I’ve dived into digital and am doing away with book shelves; I’m a book worm and I am proudly giving up the printed page as quickly as I can. The future is liberating.

We hear a lot of talk about ebooks maturing and becoming mainstream, and I do hope we will see that soon. Sadly, publishers continue to drag their feet worse than the recording industry has and we will likely see tree and ink publishers go kicking and screaming into a better tomorrow. I decided to stop waiting, though, and have taken on the task of digitizing all of the books I have in my collection.

I began a serious purge of books last year when I moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Waterloo, Ontario. I had a lot of books and opted to sell and give away the majority of the books in my collection; I downloaded replacements for as many books as I could in digital formats. Even with a purge of many books, I moved with dozens of books that I care a great deal about and wouldn’t leave behind without a digital alternative.

In June I will be moving back to Nova Scotia and I have begun a scanning project. In late June, when I move, I will do so with no more than 5 physical books in my possession. Each other book and magazine will be scanned and passed along to someone else. I have already given to a book drive and will do the same again before I leave.

It’s a long process to digitize books; scanning each page with a cheap scanner can make each book an hours-long project. Even so, it’s better to act than to wait for publishers to catch up, so I’ve adopted a DIY attitude. I have scanned dozens of books and magazines that are not available in digital form during the past two months. I’m left with a collection of PDF files that will fit on a MicroSD card instead of filling shelves upon shelves.

As convenient as digital books are to read —I greatly prefer digital reading to paper reading—, the striking difference is in the clutter that will be in my living space. For the first time in my memory I will be without a book shelf, without a teetering stack of books and with every book I have loved in my pocket. That will feel great.

If you have the time, why not join me in being proactive in the move to digital books? A cheap scanner and a netbook would be all that is necessary to start the process. I’m very happy about the change so far.

3D scanning and printing are quickly becoming near future certainties. The advent of cheap 3D scanning and printing, along with cheap data transfer means that we will soon be able to share physical objects digitally as easily as we do music, movies and books. This is going to change more than we can imagine.

The easy analogy for understanding 3D printing and scanning is the obvious one; 2d –or conventional– printers and scanners are the predecessors of a far more exciting set of technology that is coming to consumer space very soon. Instead of scanning flat paper, we will be able to scan objects in 3 dimensions. Instead of printing an image, we will be able to replicate an object as an object. In between we will be able to manipulate objects just as we edit documents and alter photographs.

3D scanning can already be done with consumer webcams.

In a recent article from British Columbia’s The Tyee, “The Replicator, No Longer a Star Trek Dream“, great care was taken to outline the ways 3D printing is already widely in use and where it may take us.

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We have been benefitting from improved memory given by technology throughout history —the book is an obvious example of this— and have just entered an exciting new wave of memory enhancement that will enrich our lives and the lives of every generation to come. E-memory is coming of age and in its wake we’ll have freedom and ability that we’re only now beginning to recognize. Imagine a world where we can retain and recall any information or event with ease for the rest of our lives. It’s here, today.

Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell, two highly respected researchers at Microsoft, released Total Recall in September and have inspired an increasing interest in e-memory. Their work promotes technology as a means to enhance human memory by freeing it from tedious work and enhancing it dispite our physical limitations. They offer an exciting, yet practical, roadmap of our future relationship with our memories.

E-memory —also known as lifelogging— is the digital storage of all kinds of data about our lives, from the intimate to the abstract, and “our magical new ability to find the information we want in the mountain of data that is our past”. Beyond this will be the ability to have computers analyze our data and reveal ways we can improve our lives. Imagine being able to correlate dietary changes and better performance at work or a new hobby and better health. The insights we will be able to gain about our unique life patterns will be endless and may well reshape society for the better.

It is becoming increasingly easy and affordable to record information about our lives: Bell has worn the SenseCam for years, having photos snapped for him throughout his day; Fitbit monitors activity level and quality of sleep; GPS cameras take photos and tag them with location and time information; sites like Daytum allow for easy manual tracking and visualization of life data; we already record our e-mails with services like Gmail; track our social life with Facebook and IM chat logs; and groups like The Quantified Self are creating new avenues of exploring lifelogging and e-memories. What is most exciting is that projects such as MyLifeBits are underway to make it easy for each of us to record, manage and use all this information. We are in the early years of a very exciting change in the way we relate to memory, but already it is shaping us.

We are being given the opportunity to retain more about our lives than ever before, and not just for ourselves. We will be able to leave wonderful records for generations to come that will allow all we have learned, sensed and done to be better preserved and re-experiened. One example Bell and Gemmell point out is the use of avatars. Imagine leaving such a detailed record of our lives that we can leave interactive guides for our grandchildren, with all the wisdom, warmth and uniqueness we can record. E-memories may be the seeds of this sort of invaluable breakthrough.

For more about e-memory, I can’t recommend Total Recall too highly. Aside from the book, there is a great Total Recall blog by Bell and Gemmell. There is a lot more to be said about this fantastic change and I’ll be writing more about it in the coming months.

Transhumanism has been slipping into my heart over the past month. I’m enamoured with the promises of improved physical, mental and spiritual capacities, even though I do still hold skepticism for the movement, especially the proposed timelines.

So what is Transhumanism, anyway?

Human enhancement is here now, and growing stronger. Already some of us are reshaping our bodies, both to maintain health and extend it. Neuro Pacemakers may soon help people suffering from severe depression and biosensors are monitoring patients after operations and could be internalized. Practical body modifications outside of the medical field, called body hacking, are emerging right now, with people already experimenting with magnetic vision, tooth implant audio, and other practical enhancements.

But you and I are likely already married to technology in an irreversible way. The internet is pervasive in our lives, we rely on our cellphones, our music players come with us, and older technologies provide our food, shelter, clothing, transportation, health and everything we take for granted. Much of transhumanism is a refinement of how we use technology. It is to become even more natural, more beneficial, more elegant and more beautiful.

One of my favourite visions of our future is at Human Upgrades, a mock site for a medical centre that offers upgrades of the sort many transhumanists (and myself) long for. The Simple Ear is purely sexy, no? I was seduced by it back in ’05.

Spirituality also can be enhanced through technology. Neurotheology has discovered many of the ways our brains physically house spiritual experiences (neurologically, an apple and godhead are both experienced as real), and this understanding is allowing neuromystics to more easily explore states thought of as spiritual. We will be able to experience exalted states normally reserved for dedicated mystics with the press of a button, opening ourselves to a more spiritual life. Already I am using binaural beats to safely enter into altered states of consciousness at least weekly. A specially made audio track is all I need to entrain my brain into states similar to those we only know in lucid dreaming, deep meditation or dreamless sleep. This is a valuable companion to meditation that has enhanced my spiritual practice significantly, and this is just the modest beginning of this technology to deepen our experience of the divine.

Not all proposals are so light. Genetic modification of our children will soon be possible and the debate over what is ethical in this field is complex. We must start to question how much we should enhance those too young to choose. “Homo Futurus: How radically should we remake ourselves – or our children?” is an example of the attention being given to this. And beyond that, we must reshape our cultures to embrace longer lives or immortality, which will have tremendous impact on every aspect of our lives and the well being of the world.

Some emerging worldviews, such as Conscious Evolution, are preparing us to live in a world where we set the pace of and decide the face of evolution. C4Chaos has proposed H++, a Transhumanism rooted in integral theory. Unlike the apparant mainstream of Transhumanism, these visions include spiritual, developmental and cultural considerations that are vital to a comprehensive stance. Only an integral approach, I believe, is adequate to respond to the increasingly complex dynamic we are entering into.

Technological and other advancements will perpetually unfold, giving us new tools that can allow us to increase our cognition, caring, beauty, and aptitude in all areas of life. Why would we choose not to benefit ourselves and others when we can safely do so? Transhumanism presents possibilities that could transform our world into a more radiant place, if we can rise to the occasion. There are real dangers, however, if we still hold pathologies and are not acting from ever higher altitudes.

Technology must be guided by cognitive, moral and other altitudes that are high enough to prevent catastrophy. In light of this, it is becoming ever more vital to our survival that we emerge into integral and higher stages. Anything else would be blind to dangers and most likely lead to our undoing.

There is no viable way to slow advancement without harming ourselves, so we must move forward with care, with great love and with an eye to the emerging potential that can help bring us into lives of more grace. We can direct our futures so they will be more Good, more Beautiful and more True, and we must step into that responsibility. Ken Wilber has imagined one future world that is worth becoming devoted to realizing, and I want to share it as a closing.

Lately I’ve had two primary sources of Transhumanist infusions; C4Chaos just wrapped up a Transhumanism Week and I’ve been faithfully reading Sentient Developments. Integral Options Cafe has also been pointing out some great transhumanist content. The art thumbed and linked to is via ~cyber-arts, ~whmurai and ~Onigoroshi on DeviantArt.I do owe the greatest debt to C4Chaos, as much of what I have recently learned in this field and shared here has been through his recent spree of blog posts.