Rich McLean
NDIS Therapeutic Supports | Artist-Life-Coach Community Access Facilitator

'A SPLICE of LIFE!'

ABSTRACT:

 

This arts-based, practice-led, qualitative investigation’s initial goal amplifies young people’s ethical opinions of what it means to be human both now and in the future through three cumulative technological lenses. These are: artificial intelligence, (AI), and the anticipated superintelligence which has already commenced (Andrews 2017), further enabling the third lens of posthumanism. 

 

Posthumanism is simply defined as utilising technology to further enhance the skills, abilities and lifespans of human beings who ultimately become posthuman (H+). This research renders a superintelligent AI may orchestrate the qualities future humans will have, considering eugenics, gene modification and the ultimate designing of entities.  Transcending our biology to coexist with future world(s), including inter-dimensionally,  is suggested as inevitable when technological acceleration is viewed not linearly but exponentially, especially considering quantum superintelligence(s).

 

This research extrapolated from recorded interviews examines both the authors and the ethical lives of young people through retrospective art and memory. It crosses generational divides, out of compassion for sentient beings the Earth and Anthropocentric ethics whilst considering global catastrophic risks. 

 

An unexpected existential creative artefact(s) emerges utilising methodologies of A/r/tography, Arts-Based Research, Narrative Inquiry and Lived experience, metaphorically mirroring ‘The Event Horizon’ of the technological singularity discussed within the data collection, in which outcomes are impossible to predict.

 

This unexpected narrative considers the lens of shamanism with the help of intuitive healers which disrupts and argues against the limitations of a western psychiatric paradigm.

 

This research can be celebrated as pure art, yet suggests much more. This being that the writers ‘paranormal’ experience actually exists as yet-to-be-unveiled ontological science.

 

Also that the limitations of most human consciousness(es) are just the tip of the iceberg in an exponentially more complex multidimensional reality framed by the end times where kindness is rediscovered and need be revered and celebrated.