Aubrey De Grey - Morris Johnson - George Dvorsky -
Patrick Hopkins - James Hughes - Patrick Lin -
Heather Schlegel - David Pearce - JoAnne Kuchera Morin -
John Lester - Nolan Bushnell - Rob Tercek -
Tony Greenberg - Natasha Vita-More - Hank Hyena
Alex Lightman's opening
Alex gives a brief opening speech and introduces some members of the Harvard Future Society who were responsible for making this conference possible at Harvard.
They say the original purpose of the club was to critically evaluate emerging technologies, and that they’d love to see similar student clubs rise up throughout the country. Now David Orban’s got something cool to show us.
David in turn introduces David Bolinsky, and we get to see the world premiere of BioVisions video about powering the cell with mitochondria. It’s a wicked pretty video.
Aubrey de Grey is a Fellow of the IEET, a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation. |
Aubrey de Grey
He says he’s not going to talk a bunch about what he does, because most of us already know about that.
We see his same 7 deadly sins of aging, and now on to his real topic for today, which will be particularly relevant for citizen scientists.
We need more accurate understanding on the part of the public and policy makers regarding what kinds of breakthroughs are important in science and what aren’t.
A lot of people know about teleomeres and how they get worse-off with age. Telomarase fights this and has gained a reputation as being really important in aging, but it’s actually the fountain of youth people think.
Morris Johnson is Chief Technology Officer of Lifespan Pharma Inc. |
Morris Johnson
He wants to use Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) as a means of life extension.
He shows a slide of him and Terry Grossman, a top practitioner of “integrative medicine.”
What you plan to do with your life will determine how aggressively you implement your life extension system.
He suggests that 2 more problems be added to de Grey’s 7 sins of aging.
HACCP for humans, aka Advanced Regenerative Lifespan Augmentation.
Citizen scientists taking care of their own body must be given proper freedom by regulatory bodies to take care of their own bodies.
Johnson thinks AGI could help with a lot of these problems.
Regulators need to be service providers instead of their current role.
6 different ‘nomics (epigenomics etc.) are very important.
He asserts that in today’s economy we’re all worth more dead at 70 than alive.
James Hughes used the term “longevity dividend,” things like Quality-Adjusted Life Years could make the longevity divided larger than the death benefit.
It’s a wonderous time to be alive, but it’ll be even more wonderous to be alive for a time of our choosing.
Edit: See the slides for this talk and a transcript here.
George Dvorsky is a member of the Board of Directors of the IEET. |
IEET's George Dvorsky
[Futurism's snarky review of George's talk]
A common thread has been neuroscience and artificial consciousness, but ethical considerations have been missing throughout out this conference.
Machine ethics is an important field, but it's sometimes confused with AI. Artificial consciousness (AC) is different.
Machine consciousness is a neglected area, and machine ethics is even further behind.
We need to set up rights for AC now, because it'll be very difficult to change things later if there's a precedent of trampling on the rights of AC. The animal rights movement knows this very well, because there's been thousands of years of precedence of ignoring animal rights.
We're not talking about robots, computers, predator drones, etc. Instead, we're talking about subjective awareness, which implies moral worth.
Part of the problem is the persistence of vitalism, even in scientific circles. Scientific ignorance is another problem, as is the belief that we could never have a non-biological consciousness.
Human exceptionalism is another problem. This is the belief that there's something intrinsically special about being human, and that giving rights to great apes would violate human dignity.
Substrate chauvinism is the biased idea that you must be composed of a biological substrate to be rights-worthy.
The Turing Test has a lot of problems, including that it's a purely behavioral approach. It conflates intellect with consciousness and inadequately assesses intelligence.
Just because something passes the Turing Test doesn't mean it's conscious.
Richard Feynman said "what I cannot create I cannot understand."
Ethical implications include issues around AI/AC experimentation, human augmentation, brain emulation, and maintaining social cohesion and justice.
Solutions adopting cognitive functionalism (there's nothing magical about the brain). This can be used as a methodological approach; if an AC has a certain, it has a certain experience.
We need to map the organs of conscious function (this is different from intelligence).
There a bunch of more potential solutions on the slides, but there isn't enough time to go into them.
George lists several of the criteria for personhood.
We need to expand protections in the legal realm. If ACs qualify as persons, we need to grant them basic rights. Moreover, qualifying ACs would have rights like not being shut down, and access to their own source code, etc.
Next steps for the citizen scientist: support neuroscience, promote the idea of non-human animal sentience and personhood, oppose patenting of life, and be ready to use these legal precedents when AC emerges.
Patrick Hopkins is a Professor of Philosophy at Millsaps College. |
Patrick Hopkins
This is an anti-uploading talk, it should be interesting.
Hopkins says he'd love to be uploaded, but it won't work.
There are a lot of parallels between religion and transhumanism, particularly immortality.
He wants to explore the language of immortality and uploading. He shows a bunch of quotes, he emphasizes the word "transfer."
What happens if we analyze this metaphor?
Location, motion and substance are the implications of the metaphors of uploading.
The most subtle implication that the mind is a substance that can be moved.
Problems: is the mind an object inside the brain? Not according to most naturalist theories of the mind. But such conceptions of the mind are common with religion and souls.
Hopkins claims that uploading uses dualist language.
Even if we think of minds as not literally being moved, the idea of transferring implies that a copy in a computer is literally the same thing. But does copying preserve identity? Does copying equal transferring? There's a slide of someone photocopying a page.
In the metaphysics of copying, does copying preserve identity? Hopkins says no. The copied mind has different matter and different history. And a pattern is not something that can be plucked from one place into another.
Thought experiment: if I held a gun to your head, would you be comforted if a copy was being made of you in the next room?
James Hughes is the Executive Director of the IEET. |
IEET Executive Director James Hughes
Now we're going hear James Hughes on "The Problems of Transhumanism Are Problems of the Enlightenment."
Alex mentions James was quoted in the NYT yesterday.
James says he was the first director of WTA (Humanity+). Back then, it didn't run this smoothly.
Anyway, when a lot of people first encounter ideas about transhumanism or the Singularity, they think these ideas are brand new, but H+ is a regiment of the Enlightenment.
The idea of citizen science goes back to the Enlightenment as well. Natural philosophers didn't see distinctions between different fields like philosophy and astronomy.
Robert Boyle had a 1660 wish list of things for the Royal Society to accomplish, including: flying, transplants, smart drugs, genetic engineering, and a bunch of other things that came to be.
Diderot said the mind was the same as the body and brain, that human-animal hybrids were possible, that machine intelligence was possible, etc.
Condorcet thought eventually we'd get rid of the oppression of women and slaves, but also that we'd overcome involuntary death.
The arguments within H+ are similar to the arguments that were going on 400 years ago.
Firstly, reason is important, but it's not enough because it's not self-validating.
Atheism vs. deism was an issue in the Enlightenment. Now we have transhumanist atheists, but our fascination with super-intelligence is circling back around towards a belief in gods.
Bostrom's simulation ideas are similar to old ideas that we're all part of a dream in the mind of a god.
Liberalism vs. Technocracy: today, this is an issue if you believe that an AGI could run society better.
Other problems include progress vs. uncertainty, ethical universalism vs. relativism, and individualism vs. no self.
We need to understand ourselves as part of this 400 year old discussion. A lot of our arguments are carried out without the understanding that these debates have happened before, and we need to change that.
Patrick Lin is the director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group and Fellow of the IEET. |
IEET's Patrick Lin
This is the only military related talk at the conference. A lot of the tech discussed at the conference has been supported by military research or is of interest to the military. When you look at the future of humanity, you can't ignore the military.
Military research is hard to follow, it's shrouded in mystery and secrecy. But still, we can't afford to ignore the military because they're a very large driver of innovation. It's hard to imagine a more basic need than security.
The US is number one in military and homeland security spending in the world. It spends about 20 times the worth of Bill Gates each year.
A lot of tech has military roots, including the Internet, computers, GPS, microwaves, radar, cars, rockets, gunpowder, etc.
Today's military projects include cyborg insects, energy weapons, telepathic communications, invisible shields and cloaks, programmable matter, etc.
But this talk is focusing on enhancement projects and robots.
The military is interested in creating soldiers who could learn better, eat grass, didn't have to eat or sleep, could climb walls like a lizard, etc.
Dolphins are an example of a mammal that doesn't have to sleep, if we could do that in humans it would be a huge strategic advantage.
Something's that already a reality is all sorts of military robots. They replace humans in dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs.
Two issues these raise is civilian blowback and a culture of war.
For civilian blowback, one issue is enhancement. Now we have 23 million veterans. What if all the veterans were enhanced when they reentered society? How would that affect competition for things like jobs?
Should these enhancements be temporary? Who should get them?
A new recruiter slogan instead of "be all you can be" could be "be more than you can be."
Another problem is proliferation, there aren't any military technologies that haven't proliferated.
The conclusion has given us a great window into our future; it's both a great driver and a roadblock to our future. This isn't a call for pacifism, but for more attention to the ethics and policy of the military.
Heather Schlegel is the VP of Product Management, Debtmarke. |
Heather Schlegel
Do we create ourselves and our identity?
A lot of people don't give much thought to this. We don't pro-actively create identities.
A lot of people have explored these ideas before. As you communicate a message via a medium, the medium changes it.
Last week there was a series of articles in the NYT on the impacts of multitasking on the brain.
How she thinks about this is how it relates to the way we create and experience technology.
It's a fallacy to think we're always the same person; she's not.
Online it's much easier to let different identities grow and expand. Anonymity is one thing that has encouraged all these different fragments of identity.
Sometimes these identities take on life of their own, and become bigger than the person who created it.
We extend our identities in many ways, including brands, cars, devices, groups, music, etc.
Some people want to segment their identities, others want to integrate them, and still others want to keep their identities private.
As a citizen scientist, you can participate in experiments of expression of yourself. Second Life and games like GTA let us try on identities, and another way of doing this is social networking sites.
Do we get lost? People get enamored with their avatar selves. Have you had the experience of turning into someone else in front of a camera?
What's the motivation for participation in things like reality shows? And would you not participate to remain private?
Who owns your identity when you extend it with all these brands?
The truth is easier than ever to know, and we can use all these technologies (blogging, Twitter, Flicker) to help us answer.
She encourages us to consider what values are being encoded in the brands we create.
David Pearce is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and author of The Hedonistic Imperative. |
David Pearce
David is talking about abolition of suffering through biotechnology. Quote from Buddha "May all that have life be delivered from suffering."
There are 5 challenges:
1. Physical pain
2. Psych pain
3. Meat-eating
4. Domestic pets
5. Wildlife, nature is red in tooth and claw.
The hedonic treadmill is a source of psych pain. Despite are gadgets we're not actually objectively happier than our ancient ancestors.
Meat production and factory farming is a huge source of suffering. A pig has the emotional development of a 2 year old, but we kill them mercilessly. Pets are another problem.
Nature is another huge problem. The life cycle of carnivores involves causing a lot of pain.
David thinks the tech he's outlining to solve these problems are very conservative.
A single gene primarily determines our level of pain sensitivity, for example. Shortly we'll be choosing the genetic makeup of our future children. We're not ready to eradicate pain, but we could make people less sensitive.
How do we get rid of psych pain? We could stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain, but this could have a lot of problems. Drugs also a lot of problems, similar to the hedonic treadmill.
But there are certain genes that determine people's happiness set point, which could make the default state of mind far better.
How would we stop people from eating meat? In vitro meat is a good solution
How do we deal with suffering in nature? We can redesign our ecosystems.
There isn't much more time, go to abolitionist.com for more details.
David thinks we're going get rid of suffering, and that our descendants are going to enjoy bliss far better than we can experience now.
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is Director of Allosphere Research Laboratory. |
JoAnne Kuchera Morin
Can we apply the same techniques to science that artists and composers do?
Composers and artists know how to switch between the intuitive and analytical sides of their brains.
We've developed an approach to mutli-dimensional mathematical data that uses the same skills of artists.
She's built the AlloSphere, a huge sphere which lets scientists "play" their data.
There's a video. We see researchers flying into metal lattices, hydrogen atoms, or a brain.
We see several different projects, from macroscopic brain projects to microscopic molecular data.
There's more, but you need to see the video for the full effect.
John Lester is Pathfinder Linden in SecondLife. |
John Lester
His talk is about synthetic worlds, oasis of the surreal. He worked on Second Life from 2005-2010. Prior to that he worked in several different areas including neurology.
The Metaverse is a synthetic/virtual multiuser 3D world.
What is the most common thing to go wrong in the Metaverse? We need meaningful metaphors.
He's worked with educators on creating virtual learning environments.
The metaphor of the avatar: we have a limbic system response when we see things that look like us.
He has several slides with various quotes.
We have the concept empathy and sharing feelings, as well as instant messaging. He wants to combine these into
Empathic Messaging, real time conveyance of feelings and emotions.
Nolan Bushnell is Chairman and Founder of Snap Education. |
Nolan Bushnell: History of the Video Game
Nolan Bushnell is the creator of Pong, and now he's back at Atari after founding 18 companies.
First there are several slides on the early history of video games.
There are a bunch more slides on all his inventions and games.
Now onto SNAP Education Systems: Soaring Creativity. So far, computer education is an unmitigated disaster.
One problem is computers and their components can be stolen. We need open labs where the hardware can't be destroyed or stolen by hand.
The citizen scientist has discovered that classrooms are obsolete and creativity can be taught. Moreover, video games can show the way, and exercise and learning must be linked.
He shows a graph suggesting that less than half of the class is paying attention after 10 minutes, and then a graph of all the competing distractions.
If you exercise adequately for 15 minutes, you'll remember what you learn for the next 3 hours. Schools needs exercise programs, and we have exercise video games.
Rob Tercek is President of Digital Media, OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. |
Rob Tercek: What Geeks Can Learn From Gurus
Rob Tercek has joined H+ in an advisor role.
Tercek thinks the opportunity for H+ to change lives is immense. But there are a lot of obstacles to widespread acceptance.
There is a spectrum of reaction to emerging technologies, from joy to fear. In the middle, there are the undecided people.
Tercek's slides are fantastic, there are some great images of people protesting changes including genetic engineering.
Social changes like abolition, worker's rights, the suffrage movement, and child labor have always required a struggle. Same thing with civil rights, and evolution is still controversial.
Now we have debates like abortion, gay marriage, and the right to die.
Tercek says there's a majority of people who are undecided about transhumanism, and we need to convince them. These undecided people already have an opinion of us though: there are several slides of negative depictions of H+ in popular culture. We're already losing the pop culture game.
Who's against transhumanism? Tercek thinks there's a built in resistance, and there are real groups threatened by H+.
People also feel that their identity and ego is threated by the changes of H+, and that's a very deep reaction.
He wants to give some examples of people who promote radical changes, but do it in a positive way. There's a slide of 8 self-help people/gurus, though I can't say I recognize them.
He gives us four suggestions:
1. Make it easy to follow. This means defining what we stand for, and being honest about the challenges.
2. Establish rapport. Put a friendly face on things, a human connection, and remove the barriers like jargon. Talk about common experiences, and relate it to human anecdotes and success cases.
3. Harness emotional energy. Don't denigrate fear, respect it. We need to harness emotional to bring about change.
4. Inspire action. This won't be a movement if people just sit in their chairs, so it's really important that we give things people to do. We need to serve as role models, and apply transhumanist principles to our own lives.
Finally, he makes an appeal to inspire people with a passion that's much greater than a single life. We need to talk about human destiny.
We have a birthright as humans to engineer ourselves to treat animals more humanely, and be better stewards of our planet, and that's the real moral high ground.
Tony Greenberg is Chairman of Ramprate; |
Greenberg, Veytzel, Pullier on Boiling the Human: Convenience and Confusion on the Path to the Singularity
Basic challenges: getting there from here. We need to go in a value-driven direction, because change is not inherently good.
Exponential growth in tech can overwhelm human decision making
The Land of the Lost: a lot of people are excited about Moore's law and advances in nanotech/biotech, but we tend to forget about the things that are not increasing exponentially.
Our basic instincts are easily manipulated by the change around us.
Boiling the frog: boiling the frog or boiling the human is the perfect metaphor. We're now faced with many things that increase the temp of society, including changes in privacy.
People don't anticipate the importance of changes in connecting people to each other, people to people, and info to info.
What's the cost to move information around? It's falling exponentially.
Like Moore's law, Zuckerberg's law says the amount of info shared between people doubles every 12-18 months. The new Puller's Law says the time and cost to launch a venture that reaches 100 million people halves every 12-18 months.
The convenience effect: the default is now open instead of private, and privacy is now a process on Facebook, Zynga, Amazon, etc. Convenience is the single most powerful and dangerous driver of how you change a seemingly intractable thing.
Facebook was originally more popular than sites like MySpace because it felt more organized and private. It felt like a zone that's separate from the rest of the world, but that's obviously changed completely. The final step is having our location broadcast (think Google Latitude).
The human brain fails to keep up with the technological force of exponential growth. But we still don't have flying cars. The simplest form of failure is failure to innovate.
As we have more and more choices, we become less happy with the choices we make and second-guess ourselves.
Transhumanism is a services market. Virtual reality, bio-uploading , cryonics, and even nanotech have to be services.
Think back to your last negative interaction with customer service. What if it was customer service with the people who owned your brain?
Now onto solutions. There a lot of fake cures, including fear-mongering, shutting down your Facebook profile, etc.
There are huge black markets for Facebook and Twitter accounts, because people trust people in their social circles.
Resources we need include regulation, covenants, impartial arbiters, and individual choice, but there are potential problems with these.
Ideas include creating a singularity bill of rights for humans and machines, and a Singularity Stock Exchange to rate companies against that bill of rights. Other ideas include divorcing politics from geography and creating self-selected communities.
How do we get a world without exploitative salesmanship?
Natasha Vita-More is a Fellow of the IEET. |
IEET's Natasha Vita-More on the Human Enhancement Project
Natasha gives some history on her involvement in human enhancement. She also thinks we need to spend more time thinking about our current situation.
Now she's talking about the plasticity of the human brain, and she has a slide showing an image of her brain. Her brain suffers from vertigo, but the bottom line is the vulnerability of human life. Every second about 2 people die.
Those lives are precious to us. It's life, the breath of our universe.
The predicament we face is that life is important to H+, but we don't know we'll become, what we'll evolve into.
For human enhancement, the control factor is to stay alive. For those opposed to H+, the issue is to keep death alive, so disease must be maintained.
She uses second order cybernetics to look at the framework from which we develop our knowledge space.
We need to look at we desire, and what is feasible, which is a concept she takes from Gregory Stock.
She highlights the importance of the work of James Hughes, and the art of bioartists.
The interrelationship of the brain body behavior is important to our efforts to stay alive.
Now she's giving some examples of H+ in industrial design.
What if we could be reminded when we take a bite of food how it will affect our health and sustain us? What kind of contract could we make with ourselves for staying alive?
In closing, it takes fun, exciting minds to come up with ideas for the future. What's important though, is that our brains, bodies, and behaviors, speak louder than our words, and how we treat each other is essential for the future.
Hank Hyena is a humorous writer on transhumanism. |
Hank Hyena: Global Transhumanism
There's no PowerPoint for this one.
Russia is the first outside of the US where you can get a cryonic neuropreservation. Russia has invest $11 million in nanotech.
Italy has one of the world's lowest birth rates. The community is aging, so they'll need service robots to help the elderly just like Japan.
South Korea is a leader in innovation, computer chips, display screens, construction, etc. South Korea is currently building farmscrapers that grow organic, pest free food 24/7 and 365 days a year.
The Dutch are leaders in in vitro meat.
France is the world leader in nuclear energy, and the world's oldest person. She did a lot of unhealthy things though, smoking was just the start.
Iran has a space program and has sent several animals into space.
India is a leader in software, but what does it think about cryonics? It turns out, they're mostly just puzzled about it because they still believe in reincarnation.
Although the US has the best universities, a lot of our degrees are given to foreign students and we don't have a lot of undergrad engineers.
He gives the example of Sergey Brin's father leaving Russia due to anti-Semitism, and then Brin founded Google.
He closes with some gratitude to the UK for SENS.