Day 2 Afternoon Liveblogging H Summit
J. Hughes
2010-06-14 00:00:00

The slides for the presentations are here

Mark Hatch - David Orban - Jessica Scorpio
David Wood - Justyna Zander, Pieter Mosterman - Joseph P. Jackson
Bryan Bishop - Brian Malow - Ray Kurzweil
Alex Lightman




Mark Hatch is the CEO of TechShop.

Mark Hatch: Boom! Making a Creative Revolution

TechShop is 15,000 square feet of every conceivable tool that a "maker" could need, plus a community of 600 "makers."

The largest resource in the world is people's free time and resources. We now have the cheapest access to tools humans have ever had, and they are getting cheaper quickly. The maker culture wants to see a creative revolution.

One of the makers is Andy Filo, who designed a jetpack. Danny Fakuba is a maker who designed a self-balancing bar stool (based on a Segway) that goes 18miles/hour. More examples of makers working on healthcare telemonitoring, energy efficiency, and low cost infant warmer whizz by.




David Orban is the Chair of Humanity+

David Orban: Intelligence Augmentation, Decision Power, and the Emerging Data Sphere

David is the chairman of Humanity+, Alex says if you have an organization where David isn't the chairman you're missing out.

David says he wants to talk about the evolving data sphere.

We're on a planet that's going to survive, but it could survive quite well without us.

We live in a world of evolving devices. The next generation of mobile devices will have to be very different.

IPv4 provided 10^9 addresses, IPv6 provides 10^38 addresses, and they're only 10^80 atoms in the universe.

We can't afford to be blind to the world anymore. The sensors we're building into our products enable them to perceive and make decisions such as whether to break.

There's a slide titled "Crossing the chasm between humans and machines in the next 40 years."

Our society's growth unless we learn to sense the world and adapt.

There are some things that are going in the right direction, such as letting people quantify their own health and take charge of their bodies.

There's a slide of Alex Lightman captioned with the statement that in the future groups will rule the world for 15 minutes.

He closes by talking about how we've freed machines to be autonomous and self-sufficient, and how we'll be free to be human and to be more than human.




Jessica Scorpio co-founded Gettaround

Jessica Scorpio: Smart Transportation, A Human Revolution

Jessica Scorpio is a graduate of Singularity University, where she worked on launching her car-sharing startup Gettaround. She is attempting to expand access to places and people that existing services like Zip cars and ride sharing haven't reached. She gives examples of the growing market for collaborative solutions, such as couch-surfing.

Gettaround is like "Zipcar meets Ebay." People would be paid to put their marginally used cars in the Gettaround pool. Members are screened, the cars are insured and available on demand. There is a Gettaround Iphone app, so that when you need a car you can call up the closest car on your geo-locator, download the electronic code to unlock it and turn on the ignition, and drive it away.





David Wood is an organizer of the UK Transhumanists

David Wood: Far Beyond Smartphones: Lessons From Disruptive Technology

Wood starts off by saying he's come to bring bad news. We need to balance our optimism with realism, which he'd like to bring with his 20 years of experience in industry with smartphones.

How quickly can tech progress? If we're not careful, not fast enough. If we're not quick enough, we face environmental disasters, terrorism, economic problems, etc.

In1998 they predicted that smartphones would be common. People thought they were mad then, but here we are.

What can we anticipate in the next decade of smartphones? There are progress accelerators, including lower prices, increasing reliability, stylishness, and increasing number of useful services.

But there are inhibitors as well, which can be present with any technology. These include technical problems, chicken and egg problems, platform fragmentation, and poor user interfaces.

There's a graph of the rapid increase of the progress of core tech (potential), with useful applications trailing behind.

To keep up with progress in tech, we need expertise. Expertise in a lot of areas, including technology, ecosystem design, and user experience.

Handheld devices in 5 years will be much much more capable than those of today. They'll be ten times more powerful, have sensors, boost people's intelligence.

There will be lots of brilliantly targeted individual content, including educational content. There will be killer augmented reality apps, and these devices will boost our cognitive skills.

Some people think we have all the apps we need, but Wood thinks that's as ridiculous as saying we have enough songs.

We could have devices much more numerous than people, in the range of 50 billion to 1 trillion.




Dr. Justyna Zander, Harvard University

Justyna Zander: Computation of Things: Challenges and Solutions for the Needs of Humanity

This talk is part of the trend toward the continuous monitoring and measuring of our lives, and aspect of the "participatory panopticon." Dr. Justyna Zander is working on software (a CoTh Engine) for synthesizing all kinds of personal, locational and social network data about individuals to create a "life mirror," an understanding of the patterns in our lives. (She references the work of Dr. J's friend Nicholas Christakis, who is also at Harvard, and the leading researcher on the influence of social networks on happiness and health.)

She plans to leverage the information that smart-tagged objects, the "internet of things," will create. You toilet, fridge, car, clothes etc. wil also collect information about your life and feed it into the software. Scaled up, all that information would permit predictive models about collective behavior, even global futures.




Joseph P. Jackson III is an organizer in the Open Science Movement.

Joseph Jackson: Enlightenment 2.0: Unleashing the Open Science and Open Source Innovation Revolutions

Joe Jackson has returned to his alma mater (Harvard) to share his gospel of open source biology. Open science is

1) Collective intelligence

2) Interoperable technology stacks

3) Radically better business models

He is organizing an Open Science Summit 2010, July 29-31 at UC-Berkeley's I-House.




Bryan Bishop is an organizer in the DIY Bio Movement.

Bryan Bishop: Do-it-yourself Transhuman Tech

Bishop will be talking about DIY transhuman tech. The kind of stuff you could use even if you don't have a lot of money.

Transhumanism is the process of building yourself from what you are into what you want to be.

In the past few years, DIYBio groups have spread from Boston to throughout the world. But what kind of projects could we actually purse with DIYBio?

Microfluidics are devices that can be constructed with simple Sharpies and glass slides. You can put water or different analytes in these.

What is practical now if you put a lot of time into DIYBio? He's talking about a cheap chip for DNA synthesis. Gene therapy could be used for a lot of different enhancements, including myostatin, IFG-1, and VEGF.

One interesting project is open source prosthetics. There's a slide of a veteran who lost an arm and decided to build his own.

The open source prosthetics community is able to save people tens of thousands of dollars by using open source licenses.

We need open source hardware licenses.

What if we band together under a co-op for sharing these technologies and developments? Bryan's been doing this under the banner of gnusha.org.



Brian Marlow: Science Comedian

Apparently, when you restrict calories to zero, it doesn't have the same positive effect on life span.

He say's we're all like a couple hundred external hard drives for him. One day, we'll look back at verbal communication and see it as so incredibly primitive. This doesn't go over well, so he says it was an endothermic joke that needed energy from the crowd.

Marlow suggests that the keys to aging are actually hidden in Aubrey de Grey's beard.

Artists do their best work when they're young, so what happens when you extend their lives? Do you really want to hear the 40th album from U2?

He thanks James Hughes for helping him reframe bestiality in the south, using hybrids. Those people are trans-humanists.

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Only in the deep south.

Malow says people complained that the messages in the Voyager space probes were sending porn out into space.

He likes SETI, but would we really be able to communicate with them? Stephen Wolfram pointed out the difficulties of distinguishing the signal from the noise, so Malow suggests aliens ought to send flowers or chocolate.

He has a closing bar joke for the weekend:

Kurzweil and de Grey walk into a bar in 2075. They sit down, de Grey says he thinks he's going through a midlife crisis, and Kurzweil says lots talk about the future.