h+ Magazine

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.

Selfishness used to be a virtue. It was a way to advance ourselves in capitalist society. We were supposed to put ourselves before other people and this was supposed to be the gateway to success. Yet this was not the way of the future and many of us were in for quite a surprise.

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.

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.

My purpose in this article is not to try to surmise who — or what — is correct about this particular scenario or about any of the dozens of other disaster scenarios that seem to confront us. My purpose is to examine how people deal with the intrusion of “scientific” information that may not only disrupt their models of reality but their projects-already-in-progress.

I first encountered Mohamad Tarifi on an AI email list, where he was discussing his deep and fascinating work on hierarchical temporal memory architectures.  Using a combination of rigorous mathematics and computational experiments, he treats these constructs very broadly as an approach to both vision processing and artificial general intelligence.

“Doctor, it looks like this patient is dead. But there is a cryonics medical team standing by in the hall ready to start him on his ambulance ride to the future.”

Or it could be “He’s dead, Jim… I am a doctor, not a miracle worker!”

These words might be among the last you may hear… or not hear, having given up the proverbial and almost certainly mythical “ghost” a few moments earlier.

Over the last couple of years, in various interviews and discussions, I’ve been dropping the notion that Voluntary Collaborationism is the model for productive and creative activity and exchange for the future. I like to say that this is the emergent property of a networked culture. I certainly hope so.

How 3D Printing Will Obsolete the Economy of Scarcity and the Corporations that Rely On It. One concept you’ll be hearing about a lot in the next decade is Additive Manufacturing….

In January 2009, I moved from Los Angeles to New York City to begin a new career in finance. My former business partner made a similar move in 2006 and in three short years was making more than $300k per year as a financial planner for JP Morgan Chase. She gave me plenty of advice and I was happy to take it. I slept on her couch for my first two weeks in the city.

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