Wake – Armand Vespertine
Author : Armand Vespertine You may already be familiar with the name Zoltan Istvan . He’s a transhumanist philosopher, best known for his book The Transhumanist Wager. His protagonist Jethro Knights is a radical iconoclast, and lately Zoltan himself has been publishing articles advocating the drastic change implemented in his book. He received death threats for his WIRED post in favour of restricting Human breeding, and his latest article on Huffington suggests that we should make it illegal for anyone under the age of sixteen to participate in religion . While I respect Zoltan and enjoy entertaining his philosophies, I believe his radicalism is misplaced. When discussing the dangers that religion…
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15 Future Technologies That Should Not Scare You
Author : Armand Vespertine On Twitter I follow a popular fact sharing account known as @uberfacts. As has been pointed out elsewhere , a number of the ‘facts’ they tweet are either questionable or completely false. On at least three occasions now they have tweeted a link to a gizmopod gallery entitled 15 future technologies that should scare you. After viewing this gallery I found it to be very conservative and neophobic, with an almost singular focus on the negative effects of future technology with almost no thought given to the positive. Frankly, the author sounds like they’re practicing for being a stereotypical old man, blinded by his nostalgia and rambling on about…
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Time and Punishment
Author : Armand Vespertine An article by Rebecca Roache has gained some notoriety among futurist circles recently. In this article Roache speculates on how anticipated technologies like life extension, mind uploading and Human modification might be used to punish criminals. The main source of controversy has been that the tone of the original article made it seem that Roache was in favour of using advanced technology to torture prisoners in ways that were never before possible. Roache has since insisted that the article is merely speculation and that she does not necessarily support any of the penal methods she discusses. Regardless of Roache’s intent, I believe that the outrage the article…
