IEET Assistant Director Marcelo Rinesi is editing a new online magazine, Frontier Economy, focusing on the economic and business implications of emerging technologies.
The Order of Cosmic Engineers are a group of transhumanists who are focused on “turning this universe into a ‘magical’ realm.” They focus on building their activity in online virtual reality worlds. They include IEET Board member Giulio Prisco and IEET advisor Martine Rothblatt. They have recently issued the “YES! to Transhumanism” statement which is a call to arms for defense of radical transhumanism against pressures to downplay the more challenging and futuristic aspects of the transhumanist perspective.
Wikipedia succinctly defines postmillennialism as “an interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation which sees Christ’s second coming as occurring after (Latin post-) the ‘Millennium’, a Golden Age or era of Christian prosperity and dominance.”
For those who believe that human-level AI isn’t far off and that a rosy scenario isn’t inevitable, 2009 is a somewhat sad and depressing time. Popular opinion is that AI won’t be here for centuries, but that isn’t a huge problem or issue. (In fact, it makes things easier by limiting the number of people involved in AI research, thus allowing me and my confederates to keep a closer eye on them.)
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.
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.
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.
Of the 128 of you who voted on the question “Is the current meltdown the end of free market ideology and a new start for global social democracy?,” only 29% agreed “Yes, this is a phase transition in the global political economy.”
A mere one day after the election, a number of Republicans are encouraging Sarah Palin to prepare for the 2012 presidential run. Rush Limbaugh has gone so far as to call her “The next Ronald Reagan.”
The Future of Humanity Institute, founded and run by IEET founder and chair Nick Bostrom, has just published a roadmap of the scientific research and technological innovations required to eventually completely model the human brain in software.
You've probably heard the dictum that most people expect too much change in the short term and too little change in the long term. That has been true generally, I think, and it may be why we hear complaints about 'No flying cars yet!' and so on.
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, have friends or loved ones who do, or simply enjoy the various products and services to be found around these parts, take heed: When the Big One hits, it won’t be pretty.
Steve Jones, head of the department of genetics, evolution and environment at the University College London, says the forces driving evolution, such as natural selection and genetic mutation, “no longer play an important role in our lives.”
Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic will each have an essay in the forthcoming collection Collapse Volume V: The Copernican Imperative, to be published on 15 December 2008
A study published in this week’s Nature magazine reveals that the likelihood that a senior citizen will be so disabled that they require high-cost nursing and medical care is fairly constant up till age 100. In other words, increased longevity will not drive up costs related to disability and dependency. But with progress supporting healthy aging with longevity therapies seniors could live even healthier and more able lives. Silke Fauve considers the demographic and economic arguments against increasing longevity.
Okay, hang onto your hats. We’re clearly in for a bumpy ride over the next couple of years; even discounting the worst-case scenarios (I’m a happy pessimist: I always need something to worry about) it looks like we’re in for a recession that will be at least as bad as the 1990-92 one, and possibly much worse.
By definition, distant (long-term) problems are those that show their real impact at some point in the not-near future; arbitrarily, we can say five or more years, but many of them won’t have significant effects for decades. Our habit, and the institutions we’ve built, tend to look at long-term problems as more-or-less identical: Something big will happen later. For the most part, we simply wait until the long-term becomes the near-term before we act.
IEET Director Giulio Prisco reports on his talk on nanotechnology at the In Nano Veritas round table of the THINK BIG - MEDEF Summer University, on August 28 in Paris.
A friend of mine believes that all this talk about “accelerating change” and approaching the Singularity is bullshit—in part because he doesn’t see things advancing all that amazingly exponentially rapidly around him.
You were all pretty pessimistic, or perhaps optimistic, about the prospects for employment in 2050 in Europe and N. America. The mean response was about 50% adult employment, while a quarter of you predict less than 25% employment. This poll was open for the last two months by the way, so it doesn’t just reflect the current market turbulence.
The IEET and the editors of the Journal of Evolution and Technology (JET) are pleased to announce the publication of two special issues of JET, one brought together by Sky Marsen with the intention of publishing a book on transhumanism, and the other a collection of papers from the IEET’s May 2006 Human Enhancement Technology and Human Rights conference at Stanford University. Together they represent the wide array of issues at play in the debate over human enhancement and our transhuman future, from the daily lived experience of pushing to maximize one’s potential, to the legal, political and philosophical arguments we will need to secure universal access to safe enhancement technologies. Enjoy!
In the midst of ongoing wars, accelerating economic collapse, and cascading environmental ruin, it’s easy to dismiss futurism as self-indulgence, a superficial pastime devoted to spotting the next hot gizmo or telling us all how some coming development changes everything. What really matters is the here-and-now. Serious people know that thinking about the future is frivolous; anyone (or any business) not focusing laser-like on the problems of today is wasting time and money. Right?
Today is the “preview” launch for Superstruct, the massively-multiplayer forecasting game that Jamais Cascio has been working on with the Institute for the Future. All IEET folks will love it.
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