Last Saturday I attended the Humanity+ UK conference in London, which brought together the various strands of transhumanism to present a great line-up of speakers. UKH+ director David Wood kicked things off by outlining the Humanity+ agenda, giving his own view of which the most important problems we will be facing over the next few decades will be. Max More, founder of the now defunct Extropy Institute, and in fairness the father of modern transhumanism, discussed the singularity, and particularly his own reasons for being sceptical about the whole thing. In essence, it boiled down to uncertainty about various socioeconomic factors, as well as questioning whether the development of human-level AI actually will lead to smarter-than-human AI. Max also noted the similarities between singularitarianism and religion.
Anders Sandberg gave a talk on cognitive enhancers, outlining the state-of-the-art, and drawing up some guidelines for their use. Most enhancers should be used with a specific goal in mind – e.g. improving your concentration would be good if you are writing a scientific paper, but not if you are driving a car, where you need to be able to take in information from different sources. Anders also emphasized the impact of collective enhancement: while in our society traditionally neglected in favour of the individual, it is at the collective level that cognitive enhancement could potentially make the biggest difference, for example in science.
Rachel Armstrong talked about protocells, a sort of intermediate between non-living and living matter. She showed some impressive films of protocells interacting in a way that looked very much like life – except there is of course no DNA involved. Surprisingly, this technology has implications for architecture, as Rachel outlined a plan to rescue the sinking city of Venice.
Aubrey de Grey gave a summary of his plan to defeat aging: reach actuarial escape velocity – the point where rejuvenation technologies make us younger faster than we age. I shall have more to write about this in a future blog post. He also discussed a few recent papers that made significant advances in anti-aging research. Many of these went virtually unnoticed by non-specialists, while at the same time several minor findings were touted in mainstream media as major breakthroughs. One wonders what accounts for this discrepancy between a paper’s importance and its media attention.
David Pearce outlined his vision of how biotechnology will eliminate all forms of suffering – with which you’ll be familiar if you attended the talk he gave here in Lund in early February. Two afternoon speakers, Amon Twyman and Natasha Vita-More, highlighted the artistic aspect of transhumanism. Amon discussed augmented perception, and Natasha talked about body modification as art. David Orban talked about the Singularity University, and the internet of things.
Finally, Nick Bostrom discussed existential risks. To get a sense of how important existential risks are, consider the following: for every second of delayed space colonization, at least 10^13 potential lives are lost (this is Nick’s most conservative estimate) due to negentropy being irreversibly turned into entropy and energy going down black holes. Nevertheless, from a utilitarian perspective, reducing existential risks by a single percentage point, would be worth a delay of over ten million years. These numbers simply boggle the mind.
Nick has developed an intricate typology of these risks, which do not only involve human extinction scenarios: there are also scenarios of unrecovered collapse, lack of potential, permanent stagnation, flawed realizations, and ephemeral realizations. The field of existential risk studies is still extremely young, and we know very little about what to do to mitigate the risks. Nick used a metaphor of a trilateral citadel protecting the grails of risk mitigation: one wall is our lack of understanding, the second is lack of research, and the third is lack of funding. Of course, all of these walls support each other: there is no understanding without research, and there is no research without funding.
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