More details of speakers, when available, will be posted at the new website.

(You can download the file from that location, or you can view it in place.)

Thanks to the 41 people who took the time to provide answers!

The survey remains open. Anyone with answers significantly different from the ones already supplied is welcome to complete it.

The feedback – both positive and negative – is useful, constructive, and thought-provoking (although not always consistent!)

For most of the questions, the answers that are presented in these slides have been generally arranged from the ‘lighter’ (easier reading) to the ‘heavier’ (more challenging reading).

Concrete proposals for improving subsequent events will shortly be shared online.

To join the online discussion group for volunteers to help/advise on the next event, please send an email to humanityplusuk@gmail.com (or reply to this message).

Note: no personal data (e.g. email address) was collected during the survey – so it’s not clear who said what.

Here’s a copy of the description of the survey:

The purpose of this questionnaire is to gather feedback about the Humanity+ UK 2010 event, with a view to improving the design, planning, and operation of similar events in the future.

Specifically, we are currently in the early planning stage for a possible “Humanity UK 2011″ event to be held in London, perhaps at the end of January.  Your answers to this questionnaire will help increase the likelihood of that event being a success.

There are 10 questions in total.  Answer as many or as few of the questions as you wish.  It should take no more than 10 minutes.

You are welcome to answer the questionnaire whether or not you attended Humanity+ UK2010 – though clearly you will need to skip some questions if you didn’t attend.

An anonymised aggregate version of the results will be made public.

Please submit your answers by midday on Saturday 15th May at the latest.

• By Anders Sandberg: A sense of proportion
• By Aron Vallinder: Humanity+ UK 2010 conference
• By Brittany Love: Transhumanism and the future of the human race
• By David Styles: Humanity+ Conference, London, April 24th
• By David Wood: Practical magic
• By Didier Cournelle: Compte rendu de la conférence du 24 Avril (H+ UK)

For immediate release:
Unprecedented gathering of futurist and transhumanist thinkers in London

Humanity+ movement comes of age
Record turnout expected for Humanity+ UK2010 conference on 24th April

The UK chapter of Humanity+, an organisation dedicated to promoting understanding, interest and participation in fields of emerging innovation that can radically benefit the human condition, announced today that registrations are on track for record attendance at the Humanity+ UK2010 conference taking place in Conway Hall, Holborn, London, on April 24th.

“Approaching 200 attendees are expected to take part in a full day of thought-provoking lectures, discussions, Q&A, and breakouts, led by a line-up of world class futurist speakers”, said David Wood, H+UK meetings secretary.  “Participants have registered from as far afield as Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and the USA.  The Humanity+ movement, previously known as the World Transhumanist Association, is coming of age.”

“Transhumanism is both a reason-based philosophy and a cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition by means of science and technology,” said Max More, founder in 1988 of the Extropy Institute think tank ideas market for the future of social change.  “Transhumanists seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its current human form and limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.”  Max More introduced the term “transhumanism” in its modern sense in his 1990 essay “Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy”.

“At Humanity+ UK2010, I plan to talk about suffering and how to get rid of it,” commented David Pearce, co-founder in 1998 of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA).  “I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world.  Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically reprogrammed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today’s peak experiences.”

“There’s growing worldwide interest to debate and understand the dramatic human implications of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and artificial general intelligence,” commented David Orban, recently elected as Chair of the international Humanity+ organisation.  “I’m eagerly looking forward to Humanity+ UK2010, where I will be speaking about the Internet of Things, and the Singularity University.”  David Orban is also Advisor of the Singularity University.

In addition to Max More, David Orban, and David Pearce, other keynote speakers at the event include WTA co-founder Professor Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, pioneering anti-aging human rejuvenation researcher Aubrey de Grey, human enhancement theorist and media designer Natasha Vita-More, interdisciplinary researcher and science fiction author Rachel Armstrong, cognitive scientist Amon Twyman from University College London, and Anders Sandberg, who is James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.  Full details of the event are available at http://humanityplus-uk.com.

Note: Journalists interested to interview any of the keynote speakers, or who wish to receive a free press pass to the event, should contact the H+UK organisation via humanityplusuk@gmail.com.

In his professional life, Dean runs the telecoms and mobile consultancy company Disruptive Analysis, which analyses technology and business model evolution of networks, handsets and applications. His clients include major operators, equipment and device suppliers, regulators and investors. He is a frequent chair and speaker at mobile industry conferences, and writes a blog, Disruptive Wireless.

Dean Bubley is a regular participant at Humanity+ UK meetings and has long held a personal interest in many areas of technology development, from computing and communications, to genetics, to geoengineering. He has a particular focus on the business, political and financial dimensions involved in creating a “human-centric future”.

As co-chair, Dean will help to ensure that the event runs smoothly, and that Q&A between audience and speakers is productive and illuminating.

Dean has a BA in Physics from Oxford University.

Footnote: This is the second version of this video.  The previous version can still be found on the AuthorSTREAM site.

There are lots of interesting connections between points in this presentation and points already covered in this blog. See if you can spot them!

On his own home page, Nick makes the following comment about the presentation:

This short talk (prepared on short notice and delivered in a somewhat sleep-deprived state) was delivered to a popular audience at the TED conference in Oxford, July 2005. I’m not sure they knew what to make of it.

Even though the subject matters of TED talks are generally thought-provoking, the subject matter of this particular talk is, in a way, significantly more fundamental and important.  However, as Nick says in the presentation, sometimes we fail to notice a problem, because we’ve become so accustomed to it, or because it’s so large.

On April 24th, Nick will be re-visiting the topic “Reducing Existential Risks”.  If you’d like to do some reading on this topic in advance of the conference, a good place to start is the webpage of a 2008 gathering to review “Global Catastropic Risks”.  This webpage contains a PDF of the Introductory Chapter to a book with that name, co-edited by Nick Bostrom and and Milan Cirkovic.

Part 3: Epistemology and Future Shock

Excerpt from “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”

This is the last of three excerpts from a paper which provides a little theoretical background to the presentation I will be giving at the Humanity+ UK 2010 conference. My presentation will make sense without reading these excerpts of course, but the additional context might provide extra value for those people who have read them. Enjoy!

In the previous two sections, we considered the possibility that perceptual technologies intended for helping people with disabilities, and those originally designed for military or industrial applications, might converge and lead to a general augmentation of perceptual capabilities beyond human limitations. The perceptuo-centrist position is that such a technological development might eventually allow us to demonstrate the existence of a threshold between qualitatively different modes of human and posthuman perception. The identification of such a threshold, based as it would be on differences been unmodified and technologically enhanced persons, would arguably be as valid or real as any distinction between humans and posthumans.

Any such perceptual threshold would be epistemological in nature, because it would demarcate the division between those aspects of physical existence which can be known (i.e. perceived directly) by unmodified human beings, and those which cannot. The equation of direct (personal) perception with knowledge is in this case justified, on the grounds that any unmodified human with true information about the nature of existence beyond the perceptual threshold would have to be inferring it in some way, or simply trusting in the truth of information supplied by others. Although these indirect forms may be considered knowledge with validity, they are qualitatively different to the experiential knowledge held by those able to cross the perceptual threshold themselves.

The idea of an epistemological threshold, beyond which lies a form of knowledge unaccessible to humans, is one with precedent in transhumanist thought. I refer to Vernor Vinge’s (1993) description of the “event horizon” associated with his concept of a technological Singularity, which drew upon earlier forms of the idea considered by Stanislaw Ulam in 1958 (unpublished) and I.J. Good (1965). Although the concept of a technological Singularity (henceforth simply “Singularity”) has since been broadened by thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil (2005), Vinge’s version was intended as a specific illustration of the accelerating availability of computational power, and its implications for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligence Amplification or Augmentation (IA) technologies. Vinge suggested that once such accelerating technological development were to reach a critical pace, it would lead to an event (the Singularity) which is best described by an analogy with the gravitational singularities known to physicists.

Gravitational singularities each have associated event horizons, popularly known as “black holes”. A black hole is caused by the inability of light to escape from the gravitational attraction caused by the tiny (and yet effectively infinitely dense) singularity. Vinge’s technological Singularity is, in this analogy, the point at which rates of technological development are expected to reach incalculable levels (by human standards), and the associated “event horizon” represents a profound human inability to predict what is going to happen after the Singularity occurs. The breakdown of reliable forecasting represented by the event horizon is said to be caused by human inability to cope with an extraordinary and accelerating pace of change, in the face of which “old models must be discarded” (Vinge, 1993).

Although agreement with such “Singularitarian” (Kurzweil, 2005) expectations is not required by the arguments being made here, the idea of an epistemological “event horizon” may provide an extant transhumanist terminology for thinking about perceptuo-centrism. An attempt to relate the perceptuo-centrist conception of a posthuman perceptual threshold to Singularitarian ideas may be made possible by using the language of Future Shock.

Future Shock Levels (abbreviated to Shock Levels, or simply “SL”) are a classification system introduced by Eliezer Yudkowsky (1999), intended to categorise degrees of familiarity with technological concepts and developments. The system is comprised of five Shock Levels (SL0-SL4) describing various technologies, or attitudes to technology, and a person may be considered as having reached a specific SL if they are not particularly surprised, impressed, or worried by the technologies typical of that level. Shock Level Zero (SL0) is included in the scheme to describe the “average person” of 1999. At each SL, a few examples of representative technologies are given, followed by the kinds of people who one might typically expect to be comfortable with the concepts at that level. For the sake of clarity in further discussion, it is worth including Yudkowsky’s full description of the scheme here:

• SL0:    The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology – not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
• SL1:    Virtual Reality, living to be a hundred, “The Road Ahead”, “To Renew America”, “Future Shock”, the frontiers of modern technology as seen by Wired Magazine. Scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers, technophiles.
• SL2:    Medical immortality, planetary exploration, major genetic engineering, and new (“alien”) cultures. The average SF fan.
• SL3:    Nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, minor intelligence enhancement, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration. Extropians and transhumanists.
• SL4:    The Singularity, Jupiter Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of “life as we know it”. Singularitarians and not much else.

As we have already seen, the concept of a technological Singularity is associated with the idea that unmodified humans are unable to predict what will happen beyond a certain point in the acceleration of technological development. In other words, the Singularity represents an epistemological threshold which can only be transcended by becoming posthuman. “Singularitarians” are unmodified humans who consider the possible nature and implications of a technological Singularity, and such activity is clearly defined by Yudkowsky as being typical of SL4.

The Shock Level system is concerned with describing human reactions to technological concepts, and it explicitly places contemplation of a Singularity at the top of the hierarchy. For the reasons already discussed, Singularitarians who accept the idea of an epistemic “event horizon” must consider any contemplation of post-Singularity technologies by unmodified humans to be of little or no more worth than guesswork. Yudkowsky himself mentions in passing (Yudkowsky, 1999) that

if there’s a Shock Level Five, I’m not sure I want to know about it!

but one might reasonably argue that if there is a Shock Level Five, unmodified humans cannot know about it, in any meaningful sense.

We can now clearly see strong similarities between the “posthuman perceptual threshold” of perceptuo-centrism and the implied tier beyond Yudkowsky’s SL4, where human prediction and understanding are stymied by the sheer scale, complexity, pace, and strangeness of technological development. For this reason I suggest that there is indeed a Shock Level Five, constituted by phenomena which by their very nature cannot be perceived or predicted by unmodified humans. This profound epistemological barrier can only be overcome by modifying one’s own physical structure in ways which facilitate new modes of perception or cognition.

References:

Bostrom, N. (2002). Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Routledge.

Bostrom N (2003) Transhumanist FAQ: What is Transhumanism? In Transhumanist FAQ. Humanity Plus. http://humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/faq#answer_19 Cited 15 Jan 2010

Carter, B. (1973). Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology. IAU Symposium 63: Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, pp. 291–298. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Davis, J. (2009, October 29). Peoria’s first cochlear implant surgery has grandfather rediscovering life. Peoria Journal Star.

Dicke, R.H. (1961). “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle”. Nature 192: 440–441.

Gibbs, J.W. (1901). Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Good, I. J. (1965). Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine. In F.L. Alt and M. Rubinoff (Eds.) Advances in Computers, vol 6 (pp31-88). Academic.

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.

Leary, T. (1983). Flashbacks. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Loizou, P.C. (2006). Speech processing in vocoder-centric cochlear implants. In Møller A (Ed.), Cochlear and Brainstem Implants, vol 64 (pp 109–143). Basel: Karger.

Moravec, H. (1999). Robot: Mere machine to transcendent mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

More, Max. (1993). Technological self-transformation: Expanding personal extropy. Extropy 10, vol.4 (no.2).

Stavenga, D.G. and Arikawa, K. (2006). Evolution of color and vision of butterflies. Arthropod Structure & Development, 35, 307-318.

Stenger, V.J. (2000). Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes. Prometheus.

U.S. Department of Energy (2010) Office of Science. In: Artificial Retina Project. http://artificialretina.energy.gov/ Cited 15 Jan 2010

Vinge, V (1993). Technological singularity. Paper presented at theVISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.

Weinberg, S. (1987). Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant. Physical Review Letters, 59, 2607–2610.

Yudkowsky E S (1999) Future Shock Levels. SL4.org. http://www.sl4.org/shocklevels.html Cited 15 Jan 2010