Are Humans Turning Into Gods?

Our friend Jason Silva – writer, filmmaker and founding host/producer of Current TV – is making a new documentary celebrating humans reaching their ultimate potential, the inexorable evolution that is turning us into gods. He’s quite optimistic about it. I’m not so sure – JD.

“First we build the tools, then they build us”
- Marshall McLuhan

Turning Into Gods is, like evolution, a work in a progress. The aim of the documentary is to explore and celebrate mankind’s journey to ‘play jazz with the universe’… it is a story of our ultimate potential, the reach of our intelligence, the scope of our scientific and engineering abilities and the transcendent quality of our heroic and noble calling.

Thinking, feeling, striving, man is what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called “the ascending arrow of the great biological synthesis.”… today we walk a tight-rope between ape and Nietzsche’s Overman… how will we make it through, and what is the texture and colour of our next refined and designed evolutionary leap?

“Design is becoming immanent to being,” says the website Next Nature. Biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will allow us to become what philosopher David Pearce calls: ‘Paradise Engineers’

Tomorrow, collaboration between biologists, electrical engineers and designers, a hitherto inconceivable proposition, will be something we take for granted.

Featuring interviews with the world’s most interesting minds, these luminaries will paint for us a picture of the world beyond the looking glass. The world we are creating.

“We are as gods,” says Stewart Brand, “and we might as well get good at it.”

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Jason Silva is a writer for various publications, a filmmaker and founding host/producer for Al Gore’s Emmy-winning Current TV. You can follow him on Twitter.