h+ Magazine

Ben Goertzel interviews Adam Ford about the upcoming Humanity+ @Melbourne (May 5-6 2012), which will feature Aubrey de Grey, Natasha Vita-More, Stelarc and many more inspiring speakers.

For 3 days in late February, Russian businessman Dmitry Itskov gathered 500+ futurists in Moscow for a “Global Future 2045 Congress” – the latest manifestation of his “Russia 2045” movement. The Congress featured an impressive roster of Russian scientists, engineers and visionaries, along with American futurist leaders like Ray Kurzweil, Randal Koene and John Smart.

Picture an event where the bridge between the counterculture and academia is finally crossed. If the original Burning Man was to meet the Singularity Summit, you would have Extreme Futurist Fest 2011.

24 talks from the recent Singularity Summit conference in New York City are online at the SingularitySummits YouTube channel. Topics include robotics, economics, technology, artificial intelligence, and more.

On December 3 and 4, Humanity+ will host the first-ever transhumanist conference in Asia — Humanity+ Hong Kong, at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I’m going to make an argument that this is more than just a great conference … it may even be a sort of historic event!

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.

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.”)

Humanity+, the non-profit which runs H+ magazine, is holding a leadership event this Thursday in SecondLife. We invite Humanity+ members to provide feedback to leadership on the direction of the organization.

The Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-11) was held on Google’s campus in Silicon Valley in the first week of August 2011. This was the largest AGI conference yet, with more than 200 attending, and it had a markedly different tone from the prior conferences in the series.

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.