Some transhumanists speculate about a future of post-biological superintelligence, and even "uploading" ourselves to a less perishable medium. This involves some fairly radical metaphysical assumptions. Viable or otherwise, universal "destructive" uploading is sociologically implausible to say the least. So what will be the fate of old-fashioned organic robots in the primordial biosphere? This talk explores a more bioconservative scenario - a future of superintelligent, supersentient and superhappy organic life in a cruelty-free global ecosystem. What are the pitfalls and opportunities of using biotechnology to abolish suffering throughout the living world?
David is an independent researcher based in Brighton UK. In 1995, he wrote "The Hedonistic Imperative", a plea for the use of biotechnology to abolish suffering in all sentient life. In 1998, David and Nick Bostrom founded the World Transhumanist Association - now Humanity Plus - to promote the use of technology to overcome our biological limitations.
A selection of David's latest work can be found on abolitionist.com
SEM, SEO e SEA. Principi di Marketing sui motori di ricerca Mediamorfosi Srl
Slide del Workshop sul Marketing Digitale ad opera di Mediamorfosi. Principi di SEM (Search Engine Marketing) con focus sulle sue declinazioni SEO e SEA.
SEM, SEO e SEA. Principi di Marketing sui motori di ricerca Mediamorfosi Srl
Slide del Workshop sul Marketing Digitale ad opera di Mediamorfosi. Principi di SEM (Search Engine Marketing) con focus sulle sue declinazioni SEO e SEA.
How the brain’s “negativity bias” makes clients overestimate threats, underestimate opportunities, and underestimate inner and outer resources, leading to anxiety, anger, depression, and conflicts with others – and how to help clients overcome that bias, see the good facts about the others, the world, and themselves, and build resilience for happiness, healthy relationships, and occupational success.
More resources, freely offered at http://www.rickhanson.net
Mindfulness and Taking in the Good: Using Neuroplasticity to Weave Resources ...Rick Hanson
How the brain evolved a “negativity bias” that continually looks for, reacts to, and stores negative experiences; how this shapes the interior landscape of the mind, leading to pessimism, depressed and anxious mood, and over-reactions; the neural machinery of memory; how to “trick” that machinery into weaving positive experiences into the brain and the self, leading to greater resilience, happiness, and interpersonal effectiveness; applications to particular situations, including healing trauma, cooperation with medical or psychological treatment, and raising or teaching children.
The Negativity Bias and Taking in the GoodRick Hanson
The brain's evolved bias is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. The unfortunate results include stress and threat reactivity, anxiety, depression, and limited gains in psychotherapy. Happily, through tree steps of mindful attention, we can internalize positive experiences in implicit memory systems, weaving resources for well-being, coping, and kindness into the fabric of the barin and the self.
A snap-shot of some of the structural changes underway in consumer health - and why the health industry is having difficulty adjusting. Includes three 'rejuvenation' strategies ensuring that the audience get to the future first.
Taking in the Good: Weaving Positive Emotions, Optimism and Resilience into t...Rick Hanson
How the brain evolved a “negativity bias” that continually looks for, reacts to, and stores negative experiences; how this shapes the interior landscape of the mind, leading to pessimism, depressed and anxious mood, and over-reactions; the neural machinery of memory; how to “trick” that machinery into weaving positive experiences into the brain and the self, leading to greater resilience, happiness, and interpersonal effectiveness; applications to particular situations, including healing trauma, cooperation with medical or psychological treatment, and raising or teaching children.
How WE create I - Heather Schlegel - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Heather Schlegel
VP of Product Management, Debtmarket
How WE create I:
Post-Human Identity, Privacy and Self-Value
Science and technology let you to create the person you want to be. How does the technology we create today enable future selves? What is the impact on identity creation, individual privacy and self-value?
Heather Schlegel is a futurist, technologist, and cacophonist. For more than 12 years she has helped build innovative Internet products in Silicon Valley and has more than 50 product launches to her name. Schlegel is currently the head of product development at DebtMarket, a financial start-up in Los Angeles. Her research projects include disruptive technology in financial markets: lending, alternate/virtual currencies and transactions; long-term product adoption for innovative technologies and positive wildcards. Schlegel is primarily known by her online moniker, heathervescent, where she explores the intersection of technology, culture and identity.
Superconducting Quantum Circuits That Learn - Geordie Rose - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Geordie Rose
D-Wave Systems Inc.
Special purpose superconducting quantum processors for disruptively accelerating machine learning
Any system that could be considered intelligent must be able to learn. Unfortunately teaching machines how to learn in a generalizable way – so-called minimally supervised or unsupervised learning – is an extremely hard problem. While much progress has been made in understanding how we might do this – for example using deep belief networks – all current proposals are extremely computationally intensive. Exercising them in real-world situations is often not possible because of the required computational cost – even for large corporations with access to enormous server farms. Here I present a path to overcoming this problem by running state of the art machine learning algorithms on a revolutionary new processor design, which uses quantum effects to enable a class of algorithms that cannot be run on any conventional processor.
Dr. Geordie Rose is the founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is known as a leading advocate for quantum computing and superconducting processors, and has been invited to speak on these topics in a wide range of venues, including TED, Future in Review and SC.
His innovative and ambitious approach to building quantum computing technology and support infrastructure has received coverage in MIT Technology Review magazine, The Economist, New Scientist, Scientific American and Science magazines, and one of his business strategies was profiled in a Harvard Business School case study.
Dr. Rose holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia, specializing in quantum effects in materials. While at McMaster University, he graduated first in his class with a B.Eng. in Engineering Physics, specializing in semiconductor engineering.
More Related Content
Similar to The fate of the meat world - David Pearce - H+ Summit @ Harvard
How the brain’s “negativity bias” makes clients overestimate threats, underestimate opportunities, and underestimate inner and outer resources, leading to anxiety, anger, depression, and conflicts with others – and how to help clients overcome that bias, see the good facts about the others, the world, and themselves, and build resilience for happiness, healthy relationships, and occupational success.
More resources, freely offered at http://www.rickhanson.net
Mindfulness and Taking in the Good: Using Neuroplasticity to Weave Resources ...Rick Hanson
How the brain evolved a “negativity bias” that continually looks for, reacts to, and stores negative experiences; how this shapes the interior landscape of the mind, leading to pessimism, depressed and anxious mood, and over-reactions; the neural machinery of memory; how to “trick” that machinery into weaving positive experiences into the brain and the self, leading to greater resilience, happiness, and interpersonal effectiveness; applications to particular situations, including healing trauma, cooperation with medical or psychological treatment, and raising or teaching children.
The Negativity Bias and Taking in the GoodRick Hanson
The brain's evolved bias is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. The unfortunate results include stress and threat reactivity, anxiety, depression, and limited gains in psychotherapy. Happily, through tree steps of mindful attention, we can internalize positive experiences in implicit memory systems, weaving resources for well-being, coping, and kindness into the fabric of the barin and the self.
A snap-shot of some of the structural changes underway in consumer health - and why the health industry is having difficulty adjusting. Includes three 'rejuvenation' strategies ensuring that the audience get to the future first.
Taking in the Good: Weaving Positive Emotions, Optimism and Resilience into t...Rick Hanson
How the brain evolved a “negativity bias” that continually looks for, reacts to, and stores negative experiences; how this shapes the interior landscape of the mind, leading to pessimism, depressed and anxious mood, and over-reactions; the neural machinery of memory; how to “trick” that machinery into weaving positive experiences into the brain and the self, leading to greater resilience, happiness, and interpersonal effectiveness; applications to particular situations, including healing trauma, cooperation with medical or psychological treatment, and raising or teaching children.
How WE create I - Heather Schlegel - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Heather Schlegel
VP of Product Management, Debtmarket
How WE create I:
Post-Human Identity, Privacy and Self-Value
Science and technology let you to create the person you want to be. How does the technology we create today enable future selves? What is the impact on identity creation, individual privacy and self-value?
Heather Schlegel is a futurist, technologist, and cacophonist. For more than 12 years she has helped build innovative Internet products in Silicon Valley and has more than 50 product launches to her name. Schlegel is currently the head of product development at DebtMarket, a financial start-up in Los Angeles. Her research projects include disruptive technology in financial markets: lending, alternate/virtual currencies and transactions; long-term product adoption for innovative technologies and positive wildcards. Schlegel is primarily known by her online moniker, heathervescent, where she explores the intersection of technology, culture and identity.
Superconducting Quantum Circuits That Learn - Geordie Rose - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Geordie Rose
D-Wave Systems Inc.
Special purpose superconducting quantum processors for disruptively accelerating machine learning
Any system that could be considered intelligent must be able to learn. Unfortunately teaching machines how to learn in a generalizable way – so-called minimally supervised or unsupervised learning – is an extremely hard problem. While much progress has been made in understanding how we might do this – for example using deep belief networks – all current proposals are extremely computationally intensive. Exercising them in real-world situations is often not possible because of the required computational cost – even for large corporations with access to enormous server farms. Here I present a path to overcoming this problem by running state of the art machine learning algorithms on a revolutionary new processor design, which uses quantum effects to enable a class of algorithms that cannot be run on any conventional processor.
Dr. Geordie Rose is the founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is known as a leading advocate for quantum computing and superconducting processors, and has been invited to speak on these topics in a wide range of venues, including TED, Future in Review and SC.
His innovative and ambitious approach to building quantum computing technology and support infrastructure has received coverage in MIT Technology Review magazine, The Economist, New Scientist, Scientific American and Science magazines, and one of his business strategies was profiled in a Harvard Business School case study.
Dr. Rose holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia, specializing in quantum effects in materials. While at McMaster University, he graduated first in his class with a B.Eng. in Engineering Physics, specializing in semiconductor engineering.
The Power of Hierarchical Thinking - Ray Kurzweil - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Ray Kurzweil
The Power of Hierarchical Thinking
What does it mean to understand the brain? Where are we on the roadmap to this goal? What are the effective routes to progress - detailed modeling, theoretical effort, improvement of imaging and computational technologies? What predictions can we make? What are the consequences of materialization of such predictions - social, ethical? Kurzweil will address these questions and examine some of the most common criticisms of the exponential growth of information technology including criticisms from hardware ("Moore's Law will not go on forever"), software ("software is stuck in the mud"), the brain ("the brain is too complicated to understand or replicate"), ontology ("software is not capable of thinking or of consciousness"), and promise versus peril ("biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are too dangerous").
There is now a grand project comprising at least a hundred thousand scientists and engineers working in diverse ways to understand the best example we have of an intelligent process: the human brain. It is arguably the most important project in the history of the human-machine civilization. The goal of the project is to understand precisely how the human brain works, and then to use these revealed algorithms as a basis for creating even more intelligent machines.
As we learn the algorithms underlying human intelligence, we will similarly be able to engineer it to vastly extend the powers of our intelligence. Indeed this process is already well under way. There are literally hundreds of tasks and activities that used to be the sole province of human intelligence that can now be conducted by computers usually with greater precision and vastly greater scale.
Was it inevitable that a species would evolve that is capable of creating its own evolutionary process in the form of intelligent technology? Kurzweil will argue that it was.
According to my models we are only two decades from fully modeling and simulating the human brain. By the time we finish this reverse-engineering project, we will have computers that are millions of times more powerful than the human brain. These computers will be further amplified by being networked into a vast world wide cloud of computing. The algorithms of intelligence will begin to self-iterate towards ever smarter algorithms.
This is how we will address the grand challenges of humanity such as maintaining a healthy environment, providing for the resources for a growing population including energy, food, and water, overcoming disease, vastly extending human longevity, and overcoming poverty. It is only by extending our intelligence with our intelligent technology that we can handle the scale of complexity to address these challenges.
Ray Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison", and PBS included Ray as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America", along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray's web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.
Among Ray's many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's
The Rise of Citizen-Scientists in the Eversmarter World - Alex Lightman - H+ ...Humanity Plus
Alex Lightman
Executive Director, Humanity+
The Rise of Citizen-Scientists in the Eversmarter World
Knowledge may be expanding exponentially, but the current rate of civilizational learning and institutional upgrading is still far too slow in the century of peak oil, peak uranium, and "peak everything". Humanity needs to gather vastly more data as part of ever larger and more widespread scientific experiments, and make science and technology flourish in streets, fields, and homes as well as in university and corporate laboratories. In this talk, H+ Executive Director Alex Lightman will give an introduction and overview of the big picture of H+ the organization, the magazine, and the conference, and how the participants can make the most of their experience and relationships at the conference. The case for ending embargoes and other beaver dams in the rivers of potentially global knowledge will be made. Lightman will offer a vision of a properly functioning Eversmarter world, ending with a call to action to become a citizen-scientist, and a recruiter of other citizen-scientists.
Alex Lightman is the Executive Director of Humanity+ and the chair of the H+ Summit @ Harvard and of the inaugural H+ Summit held December 2009 in Irvine, California. He is a director of Fortune Nest Corporation (Bahrain, Beijing and Beverly Hills, CA) and of Inova Technology. He is an award-winning educator, an inventor with several US patents issued or pending and the author of over 800,000 words, including 12 articles in h+ magazine, and Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and The Infinite Internet, the first book on 4G wireless. He has advised NATO, the US Dept. of Defense, and a number of governments on Internet Protocol version 6, the 128-bit successor to the current Internet, IPv4. Lightman's advocacy led to the only Congressional hearings held on US Internet Leadership, conducted by The Government Reform Committee and at which Lightman testified, leading to implementation of Lightman's recommendations to mandate IPv6 for the US government and require IPv6 as part of government information technology contracts. Lightman studied Civil and Environmental Engineering, and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983 (Course I-A), and attended graduate school at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He lives in Santa Monica, California, where he runs marathons, and attempts his first Ironman triathlon, in the UK, on August 1, 2010.
What computational principles explain the success of human intelligence? I will describe recent work that combines together the unbounded flexibility of mathematical logic with the robustness of statistical inference. This combination brings us several steps closer to understanding human intelligence -- and to the tools for true intelligence engineering.
Noah D. Goodman is a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He studies the computational basis of human thought, merging behavioral experiments with formal methods from statistics and logic. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. After a brief stint as a Chicago real estate developer, he joined the Computational Cognitive Science group at MIT. Goodman has published more than thirty publications in psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and mathematics. Several of these papers have won awards.
50 years of Invention and Entrepreneurship - Nolan Bushnell - H+ Summit @ Har...Humanity Plus
The products and services of my life from simple gadgets as a teen to the more sophisticated projects of an adult continue to stoke the creative fires of invention and discovery. My processes of research and execution on a project have been a significant part of successful business formation. In any business many unforeseen occurrences can disrupt any carefully crafted business plan. The objective is to minimize those instances to as few as possible so that it is unlikely to be battling more than one at a time. I will talk about my process of invention and business formation and how it applies to my various companies.
Nolan Bushnell’s career spans over 30 years in which he has made innovations and contributions to several industries. He is best known as the creator of the first digital videogame and the founder of Atari, founder Chuck E. Cheese entertainment restaurant chain, Axlon for interactive toys, Catalyst the first high tech incubator, Etak the first automobile navigation system, ByVideo the first on line shopping system and several others. Through the years Bushnell has given over 2000 speeches on subjects ranging from his companies, the history of video games, the process of innovation, entrepreneurship, intrepreneurship (bringing to market a new project in an old company) and his 10 steps to bring projects to market with no money. His speeches, while being somewhat irreverent to established cliché’s, are humorous high energy and always thought provoking.
He is widely credited with the following innovations and trends:
- The creation of the first commercial digital videogame.
- The acceptance of casual dress in the technical workplace.
- The creation of the Chuck E. Cheese chain of restaurants.
- The creation of the first digital automobile navigation system.
- The creation of the first on line marketing system.
- 3 Simple ways to inject creativity into an organization.
Several of his quotes have entered the mainstream:
- On Ideas: “Anyone who has had a shower has had a good idea--- what separates the winners from the losers is what does the person do after they leave the shower.”
- On Arrogance: “About the time someone thinks the sun shines out their rear-- all that they can be assured of is an illuminated landing area.”
- On Innovation: “Everyone wants innovation until they see it.”
- On Hard Work: “If it were easy to make a million dollars more people would be doing it.”
- The Future: “The world rewards accurate prediction of the future, the best way to be right in your predictions are to make them happen”
- Business Plans: “Anyone can create a success based on everything going correctly—the issue is to be successful even if nothing goes according to plan.
He has received numerous awards including the following:
- New Week 50 Americans that changed the nation.
- Consumer Electronics “Hall of Fame”
- Video “Hall of Fame”
- Restaurant Business “Innovator of the Year”
- Amusement Operators of America “Life time Achievement”
- Distinguished Fellow, University of Utah
- Computer Museum “Hall of Fame”
- Distinguished Leader of Silicon Valley
- The Agenda “Crystal Ball Award”
- Babson College “Distinguished Entrepreneur”
- British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Life Time Achievement Award
The Evolving Data Sphere - David Orban - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
David Orban
Chairman, Humanity+
Advisor, Singularity University
Founder & Chief Evangelist, WideTag, Inc.
Intelligence Augmentation, Decision Power, And The Emerging Data Sphere
Human civilization depends on our ability to manage its increasing complexity. Behaviors, processes, and decisions that in the past were tolerated by the complex adaptive system we call Earth, are now more and more showing unforeseen consequences in unexpected places.
Many of our theories about the workings of the world are hampered in their predictive power by the lack of data, and suffer garbage-in, garbage-out effects. New interconnected sensor networks, fast, and ubiquitous communications, and the parallel power of our massive software systems are the never too soon answer to this need, and promise to revolutionize the way we understand, and act upon the planet.
The data sphere we are building, developing through every traceable action of millions of people, and billions, soon trillions of devices, designs a fine-grained picture of necessary understanding, and empowers us to believe that we can indeed aim to evolve our civilization, and to move it to the next levels of complexity, and achievement of human potential.
David Orban is an entrepreneur and visionary. He is Chairman of Humanity+, Advisor of the Singularity University, a Founder 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.
Humanity 2020: The Next 10 Years of Human Development - Ramez Naam - H+ Summi...Humanity Plus
Ramez Naam
Humanity 2020: The Next 10 Years of Human Development
The decade between 2010 and 2020 will be a small but significant step in the development of human enhancement technology, with tremendous numbers of new discoveries in genetics fueled by the continuing exponential drop in gene sequencing cost, commercial availability of a new generation of cognitive enhancers and the first plausible aging inhibitors, likely advances in genetic reprogramming of embryos and of mature humans, and continued progress in prosthetics, imaging, sports enhancement, and numerous other areas. Science and technology will have made significant strides in empowering individuals to be smarter, stronger, faster, and longer lived than ever before.
Computer scientist Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Human Enhancement, and winner of the 2005 H.G. Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism will give a guided tour of the 10 year horizons across the board of human enhancement.
Bryan Bishop
Do-it-yourself Transhuman Tech
This talk will cover the prospects of do-it-yourself transhumanism, do-it-yourself garage biotech and engineering. These topics and more will be explored within the context of open source technology and licensing. In addition, progress on open source DIY lab-on-a-chip devices will be exhibited.
Bryan Bishop is an advocate and developer of do-it-yourself transhumanism and open source hardware. His primary focus is directing a "triple trick" transhumanist team focusing on accelerating trends like the technological singularity, do-it-yourself biology, and open source technologies. In 2008, Bishop became a research assistant at the Automated Design Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. From time to time, if you're lucky, you might find him stealing a few hours of sleep on the lab couch. Lately he spends his waking hours at the recently new hackerspace in Austin, Texas.
You can find him on the web at http://heybryan.org
Transhumanism & Education - Kevin Jain - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Kevin Jain
Transhumanism & Education
In reviewing the curricula of various Universities, one will find few, if any, classes that meaningfully consider the increasing assimilation of technology with the human. If an education predicated on assumptions of human nature is made without a meaningful consideration of transhumanism, can it remain relevant in a future where technology may render false these very assumptions? How can the question of human enhancement be introduced as a topic of more widespread academic deliberation? This talk will also discuss current efforts in this arena.
Kevin Jain is an undergraduate at Harvard University, and is Founder and President of the Harvard College Future Society, a student organization interested in evaluating the impact of future technologies on the human and humanity. He is the Student H+ Summit Coordinator, and helped organize the H+ 2010 Summit at Harvard. He plans to graduate with a special concentration in Transhumanism.
Can we extract a mind from a plastic-embedded brain? - Kenneth Hayworth - H+ ...Humanity Plus
Ken Hayworth
Can we extract a mind from a plastic-embedded brain?
We now have a good working theory of consciousness – the phenomenal self model (Metzinger 2009), and we have a good understanding of the human cognitive architecture (Anderson 2007) within which this self model is implemented. The key components of this cognitive architecture are declarative memory chunks and productions – thought to be implemented as stable attractors in the neural networks of the cortex and basal ganglia. According to neural network theory, such stable attractors are robustly defined by the synaptic connectivity between neurons. In small pieces of tissue such synaptic connectivity is easily preserved using chemical fixation and embedding in plastic, and it should be relatively easy to adapt these protocols into a surgical procedure performed in hospitals to preserve whole human brains. Such plastic embedded brain tissue can be imaged at the nanometer level using new automated techniques (SBFSEM, FIBSEM, Tape-to-SEM), and we can directly extrapolate these techniques to future ones that will enable all the synaptic connections within a human brain to be mapped allowing a fully accurate simulation of the original preserved mind. In short, we have a complete sketch of how mind uploading will work and we have a mandate to implement emergency brain preservation in hospitals for all who desire access to this future technology.
Kenneth Hayworth, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, is the inventor of several technologies for high-throughput volume imaging of neural circuits at the nanometer scale. He received a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California for research into how the human visual system encodes spatial relations among objects. Hayworth is a vocal advocate for brain preservation and mind uploading, and runs a website (www.brainpreservation.org) calling for the implementation of an Emergency Glutaraldehyde Perfusion procedure in hospitals, and for the development of a Whole Brain Plastic Embedding procedure which can demonstrate perfect ultrastructure preservation across an entire human brain.
Computation of Things - Justyna Zander, Pieter Mosterman - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Justyna Zander
Harvard University
Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS
Computation of Things:
Challenges and Solutions for the Needs of Humanity
Presented with Pieter J. Mosterman
The current exponential growth of technologies is providing novel, frequently unimaginable ways of leveraging its applications for human needs. Ubiquitous communication capabilities allow a redefinition of an individual person as one who is becoming an integrated part of the virtual world and vice versa. The challenge of sustainable development of those trends from the perspective of a single human and humanity as such remains unsolved.
In the presented vision various aspects of the sustainability (e.g., the relation between a person’s quality of life, climate change, and social awareness) are highlighted to explore and share how an individual impacts and is impacted by the surrounding. Ultimately a technological solution called Computation of Things (CoTh) is outlined. It allows for a quick and reliable assessment of people’s possible decision paths and how this affects sustainable development on a local and global scale. Forecasting life-path alternatives for a human based on its geographic position (including pollution level, energy usage), activity patterns (including nutrition habits, lifestyle, travelling load, family status, circle of friends, social network, or virtual life), and state patterns (including individual’s DNA, current health conditions, musculature) is targeted.
CoTh enables an understanding of the individual self and its surrounding based on the micro-scale information that combines with macro-scale data to enable prediction of different life scenarios. It is defined as an abundant supply of predictive computation capabilities of high performance and large-scale applicability with high accuracy and quality so as to allow for providing humanity’s physical, physiological, mental, and spiritual needs in a profound and as of yet unfathomed manner.
Its core is strongly connoted with physical systems engineering. Thus, a parallelly-conducted research on the notion of computation deploys computational models as the primary representations of physics, instead of attempting to approximate first principles ever closer. A theory of treating models as dynamic systems themselves follows. This evokes the promise for a fundamental breakthrough in terms of computational semantics the significance of which becomes paramount as far as the faithfulness of the predictions is considered.
Dr. Justyna Zander is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Harvard University (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative) in Cambridge, MA, USA (since 2009) and Project Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems in Berlin, Germany (since 2004). She holds Doctorate of Engineering Science (2008) and Master of Science (2005), both in the fields of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Technical University Berlin, Germany, Bachelor of Science (2004) in Computer Science, and Bachelor of Science (2003) in Environmental Protection and Management from Gdansk University of Technology, Poland.
She graduated from the Singularity University, Mountain View, CA, USA in 2009 where she then was a Teaching Fellow in 2010. Before she was a visiting scholar at the University of California in San Diego, CA, USA in 2007, and a visiting researcher at The MathWorks in Natick, MA, USA in 2008. Her research interests include heterogeneous system development, design, simulation, computation, humanities, and future studies.
For her scientific efforts Dr. Zander received grants and scholarships from such institutions as Polish Prime Ministry (1999-2000), Polish Ministry of Education and Sport (2001–2004), German Academic Exchange Service (2002), European Union (2003-2004), Hertie Foundation (2004-2005), IFIP TC6 (2005), German National Academic Foundation Grant (2005-2008), IEEE (2006), Siemens (2007), Metodos y Tecnologia (2008), Singularit
Far Beyond Smartphones - David Wood - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Far Beyond Smartphones:
Lessons From Disruptive Technology, Open collaboration, and Breakthrough Mobile products
David Wood has spent more than 20 years envisioning, architecting, implementing, supporting, and avidly using smart mobile devices (devices that can also be called "personal electronic brains"): ten years with PDA manufacturer Psion PLC, and then ten more with smartphone operating system specialist Symbian Ltd. He was centrally involved in preparations and planning for the open source Symbian Foundation. Over that time, many lessons have emerged, highly relevant to the H+ mission to explore how humanity will be radically changed by technology in the near future:
What factors cause both spurts and slowdowns in technology development? What enables new technology visions to "cross the chasm" towards mainstream adoption? Given the history of improvements in smart mobile devices over the last 20 years, what can we realistically expect in the next 20 years? How credible is the vision of mobile devices helping billions of people to collect data that can be used for science and advance human knowledge? To what extent can technological progress be foreseen, and to what extent is the process chaotic, risky, and even dangerous?
David Wood spent ten years with PDA manufacturer Psion PLC, and then ten more with smartphone operating system specialist Symbian Ltd, where he was co-founder and executive vice president.
His background includes: many years building and integrating UI system software and application frameworks in 16-bit and 32-bit versions of “EPOC” software (later named “Symbian OS”); growing and directing the technical consulting teams that worked with leading phone manufacturers to create the world’s first successful smartphones; and defining and running development programs to stimulate and nurture the fast-growing Symbian partner ecosystem.
From the first half of 2008, he was involved in preparations and planning for the independent open source Symbian Foundation. He served on the Leadership Team of the Symbian Foundation as “Catalyst and Futurist” until October 2009. I continue these same roles from within Delta Wisdom.
He has an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University and an honorary doctorate in science from the University of Westminster.
In September 2009 he was included in T3's list of "100 most influential people in technology": http://tech100.t3.com/list/80-61/.
Military 2.0 - Patrick Lin - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
For better or worse, the military is a major driver of technological, world-changing innovations, such as the Internet. At the same time, wars and armed conflicts are a key roadblock in the evolution of humanity. Therefore, to understand how emerging technologies will change our lives, we must look at their military origins as a harbinger of things to come for society at large. This presentation will focus on ethical and policy questions arising from two key areas making headlines today and in the future: human enhancement technologies and robotics.
For instance, are there moral or practical issues with eliminating human emotions such as fear or anger, which have led to abuses and accidents in wartime? Must these enhancements (and others, such as super-strength) be temporary or reversible, considering that soldiers usually return to civilian life? Robots can discourage such abuses if equipped with cameras, becoming objective and unblinking observers on the battlefield, but would this erode cohesion and trust among soldiers – and in the civilian realm, would surveillance robots infringe on our privacy? Generally, would these new technologies make it easier to engage in war, since they would lower political costs by reducing the number of casualties on our side – if so, is it immoral, or otherwise counterproductive to humanity's progress, to develop these capabilities?
Patrick Lin is the director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group , based at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Most recently, he has led research efforts that culminated in two major reports: Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design (funded by the U.S. Dept. of Defense/Navy, 2008) and Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions & Answers (funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, 2009). He has published several books and papers in the field of technology ethics, including a new monograph What Is Nanotechnology and Why Does It Matter?: From Science to Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and a forthcoming anthology Robot Ethics: The Social and Ethical Implication of Robotics (MIT Press, in preparation). Dr. Lin earned his B.A. from University of California at Berkeley, M.A. and Ph.D. from University of California at Santa Barbara, and completed a three-year post-doctoral appointment at Dartmouth College. He is currently an assistant professor in Cal Poly’s philosophy department and an ethics fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Sparking Our Neural Humanity - M. A. Greenstein - H+ Summit - Humanity+Humanity Plus
M. A. Greenstein, an internationally recognized commentator, researcher and coach on best and future practices for "opening the doors of perception". Based in L. A. with networked alliances throughout the AsiaPacific region, she founded The George Greenstein Institute and the future-focused e-zine BODIES IN SPACE to advance global change in designing creative and holistic learning systems as well as to encourage progressive leadership in related issues of neurotech innovation and designing sustainable lifestyles. Dedicated to BIG THINKING energized by visionary "sci-art" and anchored by S.I.T. (Somatic Intelligence Training), Dr. G is a whole-brain systems generator who privileges "interoception" as a search engine for catapulting & mapping best design images and ideas.
An Adjunct Associate Professor at Art Center College of Design, Dr. G. is also member of TED, Mindshare.la, The Neuroleadership Institute and in alliance with the Society for Neuroscience and the Neurotechnology Industry Organization.
Democratizing The Genome - Melanie Swan - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Exponential declines in the cost of human genome sequencing is starting to put applications in the hands of researchers and consumers that were only dreamt of previously. Individuals are starting to have access to their own genomic data which can be actionable in a variety of ways including drug response, health condition analysis, athletic capability, and ancestry. DIYgenomics is a new platform bringing citizen scientists together to run peer cohort research studies and conduct novel research linking genetic data and physical biomarkers. Some norms are developing in response to the variety of community-based research issues that arise such as adaptive studies, informed consent, security, anonymity, and study design.
Melanie Swan is a genomics researcher, hedge fund manager, and leader in the Health 2.0 movement. Recent publications include “Multigenic Condition Risk Assessment in Direct-to-Consumer Genomic Services,” “Engineering Life into Technology,” and “Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models.” She serves as an advisor to research foundations, government agencies, corporations, and startups. Melanie has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Georgetown University. She is an advisor and faculty member at Singularity University.
Altered Carbon - Andrew Hessel - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Andrew Hessel is an outspoken advocate and champion of DNA technologies, catalyzing new project developments, investment, and relationships in synthetic biology and bioengineering. His overarching message is that biology is poised to become the IT industry of the 21st century, fueled by a new generation of young researchers and entrepreneurs armed with technologies like DNA sequencing and synthesis that are becoming exponentially more powerful yet increasingly inexpensive. The possible applications are virtually limitless and include the typical global challenges (sustainable fuel production, environmental remediation, and better diagnosis treatment of human disease) but also extend into new, uncharted scientific territories. His popular lectures at the Singularity University and his visioning work reinforce that the foundations for this new industry are already in place, that it will grow explosively once the first few killer applications find commercial success, and that it will change the world, and humanity itself, in profound yet perhaps evolutionary necessary ways.
Do We Click? - Laurent Silbert - H+ Summit @ HarvardHumanity Plus
Do we click?
Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication
Verbal communication enables us to directly convey information across brains, independent of the actual external state of affairs (e.g. telling a story of past events). Such phenomenon may be reflected in the ability of the speaker to directly induce similar brain patterns in another individual, via speech, in the absence of any other stimulation. The recording of the neural responses from both the speaker brain and the listener brain opens a new window into the neural basis of interpersonal communication, and may be used to assess verbal and non-verbal forms of interaction in both human and other model systems. Further understanding of the neural processes that facilitate neural coupling across interlocutors may shed light on the mechanisms by which our brains interact and bind to form societies.
The capacity to communicate internal thoughts from one person to another is at the foundation of human society. Communication naturally requires an interaction between at least two people. Existing neurolinguistic studies are concerned, however, either with speech production or with the comprehension of isolated words or sentences. Little is known, therefore, about the underlying neuronal mechanism that facilitates the transfer of information between two brains during communication.
Understanding the interaction between a speaker’s brain and a listener’s brain in the context of real-world communication requires the development of new experimental paradigms. Using function Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), we measured neural signals from two brains (a speaker and a listener) during a complex everyday communication. We then built a simple, interpretable model that leverages the dynamics of fMRI and uses the speaker’s brain responses as a model for predicting the brain responses within the listener. Our model reveals that during successful communication, the speaker and listener’s brains exhibit joint, temporally coupled, response patterns. Such speaker-listener neural coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate (such as with different languages). The temporal nature of this speaker-listener coupling suggests that an ability to evoke similar brain patterns in another individual via speech may gate our communication abilities. Moreover, while in most areas the listeners’ brain responses mirror the speaker’s responses with a delay, some areas in the listeners’ brain exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. Finally, we found that the extent of the anticipatory neuronal coupling between interlocutors is predictive of communicative success.
Currently a PhD candidate in Neuroscience from Princeton University, Silbert also has a Bachelors from University of Pennsylvania (Biology and Photography), Masters in Neuroscience from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and Masters in Psychology from NYU.
Normal Labour/ Stages of Labour/ Mechanism of LabourWasim Ak
Normal labor is also termed spontaneous labor, defined as the natural physiological process through which the fetus, placenta, and membranes are expelled from the uterus through the birth canal at term (37 to 42 weeks
How to Add Chatter in the odoo 17 ERP ModuleCeline George
In Odoo, the chatter is like a chat tool that helps you work together on records. You can leave notes and track things, making it easier to talk with your team and partners. Inside chatter, all communication history, activity, and changes will be displayed.
Thinking of getting a dog? Be aware that breeds like Pit Bulls, Rottweilers, and German Shepherds can be loyal and dangerous. Proper training and socialization are crucial to preventing aggressive behaviors. Ensure safety by understanding their needs and always supervising interactions. Stay safe, and enjoy your furry friends!
A Strategic Approach: GenAI in EducationPeter Windle
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Generative AI, Image Generators and Large Language Models have had a dramatic impact on teaching, learning and assessment over the past 18 months. The most immediate threat AI posed was to Academic Integrity with Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) focusing their efforts on combating the use of GenAI in assessment. Guidelines were developed for staff and students, policies put in place too. Innovative educators have forged paths in the use of Generative AI for teaching, learning and assessments leading to pockets of transformation springing up across HEIs, often with little or no top-down guidance, support or direction.
This Gasta posits a strategic approach to integrating AI into HEIs to prepare staff, students and the curriculum for an evolving world and workplace. We will highlight the advantages of working with these technologies beyond the realm of teaching, learning and assessment by considering prompt engineering skills, industry impact, curriculum changes, and the need for staff upskilling. In contrast, not engaging strategically with Generative AI poses risks, including falling behind peers, missed opportunities and failing to ensure our graduates remain employable. The rapid evolution of AI technologies necessitates a proactive and strategic approach if we are to remain relevant.
2024.06.01 Introducing a competency framework for languag learning materials ...Sandy Millin
http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/iateflwebinar2024
Published classroom materials form the basis of syllabuses, drive teacher professional development, and have a potentially huge influence on learners, teachers and education systems. All teachers also create their own materials, whether a few sentences on a blackboard, a highly-structured fully-realised online course, or anything in between. Despite this, the knowledge and skills needed to create effective language learning materials are rarely part of teacher training, and are mostly learnt by trial and error.
Knowledge and skills frameworks, generally called competency frameworks, for ELT teachers, trainers and managers have existed for a few years now. However, until I created one for my MA dissertation, there wasn’t one drawing together what we need to know and do to be able to effectively produce language learning materials.
This webinar will introduce you to my framework, highlighting the key competencies I identified from my research. It will also show how anybody involved in language teaching (any language, not just English!), teacher training, managing schools or developing language learning materials can benefit from using the framework.
Introduction to AI for Nonprofits with Tapp NetworkTechSoup
Dive into the world of AI! Experts Jon Hill and Tareq Monaur will guide you through AI's role in enhancing nonprofit websites and basic marketing strategies, making it easy to understand and apply.
Read| The latest issue of The Challenger is here! We are thrilled to announce that our school paper has qualified for the NATIONAL SCHOOLS PRESS CONFERENCE (NSPC) 2024. Thank you for your unwavering support and trust. Dive into the stories that made us stand out!
This presentation includes basic of PCOS their pathology and treatment and also Ayurveda correlation of PCOS and Ayurvedic line of treatment mentioned in classics.
How to Build a Module in Odoo 17 Using the Scaffold MethodCeline George
Odoo provides an option for creating a module by using a single line command. By using this command the user can make a whole structure of a module. It is very easy for a beginner to make a module. There is no need to make each file manually. This slide will show how to create a module using the scaffold method.
Thesis Statement for students diagnonsed withADHD.ppt
The fate of the meat world - David Pearce - H+ Summit @ Harvard
1. THE FATE OF THE MEAT WORLD
DAVID PEARCE
“May all that have life be delivered from suffering”
-Gautama Buddha
(trad. c.566 BC - c.480 BC)
“We advocate the well-being of all sentience, including humans,
non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects,
modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological
and scientific advance may give rise.”
-The Transhumanist Declaration
(1998, last updated 2009)
www.humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
2. THE CHALLENGE:
Five obstacles to the well-being of all sentient life
1. Physical pain - millions suffer chronic pain, but compare the fate
with victims of congenital analgesia
2. Psychological pain – the hedonic treadmill
3. Meat-eating – over 50 billion factory-farmed non-human
animals per year
4. Domestic pets (cats, etc) – obligate carnivores
5. Wildlife – the food chain, Nature “red in tooth and claw”
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
3. Challenge One: Physical Pain
OPPOSITES
Hundreds of millions of
people worldwide suffer
from chronic pain. But
congenital analgesia can
lead to risky behaviour…
Congenital Analgesia
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
4. Challenge Two: Psychological Pain
Hundreds of millions of
people in the world suffer
chronic depression or
dysthymia
Why is the heritable
“hedonic set-point” of our
hedonic treadmill
commonly so low?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Rank_theory_of_depression
The Hedonic Treadmill
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
5. Challenge Three: Meat-eating
Pigs are as intelligent -
and sentient - as a two
year old human toddler.
Factory-farmed pigs live
in crates surrounded by
cold metal bars. They
spend their whole lives
on wet, faeces-caked
concrete floors in filthy
overcrowded
warehouses.
Pigs may first see direct
sunlight when they are
crammed onto a truck
bound for the
slaughterhouse.
Meat Production
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
6. Challenge Four: Pets
Cats look cute.
But what does it feel like…
to be eaten alive?
Obligate Carnivores
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
7. CHALLENGE FIVE: WILDLIFE
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is
beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it
takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are
being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives,
whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from
within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying
of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is
a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an
increase in the population until the natural state of starvation
and misery is restored.”
- Richard Dawkins, “God's Utility Function,”
Scientific American (November, 1995), p. 85
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
8. CHALLENGE ONE: PHYSICAL PAIN
CASE STUDY - SCN9A GENE
A single gene plays the dominant role in our level of pain-sensitivity
Variant alleles of the gene SCN9A code for the a-subunit of the voltage-
gated sodium channel Nav1.7 in nociceptive neurons
Activating mutations in SCN9A lead to rare conditions such as “man on
fire” syndrome - relentless, searing pain
Inactivating mutations
cause a complete absence of
pain
Other alleles cause
unusually high, or
unusually low, pain
sensitivity
Reimann et al, Pain perception is altered by
a nucleotide polymorphism in SCN9A, Proc
Natl Acad Sci. USA. 2010 Mar 16;
107(11):5148-53.
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
9. CHALLENGE ONE: PHYSICAL PAIN
THE REPRODUCTIVE REVOLUTION
Imminent reproductive revolution of “designer babies”
Pre-implantation diagnosis will shortly become routine
Question:
Which allele of SCN9A - i.e. what level of pain sensitivity -
would you choose for your future children?
Prediction:
Intense selection pressure against the nastier variants of
SCN9A gene
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
10. CHALLENGE ONE: PHYSICAL PAIN
LONG-TERM PROSPECTS
Is abolition of phenomenal pain feasible? Or merely a reduction in pain
sensitivity?
Options For A World With Nociception But No
Phenomenal Pain:
1. Information-bearing gradients of pleasure? (functional analogues of pain
- information-bearing dips of extreme bodily well-being without the
nasty raw feels. cf. pain asymbolia)
2. Smart prostheses with a manual override (cf. silicon etc robots)
[Unsolved Mystery: Why do organic robots like us sometimes suffer,
whereas our silicon (etc) robots don’t undergo phenomenal pain in
response to noxious stimuli? cf. The “Hard Problem” of
Consciousness; the “explanatory gap”; “zombies”; etc]
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
11. CHALLENGE TWO: PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN
THE HEDONIC TREADMILL - ABOLITION VERSUS RECALIBRATION
Wireheading? Intracranial self-stimulation of the reward centres of the brain
(www.wireheading.com)
Delivers uniform motivated bliss; no physiological tolerance
BUT:
not evolutionarily stable - selection pressure against wireheads. Wireheads
wouldn’t want to raise baby wireheads
not sociologically plausible
a recipe for stasis
Complication: pure bliss (activation of the mu opioid receptors)
and motivation / anticipated reward (activation of mesolimbic
dopamine receptors) are intimately linked in the brain; but
dissociable
M.L. Kringelbach & K.C. Berridge (Eds.), Pleasures of the Brain. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
Induction of pure bliss - permanent stimulation of upregulated
mu opioid receptors - without dopamine-driven desire = Buddhist
nirvana. But is nirvana evolutionarily stable?!
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
12. CHALLENGE TWO: PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN
DESIGNER DRUGS
Drug-induced pleasure can be:
shallow, amoral, one-dimensional and hedonistic
-OR-
deep, empathetic, multi-dimensional and life-enriching
Current recreational drugs… activate the brain’s negative feedback
mechanisms
Current clinical drugs… mediocre; designed to minimise “abuse
potential”
Future wonderdrugs… “Super Soma”?
PROS: reversible and fine-grained control of mood, emotion, motivation, empathy,
aesthetic sense, introspection, spirituality.
DOWNSIDE: Do we really want to medicate our children from birth?
So...
Could post-genomic reproductive medicine deliver genetically preprogrammed:
invincible physical superhealth?
-AND-
invincible mental superhealth?
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
13. CHALLENGE TWO: PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN
THE REPRODUCTIVE REVOLUTION
Question:
Prospective Parents:
What genetic setting of your future child’s “hedonic set-
point” would you choose?
Would you choose any predisposition to anxiety
disorders or depression?
Prediction:
Intense selection pressure in favour of happier children
as transition to “designer babies” gathers pace
www.reproductive-revolution.com
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
14. CHALLENGE THREE: MEAT EATING
OVERCOMING ANTHROPOCENTRIC BIAS
SHOULD ALL TRANSHUMANISTS ADOPT A CRUELTY-FREE VEGAN LIFESTYLE?
Factory-farmed Mass-produced
meat vs in vitro meat
But could the mass-production of
Can moral argument alone
inexpensive, delicious cultured meat
trump self-serving bias? products lead to global veganism?
Maybe not. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat
www.new-harvest.org
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
15. CHALLENGE FOUR: PETS
CASE STUDY
500 million domestic cats worldwide kill billions of birds and small
rodents each year in gruesome ways
Stopgap remedy: e.g. mass-produced catnip-laced in vitro mincemeat?
Genetic tweaking
Long-term solution: comprehensive genomic rewrites
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
16. CHALLENGE FIVE: WILDLIFE
SERIAL KILLERS COMPARED
Spot the difference
These predators all prey on the Should we revise our double
weak, the old, the innocent, the standards?
vulnerable...
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
17. CHALLENGE FIVE: WILDLIFE
LION AND LAMB - DO WE WANT TO CONSERVE WILD ANIMALS?
If we do, what kinds of non-human animals do we want in our wildlife parks?
Is it ethical to perpetuate “predators” and “prey” - a living world full of disembowelment,
suffocation, being eaten alive, starvation, dying of thirst?
ALTERNATIVES TO DARWINIAN LIFE
Ecosystem redesign
Immunocontraception for population control
Reprogramming predators
Remote-controlled neuroimplants for behavioural modification
Genomic rewrites
GPS tracking and surveillance of terrestrial vertebrates
Nanobots to manage the oceans and aquatic ecosystems
“Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission
natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep
within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.”
-Edward O. Wilson
Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
18. ULTIMATELY…
A PAN-SPECIES WELFARE STATE?
www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
19. THE FATE OF THE MEAT WORLD
MIND UPLOADING/WHOLE BRAIN EMULATION
Is it feasible to scan and digitise
biological mind/brains and copy
their state into a supercomputer system?
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading)
Maybe.
BUT: consider the meat-world selection
pressure against “destructive uploading”
(Will sceptics hand out Darwin Awards?)
So… Primordial life in the Basement goes on.
Therefore…
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
20. PREDICTION FOR PRIMORDIAL ORGANIC LIFE
“The limits of pleasures are as yet neither known nor fixed, and we have
no idea what degree of bodily bliss we are capable of attaining.”
-Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
[Physiologie du Goût (1826)]
(1755 - 1826)
THE FUTURE:
Genetically preprogrammed well-being of all sentience
Animation by gradients of life-long intelligent bliss
Everyday well-being orders of magnitude richer than today’s “peak
experiences”
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
21. “MIGHTY MOUSE”
MIGHTY MUSCLES: normal mouse (left) and mouse
that lacks myostatin and overproduces another
protein, resulting in four times as much muscle.
Credit: Se-Jin Lee, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
SOURCE: Technology Review; October 18, 2007
• CONJECTURE: Analogous insertion of multiple extra copies
of the mu opioid receptor and regulatory promoters into the
twin “hedonic hotspots” of the brain can deliver
superhuman capacity for pleasure in the richest sense
• Dopaminergic enhancements can deliver superhuman
motivation
• Can oxytocin enrichment deliver superhuman empathy?
LONG TERM: “re-encephalisation of emotion”?
www.superhappiness.com
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com
22. “Whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be
glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imagination can
conceive.”
-Joseph Priestley
(1733 – 1804)
ACTION: JOIN
HUMANITYPLUS.ORG
PHILOSOPHY:
ABOLITIONIST.COM
THE END
David Pearce - www.abolitionist.com