A blog focusing on some of the most prominent “-isms” surrounding humanity’s technological future: extropianism, transhumanism, posthumanism, the mouth-filling Singularitarianism, and others in that constellation.
June 12, 2010
[Continuing coverage of the 2010 H+ Summit at Harvard.] Stephen Wolfram (bio) has a very unhelpful habit of describing disciplines in terms of the spaces of possible knowledge within them. So he asks about whether we can say that art has progressed throughout history, and says it’s not clear that it has, unless you note that the...
June 12, 2010
[Continuing coverage of the 2010 H+ Summit at Harvard.] Heather Knight (bio) had the first presentation after lunch. She’s a young computer scientist, fresh out of M.I.T. undergrad, and she is interested in (even an evangelist for) socialized robotics. She goes through some of the standard stuff about making robots that can sense...
June 12, 2010
[Continuing coverage of the 2010 H+ Summit at Harvard.] M.I.T. professor Seth Lloyd (bio) takes the stage, to discuss the implications of science for democracy and the implications of democracy for science. Scientific knowledge, he says, can be defined as information that can be verified or tested by anybody. “Rats could do...
June 12, 2010
Next up is John Smart, talking about chemopreservation, or “plastination” of the brain. (Bio, on-the-fly transcript.) Smart is the co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, the purpose of which you can probably guess from the name. Its ultimate aims are not very different from those of the cryonics movement, although...
June 12, 2010
Ramez Naam is up now, outlining his vision of “The Next 10 Years of Human Development.” (Bio, slides, on-the-fly transcript.) Naam is the author of the 2005 book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, which Charles Rubin reviewed in The New Atlantis here. He starts out his presentation by asking...
June 12, 2010
Here comes an ambitious talk from Noah Goodman (bio, on-the-fly transcript), attempting to answer (in ten minutes!) the question What is thought? Among other things, he says, “Thought is actually incredibly useful.” Well, who’da thunk. He continues, “I want to answer these questions not at a philosophical level,...
June 12, 2010
Lauren Silbert, a Princeton neuroscientist, is delivering a talk on “neural coupling” in communication. (Bio, slides, on-the-fly transcript.) She seems nervous, but this gives the talk a human feel that makes it a bit more accessible than the last couple talks, which were hurried in a rather mechanical way. (No hidden agenda...
June 12, 2010
The H+ Summit is underway here at Harvard. Perhaps appropriately given the venue, this conference has a more collegiate feel than the Singularity Summit I liveblogged last October in New York, at least so far. SingSum had a more formal feel; it was delivered at the 92Y theater in New York, in a large, concert-style hall, and there seemed...
June 12, 2010
Last year, we kicked off Futurisms with liveblogging from the 2009 Singularity Summit in New York City. This weekend, Ari Schulman will be liveblogging for us again, this time covering the H+ Summit at Harvard. The announced theme of the conference — isn’t “summit” a bit too grandiloquent for such a...
June 11, 2010
Our friend Roger Scruton, who has an essay in the forthcoming Summer issue of The New Atlantis, has a new book coming out called The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope. The New Humanist has run a short preview excerpted from the book, concluding with this take on transhumanism: There is truth in the view that hope springs...