Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

Humanity Plus Conference Caltech

Humanity Plus has announced that registration is open for their latest conference, December 4-5 at Caltech.

From the Humanity Plus blog:

Today, Humanity+ officially opens registration for its next conference, Humanity+ @ Caltech: Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change. Humanity+ @ Caltech will take place on December 4-5 (Saturday/Sunday), at the Beckman Institute at Caltech in Los Angeles, California. Speakers
will include many of the top visionaries and leaders of the
transhumanist community, as well as new voices from the worlds of
science, art, media and business.

The Humanity+ @ Caltech program will be divided into four main sessions, each one of which will cover a key area of transhumanist thought:

* Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media and Methods (Saturday morning)
* Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan (Saturday afternoon)
* Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement and Substrate-Independent Minds (Sunday morning)
* Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis (Sunday afternoon)

Tickets for the conference will be $299 per person ($179 for students). If you register before November 1st,
you will be eligible for a discounted, Early Registration price of $249
($149 for students), so register today! There will also be a special banquet for conference attendees after the end of the first day, on Saturday evening. Tickets for the banquet are $39; space is limited, so register soon to ensure your seat. (Breakfast and lunch are included free for both days.)

Humanity+ conferences are open to everyone, but there is a discount for members.
If you are a full member of Humanity+, you can get a 10% discount on
conference registration, as well as discounts on future conferences.
Humanity+ is also launching a new membership program, Plus membership,
for transhumanist enthusiasts. Plus members will get a 50% discount on
Humanity+ @ Caltech registration, and free or heavily discounted
tickets to future conferences. We also expect to announce additional
benefits for Plus members over the next year.

If you are already a member of Humanity+, the discount code for
conference registration should be emailed to you shortly. If you’re not
a member of Humanity+, it’s not too late to join! Follow this link to join Humanity+ before November 1st, and you can receive all of the benefits of membership, including conference discounts.

If you are too far away or otherwise unable to make it to L.A., don’t worry! Humanity+ has chapters all over the world, and many of them hold free local meetups for transhumanists in their area. We’ve also set up a Twitter feed,
so that you can be informed when a Humanity+ meetup is happening near
you. If you or your friends are holding a meetup, just email us at info@humanityplus.org to let us know, and we’ll help you get the word out.

Humanity+ @ CalTech is hosted by the California Institute of Technology and ab|inventio, the invention factory behind QLess, Whozat, SocialDiligence and MyNew.TV. Sponsorship is also provided by TechZulu and Vokle.

This sounds awesome. I’m going to have to find a reason to be in southern Califronia that week.

The Adjacent Possible

An idea worth pondering. (Click it for a magnified view.)

The quote is from Steven Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas Come From. (The photo is supplied by Stephen Gordon.)

The adjacent possible is part of possibility space, the most easily accessed part. It is our nearest neighbor here in the world of fully realized possibilities.

One of the most interesting aspects of life in our current era is this — there was a time when one’s possibility space grew rapidly during the first few years of life and then tapered off precipitously. Today, everyone’s possibility space is growing at an enormous clip. I believe there are many more possibilities, even adjacent possibilities, available for me at age 48 than there were at age 28.

That’s pretty amazing.

Image by dragon762w via Flickr

For example, look at this picture:

Somehow, Zemanta scanned the text I had written so far and suggested this image as a possible fit. It’s really not a fit at all, of course.

And yet it is.

Even a few months ago, I wouldn’t have included this image in a blog post. It wouldn’t occur to me to do so. Such an image was possible, but it wasn’t adjacent — the way the Zemanta window is literally adjacent to this post as I write it.

The Zemanta media gallery is like a miniaturized version of the adjacent possible.

What do I want to show in my blog post?

Image by afsilva via Flickr

Autumn leaves?

Image by psiaki via Flickr

Helicopters?

Image via Wikipedia

Some random high school in Maryland?

And what ideas do I want to link? Maybe these?

Now just imagine that instead of talking about extra links and images that we can throw into a blog post, we’re talking about new people and ideas and situations and stuff that we can experience in our lives. There’s a lot more of it out there than there used to be.

FastForward Radio — Our Future at Sea

“The legal/political
environment doesn’t operate on an exponentially improving curve, why
wait for that system to catch up while technology races down the road
to the future?”

–Max Marty

Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon welcome Max Marty of the Seasteading Institute to discuss how and why people might soon be taking up permanent residence on the high seas.

From the Seasteading.org intro page:

What is “Seasteading”?

Seasteading is creating permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading
the high seas. A seastead…is a structure meant for permanent
occupation on the ocean.

Currently, it is very difficult to experiment with alternative social
systems on a small scale; countries are so enormous that it is hard for
an individual to make much difference. The world needs a new frontier,
a place where those who wish to experiment with building new societies
can go to test out their ideas.

Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk Radio

About our guest

Max Marty is Head of Commercial Seasteading with the Seasteading institute, tasked with planning for the economic
and financial challenges that individuals and firms aboard seasteads,
and the seasteads themselves, will be facing when the Institute’s
vision comes to fruition.

I'll Believe It…

…when Stephen Gordon gets a VW microbus and starts wearing tie-dyed shirts:

This is a memo to America’s hippies:

Tea Party values are hippie values.

Word of warning to Tea Partiers: if you really are the new Hippies, don’t let Eric Cartman find out.

Zombie presents an interesting four-quadrant diagram of political ideologies that (sort of) reminds me of my recent ponderings on the emergence of a new dichotomy.

One of the assumptions of the chart is the immutability of human nature. Zombie argues that collectivist systems assume that people can be changed while individualist systems assume they can’t. He quotes Bill Whittle outlining how one of the fundamental conservative ideas is the immutability of human nature.

I disagree that human nature is immutable. There’s a pretty good case to be made that human beings are growing kinder, less violent, more empathetic over time. Perhaps it isn’t our nature that’s changing, just attitudes and behaviors. (But then, what is our “nature?”)

Image via Wikipedia

Anyway, human ethical progress seems to correlate with human technological and economic progress. Today’s more affluent civilizations are more humane than the poorer ones of yesteryear. This is a correlation — it doesn’t necessarily imply causation. But hey, I say we might as well get more technology and wealth just in case.

I think the truth behind what Whittle is arguing is that changes in human nature can’t be forced. Libertarians (and Hippies) are ultimately opposed to all forms of coercion. Forcing people to be nice doesn’t make them really nice.

If the Tea Partiers truly are the new Hippies, some of them need to get hip to ideas like the Law of Accelerating Returns. Only squares think that human nature can’t be changed. Or maybe they should read The Rational Optimist. It’s groovy, baby!

I’ll Believe It…

…when Stephen Gordon gets a VW microbus and starts wearing tie-dyed shirts:

This is a memo to America’s hippies:

Tea Party values are hippie values.

Word of warning to Tea Partiers: if you really are the new Hippies, don’t let Eric Cartman find out.

Zombie presents an interesting four-quadrant diagram of political ideologies that (sort of) reminds me of my recent ponderings on the emergence of a new dichotomy.

Image via Wikipedia

Survey: Future Habitats

Later this week we’ll be talking with Max Marty from the Seasteading Institute on FastForward Radio. A couple of weeks ago, Brian Wang had us thinking about domed cities.

Seasteads and domed cities are two possible examples of future habitats — and there are several others both from science fiction and from serious future scenarios. We’ve listed a few of them here. Which of them do you think is most likely to be deployed in the next 50 years? Which would you prefer to live in?

The results are linked immediately below, but no fair looking until you’ve answered yourself!

“Question 1 Results

“Question 2 Results

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Friday Videos — Building a Caring Comunity

How do we get people to work to improve each other’s lives? Matt Ridley says the two keys are free exhange and fossil fuels.

Matt Ridley Talks About the Rational Optimist

Ridley estimates that in is his lifetime the average citizen has become three times richer, has a lifespan that is 1/3
longer, has 1/3 more food available, and loses on average 1/3 fewer children. All this has occurred while the population
growth rate has halved.

He also notes that life is markedly better worldwide in the early 21st century than it was 100 years ago, even though the 20th century was marked with horrific wars, dictatorships, etc.

At the Speculist, we’re working to get 1000 people to read the Rational Optimist. If you decide to read it, or if you’ve read it and decide to share it with someone else, we’d like to hear about it.

A New Dichotomy

The KurzweilAI daily newsletter directs us to this interesting development:

Tech CEOs tell US gov’t how to cut $1 trillion from deficit

The U.S. government can save more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years by consolidating its IT infrastructure, reducing its energy use and moving to more Web-based citizen services, a group of tech CEOs said in a report released Wednesday.

The Technology CEO Council’s report, delivered to President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also recommends that the U.S. government streamline its supply chains and move agencies to shared services for mission-support activities.

“America’s growing national debt is undermining our global competitiveness,” said the council, chaired by IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano. “How we choose to confront and address this challenge will determine our future environment for growth and innovation.”

FastForward Radio — Strange New Worlds

This view of Earth's horizon as the sun sets o...

Image via Wikipedia

Phil and Stephen discuss the implications of the discovery of the first potentially habitable planet
outside the solar system. What does the existence of Gliese 581g imply
about the existence of more such worlds? What does it tell us about the
potential for life elsewhere in the galaxy.

If we’re ever to travel to a planet such as 581g, how will we get there? And what will motivate us to go?

Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk Radio

Give it up, Anakin, I have the high ground

Image via Wikipedia

Brian Wang has some additional thoughts on potential technologies for starship propulsion. There’s no shortage of possible approaches, that’s for sure. It turns out that the star drive used in Avatar is a plausible choice — who knew?

While some are dismissing interstellar travel as hopelessly unrealistic and/or pointless, Brian begs to differ. We need to be at a different level of technological and economic development in order to seriously consider mounting such an effort, but Brian says there’s a way to get there. It begins with, of all things, weather control:

If we have moderate levels of molecular nanotech or really push non-molecular nanotech so that we can make 20 million tons of the balloons for the Hall Weather control machine

The balloon needs to be somewhere between a millimeter and a centimeter
in size. It has a very thin shell of diamond, maybe just a nanometer
thick. It’s round, and it has inside it an equatorial plane that is a
mirror. If you squished it flat, you would only have a few nanometers
thick of material. Although you could build a balloon out of materials
that we build balloons out of now, it would not be economical for what
I’m going to use it for.

Then that also gives us Kardashev level 1. Current world energy
usage and generation is at about 20 terawatts. Getting all solar power
means about 2000-5000 times current power levels. We would be 1000
times richer and able to spend 1000 times more on space without
increasing the fraction of the overall economy to space. The overall
fraction is about 2 million to 20 million times less than overall
energy and resources.

Currently about 12% of the respondents to our survey on motivations for star travel say that we’ll never go. Presumably, several of these folks are transhumanists who predict that the singularity will give us new projects to work on and that implementing the mega-engineering required to achieve the Kardashev levels will be thought a poor use of resources.

And they could be on to something. If we’re all uploaded cyber beings, there are easier ways of getting around in deep space than building massive starships. But then we may not all go that direction. A remnant of mostly original substrate humanity might decide to develop such technology — if their robot / transhuman overlords allow them to, that is.

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