Many people think that the issues Lifeboat Foundation is discussing will not be relevant for many decades to come. But recently a major US Governmental Agency, the TSA, decided to make life hell for 310 million Americans (and anyone who dares visit the USA) as it reacts to the coming Great Filter.

What is the Great Filter? Basically it is whatever has caused our universe to be dead with no advanced civilizations in it. (An advanced civilization is defined as a civilization advanced enough to be self-sustaining outside its home planet.)

The most likely explanation for this Great Filter is that civilizations eventually develop technologies so powerful that they provide individuals with the means to destroy all life on the planet. Technology has now become powerful enough that the TSA even sees 3-year-old girls as threats who may take down a plane so they take away her teddy bear and grope her.

Continue reading “TSA and the Coming Great Filter” »

The Stoic philosophical school shares several ideas with modern attempts at prolonging human lifespan. The Stoics believed in a non-dualistic, deterministic paradigm, where logic and reason formed part of their everyday life. The aim was to attain virtue, taken to mean human excellence.

I have recently described a model specifically referring to indefinite lifespans, where human biological immortality is a necessary and inevitable consequence of natural evolution (for details see www.elpistheory.info and for a comprehensive summary see http://cid-3d83391d98a0f83a.office.live.com/browse.aspx/Immo…=155370157).

This model is based on a deterministic, non-dualistic approach, described by the laws of Chaos theory (dynamical systems) and suggests that, in order to accelerate the natural transition from human evolution by natural selection to a post-Darwinian domain (where indefinite lifespans are the norm) , it is necessary to lead a life of constant intellectual stimulation, innovation and avoidance of routine (see http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/rej.2005.8.96?journalCode=rej and http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/rej.2009.0996) i.e. to seek human virtue (excellence, brilliance, and wisdom, as opposed to mediocrity and routine). The search for intellectual excellence increases neural inputs which effect epigenetic changes that can up-regulate age repair mechanisms.

Thus it is possible to conciliate the Stoic ideas with the processes that lead to both technological and developmental Singularities, using approaches that are deeply embedded in human nature and transcend time.

California Dreams Video 1 from IFTF on Vimeo.

INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE ANNOUNCES CALIFORNIA DREAMS:
A CALL FOR ENTRIES ON IMAGINING LIFE IN CALIFORNIA IN 2020

Put yourself in the future and show us what a day in your life looks like. Will California keep growing, start conserving, reinvent itself, or collapse? How are you living in this new world? Anyone can enter,anyone can vote; anyone can change the future of California!

California has always been a frontier—a place of change and innovation, reinventing itself time and again. The question is, can California do it again? Today the state is facing some of its toughest challenges. Launching today, IFTF’s California Dreams is a competition with an urgent challenge to recruit citizen visions of the future of California—ideas for what it will be like to live in the state in the next decade—to start creating a new California dream.

Continue reading “What's Your Dream for the Future of California?” »

Call for Essays:

The Singularity Hypothesis
A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment

Edited volume, to appear in The Frontiers Collection, Springer

Does an intelligence explosion pose a genuine existential risk, or did Alan Turing, Steven Hawking, and Alvin Toffler delude themselves with visions ‘straight from Cloud Cuckooland’? Should the notions of superintelligent machines, brain emulations and transhumans be ridiculed, or is it that skeptics are the ones who suffer from short sightedness and ‘carbon chauvinism’? These questions have remained open because much of what we hear about the singularity originates from popular depictions, fiction, artistic impressions, and apocalyptic propaganda.

Seeking to promote this debate, this edited, peer-reviewed volume shall be concerned with scientific and philosophical analysis of the conjectures related to a technological singularity. We solicit scholarly essays offering a scientific and philosophical analysis of this hypothesis, assess its empirical content, examine relevant evidence, or explore its implications. Commentary offering a critical assessment of selected essays may also be solicited.

Continue reading “The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment” »

Kevin Kelly concluded a chapter in his new book What Technology Wants with the declaration that if you hate technology, you basically hate yourself.

The rationale is twofold:

1. As many have observed before, technology–and Kelly’s superset “technium”–is in many ways the natural successor to biological evolution. In other words, human change is primarily through various symbiotic and feedback-looped systems that comprise human culture.

Continue reading “Hating Technology is Hating Yourself” »

Dear Ray;

I’ve written a book about the future of software. While writing it, I came to the conclusion that your dates are way off. I talk mostly about free software and Linux, but it has implications for things like how we can have driverless cars and other amazing things faster. I believe that we could have had all the benefits of the singularity years ago if we had done things like started Wikipedia in 1991 instead of 2001. There is no technology in 2001 that we didn’t have in 1991, it was simply a matter of starting an effort that allowed people to work together.

Proprietary software and a lack of cooperation among our software scientists has been terrible for the computer industry and the world, and its greater use has implications for every aspect of science. Free software is better for the free market than proprietary software, and there are many opportunities for programmers to make money using and writing free software. I often use the analogy that law libraries are filled with millions of freely available documents, and no one claims this has decreased the motivation to become a lawyer. In fact, lawyers would say that it would be impossible to do their job without all of these resources.

My book is a full description of the issues but I’ve also written some posts on this blog, and this is probably the one most relevant for you to read: https://lifeboat.com/blog/2010/06/h-conference-and-faster-singularity

Continue reading “Open Letter to Ray Kurzweil” »

1: Extropian, as in “Transhumanists tend to believe that Kurzweil’s extropian Law of Accelerating Returns will ultimately trump the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.”

2: Bemes, as in “By uploading her bemes, the transhumanist was able to create a mindfile to serve as a basis for a future cyber-conscious analog of herself.” The singular form, beme, refers to a digitally-inheritable unit of beingness (such as a single element of one’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values) as in “The transhuman survivalist had a very strong beme for paranoia.”

3: Singularity, as in “The Singularity — that era, no more than a few decades hence, when transhumanists believe machine intelligence will merge with and surpass biological intelligence.”

4: Ectogenetic, as in “Many transhumanists look forward to growing replacements for all or part of their body via controlled differentiation of stem cells in an ex vivo ectogenetic process.”

Continue reading “Ten most transhumanist words” »

If the WW II generation was The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers were The Worst. My former boss Bill Gates is a Baby Boomer. And while he has the potential to do a lot for the world by giving away his money to other people (for them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do), after studying Wikipedia and Linux, I see that the proprietary development model Gates’s generation adopted has stifled the progress of technology they should have provided to us. The reason we don’t have robot-driven cars and other futuristic stuff is that proprietary software became the dominant model.

I start the AI chapter of my book with the following question: Imagine 1,000 people, broken up into groups of five, working on two hundred separate encyclopedias, versus that same number of people working on one encyclopedia? Which one will be the best? This sounds like a silly analogy when described in the context of an encyclopedia, but it is exactly what is going on in artificial intelligence (AI) research today.

Today, the research community has not adopted free software and shared codebases sufficiently. For example, I believe there are more than enough PhDs today working on computer vision, but there are 200+ different codebases plus countless proprietary ones.

Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass.

Continue reading “The problems in our world aren't technical, but social” »

Did you know that many researchers would like to discover light-catching components in order to convert more of the sun’s power into carbon-free electric power?

A new study reported in the journal Applied Physics Letters in August this year (published by the American Institute of Physics), explains how solar energy could potentially be collected by using oxide materials that have the element selenium. A team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, embedded selenium in zinc oxide, a relatively affordable material that could make more efficient use of the sun’s power.

The team noticed that even a relatively small amount of selenium, just 9 percent of the mostly zinc-oxide base, significantly enhanced the material’s efficiency in absorbing light.

The main author of this study, Marie Mayer (a fourth-year University of California, Berkeley doctoral student) affirms that photo-electrochemical water splitting, that means using energy from the sun to cleave water into hydrogen and oxygen gases, could potentially be the most fascinating future application for her labor. Managing this reaction is key to the eventual production of zero-emission hydrogen powered motors, which hypothetically will run only on water and sunlight.

Continue reading “American Institute of Physics reveals more cost-efficient selenium photovoltaic cells” »