A brief update on some of our busy fellows.

I suspect we all struggle with the sense that we don’t use our time as wisely as we should. With a seemingly endless to-do list hanging over my head - four papers, a conference to plan, a bioethics course to teach, college administering, a set of papers to edit, gardening, etc. - I somehow found the time to work through the first two seasons of Heroes in the last two weeks. At least I have the excuse that I’m supposed to stay up on the depiction of transhumans in popular culture as part of my intellectual work. So I’ll consider it research.

But then I had to go and request an update from our fellows and staff on their recent accomplishments and upcoming gigs, and found myself wondering what I could accomplish if I could somehow steal their transhuman diligence (as several characters in Heroes are able to do). Some examples:

Linda MacDonald Glenn is currently in East Timor doing research on health and technology issues in developing nations, and getting her first responder and rescue diver certification on the side. That’s after meeting with the Feminist Bioethics folks in Singapore to help them set up a blog, speaking on cyborgs in Texas, and on pop culture in Key West Florida.

Susan Schneider has a book coming out from MIT Press called The Language of Thought: a New Philosophical Direction, and another in the works on the mind-body problem from Oxford University Press.

Natasha Vita-More will be keynoting the GOGBOT festival in the Netherlands, then she and I will be speaking at the Transhumanism and Spirituality conference in Utah, and then she will be meeting up with the other half dozen IEET speakers at the Transvision meeting in Milan Italy.

Ben Goertzel will be speaking with IEET Fellow Ramez Naam at next week’s Singularity Summit in San Francisco, then off to Beijing and Hong Kong to speak at AI meetings. (BTW I had fun last week lecturing on the ethics of AI in the distance learning course he and his Dad are teaching on the Singularity - Ben logged in from Mexico.)

Russell Blackford already has a dozen gigs lined up this Fall, promoting secularism, speaking on SF at the World Science Fiction Convention and on uploading at the first Australian Singularity Summit.

Milan Cirkovic will soon take time off from his Belgrade observatory to lecture on SETI at the Royal Society and at Oxford in the UK, while he, Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg publish a paper this month in Risk Analysis on why the fact that we still exist today (anthropic bias) has given us too much optimism that we will still exist tomorrow (existential risk).

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Ah well - my family and I will spend next week at the beach. Maybe I will be a better scholar-activist after my kids leave for college….

We are also pleased to announce another addition to our group of Affiliate Scholars, former IEET intern V. R. Manoj. He just submitted his Ph.D. thesis for a degree in Environmental Biotechnology from Anna University Chennai, India, where he has been working on aquaculture. Congratulations V.R., you are in charge of our penetration of South Asia - get to work!