h+ Magazine

Today’s guest post continues our theme on the Future of Work in a somewhat different direction: the performing arts and music.

The rise of digital music and music sharing has challenged the existing economics of the music business. And at the same time these very technologies offer artists new ways to connect with fans, customers, and other artists. A shared virtual reality environment presents an entirely new creative means for performing music and sharing music and other art as well as potentially providing a platform for selling or exchanging it.

Linda Rogers has been organizing musical performance in Second Life for half a decade. Linda shares some of the history, issues, and challenges she encountered along the way to five years of virtual reality performances in which she quite arguably and somewhat accidentally invents an entirely new art form — the shared virtual reality musical performance.

As the Singularity approaches, the very nature of work and many of the tools we use on a daily basis will change radically. Chances are that most of you reading this article are sitting at something called a desk right now. But what are desks and why do we have them? What is the future of the desk? What about mobile and augmented reality technologies? Can’t they make the very idea of a desk obsolete?

“It’s the 21st Century, and everyone is a performance artist”

Below is the video and transcription of an interview with Natasha Vita-More while in I was in Hong Kong helping with the Humanity+ @Hong Kong conference.

Could advanced technology somehow allow us to modify our brains to avoid the existence of pain — without killing us or rendering us unconscious or idiotic or something else undesirable? My best guess is that the answer is YES. To explain why I think this, I’ll first need to delve a little into the nature of a strange brain disorder called “pain asymbolia”….

When we think in a grander scope of time and space, both the past and the future can be very thought-provoking, or even elicit powerful emotional responses. But why are our imaginations so easily captivated by stories and images of cavemen and spacemen? Romans and sentient AIs. Fred Flintstone and George Jetson.

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.

Schwann Cybershaman, an h+ magazine writer and filmmaker, has been compiling a video series of lectures by the late Terence McKenna, the psychedelic philosopher and proto-transhumanist. Whether or not you agree with McKenna’s specific views, his breadth of knowledge and the boldness of theorizing will have you thinking about life, the universe, and everything in novel ways.

I have long had misgivings about large aggregations of computing nodes forming a mind because of speed-of-light delays. That will reduce “thinking speed,” since a mind cannot “be of one mind” if much it is not aware of the current situation due to speed-of-light delays.

I think all dystopian writers share the burden of witnessing how influential their ideas are. If you have a negative vision for humanity and it ends up coming true how much of this is due to your own influence? If we recognize patterns that lead us to think we are heading for catastrophe should we share them with the world? Or is it better not to put these memes into the cultural DNA pool?

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