Cyborg Liberation Front
Inside the Movement for Posthuman Rights

Village Voice | August 5, 2003
by Erik Baard

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

Yeats's wish, expressed in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium," was a governing principle for those attending the World Transhumanist Association conference at Yale University in late June. International academics and activists, they met to lay the groundwork for a society that would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren't necessarily human at all. A good many of these 160 thinkers aspire to immortality and omniscience through uploading human consciousness into ever evolving machines.

---

Aspiring to immortality... Idiots. Those Star Wars movies are not even science fiction anymore, but science fact. I used to love them because they were such high fantasy, now every little technological detail has already come true. I still don't believe it.

Bionic eye will let the blind see

Scientists have developed a non-invasive brain-computer interface

FDA Okays Another Brain-Stimulating Implant for the Masses