UK Column Discussion

There have been three articles recently suggesting that the cashless society is coming, to Holland, Japan and Australia.

There are already people who have had microchip implants so that they can pay for drinks in clubs with their chips, which was promoted by Spain's Big Brother contestants:

(4mins 21s)

Is the cashless society a step in the direction of a microchipped population?

There have also been many mainstream articles hinting at the microchip agenda. And recently there have even been various hints at the later stages; transhumanism and "upgrades" i.e. brain chips.

There is a lot of information about this agenda here.

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Here is a particularly revealing article about the unfolding of the microchip agenda:

A generation is all they need
Toronto Star | Dec. 10, 2006
By KEVIN HAGGERTY



One day we will all happily be implanted with microchips, and our every move will be monitored. The technology exists; the only barrier is society’s resistance to the loss of privacy

By the time my four-year-old son is swathed in the soft flesh of old age, he will likely find it unremarkable that he and almost everyone he knows will be permanently implanted with a microchip. Automatically tracking his location in real time, it will connect him with databases monitoring and recording his smallest behavioural traits.

Most people anticipate such a prospect with a sense of horrified disbelief, dismissing it as a science-fiction fantasy. The technology, however, already exists. For years humane societies have implanted all the pets that leave their premises with a small identifying microchip. As well, millions of consumer goods are now traced with tiny radio frequency identification chips that allow satellites to reveal their exact location.

A select group of people are already “chipped” with devices that automatically open doors, turn on lights, and perform other low-level miracles. Prominent among such individuals is researcher Kevin Warwick of Reading University in England; Warwick is a leading proponent of the almost limitless potential uses for such chips.

Other users include the patrons of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, many of whom have paid about $150 (U.S.) for the privilege of being implanted with an identifying chip that allows them to bypass lengthy club queues and purchase drinks by being scanned. These individuals are the advance guard of an effort to expand the technology as widely as possible.

From this point forward, microchips will become progressively smaller, less invasive, and easier to deploy. Thus, any realistic barrier to the wholesale “chipping” of Western citizens is not technological but cultural. It relies upon the visceral reaction against the prospect of being personally marked as one component in a massive human inventory.

Today we might strongly hold such beliefs, but sensibilities can, and probably will, change. How this remarkable attitudinal transformation is likely to occur is clear to anyone who has paid attention to privacy issues over the past quarter-century. There will be no 3 a.m. knock on the door by storm troopers come to force implants into our bodies. The process will be more subtle and cumulative, couched in the unassailable language of progress and social betterment, and mimicking many of the processes that have contributed to the expansion of closed-circuit television cameras and the corporate market in personal data.

A series of tried and tested strategies will be marshalled to familiarize citizens with the technology. These will be coupled with efforts to pressure tainted social groups and entice the remainder of the population into being chipped.

This, then, is how the next generation will come to be microchipped.

It starts in distant countries. Having tested the technology on guinea pigs, both human and animal, the first widespread use of human implanting will occur in nations at the periphery of the Western world. Such developments are important in their own right, but their international significance pertains to how they familiarize a global audience with the technology and habituate them to the idea that chipping represents a potential future.

An increasing array of hypothetical chipping scenarios will also be depicted in entertainment media, furthering the familiarization process.

In the West, chips will first be implanted in members of stigmatized groups. Pedophiles are the leading candidate for this distinction, although it could start with terrorists, drug dealers, or whatever happens to be that year’s most vilified criminals. Short-lived promises will be made that the technology will only be used on the “worst of the worst.” In fact, the wholesale chipping of incarcerated individuals will quickly ensue, encompassing people on probation and on parole.

Even accused individuals will be tagged, a measure justified on the grounds that it would stop them from fleeing justice. Many prisoners will welcome this development, since only chipped inmates will be eligible for parole, weekend release, or community sentences. From the prison system will emerge an evocative vocabulary distinguishing chippers from non-chippers.

Although the chips will be justified as a way to reduce fraud and other crimes, criminals will almost immediately develop techniques to simulate other people’s chip codes and manipulate their data.

The comparatively small size of the incarcerated population, however, means that prisons would be simply a brief stopover on a longer voyage. Commercial success is contingent on making serious inroads into tagging the larger population of law-abiding citizens. Other stigmatized groups will therefore be targeted. This will undoubtedly entail monitoring welfare recipients, a move justified to reduce fraud, enhance efficiency, and ensure that the poor do not receive “undeserved” benefits.

Once e-commerce is sufficiently advanced, welfare recipients will receive their benefits as electronic vouchers stored on their microchips, a policy that will be tinged with a sense of righteousness, as it will help ensure that clients can only purchase government-approved goods from select merchants, reducing the always disconcerting prospect that poor people might use their limited funds to purchase alcohol or tobacco.

Civil libertarians will try to foster a debate on these developments. Their attempts to prohibit chipping will be handicapped by the inherent difficulty in animating public sympathy for criminals and welfare recipients — groups that many citizens are only too happy to see subjected to tighter regulation. Indeed, the lesser public concern for such groups is an inherent part of the unarticulated rationale for why coerced chipping will be disproportionately directed at the stigmatized.

The official privacy arm of the government will now take up the issue. Mandated to determine the legality of such initiatives, privacy commissioners and Senate Committees will produce a forest of reports presented at an archipelago of international conferences. Hampered by lengthy research and publication timelines, their findings will be delivered long after the widespread adoption of chipping is effectively a fait accompli. The research conclusions on the effectiveness of such technologies will be mixed and open to interpretation.

Officials will vociferously reassure the chipping industry that they do not oppose chipping itself, which has fast become a growing commercial sector. Instead, they are simply seeking to ensure that the technology is used fairly and that data on the chips is not misused. New policies will be drafted.

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What might Hitler, Mao or Milosevic have accomplished if their citizens were chipped, coded, and remotely monitored?
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Employers will start to expect implants as a condition of getting a job. The U.S. military will lead the way, requiring chips for all soldiers as a means to enhance battlefield command and control — and to identify human remains. From cooks to commandos, every one of the more than one million U.S. military personnel will see microchips replace their dog tags.

Following quickly behind will be the massive security sector. Security guards, police officers, and correctional workers will all be expected to have a chip. Individuals with sensitive jobs will find themselves in the same position.

The first signs of this stage are already apparent. In 2004, the Mexican attorney general’s office started implanting employees to restrict access to secure areas. The category of “sensitive occupation” will be expansive to the point that anyone with a job that requires keys, a password, security clearance, or identification badge will have those replaced by a chip.

Judges hearing cases on the constitutionality of these measures will conclude that chipping policies are within legal limits. The thin veneer of “voluntariness” coating many of these programs will allow the judiciary to maintain that individuals are not being coerced into using the technology.

In situations where the chips are clearly forced on people, the judgments will deem them to be undeniable infringements of the right to privacy. However, they will then invoke the nebulous and historically shifting standard of “reasonableness” to pronounce coerced chipping a reasonable infringement on privacy rights in a context of demands for governmental efficiency and the pressing need to enhance security in light of the still ongoing wars on terror, drugs, and crime.

At this juncture, an unfortunately common tragedy of modern life will occur: A small child, likely a photogenic toddler, will be murdered or horrifically abused. It will happen in one of the media capitals of the Western world, thereby ensuring non-stop breathless coverage. Chip manufactures will recognize this as the opportunity they have been anticipating for years. With their technology now largely bug-free, familiar to most citizens and comparatively inexpensive, manufacturers will partner with the police to launch a high-profile campaign encouraging parents to implant their children “to ensure your own peace of mind.”

Special deals will be offered. Implants will be free, providing the family registers for monitoring services. Loving but unnerved parents will be reassured by the ability to integrate tagging with other functions on their PDA so they can see their child any time from any place.

Paralleling these developments will be initiatives that employ the logic of convenience to entice the increasingly small group of holdouts to embrace the now common practice of being tagged. At first, such convenience tagging will be reserved for the highest echelon of Western society, allowing the elite to move unencumbered through the physical and informational corridors of power. Such practices will spread more widely as the benefits of being chipped become more prosaic. Chipped individuals will, for example, move more rapidly through customs.

Indeed, it will ultimately become a condition of using mass-transit systems that officials be allowed to monitor your chip. Companies will offer discounts to individuals who pay by using funds stored on their embedded chip, on the small-print condition that the merchant can access large swaths of their personal data. These “discounts” are effectively punitive pricing schemes, charging unchipped individuals more as a way to encourage them to submit to monitoring. Corporations will seek out the personal data in hopes of producing ever more fine-grained customer profiles for marketing purposes, and to sell to other institutions.

By this point all major organizations will be looking for opportunities to capitalize on the possibilities inherent in an almost universally chipped population. The uses of chips proliferate, as do the types of discounts. Each new generation of household technology becomes configured to operate by interacting with a person’s chip.

Finding a computer or appliance that will run though old-fashioned “hands-on”‘ interactions becomes progressively more difficult and costly. Patients in hospitals and community care will be routinely chipped, allowing medical staff — or, more accurately, remote computers — to monitor their biological systems in real time.

Eager to reduce the health costs associated with a largely docile citizenry, authorities will provide tax incentives to individuals who exercise regularly. Personal chips will be remotely monitored to ensure that their heart rate is consistent with an exercise regime.

By now, the actual process of “chipping” for many individuals will simply involve activating certain functions of their existing chip. Any prospect of removing the chip will become increasingly untenable, as having a chip will be a precondition for engaging in the main dynamics of modern life, such as shopping, voting, and driving.

The remaining holdouts will grow increasingly weary of Luddite jokes and subtle accusations that they have something to hide. Exasperated at repeatedly watching neighbours bypass them in “chipped” lines while they remain subject to the delays, inconveniences, and costs reserved for the unchipped, they too will choose the path of least resistance and get an implant.

In one generation, then, the cultural distaste many might see as an innate reaction to the prospect of having our bodies marked like those of an inmate in a concentration camp will likely fade.

In the coming years some of the most powerful institutional actors in society will start to align themselves to entice, coerce, and occasionally compel the next generation to get an implant.

Now, therefore, is the time to contemplate the unprecedented dangers of this scenario. The most serious of these concern how even comparatively stable modern societies will, in times of fear, embrace treacherous promises. How would the prejudices of a Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, or of southern Klansmen — all of whom were deeply integrated into the American political establishment — have manifest themselves in such a world? What might Hitler, Mao or Milosevic have accomplished if their citizens were chipped, coded, and remotely monitored?

Choirs of testimonials will soon start to sing the virtues of implants. Calm reassurances will be forthcoming about democratic traditions, the rule of law, and privacy rights. History, unfortunately, shows that things can go disastrously wrong, and that this happens with disconcerting regularity. Little in the way of international agreements, legality, or democratic sensibilities has proved capable of thwarting single-minded ruthlessness.

“It can’t happen here” has become the whispered swan song of the disappeared. Best to contemplate these dystopian potentials before we proffer the tender forearms of our sons and daughters. While we cannot anticipate all of the positive advantages that might be derived from this technology, the negative prospects are almost too terrifying to contemplate.

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'Supermarkets set to refuse cash'
Thursday 11 June 2009

Dutch supermarkets are hoping to phase out the use of cash by 2014, the Financieele Dagblad reports on Thursday, quoting the retail board CBL.

The aim of the ban on cash is to make supermarkets less vulnerable to armed robberies, the paper says.

According to CBL research, 87% of customers support moves to stimulate the use of direct debit cards.

The Telegraaf reports that €10bn of supermarket total turnover of over €30bn last year was in cash. Supermarkets had to deal with 200 'incidents', ranging from a grab at the cash register to armed robbery, the paper said.

Other solutions will be found for customers who do not want to use direct debit cards, a CBL spokesman said. 'Technology is making enormous advances. Trials are also being done with payment by mobile phone, but you can also pay with a finger print or iris scan,' * the spokesman said.

The Dutch consumers association said the move was 'going too far'.

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Cash to become extinct as chips take off
By Anthony Keane
The Advertiser
June 15, 2009 06:00am

Bank bosses foresee death of cash
'Cash to be replaced by microchips'


Extinct? ... bank bosses have predicted the decline of cash as transactions are done through microchips

CASH is accelerating down the path to extinction as new technologies threaten to mark the end of loose change within a decade.

Bank and credit union bosses say cash won't be alone, with wallets and credit cards also likely to disappear too.

They told The Advertiser's round table forum that cash and cards will be replaced by computer chips embedded in mobile phones, watches or other portable devices.

Australian Central chief executive Peter Evers believes cash will be replaced for most transactions in five-to-seven years.

"Cash will disappear as there will be other forms of carrying cash, stored value in your phone or whatever it might be. It will transfer automatically," he said.

"We're very close in countries around the world. If you go in to Hong Kong or Singapore, the low-value transactions have already disappeared. You can't go anywhere, like on public transport, without pre-purchasing a card.

"I think the Australian Payment Systems Board is very much on top of it and is trying to move down a path, but hasn't publicly put things into place yet."

BankSA general manager strategy and operations Chris Ward expects Australia to follow the offshore lead, with small cash transactions disappearing first.

"So you can't go and buy a bottle of water from the deli with cash; you've got to go and buy it with your chip," he said.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank state manager SA/NT John Oliver said it was easier for retailers to use electronic transactions than manual cash transactions.

Savings & Loans chief executive Greg Connor said the concept of the wallet would go.

"Whereas now we have a wallet and purse, it will be a chip in your phone or your watch or something like that as your access," he said.

Mr Evers said credit cards were on the way out as well.

"The access to credit is still going to be there through the mobile phone, but you don't need the card because that's really only a means of identification," he said.

"There could be another way of identifying, but the product, revolving credit, will still sit there."

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From The Times
June 19, 2009
To fight deflation, abolish cash. Could Japan make reality of ‘science fiction’?
Leo Lewis Asia Business Correspondent

With recovery elusive, a population doddering into old age and perhaps a decade of deflation in prospect, Japan may start mulling the most radical monetary policy of all — the abolition of cash.

Unorthodox, untried and, said one Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi strategist, “in the realms of economic science fiction”, the recommendation has nevertheless begun floating around Tokyo’s corridors of power and economists have described Japan as particularly suitable as a testing ground.

The search for more outré economic policies continues, despite the recent surge in the Nikkei 225 index.The market may be reflecting soaring Chinese investment, rising consumer confidence and other cheerful data but economists see few long-term beacons of hope for Japan.

Other extreme ideas mooted by the financial authorities include a tax on physical currency or introducing one to operate alongside the yen.

All three ideas are based on a theory concerning interest rates and the concept that a nominal rate of zero — as Japan has now lived with for much of the past decade — may be too high. In Japan’s case, the theory would suggest that nominal rates of -4 per cent might be closer to what is required to rescue the economy from another deflationary spiral. Having agreed that this might be necessary, the next question is how it could be imposed.

Several MPs in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party believe the abolition of cash, though politically radioactive, might be technically feasible. Richard Jerram, a senior economist with Macquarie bank, told investors that “the proposal has become practical with the broad penetration of electronic money and credit cards in Japan”.

He said that all the proposals were radical but worth consideration for Japan. Without physical cash, a central bank can set rates exactly where it likes, runs the argument. Mr Jerram said: “At the heart of the problem of achieving negative nominal interest rates is the idea that physical currency is an anonymous bearer bond with a nominal interest rate of zero.” While a central bank can impose positive or negative rates on non-physical assets, transmitting those rates to physical currency is a huge challenge. By permanently removing cash from a system, he added, policymakers are robbed of the excuse that zero is the lowest that nominal rates can go as a deflation-fighting tool.

In theory, many Japanese could easily make the leap into a cashless world. The country has six main competing cashless payment systems, many of them embedded into mobile phones. Including Oyster-type cards issued by public transport companies, industry sources estimate that there are about 120 million cashless payment chips sitting in Japan’s wallets and handbags, waiting to be swiped.

Nevertheless, the country remains a wholeheartedly cash-based consumer society. Currency in circulation is about 16 per cent of its GDP, compared with the levels of 2 to 3 per cent in most developed countries. Reducing that 16 per cent to zero would be a wrench but would come with considerable benefits, Mr Jerram said.

But just as Japan’s cultural attachment to cash may prove hard to dislodge, some economists believe that the same may be true of deflation. The country’s growing population of elderly people mainly hold cash or cash equivalents and, compared with its US and European counterparts, the Bank of Japan has come under virtually no political pressure to be more belligerent in its war on deflation. It is unlikely, added Mr Jerram, to brook anything as radical as abolishing cash.

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Aaron Russo made the film America: From Freedom To Fascism, in which he was threatened by Sheldon Cohen, former IRS Commissioner and author of the tax code. A few months later Russo was dead. His death was reported as having been the inevitable result of a long-term battle with cancer, which may or may not be the truth.

Before he died Russo was interviewed by Alex Jones. This is a shortened version of that interview:

(15mins)

There is a good video about the transhumanist agenda, and what the powers that be intend to do with us over the next few decades.

(59mins)

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And here is a recent article from The Futurist.

Immortality 2.0: a silicon valley insider looks at California's Transhumanist movement.
By Gelles, David
Publication: The Futurist
Date: Thursday, January 1 2009

One afternoon in late 2007, a Yahoo executive named Salim Ismail stepped up to a podium at company headquarters to talk about what some call "the world's most dangerous idea." An intense man from India, Ismail faced a conference room packed with computer whizzes from the likes of Google, Apple, and Intel and launched into a tirade about the far frontiers of digital technology and the big battle that lay ahead.

"The current system is flawed," he said, pacing the stage. He went on to talk about routers and interrupt systems, hardly exotic material to his audience. But even within this techy sanctum, his message was a bold one. The flawed system that Ismail lamented was not a computer network, it was the human brain. "We need to design a better one," he said.

Our brains are poorly programmed, according to Ismail. Rewiring them might fix the glitches--like stupidity and violence. "We need computer chips monitoring our neural networks," he said. "Evolution isn't going to do this for us. So technology is going to have to do it."

Ismail's talk, "The Need to Reengineer the Human Brain," wasn't the most ambitious at the conference, a meeting of a local think tank called the Foresight Nanotech Institute. At another panel, a local biotechnician presented "Mind Uploading: How to Really Do It," a step-by-step proposal for transferring human consciousness onto a computer. Later, a programmer discussed "The Future of the Singularity," a time in the not-too-distant future when humans and machines will be one. These theories weren't meant as entertainment. Ismail and his ilk are working to produce extreme technologies, to reengineer the brain, upload the mind, copy people, and more. These are the technologies that lie at the heart of a movement called transhumanism.

Part science, part faith, and part philosophy, the essence of transhumanism is radical life extension and life expansion. Movement devotees perceive the human body as a work in progress. Evolution took humanity this far, the thinking goes, and only technology will take us further. Transhumanism views sickness, aging, and death as unnecessary hindrances that we have the right and the responsibility to overcome. Our bodies, frail and unpredictable, are just another problem for these engineers to solve. The brain, our body's computer, is due for an upgrade.

"Transhumanism is about using technology to enhance ourselves--enhancements like longer life-spans, better cognitive abilities, and improved happiness," James Clement, the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, told me. "It's about transcending our limitations, including death."

Transhumanism is now developing strong roots in Silicon Valley. The World Transhumanist Association, which has about 5,000 members, relocated to Palo Alto in 2007, and several other like-minded organizations have recently emerged in the Bay Area.

"Silicon Valley has become a growing hub for transhumanist organizations," Clement told me. "There's a tremendous amount of momentum right now." The movement is picking up new adherents and new energy in its quest to enhance the human body and make us immortal. And it is flush with cash from dot-com millionaires. As a result, a fringe factor of technological progress is being pushed center stage, for better or worse.

JULIAN HUXLEY and GORDON MOORE

Perhaps only in California could such an unlikely confluence of ideas and movements come together and spawn something like transhumanism. A peculiar blend of American idealism, techno optimism, science fiction, and a near cultish religiosity, today's movement incorporates strains of some very mainstream schools of thought, even as it seeks to transcend them.

When I asked one follower where transhumanism got its name, he directed me to the writings of British biologist Julian Huxley, brother of Brave New World author Aldous.

Julian Huxley, a biologist working in the wake of Darwin, was an optimist of the highest order. He founded the World Wildlife Fund and was the first director-general of UNESCO. In a secular manifesto from 1927, he coined a term for what he hoped would be a new age of enlightenment: "transhumanism--man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature." It was an inspired, if imprecise, vision, and it went ignored for 60 years. Human nature hasn't changed much since then.

Years later, just after World War II and long after Julian Huxley's coinage sank into oblivion, Silicon Valley, a region of mostly cherry orchards at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay, was emerging as the U.S. technology center. Talent from the area's military industry and Stanford University was giving rise to the modern computer industry and the most innovative community of inventors, entrepreneurs, and engineers of the twentieth century.

A BATHTUB of ICE

As the cherry orchards south of San Francisco were uprooted and replaced with Silicon Valley, Robert Ettinger, a World War II veteran wounded in Germany, was looking to channel his dissatisfaction with the human body into something radical. Ettinger became a physics professor and devised America's first science experiment with immortality: cryonics. In The Prospect of Immortality, published in 1962, Ettinger suggested that, if a body were frozen shortly after death, future technologies would be able to revive the recently deceased.

There are fewer than 200 frozen cadavers in storage today, most of them at the Scottsdale-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation. In recent years, however, the membership rolls of Alcor have been rising (today more than 800 members are signed up to be frozen in the future), thanks in large part to a surge in membership from Silicon Valley. At every transhumanist gathering in the area, one notices dozens of men and women wearing silver pendants around their wrists--Alcor bracelets, each engraved with a number to call in the event of death and instructions to put the deceased in a bathtub of ice ASAP.

Among transhumanists, Ettinger is celebrated not only for inventing cryonics, but also for penning Man Into Superman: After Immortality ... Comes Transhumanity, a 1972 tract that reinserted transhumanism into the lexicon. In it, Ettinger suggested that, instead of relying on cryonics to revive the dead, forthcoming technologies might make death obsolete. Ettinger's book didn't start a revolution. Nonetheless, he gained a sufficiently robust following that the word "transhumanism" stuck around. It was bandied about here and there for a decade, and finally received a proper hearing in the early 1980s, in Los Angeles.

It was at this point an eccentric, red-haired Englishman named Max O'Connor immigrated to America and changed his last name to More ("a constant reminder to keep moving forward"). More, an Oxford-educated philosopher, settled in Los Angeles and set about starting a movement. He coined the term extropy. The opposite of entropy (which More defined as the tendency for moving objects to slow down), extropy was the tendency for things to speed up. Things like technology. Indeed, Max More's extropy was a lot like Gordon Moore's law.

More founded the Extropy Institute to promote his idea. Institute conferences in the Bay Area attracted hundreds. In 1990, More picked up on Ettinger and wrote an essay titled "Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy." He published Extropy: The journal of Transhumanist Thought. Soon after, his Extropians began calling themselves transhumanists.

The journal, and eventually the Extropy Institute's e-mail Listserv, became salons for the exchange of futuristic ideas. More's followers were online before most people had heard of the Internet. They were also signing up to be frozen with Alcor. The future looked good.

"Early on, transhumanism was very biased towards the positive," More, 43, said from his home in Austin, Texas, where he now lives. "It was focused on the benefits of new technology. That was very important back then, because no one was taking these ideas very seriously."

With the Extropy Institute, More gave the futurists in Silicon Valley something to rally around. He gave their work a meaning greater than new products and greater profits. By attaching moral priorities--like living forever--to technological progress, More gave transhumanists a shared dream they could support.

But the Extropy Institute did not speed up. It lost momentum. As the Internet went mainstream, counter-culture gave way to pop culture. Futurism gave way to materialism. As start-up parties raged, participation in the Extropy Institute waned. Discouraged by the demise of the movement's original optimism, More distanced himself from transhumanism. The Extropy Institute went into hibernation, finally closing its doors around the time the Internet bubble burst.

By this point, however, trans-humanism was beyond More's control. A loose-knit group kept the discussions going in chat rooms and on blogs. Some were interested in cryonics. Many promoted the fusion of man and machine. Still others envisioned post-national Utopias. More was the charismatic leader who rallied disparate futurists to a common cause, but he was not essential to his own movement. Today, trans-humanism lives on, mutating in the minds of its adherents.

REDESIGNING the HUMAN BODY

In a dark exhibition hall at the Tech Museum in San Jose, Kennita Watson sat in a mobility scooter--the type usually employed by senior citizens--and pondered a standing, skinned corpse. All dried red muscle and creamy ligament, the body on display glowed under a spotlight. It was part of "Body Worlds 1," a traveling exhibition of skinned and preserved cadavers.

Watson, a retired user-interface designer for Sun Microsystems, was visiting the Tech Museum with a few fellow transhumanists. Leaning in from her seat on the scooter, Watson considered the body of a man afflicted with hexadectylism, the mutation that creates six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. She stretched out her arm, spread her hand, and said, "I can imagine an arrangement where six would work just fine." To Watson, a malformed hand was not a disability but an opportunity.

Nearby, another transhumanist named Andy Rondeau pondered a specimen whose abdominal muscles had been peeled back to reveal the large intestine and stomach. Rondeau, a young programmer bulky enough to play professional football, said, "I'm waiting for the day when the artificial limbs become better than the real limbs."

Together, Watson and Rondeau came upon a case containing a preserved brain. Disembodied, the brain was stuck on a metal stake, spinning like a rotisserie lamb. "The gap between the frontal lobes in Einstein's brain was closed," Rondeau mused. "There were synapses going from right to left lobes."

Watson perked up from her seat in the scooter. "So he was a mutant," she said. "Maybe we could engineer the closed gap in our brains. Then we would gain intelligence."

Transhumanists see the body as a machine, the brain as a computer. These are seductive metaphors, especially for computer engineers. They imply that with the right tools we might be able to fix, improve, and upgrade ourselves. And if trans-humanists have their way, the specimens in that exhibition will soon be outdated models of the human body

This optimistic vision is the direct intellectual descendant of Moore's law. With computers improving exponentially, why not expect something similar of medical technology? It's also in line with the palpable optimism around Silicon Valley today. As new money flooded the area during the most recent bubble, companies and individuals were looking for solutions to the world's ills. People want to stop climate change, feed the hungry, and end global poverty. Meanwhile, the transhumanists of the Valley have homed in on their own set of problems to solve. And they are supported by ambitious multimillionaires like Peter Thiel.

A co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, Thiel cashed out in 2002 with $55 million. Today, at 40, Thiel runs Clarium Capital, a $2 billion San Francisco hedge fund that had been garnering good returns. He was an early investor in Facebook and is known throughout the Valley as a trendsetter. But not all of Thiel's personal investments are made solely to maximize financial gain. Thiel is transhumanism's most generous supporter. He has invested more than $4 million of his own money in groups working toward immortality, and he regularly speaks at trans-humanist gatherings.

"Silicon Valley is in the business of the future," Thiel told me. "This is a logical extension of the technology industry."

SILICON VALLEY: THE "GALACTIC CENTER" of TRANSHUMANISM

The transhumanist movement boasts devotees in countries from England to Japan to Venezuela, but more and more transhumanist cheerleaders are relocating to Silicon Valley. Besides the World Transhumanist Association, there is the Foresight Nanotech Institute in Menlo Park, which sponsored the Yahoo conference. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in Palo Alto, hosts lavish conferences that attract tech luminaries and trans-humanists alike. The Methuselah Foundation, a research group working to extend biological life (it is named for the oldest man in the Bible), has an office in Menlo Park. In San Francisco, the Immortality Institute advocates for indefinite life extension technologies, while a transhumanist group called the Lifeboat Foundation works to alert the public about existential risks--everything from nuclear war and global warming to the unintended consequences of transhumanism itself. Reflecting on Silicon Valley, Kennita Watson said, "This is the galactic center of transhumanism."

These groups, together with the various meet-ups at apartments, pizzerias, coffee shops, and museums, make a rich social network for trans- humanists of the Bay Area. Nearly every week there is a new field trip, lecture, or conference that attracts them in swarms. The movement has legs, too--there is perhaps no better place on earth for recruiting new transhumanists. Between Stanford, Google, Facebook, and the hundreds of other computer companies in the area, Silicon Valley has an always-fresh supply of young, tech-savvy workers looking to change the world.

Not long after Watson and Rondeau's field trip to the Tech Museum, 20 transhumanists convened on a crisp winter evening for their monthly cryonics meeting at a Round Table Pizza in Palo Alto. James Clement from the World Transhumanist Association was there wearing his Alcor bracelet. Kennita Watson was there with hers. Around them, a gaggle of other bracelet-wearing transhumanists chatted about the future.

The Round Table was on Univerrants and boutiques extending out from the Stanford campus. The Face-book office glowed across the street, and sidewalk cafes buzzed with preppy workers. Compared with the glitzy restaurants nearby, Round Table Pizza seemed like a sorry choice for a get-together. The ceiling was low and the lighting was bad. Deflated balloons from birthday parties past remained taped to the walls. After much deliberation, someone ordered pizzas, reciting the menu from memory: an extra large Guinevere's Garden Delight and the King Arthur Supreme. It was a retro setting for a discussion of some retro technology, Cryonics, after all, is the 1960s version of immortality.

Once fed, the crowd at Round Table turned to Ralph Merkle, a board member of the Alcor Foundation with a PhD from Stanford. Merkle said, "People think cryonics is freezing the dead. That's incorrect. We're freezing the terminally ill. We want a second opinion from a future doctor".

Merkle acknowledged that there's no proof that anyone will ever be able to reanimate a frozen cadaver (in fact, the ice crystallization that occurs upon freezing damages the body's cells, a phenomenon unscientifically known as "freezer burn"), but that doesn't much matter to him. The adherents of cryonics figure that future technologies will be able to reanimate a body that is, by currently accepted definitions, dead. But they're much more enthusiastic about the idea of vanquishing old age and death entirely, not leaving a corpse to freeze.

TECHNOLOGICAL FOUNTAIN of YOUTH

Aubrey de Grey, an English biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge University, is head of the Methuselah Foundation and one of the world's foremost antiaging champions. With high-profile partners like Arizona State University's new Biodesign Institute, the Methuselah Foundation is trying to reverse degenerative cell damage. Little in the way of usable research has been produced, but the unabashed ambition of his work (and his creeping mainstream acceptance) has made de Grey something of a guru to the transhumanists of Silicon Valley. He visits the Bay Area every couple of months, often speaking at the offices of Yahoo and Google.

On an unseasonably warm winter's day, de Grey was at Brickhouse, the product-innovation division that Salim Ismail runs for Yahoo. De Grey had come to promote his new book, Ending Aging. Wiry and fidgety, de Grey spoke in a distinct English accent, avoiding eye contact. A rust-colored beard hung nearly to his waist, and his hair was pulled back in a long ponytail. De Grey set up a projector and screen as 50 employees gathered around during lunch break and started munching on catered gourmet sandwiches.

The lights came down, and de Grey began a talk titled "Prospects for Extending Healthy Life--A Lot." While the audience idly chewed away, de Grey told them, "I think that many people in this room have a good chance of living to one thousand." That got the Yahoo workers' attention. Several in the audience put down their focaccia and took out notepads. De Grey launched into a sermon about the inhumane effects of aging.

"In the next few decades there will be biotechnology that can take middle-aged people and give them a few extra decades of healthy life," de Grey told the crowd. As those extra few decades wind down, he said, even newer technologies will offer yet another few decades. So it will go indefinitely, death always nipping at your heels, while you stay a decade ahead of its reach with the latest advances in biotechnology. De Grey calls this "longevity escape velocity," a nod to our species' previously most ambitious project to date, the space program. Just as rockets let us escape gravity, biotechnology will let us outrun death, goes the theory. And on the off chance that de Grey doesn't achieve longevity escape velocity before he dies, all hope is not lost. He is signed up to be frozen by Alcor.

Artificial Intelligence, Artificial YOU

Central to the transhumanist creed is the idea that consciousness--our memories, feelings, and emotions--is not some ephemeral, ethereal, unknowable thing. Rather, it is data, encoded in the circuitry of our bodies. To make this point at the Round Table, Merkle drew on the brain-as-computer metaphor.

"The current definitions of death are basically incorrect," he said. "The current systems all focus on whether the tissue is functioning. They completely ignore whether the information is still present. This is like announcing the computer is dead when you pull the plug, or even throw it out the window. ... Crash! Bam! Even then, while the RAM, the short-term memory, is gone, the hard drive is still there." Merkle reasons that if the data is still there, encoded in the patterns of our brain tissue, it can be copied, backed up, and transferred. Or as transhumanists like to call it, "uploaded."

Uploaders believe that all the information that makes us who we are--our knowledge, memories, habits and secrets--are data encoded in the brain. This information can be successfully captured (preferably by slicing the brain into razor-thin sections, then scanning them); run on the right computer program, and voila, you are alive in the machine, running like software.

Merkle made it sound so easy. Never mind that the technology isn't remotely close to achieving anything like this; Moore's law advances steadily, and the day will come. Yet, even if it were possible, an immortal body and a digitized brain aren't exactly the same thing. However, for transhumanists, these two speculative technologies achieve virtually the same goal: the extension of the self (or at least some version of it). Biological or digital, it doesn't matter. Either is better than dying.

Is the "SINGULARITY" Near?

A close kin to uploading, for trans-humanists, is artificial intelligence. Among the disparate groups advancing the transhumanist agenda, the Palo Alto-based Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has found the most mainstream acceptance. The Singularity Institute is trying to develop a general, rather than task-specific, artificial intelligence. It has hired a team of engineers to write code that can consider and solve a range of problems, rather than just excel at one function, which is what today's AI does. Tyler Emerson, director of the Singularity Institute, told me that, in essence, what they want is a computer with a real personality. And when this happens, it will usher in what is known as the Singularity.

Emerson encouraged me to read The Singularity Is Near, the 2003 tome by prolific inventor Ray Kurzweil that popularized the term. The Singularity, wrote Kurzweil, is "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Like Huxley's original definition of transhumanism, it's an imprecise vision. But Kurzweil gets more detailed, predicting certain milestones on the march to the Singularity.

The impossibility of knowing what the Singularity will look like {let alone if it will ever come about) makes it fertile ground for daydreaming. It also makes it easy to dismiss as pure fantasy. In the best scenarios, machines smarter than humans might solve problems we find insurmountable--things like world hunger and the need for renewable energy. The Singularity could put humanity on the fast track to Utopia. Ultimately, Kurzweil says, intelligence will expand into space at the speed of light. Like de Grey, Kurzweil is something of a guru in the community. The Singularity is now the most popular of trans-humanist ideas. Kurzweil's book is being adapted into a movie and is now a buzzword in tech circles. Many transhumanists I met toted dog-eared copies of his hook in their backpacks.

SINGULARITARIAN HOPES and FEARS

In his book, lectures, and various media appearances and interviews, Kurzweil repeats many of the same optimistic scenarios popular among transhumanists: Technology will one day free the world, if not from poverty, sickness, and death, than at least from fossil fuels. He forecasts that by the end of the 2030s we will augment our thinking capacity with cybernetic implants, becoming radically more intelligent, and we'll have cured many of the world's most common illnesses through personalized medicine. An artificial general intelligence, thousands of times smarter than the entire human race, will emerge by the 2040s.

Kurzweil perceives some dangers to technological acceleration. Just as the Singularity could go very well, it could also go very badly. Nanotechnology gone awry could disassemble everything on earth, reducing the world to "grey goo." Machines empowered by artificial intelligence might seize control of the world's arms and turn them against humans. A cyborg army might decide to wipe out the human race. As Kurzweil's ideas--both the optimistic and the cautious ones--gain greater audience, doomsday scenarios have been spreading among transhumanist circles.

This nascent preoccupation with the apocalypse has affected the movement for the worse, Max More told me. "The Singularity concept to me is quite dangerous," he said. "It has a very strong religious resonance. I've never been a fan of it." More is now leery of the movement he helped spawn. "The mood today is less exuberant. It's become more gloomy," he said. More fears that today's transhumanists are too preoccupied with the Singularity and its potentially adverse effects. "They have this tendency towards apocalyptic thinking. It can be a very dangerous thing."

The Singularity Institute's Emerson cautioned, "For those of us who don't believe in God, this is a sort of religion."

Any resemblance between trans-humanism and apocalyptic Christianity is not something the movement devotees are looking to convey. The vast majority are atheists; if you believe in heaven you don't need radical life extension. But some trans-humanists have reported their own conversion experiences. Michael Gusek, an engineer developing AI systems for a major Silicon Valley contractor, learned about trans-humanism recently and was hooked. "I heard what it was all about, and the light of purpose went on," Gusek said. "1 started reading the literature, and I not only discovered my own purpose, but discovered what the nature of the universe is."

When I asked Peter Thiel if trans-humanism were a religion, he offered a cryptic answer. "Every myth on this planet tells people that the purpose of life is death," he said. "It rationalizes death, it helps them deal with it. Every temple is a tomb and every tomb a temple. If you have a set of technologies that radically changes the meaning of death, then that has repercussions for religion. These questions touch on our very humanity."

"A REJUVENATION of TECHNO-OPTIMISM"

After de Grey talked to Ismail's employees at Brickhouse, he wanted a beer. We walked out into a sunny winter afternoon, and soon found a microbrewery called the 21st Amendment. Inside, we settled into a wooden booth and de Grey ordered a pint of chocolate-colored lager called Darkness.

"Looks dangerous," he said with a smile. Leaning across the sticky table, his long beard reaching his lap, de Grey tried to color his quest as a compassionate one. "It's not about the fact that aging kills people and takes lives. It's about the fact that aging kills people really horribly," he told me. "If you talk about immortality, people have this horrifying knee-jerk reaction against it. But if you talk about keeping your health, no one argues with that. So I focus on health. Let's stay healthy for a while, and that's good. If it keeps on, then there's this side effect: We live forever."

It was not long after lunch, and de Grey ordered a second pint of beer. His tongue looser now, a ring of foam clinging to his beard, he told me about transhumanism in Silicon Valley. "This sort of crowd seem to be the easiest to enthuse," he said. "They have the money, and the mind-set. They haven't accepted death as an inevitability. It's a feedback loop. A year ago, Peter [Thiel] gave me a lot of money. So I've been coming back. Peter has a lot of friends who also have similar interests, and money. It's a rejuvenation of techno-optimism."

After my conversation with de Grey, I called up Thiel and asked him why he supported trans-humanism. At first, Thiel qualified his involvement as a sort of pet project that shouldn't be taken too seriously. "There's always this big question about how much of this is too bizarre to be affiliated with," he said.

Thiel's acknowledgement that for all of transhumanism's ambition it lacked a certain grounding in the real world was a rare--even refreshing--departure from the tyrannical optimism that rules most trans-humanist conversations. But any hope that Thiel might be more forthcoming about the ethical ramifications of transhumanism, or provide some further insight into the true motivations of transhumanists like himself, faltered as his tone changed. Thiel became assertive, defending transhumanism and his involvement with it in the same breath. "We're living in this world where science and technology are growing at a tremendous clip," he said. "These technologies are being developed, and we're going to have to deal with them."

Thiel's defensive optimism is characteristic of transhumanists. They are eager to see how far technology can go, and not inclined to spend much time worrying about any potential ramifications. Eric Boyd, another fresh-faced member of the digerati at the Round Table meet-up (he wore a T-shirt that said FIGHT AGING), asked me, "What if you could take a pill that gave you extra muscle mass? You'd never have to go to the gym again. Would you take it?"

"Like steroids?" 1 asked.

"But with no side effects," Boyd said. "What if there were perfectly legal enhancements that caused no harm, only good?"

I didn't have a quick answer for Boyd. A perfect body would sure be nice, but would I appreciate it as much if I didn't sweat for it? And even if my muscles were toned, wouldn't I find other imperfections to complain about? Could a pill cure human nature?

As Boyd chewed away, I couldn't help but wonder what was wrong with life as it is. All flaws aside, the world is pretty miraculous. Who knows what might happen if we begin tampering with it? I hadn't come up with an answer when Boyd said, "Well, I would."

IMMORTALITY Detractors

As the transhumanist community has become more visible, it's also won its share of critics. Some bioethicists worry that tampering with the human body may irreversibly screw up our genetic composition. In Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Times Books, 2003), environmentalist Bill McKibben argues against enhancement and life extension. Conservative pundit Francis Fukuyama called transhumanism "the world's most dangerous idea" in the journal Foreign Policy, elaborating, "The first victim of trans-humanism might be equality."

Even assuming life-enhancement one day proves not only possible but safe, not everyone wants to live forever. What transhumanists see as unalienable rights, others see as affronts to human nature. Richard Hayes, executive director of the Oakland-based Center for Genetics and Society, worries that transhumanism could usher in a new, high-tech eugenics. As enhancements become available and only the wealthy can afford them, an ever-wider wedge will divide society's haves and have-nots.

"At what point do we start thinking of each other as humans and sub-humans?" he wondered. "Or humans and superhumans? Or humans and transhumans?"

Overpopulation is a concern of many critics as well. If everyone's living forever, won't the earth get crowded pretty quickly? How will our already-strained natural resources hold up? Transhumanists respond that people will still die--via car accidents and the like--and that technological advances will solve problems like finite energy, scarce food, and a warming globe.

While Hayes said he thinks many items on the trans humanist agenda--like cryonics and uploading--are patently impossible, he doesn't underestimate the harm that the misuse of advanced genetic technologies poses. "1 think that trans-humanists and a lot of these Silicon Valley types are just like a bunch of 14-year-old boys, and you don't want 14-year-old boys running the world," Hayes said.

He went on to voice concern about the transhumanists' very motivations. "The seriousness with which they want to live forever, the fear of dying, it's very disturbing," Hayes told me. "1 think the prospect of immortality is awful. 1 pity them. They are going to spend their whole lives thinking they will live forever. That's tragic. Life is a mystery, and death is part of life."

Such skepticism of transhumanism is, arguably, natural. At the deepest level, living forever interferes with everything we understand about the world. Many would say the cycle of life and death is harmonious, even beautiful. But such concerns may not matter any more. As Peter Thiel had told me, "It's hard to extrapolate where exactly it's going, but I think people are underestimating the scope of this change in the longer term. At the end of the day, I'm not sure there really is a choice."

Interestingly Labour have done something of a U-turn on ID cards as detailed here:

Dramatic Labour U-turn by new Home Secretary means we will never have to carry ID cards

Maybe the new policy is going to be a leap directly to chip at some point in the all-too-close-for-comfort future.

Unfortunately this area is one which is of most concern, in my opinion, because somewhere amongst it all the experiments have already been done. The evil with which this so-called living forever has been propogated is now denying each and every one of us the freedom to live according to our natural life span and has placed the children in great danger, since it is a madness to so seriously desire immortality that one would deny others their lives or the life span which was not only intended for them, but which they would wish to have. All to many scientists and medical practitioners seem to think that playing God is their inalienable right without regard for others.

(01-07-2009 04:54 PM)Hubris Wrote: [ -> ]Interestingly Labour have done something of a U-turn on ID cards as detailed here:

Dramatic Labour U-turn by new Home Secretary means we will never have to carry ID cards

Maybe the new policy is going to be a leap directly to chip at some point in the all-too-close-for-comfort future.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson unveiled the final design of the national identity card, reported yesterday by the BBC. (I would post the link and the article but the "anti-spam" system seems to want to prevent that sort of thing, albeit inconsistently.)

The card will be offered to members of the public in the Greater Manchester area from the end of this year.

Ministers plan to launch the £30 biometric ID card nationwide in 2011 or 2012 - but it will not be compulsory.

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Just like how anti-terrorist legislation will not be used on anyone other than known or suspected terrorists, we promise.

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(01-07-2009 11:19 PM)Waggy Wrote: [ -> ]Unfortunately this area is one which is of most concern, in my opinion, because somewhere amongst it all the experiments have already been done.

Exactly, by Dr Jose Delgado et al, over the last 5 decades and more.

maybe the chip/implant will be delivered in the mandatory vaccination.
I don't trust any of it, or anyone pushing for it.

Very scarey times.

regards U

Wow, good article. I'd be surprised, a little only, if the Amero comes in to replace the Dollar because it seems like a good opportunity for them to introduce the chip for Americans, Canadians and Mexicans. They can also use it as an excuse to ensure no body is crossing borders illegally because their chip won't work outside of their own borders. They will not be able to buy or sell without it, as the Bible says.

Micro chips cause cancer in dogs - they will do the same in humans!
the chips have to have a POWER source, which creates cancerous cells!
Micro chips are not going anywhere - they dont work - not unless you dont mind getting cancer!!


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...97_pf.html

In relation to the last link there, just above in the last post by derkarnys. It's a link to the Washington Post newspaper.

Do you trust that newspaper? I'd expect them to use the truth because if they didn't they would get critisism from all quarters. But you don't have to lie to deceive someone.

It's just that in Washington DC, the capitol of the United States guess how many newspapers there are. 20? 10? 7? Try 1... the Washington Post.

So whilst it could be that chips do cause cancer, and it could be the Washington Post is reporting the truth on that, it could also be happening that this truth is only reported because, say, someone in the United States military industrial complex has found a way to use chips without causing cancer, and they want you to stay in the dark about what's coming to get you, around the next corner, with a chip in it's brain and a chaingun grafted onto it's chest!

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Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software

Alexi Mostrous and David Brown - TIMESonline, January 16, 2008

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker's productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees' performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their physiological state.

Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker's weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.

The Information Commissioner, civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticised the potential of the system for “taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level”. Hugh Tomlinson, QC, an expert on data protection law at Matrix Chambers, told The Times: “This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees. It raises very serious privacy issues.”

Peter Skyte, a national officer for the union Unite, said: “This system takes the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level with a new level of invasiveness but in a very old-fashioned way because it monitors what is going in rather than the results.” The Information Commissioner's Office said: “Imposing this level of intrusion on employees could only be justified in exceptional circumstances.”

The US Patent Office confirmed last night that the application was published last month, 18 months after being filed. Patent lawyers said that it could be granted within a year.

To be honest it would be best if it were to be unanimously declared that chipping human beings outside of necessary medical procedures (exceptions would have to be vetted with a sanity test) was catagoricaly outlawed. Or at least there should safeguards to protect people from being pressured into taking a chip, or people of the ilk of modern-day clamping bandits will be able to have almost godlike controls over sections of the public. It's unbelievable but there is nothing to protect anyone from this.

If evidence shows them as carcinogenic that would help, to begin with (obviously nurds would soon be working around that problem though), it would only have to hold true until a ban was put in place outlawing chipping for this and other reasons.

Putting microchips into peoples lives and eventualy into their brains transforming people into systems is when you stop and comprehend it all - FRIGHTNING. (I've just realised it's like on these adverts you keep seeing on T.V. "I'm a P.C." and "I'm an I.B.M." oh, God that's just dawned on me! How slow was I there, you too! that is pure mischeif and subliminal psy-op that should be fucking well illegal)

It's got to be at least as dangerous as drugs, obviously more so and therefore I'm breaking my cherry here and declaring that something needs to be banned.

I'm actualy thinking whilst I'm typing here, I think that veiw could win political support, especially if a campaign were launched to make every person look at the evidence.

How come we lock children under 21 in jails for taking drugs but Dr.Frankinstein von mengele is free to meddle and play at God?

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Ban this slick sick shit right now.

Harness the nurds, yes, yoke them as nurds should be yoked. (By their underwear, from coat-hooks). But never forget that by a matter of natural compensation the more academic these people are the less worldly wise they are. Lets just say nurds aren't known for their girl kissing powers, or their fantastic strength, and the nurd isn't catagorised by leadership, personality or wisdom, he has intellect but don't mistake that for wisdom. In fact all the true nurd has is intellect, this often makes them bitter and prissy and sneaky and as material as a crack whore, some like Dawky Dawkins are spitefully spiritualy redundent, poisonously using their big throbbing brains to find 'tricks' (as they say in the trade) to raise the value of the hollow materialism that validates their large fore-heads.