h+ Magazine

I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the potential implicit in the combination of artificial general intelligence and video games.  If an AI is going to be even vaguely humanlike, it needs some kind of body, and there are two ways to supply that right now: robots or animated characters.  Robotics is an important direction that I’m also experimenting with, but game characters have a lot of advantages too. They’re easier to work with; the commercial potential is explosive; and the same AI mind can easily learn from millions of human game-players at once, as they sit at home interacting with the AI characters in a game.

1. I hate it when people call us "trannies." Whoa, like so original.

2. I hate it when people refer to our deceased friends who are in cryonic suspension as "corpsicles." Okay, first off, most of them are really just "headsicles." So there.

First there was the nuclear arms race of the 1950s.  The space race followed quickly in the 1960s. While these nationalistic competitions continue today in 2010, the real race of the 21st Century may be the raw computing power to produce intelligent systems.

"It’s time for a thousand specialty channels of Transhumanist TV!"

• 1 million+ specialty video channels on your TV. A video platform for a 21^st century democracy.

• Americans spend half their free time watching TV. They need much better news & edutainment.

• Ability to like, dislike, and ban ads. Only ads you care about will get into your home. Finally.

The Pope has recently warned about the dangers of an increasingly virtualized world, arguing that new media technologies and the proliferation of images threaten the search for truth.  Benedict XVI cautioned that the image can “become independent of reality; it can give life to a virtual world, with several consequences, the first of which is the risk of indifference to truth.”

1. Eternal Life Through Data Storage

In many respects the Holy Grail of transhumanism, many transhumanist authors and artists have imagined a future in which the human being is essentially immortal via the capability to upload memory, personality, and consciousness into a database and then reload this information into a new body when a person dies.

Everything is information processing.

Cells grow and reproduce.  From the smallest prokaryote to the most complex metazoan the principle connecting life at all levels is the abstract ability not only to process information, but also to share it.  The integration of multiple detection events coordinated to build a picture of the world the processor finds itself in; this is Anakentavada.

Humanity+, the publishers of H+ Magazine, will hold their next conference, Humanity+ @ Caltech, 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.

Reality is big. So our optimism must be confined to sentient beings in our forward light-cone. But I tentatively predict that the last experience below "hedonic zero" will be a precisely dateable event several hundred years hence.

The nature of the identity is intimately related to information and information processing.  The importance and the real nature of information is only now being gradually realized.  But the history of the subject goes back a long way.

In ancient Greece, those who studied Nature — the predecessors of our scientists —considered that what they studied, material reality, had two aspects: form and substance.