The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist

Cyborg Rights Activist

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The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist

>>>𝕄𝕜𝕕𝕚𝕣 "𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪"...

>>>ℂ𝕕 "𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪"

>>>𝔻𝕠𝕨𝕟𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕 𝕙𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕟𝕕.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>𝔻𝕠𝕨𝕟𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕 𝕔𝕠𝕣𝕡𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕜𝕝𝕖𝕡𝕥.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>ℝ𝕦𝕟 𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>𝕄𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪 <𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘-𝕗𝕒𝕚𝕝𝕖𝕕: 

      "𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪.𝕙" 𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕗𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕕>

>>>𝔼𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕣 𝕞𝕖𝕤𝕤𝕒𝕘𝕖: "ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕗𝕚𝕟𝕕 𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪.𝕖𝕩𝕖. 𝕎𝕖 𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝕚𝕟 𝕚𝕥."

>>>...

Flash into the past and look into the future. Recall the early stages of the digital age—the new millennium—and how, at the precipice of a thousand transformations, civilization was defined by its endless climbing innovation. In the 80’s and 90’s, when consumer use of the personal computer was infecting society like a virus, our entire idea of communication changed. The net became a pivotal point in shaping what it meant to be human. Through an ever-expanding web of information, human innovation seemed to spiral until promising “authorship over reality itself”. Those who felt constrained by the world, escaped into a fractal space with infinite possibilities of connecting with others. 

Douglas Rushkoff termed it ‘Cyberia’—a dreamlike place offering “a way to crack open our civilization’s closed-mindedness, and to allow for a millennial transition that offered something a lot better than apocalypse: consciously driven evolution”, but the mesmerizing unity in this newfound cyberscape didn’t last. What followed—what we see around us now—may lead us to believe that all is lost, but perhaps there’s something more than war, corporate politics, espionage. Perhaps, there still exist some humans among us interested in a higher cause: unlocking the mysteries.

While the net was first adopted solely by military personnel and groups of scientists across academia who saw fit to interconnect themselves for research and communication purposes, it soon fell into the hands of the geeks using hypertext forums to discuss niche hobbies or send pictures to one another. The net became a mystic place of interlocking minds, where interconnected collections of data contributed to the neural network of humans that composed a global brain. As this paradise aged, however, the desire of investors to monetize and capitalize from the cyberscape arose alongside it. Advertisements flooded the web; businesses sprung up in every forum, website, and chat client. It wasn’t long into the 21st century that the nature of the web was forever molded by a greed to optimize its use for social credit, capital, and leverage for everything from corporate intelligence, to data harvesting, to control and censorship of media. The symbol of freedom and exploration was thus transformed into a stratified market and a subversive survival game. It’s all so… Cyberpunk.  

In the 80’s and 90’s, alongside the rise of computers and the net, came the rise of Cyberpunk literature—a sci-fi subgenre defined by its retro aesthetics intermixed with contrasting commentary that showed us the wonders of new technology while simultaneously revealing the deep divide that emerged as a result of inequality. Pioneers like William Gibson in Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, and Katsuhiro Otomo in Akira revealed the true impact of this divide. In a world where everyone in the streets is chromed up with augmented cybernetic prostheses, but can still hardly afford to eat—a world where cities have been replaced by endlessly sprawling megalopoli—we’re left immersed in the aesthetics of ‘high tech-low life’ people struggling to get by. 

Cyberpunk showed sci-fi fans what it might look like if kleptocratic corporations spiralled further and further into the power vacuum created by advancing technology. If caution and regulation aren’t put in place to protect the people from marvelous creations that humanity could hardly predict outside of science fiction, the people are further exploited and economic classes are further stratified. When this is combined with life-threatening dangers around every corner, the difference between economic class can mean life and death. 

While the additional flourishes of weapons-grade cyborgs, sentient and sentimental artificial intelligence, and laser guns can make Cyberpunk seem like a farfetched reach into a future that will never come, I am here to tell you that this is Society, and we are living in it. Around the world, rising sea levels begin to swallow more of the coastline, and megafires consume any shred of nature or infrastructure in their path. Both of these events are spurred by human-driven climate change which is created in large part by first-world corporations churning out fossil fuels or slicing up rainforests for profit. The global hivemind that is the internet has become the limitless communications apparatus we wanted it to be, but it is covered in adverts and subverts its users attempts to harness its power with misinformation, propaganda, and profit-driven exclusive content. Riots over authoritarian state measures have propped up not only in the United States, but in Hong Kong, Belarus, and all across the globe. Pandemic disease and refugee crises displace hundreds of thousands of humans each year, and the rich keep getting richer by the billions.

In more recent Cyberpunk writing like William Gibson’s The Peripheral, Gibson describes the Jackpot:

And first of all that it was no one thing. That is was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns… or else were eaten alive by something that caused the big event. Not like that.

It was androgenic… that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

...it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years.

Jackpot. The repercussions of humanity’s actions finally catch up, and those bits of humanity that do remain are saved by an extreme surge in innovation that manages to save society’s elites. As Douglas Rushkoff puts it in his recent essay The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods, more and more of those who have the capital to do so have already begun their plans, whether those plans are to escape to Mars or to set themselves up with a cushy work-from-home job while the lower class workers are forced into the public during the pandemic crisis. The need to automate away positions for the safety of our species is becoming even more prevalent than it once was in the minds of corporate conglomerates, but the cancerous overgrowth of our bureaucracy has become so bloated and tripped up in its own processes that we can no longer look to our political systems to keep up with the exploitation of innovation. Lo and behold, the world’s looking pretty CPAF to me.

Where have the visions of Cyberia gone? What happened to the early stages of internet punks, pushed aside in their desire to surf the datasphere purely for the rush of uncovering swathes of data? Where did visions of “authorship over reality itself” twist to become ‘authorship over reality by those with the capital to control’? It may seem that this explosive spiral of technological innovation in the new millennium is driving us towards extinction and only saving those with enough coins in their pockets to buy a ticket on the ark, but perhaps it’s not too late to change course and save ourselves from the ultimate Jackpot.

United by the global nature of the net, every one of us is connected as a single living entity that is the Earth—a Technogaia. Developments in artificial intelligence promises us exponential increase in information processing capabilities across all fields. Breakthroughs in genetic engineering could allow us to delete diseases from our genomes, and have already shown minor success in the de-extinction of species. With the first cyborg part already installed in each of our pockets, every citizen can extend their minds beyond capacity; each one of us becomes a journalist at a moment’s notice when injustice needs to be documented and challenged. Nuclear, hydrogen, solar, and wind energy lead us towards a cleaner and greener future. The rise of urban ecology shows a path to optimize the use of space to lower humanity’s carbon impact while providing more space for habitat rehabilitation and the reintroduction of lost biodiversity.

In the palm of our hands, humanity has taken control of the world. With science and technology, we’ve become the manipulators, but if we do not recognize what our impact is on the Dao of Earth, we may tip the scales too far into the Chaos. I’ll be honest in saying things look grim, but these same innovations that have paved the way for flying killbots and smoke stacks spewing gases into the sky have given us the power to reshape the world in a beneficial image. Futurist politicians call for universal basic income in a world increasingly run by machines. Transhumanists pave the way for the radical extension of the human lifespan. Technogaians design solarpunk arcologies to house a society ready to save their Earth rather than one intent on consuming it. Cyberians fight for our rights to privacy and the freedom of information. Just as the visions of grim dystopias in the 80's and 90’s saw themselves transformed into modern realities, we can use humanity’s greatest tool—this near-deific domain over innovation—to mold this fractal reality into our vision. But is it chaos, order, or some harmonious Dao in between that we seek? 

No matter our choice, it’s going to take a lot of united high tech-low life cyberpunks to get there. This is the Cyberpunk Zeitgeist, and we’re living it.

For more works by The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist, see our Twitter page @CyborgZeitgeist

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A Cyberpunk’s Guide to Emerging Technology in the Modern Day

Promote discussion about new technology with a solid base of information

The State of Artificial Intelligence:

Modern day artificial intelligence has been causing an uproar across a wide array of technological fields, due to the versatility of its use. Even with such a wide array of applications, though, modern artificial intelligence is limited often by the heavy specialization of its intended task and its inability to succeed at even the most basic tasks outside of its specialization.

Interesting Modern Applications: Stockfish Chess Engine

AI chess engines have come a long way since grandmaster Garry Kasparov was defeated by AI Deep Blue in 1997. The most popular, and highest rated engine is Stockfish. Stockfish succeeds primarily by its great search depth of game tree complexity: running simulations of various chess positions, pruning less-successful results, and playing the position it finds most advantageous. In 2014, Stockfish won the most recent Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC Season 18) in 2020, but also won seasons 11, 12, 13, and 16 in recent years. Through the use of Stockfish, chess scholars around the world are discovering new logic to the creativity of the game while research teams are competing to produce artificial engines with even more optimized capabilities.

The State of Biotechnology:

The Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project, publishing the full sequence of the human genome in 2003, paved the way for countless new innovations and studies with regards to the genetic makeup of our species as well as what impacts each of its individual pieces may heritably have. The Human Genome Project has since provided scientists with the information to create more effective diagnostic tools and target medical treatment to account for an individual’s specific genetic makeup.

Cloning Technology for Biodiversity Preservation

Using tissue samples taken from the last living Pyrenean Ibex, scientists fused these somatic cells with cells from a goat capable of undergoing meiotic division. Since the DNA from the goat donor cells was removed, the resultant embryos were perfect clones of the Pyrenean Ibex donor. In 2003, one clone was birthed by cesarean section from an ibex-goat hybrid surrogate. It lived only 10 minutes, but this event marked the first de-extinction of a species. The implications of this event could provide, with investment, further security against mass extinction events.

The State of Climate Technology:

As our urban centers continue to swell, local and global climate effects as well as effects of resource depletion beyond urbanized areas are taking an environmental toll that halts human progress. A number of logistical problems have arisen, and through applied climate technology, we may have the solutions necessary to combat greater climate destruction. To even begin to mitigate risk around climate issues, greener power solutions such as increased use of green hydrogen and nuclear fission energy would help reduce carbon emissions. The minimization of urban living impact could come through a number of urban ecology technologies.

Passive Housing and Begich Towers Arcology

The reduction of energy expenditure can be explored on the consumer level through an optimization and widespread adoption of passive housing technology. This would include a revamping of current housing standards to improve the airtight and superinsulated nature of our houses and increased passive power generation through integrated technology such as solar roofs. 

Arcology structures built to facilitate ecological integration of multiple facets of our urban centers could also reduce land use to provide more space for the necessary vegetation to promote carbon reuptake and the necessary habitats to promote increased biodiversity. One such small-scale example of a project like this is Whittier, Alaska’s Begich Towers: a fourteen storey high rise that houses a majority of the town’s residents, its post office, grocery store, health clinic, and more. Connecting the towers to other buildings around the town are underground tunnels to help protect against the subzero temperatures and consistent snowfall. Begich Towers shows us how urbanization itself can be modernized to provide more efficient structures and limit ecological impact while also benefiting human life.

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A Letter on to Sherrod Brown on Climate Tech

Dear Senator Brown,

With the effects of the climate crisis flaring up all around the United States in the form of wildfire destruction of biodiversity, increased air quality pollution, and greater threats from hurricanes in the south; the need to mitigate further risk is the only way to prevent even greater loss of human life in years to come. To begin this process, your mentioned “$30 billion loan proposal to help smaller manufacturers transition to clean energy economy” in 2018 could be a great boon to the economy while addressing climate concerns. I ask you to consider further taking a stand behind this stimulus and pushing to allocate funds for addressing urban ecology through emerging technologies available at consumer- and small business-levels. 

Our urban centers house 50% of the world’s population in less than 3% of the terrestrial service, but still account for 78% of the carbon emissions and 76% of wood used for industrial purposes. This unsustainable model of urban production has catastrophic consequences on surrounding land where natural resource production still resides. We can reduce this emission expenditure in Ohio’s cities by increasing subsidies and providing more regulation for passive housing projects. This could manifest as increased insulation of homes and increased implementation of solar roofing in citizens’ homes. Passive housing technology is now available, but its widespread implementation is in the hands of our legislators. Using your proposed loan fund for clean energy transitions to provide for enhanced carbon-reuptake projects in urban centers could also reduce rising temperatures due to the Urban Heat Island effect. These could be accomplished through subsidization of urban ecology projects such as vertical farming and hydroponics research. 

Not only can these proposals benefit the quality of life of your constituents in Ohio, they can help make early moves towards offsetting global costs of climate catastrophe, and provide new economic opportunities in fields that will only flourish and the climate crisis becomes more prevalent. If you push for this ‘clean energy fund’ as mentioned in 2018, or expand to include funds for the growth of green technology industries, we can set Ohio’s citizens on a forward-looking path to a cleaner and more developed future. 

I hope you will consider leading this technologically-minded charge for a better future. Thank you for your time and your considerations of new urban ecology plans to help mitigate future climate risks.

Sincerely,

The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist

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Looking Towards the Future at Transvision 2020

The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist encourages all enthusiastic and forward-thinking parties to look into Transvision 2020, a conference on emerging technologies occurring in Madrid from October 16th to October 18th. Transvision 2020’s ‘Future Summit’ explores topics of interest for all futurists, including breakthroughs in fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced medicine, virtual reality, climate science, and energy production, detailing how they might change in the next twenty years. 

The international conference is primarily organized by the transhumanist nonprofit group Humanity+ that advocates for the safe and ethical use of technology as progress accelerates. Open to interested parties from all countries, Transvision 2020 will feature a number of speakers coming from various fields in the research, management, education, and implementation of technology. Among these speakers is Ray Kurzweil, a writer and inventor on futurist thought and emerging technology; Ben Goertzel, an artificial intelligence researcher and vice chair of Humanity+, and Natasha Vita-More, Executive Director of Humanity+ and instructor at the University for Advancing Technology.

The Transvision 2020 conference aims to promote futurist research and development in both Spain and around the world. Some key presentations that will be taking place at the event are Ray Kurzweil’s The Future of the Singularity and Aubrey de Grey’s The Future of Longevity. To register and learn more about the upcoming event, visit its press website at 2020.transvisionmadrid.com. 

The promotion of futurist movements around the world will be crucial in shaping public opinions regarding emerging technologies that may otherwise be obscure and esoteric to those outside of the field. By promoting attendance and participation at this Humanity+ event, we can all support ethical implementation of life-changing technology as it becomes available in the next twenty years.

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Combining the Power of Public Open Source Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence

For as long as shortcuts made possible by information technology have been available, humans have been using them to optimize communication and data handling processes. The advent of artificial intelligence technology has only expedited our ability to rely more heavily on machine interfaces to organize and streamline our work, but our systems of data management and communication are still far from flawless. Each ‘supermind’ collective of human intelligence—be it a corporation, a government, or a community group—is still limited in how well ideas can be gathered, tested, and implemented to solve problems, but artificial intelligence may help provide us with the open source intelligence we need to implement crowdfunded solutions to problems far quicker than ever before.

Using information technology available over the past decade, organizations like Climate CoLab have shown us what is possible if we can optimize larger and more diverse human collectives to come up with solutions. Climate CoLab showed their new strategies by managing contests open to the public where people from various disciplines could display their ideas to help improve climate issues and find other experts across various fields to help develop those ideas into a reality. By providing this open-source way for people to propose ideas that may not come to those in highly-specialized and difficult to enter fields, Climate CoLab has shown that people from all sorts of communities can contribute to the creation of projects such as consumer-grade solar technology, climate awareness technology, and nonprofit climate outreach programs. 

When we look to combine this unique open-source approach to generating innovation with the innovative powers of artificial intelligence such as the capacity of OpenAI’s GPT-3, a language generation model, the possibilities of boosting innovation could once again skyrocket if properly implemented. GPT-3 has already shown promise in its ability to generate near-humanlike text mimicking whatever text inputs it is primed with. Developers have seen success using GPT-3 to output basic SQL, Python, and JSON translations after being prompted to do so. While GPT-3 is already set to be released as a consumer product, the collaborative use of this technology in open-source manners such as those used by Climate CoLab could provide routes to explore the true bounds of this language generation model and what it might be used for to benefit humanity and further expand our technological understandings.

The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist calls for readers across all fields to crowd-source new plans for the implementation of GPT-3 and similar machine learning models in fields that could benefit humanity. The modern age is rife with existential threats among the raging wildfires, loss of personal privacy, and increasingly monopolized markets, the ability for larger groups to collaborate without high barriers of entry could offer us new solutions. What are your ideas to implement language generative models like GPT-3 to improve quality of life across all disciplines? If we crowd-source new applications for information technology, GPT-3 and emerging artificial intelligence can provide benefits for those who would otherwise be unable to access this sort of technology.

[the-cyberpunk-zeitgeist]

The sky above the biosphere was the color of television tuned to the nature channel…

An Open Letter to Transhumanists, Futurists, and Environmentalists:

 As populations of rising transhumanists, dark-ecology environmentalists, and other futurist movements all continue to multiply and argue amongst themselves today, it can be hard to agree on the specifics of anything, save for the necessity of technology’s proliferation  to bring about the higher standards of living these futurist ideologies promise us. And hey, I’m all for eschewing the weak flesh and becoming robots, but for practical engineering to catch up with the capabilities we’d like to see in the world, we’re gonna need to make it that far, and recently things are looking ever more grim. Rising global temperatures are linked to reddening skies in the western US and the air quality in the urban centers that will become our cyberpunk sprawls is notably poorer than less-industrialized areas, which is already having adverse effects on humans.

If we intend to make it as far as robotic Heelys and genetically-engineered cat people, we’ve first got to survive the coming onslaught of global climate change, the increased natural disasters, hazardous living conditions, and refugee crises it will bring with it. For so long now, environmental movements have been respected just well enough to be pushed aside for lack of funding interest, but 2020 brings with it the most dire environmental circumstances we’ve faced yet, and the longer we take to invest in measures to offset rising global temperatures, the more we’ll have to look into sea walls and floating civilization before we can get to the robot arms.

What many may be unaware of is just how much research has been done regarding the impact of the climate, but how little the research of mitigating those impacts has been put into practice, particularly in large urban centers. Urban environments house 50% of the world’s population in less than 3% of the terrestrial surface, but still account for 78% of carbon emissions, 60% of residential water use, and 76% of wood used for industrial purposes. Offsetting such a massive footprint poses a number of issues, particularly in America, where the carbon output of cities is increased by the overwhelming automotive infrastructure that citizens rely on, but there are other methods of reducing urban climate impact by improving city infrastructure.

One well-documented example of the impact of urbanization on climate is the Urban Heat Island effect, where cities are documented as having far higher air and surface temperatures than their rural surroundings due to the high density of heat-absorbing materials. About 3-8% of America’s electricity expenditure was estimated to be used as compensation for this issue, and the solutions to lowering this lie in Arcology, a term used to describe architectural methods to create urban structures with low ecological impacts. The megastructures we see in hopeful artwork aren’t easy to fund or construct, but the production of smaller-scale operations in passive housing may be the key to providing a market as well as greater research efforts into Arcology tech.

The Passive House Institute describes their processes for reducing residential energy use via focus on making spaces airtight and super-insulated to prevent entropic heat loss. This is coupled with mechanical ventilation systems that keep air quality high, run on solar panels installed on the house’s roof. With this lower expenditure on energy and increased generation via solar panels, passive housing systems can have near net-zero energy use, especially during summer months.

Another crucial aspect of increasing environmental qualities of urban areas has been seen in the use of urban forestry, as the addition of greater biomass in cities can lead to improved air quality and higher albedo to combat the UHI effect, but spatial trade-offs and high water expenditure are often cited as key problems with creating lush biospheres around our desired megastructure arcologies. There are, however, modern methods to mitigate these problems as well. Paignton Zoo Environmental Park is using vertical farming to not only offset food costs, but also to research advanced hydroponics arrays. In 100 square meters of space, the greenhouse has the capacity to grow 11,200 plants. This project provides insight into what might be possible not only to offset extensive land cost of agricultural industries—thus allowing societies to optimize natural ecosystems that can offset global carbon costs—but also to provide food for an increasingly booming urban population that requires more and more resources.

As our arctic glaciers melt, our skies turn red, and the sixth mass extinction cranks on, our urban centers are going to require greater capacity, greater efficiency, and a greater supply of crucial resources such as food. Humanity’s ability to expand endlessly outward, consuming more land space and devouring more natural resources, is coming to an end as we finally see the repercussions of our acceleration. We have reached a critical stage in the Anthropocene era, and any forward-thinking supporter of emergent technologies can see that it is the time to choose between mitigation of or frantic response to impending catastrophe. In order to not only save human life, but also to reduce possible losses of progress that lead us forward into transhumanity, I encourage all transhumanists, environmentalists, and futurists to support the implementation and research of this early Arcology tech on the small scale, for it is this that will pave the way for greater technological advancement to come.

[the-cyberpunk-zeitgeist]

A Letter to the New York Times Responding to “Big Oil Faded. Will Big Tech?”

While the problems of Big Oil also influence tech industries as mentioned in “Big Oil Faded. Will Big Tech?”, the tech industry’s approach to controlling innovation may sustain its monopolies far beyond the oil industry. What sets tech companies apart is their expansion beyond the company’s original product. Tech giants are diversifying their assets with new company acquisitions, as we see with Google’s involvement with DeepMind or Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Since 2010, Apple has acquired 20 AI startup companies. Google and Microsoft have acquired 14 and 10 respectively. 

Oil companies focused on influencing policy to maintain their prosperity, but tech companies also direct capital into emerging fields of technology, like artificial intelligence. Big Tech may help us in the short run by providing enhanced personal privacy, but the research and development of these monopolies can’t be outcompeted. If we don’t examine ways to prevent future competition in new fields of research from being eliminated, the monopolies of companies like Google and Apple could extend far beyond the capacity of the oil industry.

The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist

Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/technology/big-oil-faded-will-big-tech.html

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Mosquitos: Bioweapon Vector or Technogaian Disease Eater?

With the topic of biotic threats to our environment fresh in our minds, I'd like to take a look at one vector that could bring harm OR provide benefit to humanity if we seek to use this science for greater good. To explore this concept, I will focus on Aedes Aegypti [yellow fever mosquito] which spreads diseases like yellow fever, dengue fever, and Zika fever. We'll look at two cases: one exploring Aedes Aegypti for biological warfare, and one as a means of preventing disease. First, let’s look at the bad.In 1965, the U.S. Military dropped over 300,000 Aedes Aegypti over Georgia to evaluate the use of dispersion of mosquitoes as a method of entomological warfare. Here are some excerpts from an unclassified report on the subject by William H. Rose.

This experiment, called "Operation Big Buzz", concluded that the A. aegypti was estimated to be the "most likely antipersonnel EW system that could be used against the US", and while Rose's document also included defense measures, the implications of such a test are clear. Big Buzz proved the ability of our government [and other state actors] to produce and distribute this disease vector. While such an attack is prohibited under the Biological Weapons Convention, it may seem like Aedes Aegypti have only destructive scientific applications.

But the UK-based biotech company Oxitec has different ideas for A. Aegypti, as plans for the release of 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes in 2021 have recently been approved by the EPA as well as local authorities in the Florida Keys. Oxitec’s modified mosquitoes [OX5034] are all male, so they don’t bite humans, but they will breed with the local population. They carry a protein that will inhibit survival of female offspring when passed on, thus reducing A. Aegypti populations.[Graphic by Oxitec]

While Oxitec anticipates no adverse effects on humans or animals from the drop, media reports in Florida quote residents already worried about OX5034, and environmental groups have stated worries about unforeseen effects on endangered species that feed on mosquitoes. Concerns for insects as bioweapons are thus met with modern scientists looking to harness the A. Aegypti to combat disease. As further Oxitec research is conducted, it will be hard to ignore the power of this genetically-modified vector whether used for good or for ill.

The burden to ensure that these new concerns and applications for entomological technology are used correctly then falls upon an informed public, so that research like Oxitec's may be used to eradicate deadly diseases and save human lives rather than cause harm. Rather than falling for news that promotes hysteria regarding this misunderstood science, I encourage all of us to further explore what might be possible if technology like this can be better researched, funded, and safely implemented in our society.

[Sources Below]