Humanity+

In his talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, examines the nature of human beings as products of evolution, in particular their limited altruism, limited co-operative instincts and limited ability to take account of the future consequences of actions. He argues that humans’ biology and psychology are unfit for the kind of society we live in and we must either alter our political institutions, severely restrain our technology or change our nature. Or face annihilation by our own design. Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney Opera House, October 2009.

Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction – PART 1 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.

Q&A

Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction – PART 2 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.

Oddly this article in Forbes has the T-word in the title even though it is never mentioned in the body, which is about Singularitarianism. Does this mean Forbes editors think transhumanism now needs no explanation?

Michael Vassar, the president of the institute, gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040 and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says nothing will be the same. “Humans living in the post-Singularity world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today’s world,” he says. His odds don’t take into account the chances of the world plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or a worldwide collapse into barbarism.

Vassar’s six staffers at the Singularity Institute… publish papers with titles such as, “Uncertain Future Project,” “Global Catastrophic Risk Project” and “Economics and Machine Intelligence,” and have developed software that supposedly predicts technology’s trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.

Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps. Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.

The pessimists, and Vassar is one of them, see threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence that will want to enslave humans….

The most radical thought experiments entertained by transhumanists often involve some reference to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and/or Virtual Reality (VR), and can be classed as Extreme Simulation Scenarios (ESS). Such scenarios can be equal parts attractive and disturbing. They describe conditions of radical liberation from traditional human constraints, but also open up entirely new categories of potential risk. Evaluations of ESS frequently conflate assessments of promise, risk, technological credibility, and congruence with extant belief systems.

This presentation will disentangle the various threads within ESS evaluation as follows: (1) explaining key ESS concepts such as uploads, utility fog, and virtual autonomous zones; (2) describing the principal extreme simulation scenarios and their historical roots; (3) evaluating specific criticisms of ESS; and (4) considering the degree to which assessments of ESS are often a matter of opposed assumptions and worldviews rather than the unprejudiced examination of evidence.

This lecture was recorded on 11th of July 2009 at the UKH+ meeting. For information on further meetings please see: http://extrobritannia.blogspot.com/

This is the first part of the lecture. View the rest of the lecture here.

About the speaker: Amon Twyman is a cognitive scientist and artist based in London. His work within cognitive psychology at University College London has investigated the role of conscious awareness in decision making, and he has explored transhumanist themes as a member of electro-industrial band Xykogen.

Nick Bostrom offers a 20 minute overview of the posthuman possibility space, including catastrophic risks and the concept of the Singularity.

This feature length documentary will include interviews with Humanity+’s James Hughes, Jonas Lamis, Ben Goertzel, and Nick Bostrom, as well as dozens of others from both inside and outside the S^ and H+ community. Coming December 2009.

“The Singularity – Will we survive our technology?” is a comprehensive documentary showcasing the promises and perils of future technologies such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Serious thinkers in the science community are wowed by the techno-utopia promises of transcending our biology, merging with our machines, and creating greater than human intelligence.

This film illustrates how these technologies may be achieved within the next two decades then questions what these technologies could mean to humanity. Not only should we be concerned with the unintended consequences of these powerful technologies, we should pause to think about what happens if these technologies actually pan out as anticipated.