Mark Hatch is the CEO of TechShop – a membership based “maker space” that provides machine tools and other resources to individuals to create products and prototypes. He showed videos and photos of told many stories of designers and entrepreneurs who have created products and businesses. He noted that the cost of machine tools has dropped by 90% in the last 15 years, presaging a creative revolution as innovation essentially becomes free.

Jessica Scorpio discussed her new company that arose out of a Singularity University project–the Gettaround P2P csr sharing service. It improves on the Zipcar model because you don’t need to be in the densest population areas to find cars. It takes advantage of the fact that most cars sit idle most of the time. It covers things like payment, insurance and screening so people can confidently share their cars.

Joseph Jackson talked about open source and DIY biology and the importance of that in changing the structure of the drug and biotech industries. He is hosting a summit on this topic in late July–see Opensciencesummit.com.

Ray Kurzweil was the final keynote speaker and definitely the rock star of the gathering. Sandwiching this appearance in between his premiere in Denver and a trip to LA, he was on a tight schedule. While he spent some of his time summarizing his usual basics, he skipped over a lot of that and talked about a variety of things he has been doing lately and recent developments:

–Regarding SETI and the lack of results from that project, Ray (softly) concludes that we may be the first civilization in our galaxy to reach this point. If that is true, we have a doubly important stewardship role, not just of the planet, but also of technological progress in general.
–Regarding the idea that the economy will collapse as stuff becomes cheaper and cheaper due to the law of accelerating returns, he says it won’t happen because as things progress, new products and applications become feasible.
–He notes how quickly humans adapt to new technologies, even as they come faster and faster; in terms of people who are philosophically against various types of progress in theory, when the products come out, they are all for it (gee, do you want this life extension product now that it’s available?).
–He discussed the hard problems of consciousness and free will, and said that we still can’t even imagine a scientific experiment that could prove or disprove any theory or philosophy.
–He talked a bit about brain research and the projects of reverse engineering the brain–thinks that we are about halfway through that project, which means that we know only 1% of what we need according to the acceleration curves.
–”The brain is a probabilistic fractal”
–Technologies coming soon to display directly to your retina which will eliminate the need for huge screens.
–Lots more but I will have to watch the replay…..it was great to see him in person.

Started the day treated to a world premiere of a new video – by the group who created the Inner Life of a Cell, there is now a similar video that shows the workings of mitochondria and atp production.

A few other highlights:

Aubrey DeGrey described a role for citizen scientists to aid the work on anti-aging: improve the accuracy of media coverage by evaluating carefully and publicly reacting to press accounts of “breakthroughs” (many of which are not really). This keeps things realistic and reduces the fuel for the anti-hype side which can slow public acceptance.

Morris Johnson talked about applying a methodology from business (HAACP) to medical care. You would have complete control over your medical care and set up a plan that included monitoring. This vision would involve, among other things, reform of the FDA to make it more of a service than a regulatory agency. He spoke of treating individuals the way we treat “accredited investors” when it comes to making their own health care decisions.

George Devorsky proposed that the basis for moral worth should be subjective awareness, which he distinguished from pure intelligence, and that the ethical and legal framework for this should be put in place now before we create such intelligences. Self-aware entities would have rights such as not being experimented upon without consent, not being shut off, not having source code modified without consent, right to privacy etc.–basically equivalents of human rights we expect today.

Patrick Hopkins’ presentation was entitled “Why Uploading Will Not Work” and he started by stating that he hopes he is wrong. He discussed the problems of mind transfer in that the uploading ideas we talk about are really mind “copying” (i.e. “we” don’t really go on the trip). The philosophical problem of whether the mind or consciousness is something that can be “located” in our brain or elsewhere has been wrestled with for ages and he believes that we have inherited a lot of these ideas from religion, whether or not we consider ourselves religious. He concludes that since copying does not preserve identity, we will not really able to upload, but will just copy our patterns to a different substrate.

JoAnn Kuchera Morin is the director of the Allosphere and she showed an incredible video with some of the visualization projects from it. It takes real data from scientific experiences and presents it in 3D artistic rendering with sound that can be “explored” by the people standing on a bridge in the middle of the 3 story sphere. She talked about how the ability to control and manipulate data with your intuitive side in a multi-modal format helps you to be creative and understand more deeply.

Rob Tercek discussed the transhumanism movement and what it needs to do to generate support and understanding of the masses. HIs talk “What Geeks Can Learn From Gurus” laid out all the bad memes in pop culture that are working against transhumanism and the factions that will naturally work against it. He recommended four basic steps to take to generate popular interest and support that is needed to move these ideas forward:
1. Make it easy to follow and well-defined (and be honest about the challenges)
2. Establish rapport – eliminate jargon, tell human stories, minimize weirdness, emphasize benefits to regular people and link your values to theirs
3. Harness emotional energy – fear is not rational; respect it and convert it into fuel for change; show how improvements will increase pleasure and decrease pain
4. Inspire action – talk about today – there is not enough urgency for action in the distant future; become role models;
start talking about destiny and moral imperative!

Heather Knight brought a robot with a lot of great human-like mannerisms for a demo (look for it in the video coverage) and discussed the importance of teaching robots to interact appropriately with humans, to facilitate our future collaboration.

Seth Lloyd was a very dynamic and entertaining speaker and touched on some mind-bending scientific ideas including the quantum nature of photosynthesis and the time-travelling of sub-atomic particles. (The good news is that when they make the particles go back in time and try to kill themselves, something always goes wrong. Looks like the universe abhors a paradox!)

Stephen Wolfram was a keynote speaker and spoke primarily about his work with NKS (New Kind of Science) and the implications of his discoveries in that area. He discussed some different approaches to software development that involve “mining” the natural universe of computational algorithms to discover programs fit for certain purposes rather than trying to “engineer” them which gets harder as we tackle more complicated problems. We may not understand exactly why it works, but like other types of technology, we just need to know that it does.

Kevin Jain is president of the Harvard Future Society who co-hosted the conference. He has been working on developing a text book/curriculum that considers that the assumptions of many traditional disciplines (such as economics, psychology, biology) are based on assumptions such as scarcity, human limitation, etc. that may not continue to be true in the future, and he believes that education needs to take a different approach that helps people to question assumptions and pursue different avenues in many of these subject areas.

Jeff Lieberman (from the Time Warp TV show) discussed the ability to think about the future and the past as a “tool” that we employ that no other life form has, and one that has basically taken over our brains so that it is pretty much impossible for us to NOT think (e.g. the difficulty of meditation). He suggests more research into how we “focus in the moment” and the benefits that would have for our overall happiness.

Darlene Cavalier discussed a website for the aggregation of citizen science opportunities scienceforcitizens.net.

Itamar Arel reinforced his message from the Singularity Summit to say that we already have all the tools we need to create AGI. He believes it’s just a matter of time and this will be coming in the near future, and therefore the time to talk about moral and ethical issues and policies is now.

Ben Goertzel presented “The Future History of AGI 2010-2045″. He reviewed the state of the art today–narrow AI still dominating the industry, but AGI is no longer considered so “far out”. By 2020 or so he predicts AGI “children” and AGI scientists that combine narrow AI and AGI. Also that these intelligences will be networked. By 2030 he sees one big AGI network–the global brain to which we will be jacked in via brain-computer interface. In 2040, “the singularity is near” and it’s hard to see beyond that.

Just some quick notes from the H+ Summit. There is a very ambitious schedule with an A-list group of speakers, full streaming worldwide over the internet–many speakers have only 10 minutes, leading to a joke by one speaker about the acceleration of talking speed–and all questions being taken via Twitter to level the playing field between those here and those watching around the world as well as for efficiency, since they are being answered by speakers via conversations on Twitter. Also, speaker powerpoint slides are available on Slideshare.net.

A recurring theme is the observation that going directly to serious human enhancement will have to happen via the path of medecine and curing disease and disability, due to the high costs, high requirements for safety and improvement, need for multiple technological breakthroughs, and ethical reluctance by many to mess with healthy, functioning bodies and minds.

Some notes from specific speakers that I thought were interesting:

Lauren Silbert talked about research at Princeton that is studying the communication process between speakers and listeners at the brain level to judge the efficacy of the communication and to view the brain processes in real time. There are a lot of technical details to overcome, including the time shift between the person who is thinking what they will say and the listener who is anticipating, but I thought the most interesting outcome of the research is that there is a lot of similarity in the brain of the communicator and the understander. This means it should be less complicated to facilitate many types of brain engineering, which would be infinitely more difficult if all of our brains were randomly wired in different ways (not so much need to reinvent the wheel for each person). I think there will be lots of interesting applications in the field of education and learning, as it will become possible to assess someone’s understanding at the brain level.

Alex Backer announced a new Wikipedia type platform for publishing scientific research at EverybodyScience.org.

Noah Goodman discussed his research to reverse engineer intelligence by combining the concepts of composition (big thoughts are made up of smaller thoughts) and probability (dealijng with uncertainty) to produce inferences that match those that humans make in the real world.

Andrea Kuszewski discussed how to increase your fluid intelligence:
1. Seek novelty – this personality trait correlates highly with IQ – gives your brain more different “stuff” to work with
2. Challenge yourself – once you learn something your brain gets efficient about it and there is not much further progress
3. Think creatively – approach things multi-modally (in different ways, from different angles, using different media, etc.) to transfer between domains
4. Do things the hard way – brain is more engaged if you don’t rely all the time on helpful things like GPS
5. Networking – getting perspectives from lots of different people keeps your brain flexible and open to new approaches

Andrew Hessel (of Singularity University) has been doing a lot of work on carbon and its complicated role in our ecosystem and energy industries. He wants us to “look up insead of down” and see the carbon in the air as an energy resource rather than just looking for it underground and trying to figure out how to get rid of it in the atmosphere.

John Smart announced his new venture to provide a push prize for brain preservation (25% for a mouse brain and 75% for a pig brain) at a nano-scale resolution. They have $100,000 but are hoping to grow that prize with additional donations. He discussed the plastination process in more detail, and his colleague demonstrated via video the extremely high resolution that they get with that now for small brain tissue samples.

Much more of couse, and that is just the first half day!