No Child Left Behind: the newest member of Italian Parliament is calling for humans to evolve into a higher form of life via technology. KurzweilAI writes:
In July, Italy — ironically, a stronghold of the Catholic Church — became the first major Western nation to elect an active transhumanist.
Giuseppe Vatinno ran on a platform of “politics that strive to improve the human condition, making use of appropriate advanced technologies.” And not a moment too soon, as Italy slides dangerously toward bankruptcy and urgently needs a new direction.
Transhumanism — the idea that we can radically change ourselves by merging with technology — already had a precedent in Italy: former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi invested in MolMed, which aims to raise average life expectancy to 120 years and beyond. And transhumanism was already present in the work of the Futurist movement of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which had an important influence in Italian politics in the first half of the 20th century, and is explicitly transhumanist in its modern revival.
A graduate of the University La Sapienza in Rome in theoretical physics and specialized in particle physics, cognitive psychology, neural networks, and image processing, Vatinno teaches in the Masters program on energy and environmental issues at the Politecnico in Milan and the University La Sapienza in Rome.
