h+ Magazine

It’s interesting to consider virtual communities as social groups of great potential. The way they are formed is shaped by many things: technological infrastructure, platform or program design, but also by the actions of the members themselves.

A Robot Bill of Rights is needed to reflect a new perspective in the way humans see future robots – not only as mechanical slaves but as sentient beings.

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.

Our knowledge of how the human brain works is rapidly increasing and some people will use that knowledge to enhance their minds – to make themselves more intelligent, to feel permanently happy or to choose different aspirations. This will challenge the existing political order in many ways: Hyper-intelligent people will find it easy to dominate their relatively dim fellows.

in the second half of 2011, I started taking opinion polls concerning the rise of massively intelligent machines (“artilects”), by creating questionnaires. This essay reports on the results of the third such poll.

In the second half of 2011, I started taking opinion polls on the subject of a potential impending Artilect War. This essay reports on the results of two such polls.

Mutual assured destruction kept the peace during the Cold War because both the United States and the Soviet Union believed that a first strike attack couldn’t knock out a rival’s ability to land a devastating counterblow. A military armed with advanced molecular nanotechnology (MNT), however, probably could neutralize an enemy’s retaliatory capacity.

The Singularity is probably near – and the outcome is radically uncertain in almost every way. How can we, as a culture and a species, deal with this situation? One possible solution is to build a powerful yet limited AGI system, with the explicit goal of keeping things on the planet under control while we figure out the hard problem of how to create a probably positive Singularity. That is: to create an “AI Nanny.”

Are Bill Clinton and George W. Bush sociopaths? Probably not, but since both men’s presidencies gave them control over thousands of nuclear weapons it would’ve been nice to have some hard data on the question before they each took office. Thankfully, in the near future presidential contenders’ DNA will likely be scrutinized for signs of sociopathy.

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