IEET Culture News

Marcelo Rinesi From Space, Watts, Bits, and Dreams

2009-07-02T23:04:54+00:00

Space travel is very cheap. There’s no friction in the vacuum of space, so once you get something to move, it just keeps moving without spending any energy. The problem lies in getting things away from the gravity well of a planet.

Mike Treder The Difficult Questions of ‘Personhood’

2009-07-02T15:06:43+00:00

Every human is a person, right? And anyone we call a person must be a human, correct?

Well, no, not necessarily.

7th European Conference on Computing And Philosophy

2009-07-02T10:45:00+00:00

The 7th European conference on Computing And Philosophy has a track on Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies, with the deadline for submissions being extended to March 16th, two weeks from now. Here is the info:

Track in: 7th European conference on Computing And Philosophy — ECAP 2009
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2-4 July 2009

Historical analysis of broad range of paradigm shifts in science, biology, history, and technology–in particular in computing technology–suggests an accelerating rate of progress. This observation has led the attempted unification of the predictive power of biological evolution, cultural evolution, and technological evolution under the Law of Accelerating Returns. As a consequence, John von Neumann described forecasted the arrival of an “essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue”. This notion of Singularity coincides in time and nature with Alan Turing (1950) and Stephen Hawking’s (1998) expectation of machines to exhibit intelligence on a par with to the average human by 2050. John Irving Good (1965) and Vernor Vinge (1993) expect it to take the form of an ‘intelligence explosion’: the process by which ultraintelligent machines design ever more intelligent machines. Transhumanists suggest a parallel process of explosive progress in human intelligence and physique. Unfortunately, the very term ‘Singularity’ also suggests the presence of an ‘event horizon’, an epistemological barrier on our ability to understand the events that may follow it.

We invite abstracts examining the following issues from a philosophical, computational, mathematical, and scientific points of view:

1. Empirical assessments of the Law of Accelerating Returns
2. Estimating the reliability of a technological forecasts
3. Historical analysis of the Law of Accelerating Returns
4. The impact of acceleration on science and society by 2050
5. Hazards of technological acceleration and preventative measures
6. The nature of the Technological Singularity
7. The nature of an intelligence explosion
8. Beyond the ‘event horizon’ of the Technological Singularity

Important dates:

* Submission deadline: 23 Feb. 2009 extended: 16 Mar. 2009
* Notification: 16 Mar. 2009 extended: 23 Mar. 2009
* ECAP Conference: 2-4 Jul. 2009

Submission guidelines: http://ia-cap.org/e-cap09/openconf/openconf.php

Papers submitted to the Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies track in ECAP 2009 will also be considered for publication in a special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Elsevier).

Track chair: Amnon H. Eden
School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK and Center For Inquiry, Amherst NY

Ben Scarlato True Blood: Coexistence

2009-07-01T02:39:59+00:00

[Contains spoilers] True Blood is a fascinating HBO series about vampires living with humans, now in its second season. It follows Sookie Stackhouse, a human that has fallen in love with the vampire Bill Compton. While the vampires’ fight for marriage rights and the intense religious opposition reflects the gay rights struggle, True Blood’s depiction of an ageless species with several enhanced powers also provides an exploration of how society might deal with transhumans, and perhaps more importantly how society views such possibilities.

Mike Treder Progress on the Technoprogressive Wiki

2009-06-30T13:49:32+00:00

What is a ‘technoprogressive’? What do they believe? And what the heck’s a ‘TP Wiki’??

George Dvorsky Exploring transhumanist themes in Battlestar Galactica: Caprica

2009-06-30T13:07:56+00:00

Good news for Battlestar Galactica fans: the new Caprica series is excellent. I finally caught the two-hour pilot and was quite impressed with the new direction. If this first episode is any indication, this is going to be a provocative and fascinating series—one that will touch upon many topics near and dear to transhumanists, including artificial intelligence, whole brain emulation, consciousness transfer, virtual reality and even immortality.

Jamais Cascio Hacking the Earth

2009-06-29T16:25:58+00:00

Some of the most thoughtful work on the topic of climate change appears in Jamais Cascio’s new e-book, Hacking the Earth. Cascio is a Bay Area futurist who worked with Global Business Network during the 1990s and is currently a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a global futures strategist at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Science Fiction and Tech Innovation

2009-06-28T13:30:05+00:00

io9’s head honcho Annalee Newitz talks about the relationship of science fiction and technological innovation at Webstock09. “Just two decades ago, the Web and public internet were the stuff of science fiction. Creators like William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer, helped define the terms of social life online, as well as inspiring many of the inventions (like smartphones) that we take for granted. But what is today’s science fiction telling us about where our technology will go tomorrow? I’ll talk about the stories today’s scifi creators are telling about the Web and internet, and how their ideas create a fantastical map of what people are seeking in their online lives.”

Annalee Newitz at Webstock 09 from Webstock on Vimeo.

Mike Treder Technoprogressives and Transhumanists: What’s the difference?

2009-06-25T15:41:11+00:00

Nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science—the so-called “NBIC” technologies—have the potential, especially as they converge, to radically transform both human beings and human societies.

Let’s consider a couple of questions raised by the powerful possibilities that loom in the near future.

J. Hughes On Democratic Transhumanism

2009-06-24T19:50:03+00:00

The political journal Re-Public has published two special issues on the politics of transhumanism. The first collection included IEET Executive Director J. Hughes’ article “Transhumanist politics, 1700 to the near future”. This second collection of essays includes IEET Fellow Riccardo Campa’s “Toward a transhumanist politics”, an interview with IEET Fellow Andy Miah on “Human enhancement and the accumulation of biocultural capital,” and this interview with Dr. Hughes about democratic transhumanism and technoprogressivism.