2010 Interim Elections – Candidate Statements
Candidates in alphabetical order: Bryan Bishop, Howard Bloom, Jamie Bronstein, Patri Friedman, Frederick Gaston, Victoria Jaguar, Alex Lightman, Thomas McCabe, Max More, Nick Taylor
Bryan Bishop
My name is Bryan Bishop. I am an activist and self-motivated enthusiast of the transhumanist future. My goal in running for a seat on the board is to build our membership participation, help keep the magazine going (perhaps as editor if needed), and further international projects and media attention for Humanity+. I want to help form positive life experiences around H+ through conferences, social media, and community.
I work on projects at the intersection of DIYbio/biohacking, transhumanism and accelerating trends. I also do community outreach by giving talks and training at various conferences like H+ Summit 2009 and 2010, Scientific Python (SciPy), Texas Linux Fest, etc. My unique perspective and on-the-ground experience in these communities should help to provide interesting returns as a board member. On a personal note, I am based in Austin, Texas and studied at the University of Texas at Austin in mechanical/manufacturing engineering and computational neuroscience.
It’s been known for a while that the future is all personalized- like personalized medicine in the health sector. And that’s just exciting- I am excited about personalizing the future, making it more relevant to a wider audience, and bringing in new people for projects. That’s how positive experiences are formed, through personal projects and interaction. Maybe these principles and others can be applied to help shape and form the policies that, as a board member, I want to help make happen. Transhumanism needs to be more easily hackable and accessible to mainstream audiences.
Howard Bloom
Technology makes us human. The more technology we have, the more human we become.
Howard is the founder of the The Space Development Steering Committee, members of the Steering Committee include:
Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 Astronaut,
Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut,
Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center,
among others.
He is a member of the:
- New York Academy of Sciences
- National Association for the Advancement of Science
- American Psychological Society
- Academy of Political Science
- Human Behavior and Evolution Society
He has written several books, including:
- The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism
- Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
- The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
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.
Jamie Bronstein
I’m married, 42, and the mother of one boy. I have a PhD in history from Stanford University, with a primary field in British History and a secondary field in US history; a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and undergraduate majors in history and Spanish. I am a full professor of history at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and am the author of three books. In my spare time I like to study philosophy, and am particularly interested in social and political philosophy and in bioethics.
Although I am new to HumanityPlus, I have been interested in transhumanism since 2006, have done a lot of research and reading on such topics as biohappiness, superlongevity, cryonics, personhood and artificial intelligence, and the ethical implications of life-sustaining technologies. I have participated in transhumanist listservs and IEET fora, helped to edit manuscripts on transhumanist philosophy, and, with Mike LaTorra and Mark Walker also participating, have taught at the graduate level on the historical and philosophical implications of modernity and the Enlightenment. Along with others, including Russell Blackford, I have a commentary on Mark Walker’s paper on genetic virtue that should be coming out in the fall issue of the journal Politics and the Life Sciences.
My particular interests lie in the nexus between transhumanism and the humanities, and in contextualizing this movement within the broader, post-Enlightenment drive to use social movements to promote the human (and post-human) good. I would like to see HumanityPlus lobby for a speedier testing and approval process for medical technologies that could be highly beneficial to millions of people. It is my belief that new technologies ought to be introduced in ways that respect diversity and take into account the goals and preferences of minority groups and women, who may be underrepresented in the sciences and in policymaking. I am also interested in the implications of the introduction of new technologies for empowering or disempowering people in developing countries.
My contribution, if chosen for the HumanityPlus board of directors, would be to bring to the table a different perspective in many areas, including what sorts of approaches might appeal to people outside the areas of traditional HumanityPlus demographic strength. I could also help with marketing some of the most pressing concerns of HumanityPlus in ways that will have wide appeal without diluting the essential message. Finally, as a historian of social movements, I could bring lessons from history to bear.
My outside interests include whitewater rafting, cooking, watching documentary films, listening to RadioLab and This American Life, and being a big geeky fan of They Might Be Giants.
Patri Friedman
We live in interesting times – facing an upcoming century of radical uncertainty, where any number of new technologies may dramatically alter the world. Probably for the better, but possibly for the worst.It will be exciting time for humanity, and one in which we will see transhumanism make the same transition as personal computers and networks have in the past few decades. Transhumanism will go from a fringe area appealing to a small group of open-minded geeks to an integral part of our society, discussed daily in newspapers and television. (For as long as we still have newspapers, and television, that is!)
I am interested in joining the Humanity+ board to help take advantage of this opportunity to move the organization into the mainstream and grow its membership, publicity, and influence as part of the global trend towards technology being at the center of human life. I’d like to work on projects such as student chapters, improving the H+ membership program, internships, and media reach.
Background: I have degrees in Math, CS, and business.I worked at Google for 3.5 years as a software engineer, and left to become the founder and Executive Director of The Seasteading Institute (seasteading.org), a futurist nonprofit dedicated to building autonomous ocean cities to experiment with new political systems.
I have only become active in the futurist and transhumanist community in the last few years, but have been interested in these topics since childhood.I previously served on the board of Humanity+ in 2009. I live in Mountain View, CA with my wife and 4-year old son, in a small intentional community called Tortuga. You can learn more about me at my ancient homepage, patrifriedman.com, or my blog, patrissimo.livejournal.com.
Frederick Gaston
Humanity + stands amongst the absolute avant gard of human development and culture. As a leader, Humanity+ will help define and create what is considered our cultural norm. Indeed, Humanity+ stands in a unique position that will allow for a heavy influence on our world’s next dominant meme. To be a part of this group is thrilling. To be a part of the board, would be an honor.
I am drawn to Transhumanism and Humanity+ by a true passion for the areas of religious anthropology and cognitive psychology. It is my view that these fields have progressed, arguably, and blended, certainly, with Transhumanism and thus touch Humanity+. Ergo, I am passionate about theoretical transhumanism and Humanity+. It is my desire to help work towards further integration of science and human development to maximize both human intelligence and the human state of existence.
As background, before my current position, I worked in Naval intelligence as a Chinese linguist and moved to San Diego to attend the University of San Diego School of Law.
Currently, I work as a business attorney in the San Diego area where human fertilization, genetics, new energy, medicine and bio technology is the business. The future advancements in these often controversial fields will have a profound effect on Transhumanism, our legal landscape and all global culture. Working in these fields and areas is invigorating. I will bring that energy to the board.
Your vote is sincerely solicited.
Victoria Jaguar
I have worked in the medical field since obtaining my EMT certification in 1996. My extensive medical experience includes a variety of clinical work in addition to 10 years specialized work in organ and tissue donation.
Prior to coming to LA, I was the Manager of Tissue Recovery at New England Organ Bank. NEOB is the oldest and one of the busiest organ procurement organizations in the country. Similar companies often handle under 500 donors a year, while NEOB recovers nearly 2000 organ and tissue donors annually. Other experience includes working at industry leaders such as LifeNet (Richmond/Virginia Beach, VA), Southwest Transplant Alliance (Dallas, TX), and Old Dominion Eye Bank (Richmond, VA).
I possess a BS in Chemistry from Virginia Commonwealth University, a Certificate in Supervisor Development from Northeastern University, and am CTBS certified through the AATB. I also spent three summers in the science program at the Duke University TIP Academy. I have been a moderator at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB) and am an active member of Toastmasters.
I come from a strong medical background in an industry that is not only highly regulated but also driven by innovation. We are always looking for ways to save more lives by increasing the number of viable organs and also opportunities to improve the quality of life by utilizing tissue in ways that have never before been imagined.
Saving and improving lives is a passion that is deeply ingrained in me. In my experience, we remove the parts that are still good and we transplant them in place of aged, damaged, or diseased parts so that the patient can go back to living a full life doing the things that they enjoy. It is like many other disciplines in which we are using science and technology to improve humans. I support Transhumanism because I support maximizing the mental and physical characteristics of humans to minimize diseases, degeneration, and death. I stand behind Humanity+ as an organization and am committed to helping make H+ strong and credible.
A hot topic right now is utilizing medical tourism for “experimental” procedures. Coming from the industry, I am familiar with the challenges faced when patients pursue hand and face transplants in the United States. I am completely in agreement of facilitating access to all kinds of procedures, especially those that are new and controversial. Simply because the US health system has not yet developed an opinion on whether or not to endorse a technology should not limit the availability to patients. The solution may very well be outside of this country. H+ is a worldwide organization and I would like to see it represent itself as such.
Alex Lightman
I respectfully ask for your vote to the board of Humanity+ to fill one of the vacancies. I believe that I know as much as any other person what the strengths and weaknesses of the current board are, having worked with the former and current board over the last 15 months, and to help it evolve in a positive direction.
Humanity+ is in a rare and crucial position to speak for the future. As executive director, I organized two H+ Summits over the last eight months, bringing new interest and excitement around Humanity+. I would like the board to be more energetic, active, productive, consistent, and effective. Humanity+ needs to have a clear vision, mission, strategy, and policies that say what we should focus on, and, even more important, what we should not focus on.
I would like to be on the Board to contribute to the creation, documentation, and implementation of policies and plans that will make the board an asset to Humanity+.
For what it’s worth, I’ve put more hours into Humanity+ over the past 15 months than any other person, and seen first-hand that how the board can amplify or attenuate day to day progress and productivity, and know, rather than put in more hours, I want each hour I put in to have maximum productivity towards making Humanity+ better.
It is also my intent as a board member to have professional standards for evaluation. Transhumanism has enough skeptics, and needs a board that with the right criteria, will ask the right questions, devote sufficient time, care, and caution to make prudent decisions, and work in a collaborative, intelligent fashion with the executive director and other stakeholders to get projects done, and I want to contribute substantially to this.
One of the assets that I will bring to the Humanity+ board is connection with many prominent scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, transhumanists, authors, politicians, and government officials who work on the future of technology, in 40 countries. through the hundreds of international events and projects that I’ve organized and chaired, I’ve had the pleasure to meet and collaborate with smart, ethical people who have pieces of the puzzle that is a better future civilization. By having me, you have a bit of each of them as well to serve on the Humanity+ board.
It is still my intent to organize H+ Summits to provide opportunities for Transhumanists and others who care about about the appropriate use of science and technology to build a better future, and to write for and otherwise assist H+ magazine. If you want to get a sense of my excitement about H+ ideas and review my writing contributions, you can go to http://www.hplusmagazine.com/ and type Alex Lightman into the search field, and find a baker’s dozen articles.
Some of these articles were co-authored with people I saw as rising talents who deserved a wider audience, and helped them get their first publication credit. I think Humanity+ is a good place for young, smart, technically interested people to develop unique insights that don’t fit neatly into other large groups, and that H+ magazine and the H+ Summits provide a valuable service, where someone, rather than powering down their intellect and enthusiasm to fit in, can say, “Wow! I can pursue my interest, and there are people who will still be my friends, and will be interested in what I have to say.” In this way, Humanity+ is sort of like a nature conservation organization, only for memes about the present and future.
I thank you in advance for your vote, with which I will be able, together with my fellow Board Members, to shape the policy that will guide your organization Humanity+ in the future!
Thomas McCabe
I first became interested in transhumanism when I was eleven. Since that time, I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects with many different transhumanist organizations- from Humanity+, to the Singularity Institute, the Lifeboat Foundation, Ray Kurzweil’s website KurzweilAI.net, Betterhumans LLC, and the Future of Humanity Institute through their website Less Wrong (lesswrong.com). Although I am currently studying at Yale University, and have enjoyed my time there a great deal, I can honestly say that the transhumanist community far exceeds the Yale student body in both the quantity and quality of interesting ideas.
Since Humanity+ was founded twelve years ago, we have all gained an immensely greater understanding of the promise and impact of human self-modification and accelerating technological progress. Now it is time, I firmly believe, for us to embark on the journey of, not just discussing these technologies, but actively influencing and contributing to their development. For we, as some of the very first intelligent creatures to ever exist, have been handed a golden opportunity- to not just understand the future, but to make it better than it would have otherwise been, for us and for our descendants during the trillions of years to come.
Some might wonder how we can do this effectively, since Humanity+ is still a relatively small organization (though I have pushed, and will continue to push, hard for its growth). The answer lies in the curious gap that has opened up in modern society. On the one hand, we have corporations- who pursue only technologies which will generate an immediate near-term return, and who (for the most part) avoid doing anything too radical, for fear of upsetting institutional investors. On the other hand, we have academia- which is free to explore the infinite possibilities of future technologies, but whose output is measured in papers and citations, rather than number of lives changed or patents filed. Into this gap have poured a large number of the most interesting projects of the past thirty years, including the free software movement, the RepRap project and the DIYBio groups. As a professional software engineer, I have not the foggiest idea how I could possibly write even ten percent of the code I produce without these projects, even though their budgets are very small or nonexistent.
Therefore, if elected, I would make it my goal to have Humanity+ complete at least one nontrivial engineering, software, biotech, or other technology development project that helps further transhumanist objectives by the end of 2011. It may be necessary to start small, but with every project, our collective expertise will grow, and we’ll become more adept at handling difficulties. In the Humanity+ community, we have already brought together the ideas, the talent, and the desire to make something like this happen. All that remains is simply to decide on a project, and then get out there and do it.
In addition to this, I will continue pushing the existing projects of Humanity+ forward at an accelerating pace. I firmly believe that the major role I played during 2009′s and this year’s Singularity Summit, including managing the website and registration system, would be of significant help for the coming Humanity+ Summit in L.A. this November. I have been writing for H+ Magazine for over a year now, and hope to continue my efforts to expand the magazine and make it a primary source for transhumanist journalism. And I also greatly desire to build individual websites and social networks for the local chapters of Humanity+, so that those passionate about our cause can more easily participate in face-to-face meetups and collaboration with those close to them.
In summary, I ask that you join me in pushing for a better future, for ourselves, for Humanity+, and for our distant, posthuman descendants.
Max More
Fellow transhumanists and other advocates of human enhancement: I am asking for your vote so that I can join with the Board in developing transhumanism and promoting its beneficial influence on all of our futures.
For decades I have cared deeply about the future of humanity—about helping to change our species’ mindset so that we question the fundamental limits of our nature and our potential. We should be questioning and overcoming limits to our life spans, our intelligence and wisdom, our emotional maturity, and our collective institutions. Only transhumanism systematically challenges all these unchosen limits on what we have called “human nature”. We live in a historically unprecedented time when we are rapidly gaining the ability to chart better courses for our future. Transhumanism as represented by Humanity Plus can play a vital role in making this happen.
Not all of you will be familiar with my long and deep background in transhumanism, so let me note that I: 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.
I know how boards work, both through personal experience and many years of organizational study. I know most of the current directors and value their ethics and commitment. Being able to work well together is critical, so I emphasize that I have always worked smoothly with other directors in previous times of board experience. I would be honored to work together with the current Board to further Humanity Plus. My own goals as a director fit very comfortably with the plans of the current directors, especially in terms of helping develop a stronger student network, the H+ online magazine, attracting people currently “in the closet”, developing specific research projects, and supporting the board in its shared objectives such as growing membership and increasing our influence in both academic and more general discussions of technology-related issues of opportunity and risk.
My first and primary area of activity will be leading and personally contributing to a well-organized bibliographic resource—the greatest ever collection of transhumanist information, organized by topic, tagged and searchable by topic and author. Part of this resource should be a directory of Humanity+ members and their skills, both to spur volunteer efforts for Humanity+ projects and to encourage productive networking and project development to the benefit of individual members and to transhumanism and our species as a whole. I would also bring my skills and experience to bear to boost publicity for Humanity+ and bring to the board deep knowledge of effective processes for both creative and critical thinking. As a board member, I would eagerly draw on my experience and good relationships with thousands of thought leaders and practical organizers developed over almost three decades.
A bit of other background: I am currently co-editing a major volume, The Transhumanist Reader, and also completing my own book on making wiser and more intelligent decisions about complex issues concerning technology and the environment. My educational background: I received a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University in 1987, and a PhD in Philosophy in 1995—but please don’t hold that against me.
I would greatly appreciate your vote so that I can immediately being contributing to the bright future of this organization.
Nick Taylor
Exploration. That’s what’s driven me since I was a child. From climbing the small mountains we have in the UK to pulling old electronics apart (and occasionally reassembling them), I’ve always been fascinated by both the “how” and the “why”. Later in life, I became an engineer (an IET Chartered Engineer), an explorer (a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society), and moved to beautiful Colorado (larger mountains) after living all over the world. I pushed the limits of technology on Wall St. (I now advise companies on Technology Strategy), and have explored remote and occasionally dangerous parts of the world, and strove to find solitude in the Empty Quarters of Earth’s deserts.
But there’s something more. My engineering and exploration experiences now see very pedestrian, very 20th Century. I’ve lived inside Kurzweil’s curves for the last few years, and seen the returns accelerating first hand. Early 21st Century exploration is more introspective, but at a level that affects us all. Considering how far we have traveled already and what we’re capable of; what we can potentially become when we augment ourselves with the technology and knowledge we have available, the scope of our exploration seems unlimited in a way impossible to comprehend even a decade ago. Our responsibility as early Transhumanists is to provide guidance and engagement to a wider public. The Victorian explorers came back with fantastic stories, untold riches – and maps. Maps that would educate and inform the next wave of travelers. This wider public that followed were the people who solidified the explorers experience. They built roads, houses, businesses, entire economies. Some places have faired better than others, but all have undoubtedly progressed, once the fear, uncertainty and doubt was replaced with knowledge, even enlightenment perhaps.
This is our role now. If elected to the board of Humanity+, I’d help us all create the maps. I’d strive give to those that follow us the education, information and hopefully some entertainment. An inclusive approach centering around openness, transparency and patience to the public at large and to help them understand that this is our time to explore, this is the future of humanity. This is Humanity+.
