Humanity+

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

Contact: ben@humanityplus.org

Ben Goertzel, Chair

Ben Goertzel is founder and CEO of two computer science firms Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC, and of the non-profit AGIRI (Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute). He has served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. He is author of two books focused on the future of technology and society Creating Internet Intelligence (Plenum, 2001) and The Path to Posthumanity (Academica, 2006). He serves as Director of Research for the Singularity Institute for AI.

Natasha Vita-More, Secretary

Natasha Vita-More, PhD researcher, University of Plymouth, is media designer and theorist and 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.

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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.

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.

Todd Huffman

Todd Huffman is a technologist and entrepreneur in Phoenix, AZ. He co-founded the sStitch project, a mobile computing company developing geospatial and social data organization techniques. He is co-founder of the BIL Conference, an open-culture big-ideas forum. He has worked or published in a variety of areas including neuroscience, cryonics, body modification, sustainable technology, tech in developing countries, technology transfer, and open-culture.

Mike LaTorra

Mike LaTorra has long been concerned with advancing and safeguarding both the material, scientific achievements, and the spiritual, cultural aspects of human civilization. After 15 years working as a technical writer in industry, he became a college professor in the English Department of New Mexico State University where he teaches Technical Communication courses. He is the author of A Warrior Blends With Life: A Modern Tao, the first book on spirituality from that time to mention nanotechnology. He also serves as President of the Daibutsuji Zen Temple where he is in training to become a Zen priest.

Thomas McCabe

Thomas McCabe is currently a scholar at Yale University. Tom has been writing for H+ Magazine for over a year and currently works with its editor on magazine projects. Tom also has been working with such noteworthy organizations as the Singularity Institute, the Lifeboat Foundation, KurzweilAI.net, Betterhumans LLC, and the Future of Humanity Institute through their website Less Wrong (lesswrong.com).

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 o 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.