HPlus Recap: Final Thoughts

December 6, 2010 1 Comment

This was my first Humanity Plus conference.  Overall, I thought it was excellent.  You can read my reviews of the four sessions below.

  1. Re-imagining humans: Mind, Media and Methods.
  2. Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan.
  3. Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement, and Substrate Independent Minds.
  4. Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis.

On the way to the conference, I read a blog post by the infamous economist Tim Harford.  He’s one of my personal heroes – Harford as an excellent way of making economist incredibly accessible to the laypeople.  Harford’s blog post was on using Twitter while attending an event.  ”When I indulged, for the first time, in “live-tweeting”,” Harford said, “I later had very little recollection of what any of the three potential prime ministers had actually said.”  Harford cites some interesting multitasking studies to back up his experience.

At previous conferences, I’ve been a very aggressive blogger and tweeter.  This time around, I tried to lay off a bit, and, while difficult, I do believe it helped me synthesize the information better.  That being said, I do believe that things like live-tweeting and blogging add a useful and compelling layer of complexity to already interesting talks.  This is a topic I would like to revisit at a later date.

I, like many, like to attend these conferences for the networking opportunities.  Per usual, I wish I had more time to connect with the amazing people who were also at the conference – there never seems to be enough time at these things.  I definitely met a lot of people with whom I hope to stay in touch and continue these kinds of conversations.

At the end of the day, the point of a conference like this is to speculate on the future.  It’s to get us thinking about the big picture, and what the next five, ten, fifty, or five hundred years might look like.  In that sense, the conference was a wild success.  The speakers and the attendees introduced a variety of intriguing concepts, and everyone was excited to share and exchange ideas.

Gino Yu ended his talk with an appropriate video.  I think the sentiment of the video sums up my feelings about the conference quite well, so I, too, will leave you with that.

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Humanity Plus: Session 4 Thoughts

December 6, 2010 Leave a comment

The theme of Session 4 was “Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis.”  Due to the title, I had very high hopes for the session; it seemed like the speakers would cover a variety of topics relevant to my interests such as, for example, business and economy.

While some of the speakers did touch on business and economic concepts, the talks that did were often only tenuously tied to the idea of transhumanism, and didn’t provide any real insight into how business or economics would change or inform the supposed Era of Radical Technomorphosis.  Instead, it seemed like this was just sort of a place to put a lot of talks that didn’t really fit into any of the other categories.

However, two of the talks, while not entirely substantive, were very entertaining and inspiring.

The first, by Patri Friedman, would have fit very well into Session 2, which focused on extending lifespan.  Indeed, I believe that Friedman spoke at the Life Extention conference a few months ago.  The topic of his talk was “How to do anything through practice, focus, research, and science.”

Partway through his talk, in my notes I wrote “I totally agree with this guy.”  He was logical, upfront, and admirably blunt.  For example, a quote that I particularly appreciated, because I espouse the idea, was “Surfing the internet to be more productive is like buying a chair about jogging.”  His point was that the best way to accomplish what you want to accomplish is, well, to just do it.  Stop procrastinating by doing the research.  Stop learning about writing a novel and instead just go write it.  One of his favorite motivational tools, he said, was this website: justfuckingdoit.com.  If you ever need motivation to do something, just head on over to that website.

I can’t overemphasize how much I agree with Friedman’s premise.  If you want to do something, just do it.  Stop making excuses.  ”Research” is, nine times out of ten, procrastination.

Gino Yu was the other inspiring speaker.  He introduced some very high-level concepts, but also forwarded another idea that I endorse: living in the moment.  He had the audience stop and focus on him for a moment, asked us to do a math problem, and then reflect on how it felt to be sitting there, in that auditorium, at that moment.  It was almost magical.

Overall, a mixed bag.  I do realize this is a transhumanism conference.  However as an economist, I obviously wish there had been more, well, economics, in a session that has the word in the title.

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Humanity Plus: Session 3 Thoughts

December 5, 2010 2 Comments

The theme of Humanity Plus’s third session was “Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement, and Substrate Independent Minds.”  Speakers talked about Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, how to create brains, and everything in between.

Far and away, this was the best session of the event.  Not only were the speakers well-prepared and good presenters, but the topics were generally the most engaging and well-researched.

One of the most prevalent topics throughout this session was the idea of defining intelligence.  Randal Koene, who spoke first, said, “There’s no single algorithm for general intelligence of the brain.”  Rather, Koene said, it’s determined by a variety of factors and is the result of a long and storied evolutionary history.  Suzanne Gildert, the second speaker of the evening, agreed that it wouldn’t be easy to create a general purpose brain system.  However, she had a very unusual definition of intelligence that was very data-oriented, even going to far as to say that a photon is an intelligent system, a claim that didn’t go over very well with the audience.  Geordie Rose looked at intelligence from a more neuroscientific perspective, whereas Paul Rosenbloom noted that an intelligent machine would have self reflection.  All in all, nobody seemed to have a concrete definition of intelligence, but all took the time to define it at the beginning of their talk.

Two talks in particular stood out in this series.  The first was Alex Peake, from Primer Labs.  Primer Labs is working on the OpenPrimer project, which aims to “develop a free game and web platform that makes any game a lifelong learning game and embeds game learning into any web content.”  Peake was an incredible presenter.  One of the themes I discussed in an earlier blog post was the necessity of making science accessible to the general public, and this was a perfect example of doing just that; in the first five minutes of the talk, he referenced Neal Stephenson, Earl Grey tea, Brave New World, and Jean-Luc Picard – complete with the accent.  However, Peake also discussed more philosophical matters, such as “What happens when we make machines that can engineer humans?”  and “Will we love our kids – and will they love us – if they relate to artificial intelligence better than they do to us?”

The second talk that really stood out was Paul Rosenbloom‘s.  Hailing from the University of Southern California, his claim to fame at the conference was a very impressive model of Artificial Intelligence, complete with videos.  He also brought definitions to the forefront of his talk.  Rosenbloom said, “A virtual human is a graphical human body with a simulation of a human mind inside of it.”

Overall, a really excellent session.  My main takeaway message was that we don’t yet have a solid definition of intelligence.  Right now, it seems like the entire scientific community is approaching it haphazardly, from a number of directions.  The rest of us are, at the moment, content with the “I’ll know it when I see it” approach.

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Humanity Plus: Session 2 Thoughts

December 5, 2010 1 Comment

Session two focused on longevity.  It featured speakers such as Ben Goertzel, Michael Rose, and the notorious Aubrey De Grey – all heavyweights in the field of life-extension.

A few points stood out about the afternoon session.  The first, of course, was having the pleasure of listening to Aubrey De Grey.  He spoke after four other speakers, and his speech was, quite literally, a “Response to the Other Speakers,” as billed on the program.  Essentially, he listened to what everyone else had to say, then gave his very well-informed opinion on the topic.  Not only did he have a beard which one attendee said “almost qualifies as a cat,” but De Grey spoke quickly, didn’t use a slide deck, and took advantage of what he called “paleolithic technology” – a chalkboard – all positive points, from my perspective, when it comes to presentations.

Having been to the Life Extension Conference in San Francisco - admittedly, for just a few hours – it seemed like the afternoon session was “Life Extension Conference Lite.”  That is to say, it was a condensed, high-level overview of the field, made accessible to those of us less familiar with the area of study.

Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly, all of the speakers took the question of longevity as given.  That is to say, the question for the session was never “Can we live longer?”  It was always “Given that we can live longer, how do we do it? What’s preventing us from achieving centenarian status on a regular basis?”  In looking at that question, the speakers explored a broad range of different options, from medical, pharmaceutical, biological, environmental, or technical.

Gregory Benford made a very thought-provoking point: “Most of the advantages in longevity come from increases in hygiene.”  That is to say, all of the gains we’ve made in terms of life extension haven’t really come from any particular medical cleverness geared towards living for a long time, but, rather, advances in sanitation.  What does this mean for the future of living forever?

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Humanity Plus: Session 1 Thoughts

December 5, 2010 6 Comments

Session one explored the theme of “Re-imagining humans: Mind, Media and Methods.”  Of the speakers, my personal favorite was Robert Tercek, who kicked off the conference with his talk on digital media accelerating human evolution.  While he didn’t provide a lot of new content, his presentation skills were excellent, and his presentation served as an engaging overview of technology advances in the last few years, as well as a few predictions.

Also that morning we heard from performer J-Walt, who’s responsible for Spontaneous Fantasia, which is a live digital performance. He uses interactive computer graphics techniques to create animated movies before an audience – definitely worth checking out his website.  I got to play around with the equipment last night – very interesting stuff.

Michael Masucci was another speaker who really stood out.  Masucci talked about rampant technophobia – fear of technology – and how to address that.  He had a lot of great soundbites.  For example, in order to combat technophobia, he said, “We need to admit that we kindof know what we’re doing.  We largely don’t.”

Perhaps the most important part of Masucci’s talk – and, arguably, the entire morning – was when he said “Most people have never even heard of the issues that you take as givens.”  Understanding this, I think, is integral to combating any form of technophobia.  More importantly, the admittedly more fringe futurist/transhumanist/singularity cabal needs to realize that most of this material is largely science fiction for most of the population.  While, for those of us who attend these conferences, talking about things like HeLa cells, accelerating returns, and uploading consciousness is rather pedestrian, most people probably haven’t even heard of these concepts.

Making science accessible has been a constant battle over the course of the history of science.  In order to gain mainstream acceptance of more radical ideas, or at least get a conversation going outside of isolated auditoriums, creating accessibility is integral.

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