All the talks from the November 14, 2008 Global Catastrophic Risks: Building a Resilient Civilization seminar, co-sponsored by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Lifeboat Foundation, are now online, thanks to Jeriaska.
Bruce Damer, CEO, DigitalSpace & Director, Contact Consortium “Asteroids and Comets: Mitigating Impact Risks and Stepping Stones to a Sustainable Space Program”
Kattesh V. Katti PhD, Director, Cancer Nanotechnology Platform, Professor of Radiology, University of Missouri “Green Nanotechnology: An Economic And Scientific Initiative For the Future Of Human Civilization”
Jamais Cascio, IEET Fellow, and research affiliate, Institute for the Future “Strategies for Civilizational Resilience in the Face of Global Catastrophic Risks”
Scientists have taken us one step closer to achieving permanent bliss. Neuroscientists Morten Kringelbach and Tipu Aziz recently announced that they were able to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain by implanting a chip that sends tiny shocks to the orbitofrontal cortex. This is the same area that is responsible for feelings of pleasure induced by such things as eating and sex.
IEET Fellow Marshall Brain gave this speech on the inevitable structural unemployment that automation and artificial intelligence will create at the Singularity Summit 2008. The astonishing thing about Marshall’s talk was the amount of outrage from the libertopians in the audience who were all perfectly content to imagine that we would soon have super-robots doing things a gazillion times better than humans, and that that transition might wipe humans out or bring about a utopian society, but they couldn’t accept that such a transition might cause unemployment and require any redistribution of the wealth. History apparently shows that the market solves all structural unemployment, even after an historical discontinuity so radical that we make up a word for it - Singularity - which precisely means that we can’t predict anything after that point. Libertopians would be funny if they hadn’t just ruined the world economy.
One of the secondary effects of the latest set of crises to grip the world is the rise of essays and articles from various insightful folks, laying out scenarios of what the future will look like in an era of limited resources, energy, money, and so forth. Most of these follow a similar pattern: a list of reasonable depictions of a more limited future, and at least one item that seems completely out of the blue.
Edge.com asked 150 of the most visionary minds on the planet - including the IEET’s Nick Bostrom, Aubrey de Grey and Douglas Rushkoff - the question “What will change everything?”
Virtual Reality (VR) has advanced to incredible heights. For those who haven’t kept up with the gaming scene, the newest game renowned for impressive graphics is Fallout 3. Of course, graphics aren’t all that matters to gamers, which is why another one of the hottest games on the block right now is Spore, which looks very cartoonish.
Wireheaded pleasure. Brain damage causes religious selflessness. Powerful people are less compassionate. The US is become more unequal. Obama and the Congressional Democrats want to fund science, respect science and use science. Three rules for knowing when technology will - and won’t - fix a social problem. Jonathan Coulton salutes the worst President in US history. (MP3)
Dr. Anders Sandberg gave the opening keynote address at a conference on Global Catastrophic Risks on Nov 14, 2008 in Mtn View CA. The meeting was sponsored by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Lifeboat Foundation. Sandberg spoke on threats to the future of humanity, natural and man-made. (MP3)
The Oxford English Dictionary has added “transhumanism” as a new word. Only fifty years since Julian Huxley coined it, but the OED needs to be sure of these things.
As we prepare for the emergence of the next generation of apocalyptic weapons, it needs to be acknowledged that the world’s democracies are set to face their gravest challenge yet as viable and ongoing political options.
A new economic superpower undermines established economic leaders. The collapse of complex financial instruments turn a boom into a bust. Banks fail in waves. Unemployment reaches up to 25% in some areas. A global depression holds on for more than two decades. Class warfare breaks out. Transportation networks stall—along with industries dependent upon them—as the main “fuel” for transportation disappears. Pandemic disease exacts a terrible toll. Religious fundamentalism skyrockets. Totalitarianism rises around the world.
It may seem premature to be discussing approaches to the effective elimination of human aging as a cause of death at a time when essentially...Alles » It may seem premature to be discussing approaches to the effective elimination of human aging as a cause of death at a time when essentially no progress has yet been made in even postponing it. However, two aspects of human aging combine to undermine this assessment. The first is that aging is happening to us throughout our lives but only results in appreciable functional decline after four or more decades of life: this shows that we can postpone the functional decline caused by aging arbitrarily well without knowing how to prevent aging completely but instead by increasingly thorough molecular and cellular repair. The second is that the typical rate of refinement of dramatic technological breakthroughs is rather reliable (so long as public enthusiasm for them is abundant) and is fast enough to change such technologies (be they in medicine, transport, or computing) almost beyond recognition within a natural human lifespan. In this talk I will explain, first, why (presuming adequate funding for the initial preclinical work) therapies that can add 30 healthy years to the remaining lifespan of healthy 55-year-olds may arrive within the next few decades, and, second, why those who benefit from those therapies will very probably continue to benefit from progressively improved therapies indefinitely and thus avoid debilitation or death from age-related causes at any age.
Russell Blackford, editor of the IEET’s Journal of Evolution and Technology (JET), has just published the first three items for JET’s new 2008-2009 volume (Volume 20 of the journal). The first of these is Russell’s editorial, entitled “Celebrating our past, imagining our future” which sets out his vision for the journal ... and for some mild celebration of its first decade.
A recent poll conducted in 15 countries by the BBVA Foundation shows that citizens in the developed world are largely in support of assisted reproductive technologies. In particular, most people polled were very much in support of in vitro fertilization, a technique used to help couples with fertility problems (scoring over 7 points on an acceptance scale from 0 to 10). At the same time, however, there was strong disapproval for using the technique to choose a baby’s gender, with scores consistently showing below 3 points.
Interview with with Dr. Carl Marci who is the Director of Social Neuroscience for the Psychotherapy Research Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Marci is involved with some of the most advanced research that focuses on measuring and quantifying the human emotion of empathy.
J. Storrs Hall, author of Beyond AI, presents at a day-long seminar on threats to the future of humanity, natural and man-made, and the pro-active steps we can take to reduce these risks and build a more resilient civilization.
Mike Treder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and J. Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies introduce the November 14 conference on Global Catastrophic Risks taking place in Mountain View, California. The event followed a meeting on the same subject, an immensely diverse collection of events could constitute global catastrophes, in July at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. The topic for the conference was “Building a Resilient Civilization.”
I have to admit something: I’ve been a business consultant. Not just in the consulting futurist sense, but also in the “let me help you innovate your product cycle, grow your stakeholders, and immanentize your eschaton” sense.
DR ANDY MIAH, from the University of the West of Scotland, believes that in this critical time of financial turmoil and concern about climate change there needs to be collaboration between the arts and the sciences. He argues that we no longer need specialist knowledge but ‘transdisciplinary’ creative solutions. Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty is edited by Andy Miah and published by Liverpool University Press.
Also, the Burj Tower in Dubai will be finished next year and at more than 700 metres high it will become the tallest building in the world. In contrast, the construction of skyscrapers in London planned in the recent period of growth now looks under threat as recession looms. DEYAN SUDJIC, Director of the Design Museum, predicts the future for British architecture and examines how it is a seismograph for economic change. Deyan will be chairing the debate Design Cities: Where Next? at the Design Museum, London at 7.15pm on 15 December.
What makes a perfect house? A feeling of contentment, well-proportioned rooms and a sense of grandeur? Television producer and director TIM KIRBY asserts that these notions of what makes a good home can be traced back 500 years to the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. The Perfect House: The Life and Work of Andrea Palladio is on BBC Four on 17 December at 9.00pm.
The grandeur of space has enthralled poets for centuries, but as we journey further into its depths, does it lose its mysticism? Astrophysicist DAME JOCELYN BELL BURNELL has co-edited an anthology which rekindled poets’ curiosity in space by twinning them with astrophysicists to inspire them with the latest advancements in astronomy. Dark Matter: Poems of Space, edited by Maurice Riordan and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, is published by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Two reports out this week hint at a new political alignment in the coming decades. Both reports focus on nanotechnology, but have implications well beyond.
Biologist Drew Endy debates researcher and historian Jim Thomas on the future of bioengineering at the Long Now Foundation. While Endy discusses the potential benefits of being able to “program” DNA, Thomas advocates caution, citing the dangers of untested technology. (MP3)
The Long Now Foundtion
San Francisco, CA
Nov 17th, 2008
http://www.longnow.org/
In 2001, the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was established by Congress to: (1) Advance a world-class nanotechnology research and development program. (2) Foster the transfer of new technologies into products for commercial and public benefit. (3) Develop and sustain educational resources, a skilled workforce, and the supporting infrastructure and tools to advance nanotechnology. (4) Support responsible development of nanotechnology.
On September 19, 2008, Jeff McMahan, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University spoke on cognitive enhancement at Stony Brook University. (rightclick to download podcast: 43:20 345 MB)
It seems there hasn’t been a lot of good news lately: Parliament is falling apart, the economy is belly up and environmental problems continue to mount. Just how much worse could it get? Well, actually, it could get a whole lot worse: the world could come to an end. So take your mind off of all that trivial bad news, as we show you exactly what real disasters are all about. From giant asteroids to alien invasions, from galactic collapse to mega-volcanos, we’ll tell you 10 Ways the World Could End.
I used the term ‘legacy code’ in one of my novels, and Farah Mendlesohn, a science-fiction critic who read it thought it was a term I had made up, and she promptly adapted it for critical use as ‘legacy text’. Legacy text is all the other science fiction stories that influence the story you’re trying to write, and that generally clutter up your head even if you never read, let along write, the stuff. Most of us have default images of the future that come from Star Trek or 2001 or 1984 or Dr Who or disaster movies or computer games. These in turn interact with the tendency to project trends straightforwardly into the future.
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