Humanity+ is governed by its membership, which elects a ten-person Board Of Directors.

Natasha Vita-More, Chair

Natasha Vita-More, PhD researcher, University of Plymouth, designer and theorist and is a frequent guest speaker on topics concerning the future in the international arena. She is best known as designer of “Primo Posthuman”. Her writings have been published in numerous books, she has appeared in more than twenty-four televised documentaries, and featured in magazines including The New York Times, Wired, Village Voice, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, U.S. News & World Report, Net Business, and Teleopolis. Natasha is a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Visiting Scholar at 21st Century Medicine, Scientific Board of Lifeboat Foundation, and advises non-profit organizations including Alcor Life Extension Foundation. She was formerly president of Extropy Institute from 2002-2005. As a bit of history, Natasha authored the “Transhuman Statement”, Create/Recreate: the 3rd Millennial Culture (cybernetic culture and the future of humanism and the arts and sciences). In the early 1990s, she hosted the TV show “Transcentury UPdate” and was elected to the Green Party as a Los Angeles Councilperson.

Ben Goertzel, Vice Chair

Ben Goertzel is CEO of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; leader of the open-source OpenCog Artificial General Intelligence software project; Chief Technology Officer of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Director of Engineering of digital media firm Vzillion Inc.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series. His research work encompasses artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds and gaming and other areas, He has published a dozen scientific books, over 100 technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles. Before entering the software industry he served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. He has three children and too many pets, and in his spare time enjoys creating avant-garde fiction and music, and the outdoors.

Amy Li, Treasurer

Amy Li is a multidisciplinary creative director and designer, specializing in branding, creative marketing strategy, and user interface design for global brands like Yahoo, AT&T, etc. She is passionate about combining design, technology, and human factors to create state of the art products that impact our daily lives. One example of this is the iPhone app Have2P. It is a fun and creative app that addresses a universal human need in a new high-tech fashion. It was showcased as “App of the Week” in the New York Times, and also featured in Gizmodo. Amy also has years of experience specializing in designing visually engaging web sites with intuitive interfaces, flash animations, emails and landing pages with a strong focus on branding and UX design. Her portfolio can be seen at www.meidesign.net and she is easy to connect with on LinkedIn and Twitter. One of Amy’s true passions in life is to use her skills to help members of the scientific community become better communicators, one typography at a time . Born and raised in China, Amy immigrated to the U.S. and received her BFA with honor at CSULB, one of the top eight graphic design programs in the country, and later continued her education in Advanced Web and Interactive Design at UCLA.

Michael Anissimov, Secretary

Michael Anissimov is Media Director for the Singularity Institute. In 2005, at age 21, he co-created the concept for the Singularity Summit, the world’s largest conference focused on transhumanist technologies. Under Anissimov’s tenure as Media Director at the Singularity Institute, the organization has been covered by GQ, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Playboy, The New York Times, Scientific American, NPR, Forbes, and a front-page article in TIME magazine. Anissimov’s personal blog, Accelerating Future, is among the most popular transhumanist blogs, with over 100,000 monthly uniques. Since 2005, he has accepted consulting contracts for over a dozen transhumanist organizations and companies, including stealth-mode startups. Recently, Anissimov’s writing was featured in a front-page article for IEEE Spectrum by former editor-in-chief of Scientific American John Rennie.

Howard Bloom

Howard Bloom , is the founder of the The Space Development Steering Committee, members of the Steering Committee, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, National Association for the Advancement of Science and American Psychological Society. He has written several books, including The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. In 1976, he founded The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd a public relations firm that represented such artists Prince, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Simon & Garfunkel, Queen, Kiss, Aerosmith, AD/DC, John Mellencamp and Run DMC.

Patri Friedman

Patri Friedman received a BS in math from Harvey Mudd College, an MS in CS from Stanford University, and an MBA from Cardean University. Throughout his studies, he has helped launch technology startups, run a small consulting business, and co-founded two intentional communities before joining Google in 2004. After four years at Google as a software engineer, during which the company scaled from 3,000 to 20,000 employees, he left to found The Seasteading Institute in 2008 with seed funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Patri has served on the board of Humanity+, is a prolific writer on political theory and philosophy, and attends festivals such as Burning Man and Pennsic (founded by his father, economist and author David Friedman). His grandfather Milton Friedman won the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics and was a well-known speaker on politics.

Thomas McCabe

Thomas McCabe is currently a scholar at Yale University and software engineer at Stik.com. Tom has been writing for H+ Magazine for over a year, and currently works with its editor on magazine projects. He is the IT and website manager for the Singularity Summit, and the author of the articles “The Top 5 Technology Panics of 2009″ (published in H+ Magazine and featured on Slashdot) and “Failure and Success in AGI Projects” (published at the 2009 Conference on Artificial General Intelligence). He is also a Research Consultant for KurzweilAI.net and Technical Moderator for the KurzweilAI.net Forums.

Max More

Max More co-founded the original transhumanist magazine, Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought in 1988, and Extropy Institute in the early 1990s; organized five Extro conferences—the first explicitly transhumanist conferences; founded the English cryonics organization Alcor-UK (originally Mizar); wrote seminal transhumanist essays, including “Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy” (1990), “The Principles of Extropy”, “A Letter to Mother Nature: Amendments to the Human Constitution” (1999), “Technological Self-Transformation: Expanding Personal Extropy” (1993), “Dynamic Optimism: An Extropian Cognitive-Emotional Virtue” (1992), and more recent papers such as “True Transhumanism” (2009); spoke at dozens of conferences (including several WTA/H+ and Singularity Summit events), and spread transhumanist ideas through numerous newspaper, magazine, and TV interviews.

David Orban

David Orban is an entrepreneur and visionary. He is Advisor and European Lead of the Singularity University, a Founder and Chief Evangelist of WideTag, Inc., a high technology start-up company providing the infrastructure for an open Internet of Things. David shapes the strategic vision of its technologies by developing the policies and communication steps necessary to enable constructive progress. He is further a Scientific Advisory Board Member for the Lifeboat Foundation. David cuts across the limits of deep specialization to contribute to the new renaissance. He explains, “My vision is at the crossroads of technology and society as defined by their co-evolution.” David Orban’s personal motto is, “What is the question I should be asking?” This concept is his vehicle to accelerating cycles of invention and innovation in order to build the new world ahead.

Michael Vassar

Michael Vassar is the President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and provides overall leadership of the SIAI as it develops its research capabilities and its role as a forum for discussion of the challenges and potential of artificial general intelligence. He is also responsible for the organization of the Singularity Summit. Previously, he was a Founder and Chief Strategist at SirGroovy.com, an online music licensing firm. Prior to that, he held positions with Aon, the Peace Corps, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Michael has been writing and speaking on topics related to the safe development of disruptive technologies for a number of years: his papers include the Lifeboat Foundation analysis of the risks of advanced molecular manufacturing co-authored with Robert Freitas, and “Corporate Cornucopia”, authored for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Task Force. He holds an M.B.A. from Drexel University and a B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State.