Monthly Archives: October 2009

Friday Videos, Flu Edition — Week 2

Well, I’m still not back on my blogging game (obviously) but in my achy insomnia last night I came upon some items of interest. I give you the original trailer for Star Wars:

Just goes to show you how much George Lucas changed movies. In a post-Lucas world, a trailer with this level of teh suckage would never see the light of day.

And please note the movie’s title: no episode number, now “New Hope” nonsense. Lucas had not yet dreamed up a number of things that he “planned all along,” including apparently — spoiler circa 1980 follows — the fact that Vader was Luke’s father.

From the Youtube comments:

You can’t say you wouldn’t have liked this trailer because you don’t have a 1977 mind dude.

It was ALL different in those times, even the way we conceived coolness.

It was a remote and strange epoch in human history, that’s for sure. I have high school pictures that could very much make this guy’s point.

Next we find:

See how Lucas changed the world? This looks like an infinitely better movie than the first one when in fact it was only substantially better. From the voice over at the end, I take it that this was a “now showing” trailer, not a “coming soon” trailer — I’m not sure whether that distinction even exists today.

Finally, a trailer for a movie that was never released — at least not with the title shown:

Lucas claims that he had to change the title at the last minute because he suddenly realized that revenge is not a Jedi value. While that speaks to the overall coherence of a guy who planned so many things “from the beginning,” I’ve also heard that this was a head fake on merchandising. He knew what the title would be all along, and when his officially approved action figures and so forth hit the market, they had the right name on them. Any merchandise labeled “Revenge” was immediately spotted as a fake.

Note to Harvey — I don’t think it’s where I cough so much. I just need to break this habit of licking doorknobs.

America's Tricentennial

While going through old SF magazines, I found mention of Atlantic Richfield’s ad campaign requesting vision statements from Americans of what life might be like in the Tricentennial. ARCO received some 60,000 responses and in 1977 published an 80-page booklet summarizing those visions.

The SF reviewer stated that most of the visions listed therein would have seemed old-hat to SF fans in the ‘70s. As in 20 to 30 years out of date. He figured these visions were “borrowed” from old-time SF books and movies. Or, more likely were (at the very least) slow extrapolations of life as lived in Bicentennial America towards Tricentennial America. A linear progression was foreseen for America, and presumably for the world.

Here are some of those visions: We will have early retirement. Education will stress careers, quality of life, liberal arts, and culture. There will be less government at all levels, with more relative power in local governments’ hands (well, we could always hope). There will be more interest in religion and spirituality. There will be universal health care (Obama, call your office). Labor unions will exist. The family as we now know it will exist. Marriage as we now know it will exist. Issues will include environmentalism, attempting to slow down the pace of modern life, restricting individual credit, and an array of even more prosaic concerns.

In short, life would be like 1976 in 2076, only more so.

No hint of the telecommunications revolution that was already well underway in 1976. No hint of the things young men named Gates and Jobs were up to. Nor any discussion about what that then newfangled computer network, the Arpanet, might grow into.

Curiously enough, when discussing the idea of a Technological Singularity on most public discussion boards today, I find most participants wear the same blinders the American people did 1/3 of a century ago. We’ll suffer from pollution, lack of jobs, poor education, traffic jams, health care rationing… The future will look an awful lot like now, only more so.

In the last few decades, we’ve had the advantage of seeing giant firms grow up out of what were then the garage firms of cutting edge computer technologies. We’ve witnessed the Internet explode with billions of web pages of content. We’ve seen a young grad student revive and expand the late ‘50s concept of von Neumann machines into the late ‘80s concept of nanotechnology. And we’ve seen master inventor Kurzweil analyze the history of human technology and detect what we all should have noticed, at least since 1976, that its development is indeed accelerating.

And yet, we (or most of us) have yet to put 2 and 2 together and come up with the accelerating technological answer: At least 16.

With the concept of the Singularity staring at us out of Moore’s Law and numerous other accelerating trends that are telling us emphatically that things really are changing faster and faster, will we do better than our younger selves did during the Bicentennial? I hope we will, but I suspect mostly we won’t.

The Singularity will sweep over us like a tsunami well before the Tricentennial and we will be stunned as the future proves to be far, far more than “2009, only more so.”

Friday Videos — Sagan Remixed

I’m in bed with the flu, so blogging has been even lighter than the lighter-than-usual recent norm, but I had to post this. Via Harvey, here’s Carl Sagan singing (sort of) some truly profound ideas:

And is it just the cough syrup talking, or does Carl sound a little like Kermit?

UPDATE: Was catching up on my podcast listening and only just realized that this was this week’s closing music! Sorry, I’m a little slow…

FastForward Radio with George Dvorsky and PJ Manney

Stephen
Gordon welcomes guest-host PJ Manney and guest George Dvorsky back to
fastForward Radio to talk about where technology is leading us and to
continue the discussion about whether we are alone in the universe.

FFRNewLogo9J.jpg

If you listen live you can contribute to the show by joining the text chat.  Our chat host Sally Morem will be on hand to lead the discussion. Get all the details on listening live at our audio host, Blog Talk Radio. The show starts at:


10:30 Eastern/9:30 Central/8:30 Mountain/7:30 Pacific.





 About Our Guests 


Canadian futurist, consultant and award winning blogger, George Dvorsky has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology – particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and Humanity+. georgedvorsky.jpg

As a frequent guest and occasional co-host — not to mention our official Hollywood correspondent — PJ Manney brings a unique perspective to FastForward Radio. She is a writer and futurist, and a leading voice in the Humanity+ movement. She has written extensively on H+ topics, having previously been involved in motion picture development (Hook, It Could Happen to You, Universal Soldier) and writing for television (Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess).

 pjlittle.jpg

Nobel Prizes for Anti-Aging Research

Popsci.com noted the convergence of two very interesting events for Singulatarians: The annual Singularity Summit and the awarding of Nobel Prizes to researchers working in the area of telemeres, the proteins at the end of each strand of chromosome that permits orderly replication of said chromosomes.

The Nobel Committee has today honored three U.S. scientists for discovering the genetic code that regulates aging in cells.

The announcement comes as researchers race to develop anti-aging medicine or technology that can make humans immortal. PopSci recently covered the Singularity Summit 2009 where none other than visionary Ray Kurzweil spoke of a future when a computer could simulate the human brain.

Merging humans with artificial intelligence remains some ways off, but there’s also plenty of focus on extending the natural human lifespan. The latest Nobel Prize winners helped illuminate the aging process by discovering the repetitive genetic sequences on the ends of chromosomes known as telomeres. The telomeres serve as protective caps that gradually shorten as genetic material is copied many times over during cell division — a process that parallels human aging, even if other factors also come into play.

The researchers who will receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and share $1.4 million are: Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California in San Francisco; Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and Jack Szostak, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. This is the first time that the Nobel Prize in medicine has gone to more than one woman in a single year.

Every time I find articles like this, I think the Singularity is getting nearer than even Kurzweil expects.

Who Are They Sticking it To?

Via InstaPundit, the new Futurisms blog from The New Atlantis is providing some live and in-depth coverage of the Singularity Summit with surprisingly restrained snark for an organization that takes such pride in its association with Leon Kass. Of course, the snark does come through from time to time, along with what appears to be genuine puzzlement over the tone of much of the audience reaction to certain ideas. Here’s a snippet:

A questioner asks what the FDA has to say about this, since they don’t recognize aging as a disease (yet). Benford calls on David Rose to answer the question. Rose says the FDA is regulating health, but he says “everyone in this room is going to hell in a handbasket, not because of one or two genetic diseases,” but because we’re getting uniformly worse through aging. And that, he says, is what they’re trying to stop. Scattered but voracious applause and cheering. It’s that same phenomenon again — this weird rally attitude of yeah, you tell ‘em! Who is it that they think they’re sticking it to? Or what?

Gosh, I can’t imagine. Maybe it’s people who, upon seriously examining radical life extension, immediately start looking for ways to “help in forming the sort of public opinion that will be necessary to stave off some of these developments.” Or maybe it’s those who describe the inevitability of aging in poetic, if not romanticized terms…

This drama of growing old, passing down, and passing on is hardly new. It has always been at the heart of the human lifecycle, recognized by the wise men and women of every age

…and who put the blame for increases in dementia (and the increased fear of the possibility thereof that many suffer from as they age) squarely where it belongs — medical progress:

The rising prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias in old age only makes these questions about the trajectory of life more acute. Besides the normal fear of senescence and death, many people are horrified at the thought of ending their lives only after a long period not just of physical frailty and disability but also of mental incapacitation, impaired memory, diminished awareness, loss of modesty and self-control, distortion of personality and temperament, inability to recognize friends and loved ones, and general dullness and enfeeblement of inner life. It seems a cruel irony that the very medical advances that have kept many of us reasonably healthy into a ripe old age have, by the same token, exposed us to the ravages of incurable and progressive dementia, and to the prospect that our life’s drama may well end with an extended final act marked by a gradual descent into mindlessness.

You can see how the New Atlantis gang might have a hard time connecting the dots, here. They have achieved such a lofty moral, spiritual, and intellectual state that they have a difficult time even imagining that the positions they routinely take on issues — being manifestly and self-evidently correct — could be seriously opposed by anyone, much less in a vocal and enthusiastic way.

Calling All Transhumanists

Transhumanism received a major tip of the hat from one of the biggest players in business news, Forbes.com.

In his articleCalling All Transhumanists, reporter Courtney Boyd Meyers describes the fourth annual Singularity Summit happening in New York this weekend. Here are some outtakes from the article:

Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps. Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.

Some skeptics were quoted, along with some who fear a Matrix-like Singularity. But, read on…

But the Singularity continues to pique the curiosity of the layman. Over the next 12 months, Hollywood will release several movies with trans-humanist themes, such as Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates, James Cameron’s Avatar, Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near, with a script by Ray Kurzweil. In a time when the publishing industry is struggling, Better Humans LLC has just launched a new magazine called H+ covering the trans-humanism scene for fans of radical technological change.

It’s possible that because the Singularity is a relatively new idea, it’s embraced mostly by the youth and dismissed as a counter-cultural trend by an older generation of professors and scientists. “I’m the older side of the Singularists,” says Vassar, who is 30 years old.

Vassar makes me feel SO OLD. :O

More seriously, the Singularity Summit folks were hoping for big publicity when they scheduled this year’s event in New York. I think they’ve achieved their goal.