Concept

Giulio Prisco

Overview

Giulio Prisco (born in Naples in 1957) is an Italian information technology and virtual reality consultant; as well as a writer, futurist, transhumanist, and cosmist. He is an advocate of cryonics and contributes to the science and technology online magazine Tendencias21. He produced teleXLR8, an online talk program using virtual reality and video conferencing, and focused on highly imaginative science and

technology. He writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including science, information technology, emerging technologies, virtual worlds, space exploration and futurology.

Prisco's ideas on virtual realities, technological immortality, mind uploading, and new scientific religions are extensively featured in the OUP books Apocalyptic AI - Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality by Robert M. Geraci and Virtually Sacred - Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life by the same author.

Prisco's ideas are also extensively featured in the 2017 book Dynamic Secularization - Information Technology and the Tension Between Religion and Science by William Sims Bainbridge and the 2019 book Transhumanism - Engineering the Human Condition: History, Philosophy and Current Status by Roberto Manzocco, both published by Springer.

Formerly a researcher at CERN, a staff member at the European Space Agency, and a senior manager at the European Union Satellite Centre, Prisco is a physicist and computer scientist. He served as a member on the board of directors of World Transhumanist Association, of which he was the executive director, and the board of directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, from which he resigned in 2021. He is currently the president of the Associazione Italiana

Transumanisti. He is also a founding member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, and the Turing Church, fledgling organizations which claim that the benefits of a technological singularity, which would come from accelerating change, should or would be viable alternatives to the promises of major religious groups.

Prisco has been repeatedly at odds with technocritic Dale Carrico who argues that transhumanism is technological utopianism turned into a new religious movement. Prisco agrees but counters that transhumanism is an “unreligion” because it offers many of the benefits of religion without its drawbacks.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

Or by the usage of language. Thus any mixed drink is called {omicron iota nu omicron sigma}, 'wine.' Hence Ganymede is said 'to pour the wine to Zeus,' though the gods do not drink wine. So too workers in iron are called {chi alpha lambda kappa epsilon alpha sigma}, or workers in bronze. This, however, may also be taken as a metaphor.
Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle
States what Giulio Prisco is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Important that our grand Reformation were begun. (308.) Chap. II. _Bribery Committee._ Our theory, perfect purity of Tenpound Franchise; our practice, irremediable bribery. Bribery, indicative not only of length of purse, but of brazen dishonesty: Proposed improvements. A Parliament, starting with a lie in its mouth, promulgates strange horoscopes of itself. (p. 312.)--Respect paid to those worthy of no respect…
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.
States what Giulio Prisco is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
For example, if it seems as if some change took place without a cause, or some one who is dead appears again, or if in any other way the past or the future becomes present or the distant becomes near.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
Close in meaning to Giulio Prisco; the term itself is not named.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Transhumanism.

Explore Giulio Prisco in the interactive graph →