This is a call for poster submissions for the Humanity+ UK 2010 one-day conference, to be held on Saturday April 24th at Conway Hall, London.

In addition to the exciting list of speakers listed on the event website, there will be a networking room at the conference with limited space for poster presentations, on topics relevant to the themes of the conference.

If you would like to be considered to give such a poster presentation:

• Please send a 100-200 word summary of the work or ideas you would present, to Amon Twyman (amon @ doctrinezero.com <amon@doctrinezero.com>), by 5:00pm on Wednesday March 31st.
• You will receive confirmation of acceptance or otherwise, with full instructions for poster format, venue and schedule details by Wednesday April 14th.

If you have any questions about poster submission, please do not hesitate to contact the address above. For any other questions or registration for the conference, please see the event website.

Humanity+ UK2010 speaker Rachel Armstrong was filmed last year delivering a TED talk, “Architecture that repairs itself“:

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The following guest article is authored by Amon Twyman.

Part 2: The Anthropic Principle

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

This is the second 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!

The anthropic principle (Carter, 1973) is based upon the observation that conditions in the universe as we observe it are exactly what they need to be in order for us to exist. That is to say, there are a number of ways in which the universe might be described or measured, and in every case where such a measurement would need to fall within extremely narrow parameters in order for human beings to exist, it does. Let us momentarily leave aside objections to this kind of reasoning or consideration of its value, and take a brief look at a few illustrative observations.

Dicke (1961) noted that if the universe were one order of magnitude (i.e. ten times) younger or older than it is understood to be, then human life could not exist. One order of magnitude younger, and there would not have been sufficient time to build up requisite levels of vital elements (such as carbon) by nucleosynthesis, meaning that small rocky planets like Earth would not exist. One order of magnitude older, and most stars (other than the dimmest red dwarfs) would have turned into white dwarfs, and stable planetary systems would have ceased to exist.

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The following guest article is authored by Amon Twyman.

Part 1: Perceptual Augmentation

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

This is one 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!

A central tenet of transhumanism is that augmentation of human capabilities is desirable. In the Transhumanist FAQ (Bostrom, 2003), Transhumanism is defined as follows:

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

Augmented perception is arguably a particularly tractable aspect of the kind of enhancements usually considered by transhumanists. Such tractability is evidenced by the relatively rapid progress in mapping brain regions dedicated to processing sensory information, and by recent advances in the development of prosthetic hearing and visual aids (e.g. Loizou, 2006). Despite such advances, however, most discussion of perceptual augmentation is still presented in terms of the five senses familiar to us as human beings. Moreover, the limitations of our normal sensory range are necessarily invisible to us, and therefore do not often become the focus of transhumanist thinking.

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The following video “Quest for Immortality” was produced by the New Scientist in October, 2007, and features three futurists who will be speaking at the Humanity+, UK 2010 event:

• Anders Sandberg
• Aubrey de Grey
• Nick Bostrom.

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The following guest article is authored by Aubrey de Grey.

It was previously published in Volume 12, Number 6 of the journal Rejuvenation Research (2009).

The Einsteinian anti-aging imperative

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”
Albert Einstein

You don’t need to be a biologist to know that a lot of bad things happen to our bodies, more-or-less simultaneously, after middle age. Geriatricians have a special word for this multiplicity of ailments – they call it “co-morbidity” – but we all know it when we see it.

The human body is a machine, albeit an astronomically complicated one, and when numerous things are going wrong with a machine all at the same time it is generally considered time to get a new machine. This has, implicitly, been the conclusion of geriatricians too: the effort to maintain the health of the elderly in the face of advancing frailty and decrepitude is ultimately understood to be quixotic, and is not undertaken with any real fervour. Their emphasis, instead, is on “managing” that decline: ideally on postponing it a little, but mostly on making it more endurable – and also, albeit not too explicitly, on not prolonging it, as so memorably enshrined in the rhyme “Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive/Officiously to keep alive”.

This is not good enough for biogerontologists – those who study the means by which initially healthy young adults progressively approach and endure the inexorable decline of old age. There are two types of biological explanation for why essentially all the various aspects of age-related ill-health emerge and progress at roughly the same age in a given species.

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The following guest article is authored by David Pearce:

The End of Suffering?

“During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying from starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.”

Richard Dawkins
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995)

“It must be so.” Is Richard Dawkins right? Are the cruelties of the food chain an inescapable fact of Nature: no more changeable than, say, Planck’s constant or the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The Transhumanist Declaration expresses a commitment to the “well-being of all sentience”. Do these words express merely a pious hope – or an engineering challenge? (more…)

Nowadays there’s lots of discussion about Apple’s iPhone, and Google’s Nexus One Android.  These are among the latest smartphones, which place all kinds of interesting new functionality into the hands of users.  They’ve generated lots of excitement.  In some ways, they’re great poster children for technology.

My own history is that I was part of the smartphone world since long before anyone heard of the iPhone or Nexus One. (more…)

Registration for Humanity+ London 2010 is now open.

Tickets are available from this page, where you can buy either a ticket for this one-day conference or an Annual Membership which includes admission to two UKH+ full-day events (including this one) and shows your support for the regular Saturday Afternoon meetings.

Concessionary prices are available for both tickets and Annual Memberships.

Building on the increasing popularity of the regular UK Transhumanist Association meetings, we’re pleased to announce the first in what we intend to be a series of one-day conferences highlighting the fascinating possibilties (and potential pitfalls) of accelerating technological change.

Over the next couple of months, we’ll be previewing the conference, introducing you to the speakers (if they need an introduction!), telling you about other UK events where you can discuss the future development of technology and society as well as highlighting technical and social developments that we think are important.

If at any time you want to contact us, simply leave a comment on a blog post, use the contact form or email us directly on humanityplusuk@gmail.com.

Registration for the conference will be open soon and we’ll blog about registration as soon as it’s available (as well as sending direct emails to all those who have contacted us). Space is limited so please keep an eye on this blog and your email inbox.

We look forward to meeting you all on 24th April 2010.