h+ Magazine

The term “biological immortality” doesn’t mean what you may think – it doesn’t mean living forever, but merely “the absence of a sustained increase in rate of mortality as a function of chronological age.” That is, you’ve reached biological immortality if your “personal death odds” – your chance of dying during a given random day, month or year — has stopped increasing.

It’s been my privilege, over the last month, to help out with organizing the next Humanity+ conference, which will be at CalTech’s Beckman Institute Dec 4-5.  So I wanted to take the chance, in this article, to introduce just a handful of the extraordinarily interesting talks that we’ll be bringing you.

Of course all the talks and demonstrations we have planned for the conference are awesome, and I can’t do justice to them all in a short article, so if you want to get a fuller picture please see the conference website.  Also see the H+ magazine blog entry I recently wrote, that pertains to my own presentation at the conference, about my work on AI for video games.

The World Health Organization estimates that 25 million people worldwide are affected by over 1,000 genetic conditions.  There are approximately 24.6 million people alive today that have been diagnosed with cancer within the last five years. In the United States alone, 101,000 people are currently waiting for an organ transplant, and the number grows 300 people each month, according the Mayo Clinic.

Human intelligence has not advanced at the speed of accelerating technologies.  What can we do to advance our own human physiology?  The following is a list of possible transhuman must haves for the 21st century:

Recently I made a bet with a member of the Institute for Ethical and Emerging Technologies.  That bet sounded to him like I was being wildly optimistic, and he jumped at it, thinking it was a sure bet that I would lose.

Hatsune Miku is a completely virtual Japanese pop star. She began as a piece of music software powered by Yamaha’s VOCALOID technology that takes text input and converts it into synthesized singing. Developed by Crypton Future Media, the virtual singer with a cartoon face began to take on new life as fans remixed her music, created videos, and propagated their own drawings of the anime-ish idol.

1.  DNA sequencing:  Over the next decade gene sequencing prices are expected to continue to decline by over 50% per year.  That means that by the end of the decade we should probably know the genomes of a large fraction of the developed world population; of all important species of animals, plants and fungi; and of the microbial ecosystems in all sorts of natural environments.  This should enable everything from GATTACA style genetic analysis of adults and embryos to improved flavors of cheese via better bacterial fermentation, as well as very advanced personalized medicine.  The biggest questions relate to privacy and consent issues.  Will knowledge of one’s own genome be tightly regulated?  Will drugs ever be FDA approved for a market of one, and if not, how will personalized medicine work?  Stay tuned to find out.

It’s widely known in futurist circles that Alex Lightman — the former Executive Director of Humanity+, author of Brave New Unwired World: the Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet , and H+ magazine contributor — has been obsessing over ending the US embargo against Cuba. 

Since winning the Loebner prize, Suzette has donned sun glasses and become increasing reclusive. Not that she completely shuns the paparazzi – as virtual worlds reporter Hamlet Au (James Wagner Au) recently discovered.  

Emergent technologies often inspire great excitement attended by utopic visions of how they will transform our lives for the better. Yet all innovations introduce risk and the likelihood of unforeseen consequences. The transhumanity stack of technologies – life extension, medical & genetic modification, brain-computer & brain-machine interface, and virtual & augmented realities – offer great opportunities for human enhancement but pose profound risks for all aspects of humanity & civilization. It is critical to confront these dangers and temper the enthusiasm of tranhumanism with diligent risk assessment and thorough scenario modeling for possible outcomes.

When I was at Caltech (1968-1973), the Nobel laureate neurophysiologists I spoke with, such as Roger Sperry, told me “there are roughly ten billion, 10 to the power of 10, brain cells in your head.”  Back then, neurons were thought to be doing memory, thought, and consciousness alone.  Glia (Greek for “glue”) were demoted to a supporting role regulating a neuron’s environment, helping it to grow, and being the physical scaffolding.  When I studied Brain Science in graduate school, the experts told me “there are roughly ten billion brain cells in