h+ Magazine

Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller called themselves “performing philosophers,” using the power of media communication to spread galactic-sized ideas about the state of the species in relation to the wider universe. Leary used to say, “In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today, he’d have a talk show.” Carl Sagan is another example of the philosopher-as-media-personality, effectively hacking pop culture with his iconic Cosmos TV series and sending our collective minds reeling.

2016 presidential candidate Bob Glitch is preaching to the Republican Party faithful: “With God as my witness, we’re going to bring morality and family values back to America and we’re going to turn back the homosexual agenda…” Anonymous member Bob Dobbometer joins the cheering throng, raising his fist in the air and points his magnetic truth ring right at the candidate. Glitch continues. “I have nothing against homosexuals. Jesus said we should love every… (Glitch pauses, twitches slightly) “Man, that dude in the muscle shirt is freaking’ hot. I’d like to meet him in a men’s room and…” The mic goes dead.

The first person to introduce the concept of Future Shock was Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock. The main argument is that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation” – future shocked.

There’s someone in the room with you; he’s unconscious, and what’s really odd is he’s identical to you in every way—he shares your DNA, your memories, your love of dubstep, Beethoven, and psychedelic drugs. He has all your scars. He’s felt all your humiliations, your embarrassments, your regrets. He is, at least from objective realities’ perspective, indistinguishable from you by every conceivable objective measure, e.g, the arrangement of his neurons, his reactions to identical situations, his thoughts in general.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced the 100 Year Starship Study, an effort to encourage long-term thinking about the realistic prospects of interstellar travel, specifically with the goal of devising a workable mission-plan within the next century. This bold call to action is exciting, but let us consider the more plausible scenarios under which such a venture might eventually occur.

The human brain is a massively parallel processor — each of its 100 billion-plus neurons is processing data all the time, and responding if appropriate. By contrast, today’s default computer architecture is highly serial — our processors operate, by and large, one step at a time. Certain types of operations that are slow for brain cells are extremely fast for today’s computer processors, enabling our computers to do a lot of amazing things in spite of their serial architecture.

This Singularity Summit line-up this year features a mix of 25 speakers from numerous fields, with a central focus on robotics and artificial intelligence, in particular the victory of the IBM computer Watson in Jeopardy! this February. Inventor and award-winning author Ray Kurzweil will give the opening keynote on “From Eliza to Watson to Passing the Turing Test”. Registration for the Summit, which runs on October 14-15 at the 92Y in New York, is open to the public.

At first this article may seem a little outside the scope of the standard type of human augmentation, or singularity articles you may read about, as it’s a little more modern day application than future tense. Many people envision the singularity with different outcomes, some think humans will merge with machines, or possibly destroy itself with a super virus, but until it happens, then all of these are just predictions based on an intelligent hypothesis. To be honest I have no idea what the future entails, but I do know that I want to help build it, which is where SimpleCV comes in.

More than 80 transhumanist avatars stormed the virtual world of Second Life for a community event organized by Humanity+ on September 15. This has been by far the largest virtual transhumanist event that I have seen, and I believe I have seen them all. Two or three years ago the Second Life system would have been slowed down to a halt by 80 participants, but now everything worked without a glitch: virtual reality technology has evolved, and transhumanists want to bring the same fast evolution to RL (Second Life slang for “Real Life.”)

At the AGI-11 conference on Google’s campus in Silicon Valley, James Barrat concocted a simple survey and administered it after the conference to the email list of conference participants. His survey consisted of two brief questions: one on the time till AGI, and one on the likely positivity or otherwise of the outcome for humanity after AGI is created.