There’s an interesting article about Ray Kurzweil up at UPI, which gives more perspective than usual for a news article, and quotes interesting people besides Ray. The title is “Commentary: the Singularity is Here”.

Dresden Codak, which publishes new strips only every couple weeks or even every month, has a funny new piece up, Dark Science #01.

Also, Monday will be your last day to register for the Singularity Summit at the $385 price point. Prices go up to $485. There are plenty of discounts available — it’s $100 off if you’re a student. You also get a $100 discount for every non-student referral. Refer four people who pay for full price by Monday, and you can get in for free.

The banners with the proper city (San Francisco) are now available.

Ben Goertzel at Singularity Summit 2009 — Pathways to Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

The World Future Society has a press release and YouTube video out promoting their conference on July 14-15 in Boston. I won’t make it, but it would be nice to hear from anyone who is planning on going.

Are you an audio/visual/photography professional who is interested in filming or taking photographs at the Singularity Summit 2010 in San Francisco on August 14-15? If so, please email me your past work and qualifications and we can talk. We would love to have help on this — I want to have at least a 2-3 people filming and taking photos so that we can create a strong body of media from the event, which can be appreciated for years to come.

I’ve become more interested in survivalism over the past few months, for a number of reasons.

1) Survivalism describes a “back to the basics” approach to survival and living that helps strip away (or at least make optional) the consumerism and other trivialities that tend to preoccupy the minds of modern city dwellers, which is refreshing. It’s also intellectually fulfilling because it’s a vast domain of knowledge with practical application. Smart people also tend to see new solutions to problems that many others do not see, so in an area where it’s easy to get up to speed and start having novel ideas, they benefit from the satisfaction of developing novel ideas that few if any people have thought of before and which can help others.

2) In today’s uncertain times, survivalism is especially appealing to generations growing up in periods of economic and geopolitical turmoil. Survivalism doesn’t have to be an all-out lifestyle change — even something as simple as growing food in your own backyard to supplement purchases from the supermarket can lead to better nutrition, less expense, better tasting food, and the satisfaction of producing something with your own two hands.

3) Before you can run, you have to learn to walk. Before you can live to 100, you have to live to 50. Before you live to 200, you have to live to 100, and so on. Too much discussion of life extension seems to focus on supplements and exercise (not to say these aren’t important, just that these points are practically common knowledge in many parts of the US and Europe), and not on the less-trendy-among-the-SWPL-crowd topics such as pursuing scientifically legitimate anti-aging technologies (though some transhumanists are doing a good job on this, and the mainstream is quickly following), medical knowledge (if you injure yourself and can’t easily get to a hospital, what do you do?), and self-defense (if you are attacked by a mugger in the dark, how should you react?) With our handy-dandy friend, Bayesianism, we make a good shot at precisely quantifying risk and allocate our attention accordingly.

4) Of course, survivalist knowledge and skills can vastly magnify your chances of surviving a major disaster up to and including nuclear war or worse, while also increasing your chances of being able to save dozens or even hundreds of lives of others in such a scenario. . Even straightforward knowledge like the fact that millions of gallons of water could be recovered from underground water pipes in undulating terrain even in a grid-down scenario by opening fire hydrants at the lowest available altitude could save hundreds of lives in a disaster. During the exodus from Hurricane Katrina, thousands of thirsty people walked right by fire hydrants. There are many thousands of similar examples of people suffering due to lacking simple knowledge as soon as they are transplanted outside of their zone of familiarity.

5) Acquiring survivalist knowledge can help us take action today to prepare our cities, countries, and planet for resilience under any disaster. If every person in the US spent $50 today, they could acquire enough food and water to keep them in good health for a month even if distribution were halted. Even such a basic measure would increase societal resilience far out of proportion to its cost. Not only resilience in the face of catastrophic disasters like EMP attack or pandemic flu, but even simple downturns like a recession. For someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, which is most Americans, setting aside a small reserve for a rainy day can make a huge difference. For practically all of human civilization up until very recently, this was considered common sense, but with the great economic boom of the last 60 or so years, many people have become complacent. This fits in with the logic of someone who wants to live a very long time — take history seriously and you can get the next best thing to having hundreds of years worth of wisdom. This view of life stands in stark contrast to the thrill-seeking risk-taker who regularly speeds, drives buzzed, and generally regards his life as disposable — something to be used up and then thrown away.

6) Another reason for valuing survivalism, and this is somewhat related to #1, is that it builds a greater understanding for how people live in poor countries. Surviving with basic tools is daily reality for billions of people. The poor make up most of the population of the world. To see how high technology can really help people and change the world, don’t just look at the latest Apple products. (”Think Different”, y’know?) Everybody and their brother is excited by the sexiness and sleekness of expensive, new gadgets, and some of these toys may indeed be the wave of the future, but a lot of it seems to merely be technophilic masturbation. What is more exciting to me are technological upgrades to long-standing human needs, like acquiring water or generating basic alternative power. I am far more interested in a machine that takes water directly from air than the latest $4,299 monitor. When I say “artificial general intelligence could have a massive beneficial impact on the world”, I’m generally thinking of its potential contributions to the former type of technology, not the latter.

7) Survivalism embodies back-to-the-earth type attitude that fosters good health (by helping us see the value of exercise) and better treatment of the environment.

8) At some point over the next 10-20 years, probably prior to the Singularity, I foresee the possibility of increasing decentralization of technological society due to wonderful inventions like better fab labs, alternative energy systems, personal security systems, and much more. The more technology improves, the less it makes us dependent on sometimes hectic agglomerations of technology like cities. Already, technology is making it easier for the middle-class to live well while camping, backpacking, or visiting a country home, so these activities do not have to be synonymous with low-tech. With a hand-crank radio and personal solar cell, I can charge my cell phone or even a laptop or Game Boy in the middle of nowhere. This opens up the possibility of entirely new communities — savvy, educated city folk capable of living off the grid in picturesque areas without going back to the Stone Age or dragging along a massive, gas-guzzling RV. I think that FM-2030, an early transhumanist I admire, would really appreciate this. For someone like me, who loves both high technology and the ruggedness of nature (and is interested in seeing their eventual fusion), this is like having my cake and eating it too.

9) Somewhat more obscurely, learning more about the totality of the “tech tree” of modern society, rather than just a few pieces of it, could help me better argue the ways in which a “human-equivalent AI” could rapidly bootstrap its own infrastructure and practically become an autonomous civilization of its own, with great potential for helping or hurting humanity, including humans that live in the middle of isolated forests. Technology-soaked urban humans find it difficult to fathom the idea of a human-equivalent AI surviving and thriving outside of a regulated lab or mainframe environment, but the knowledge I’ve acquired over the last few years makes it seem more plausible — and I’m not even an AI, which would have a much greater-than-human memory and focus even if its general intelligence were “merely human-equivalent”.

Here is the press release from April 15th helping to build buzz for the Humanity+ UK 2010 conference in London, which begins tomorrow and runs over the weekend. There will also be a live feed of the conference for those who can’t be there in person.

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.

Todd Huffman, a director of Humanity Plus and a long-time transhumanist, has a really interesting Flickr photostream. He spends a lot of time in backwater villages in Afghanistan, learning about the local people and trying to find new ways to help them through medical and other technologies. Some of his most recent uploads show an off-grid home that uses micro-hydro and biogas systems to generate electricity, which is particularly interesting to me in light of my recent studies in survivalism and resilience.

More videos at the Ishikawa Komuro Lab website.

CNN has some light-hearted coverage of fictional robots in honor of National Robotics Week.

“No one of us is ever safe. There is no security this side of the grave. A shipwreck or a hurricane can put man back to the brink of savagery, both in the means he uses to get his food and the lengths he will go to get it. The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other.”

– Novelist Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) from his novel “Bendigo Shafter“

This introduction makes such a big deal about how horrific the movie is, but much of what would have been the worst parts aren’t even shown. I thought the movie was more of a censored sketch than anything truly vivid. (Though I may be judging the movie a bit unfairly due to its dated production techniques.) People who were alive during the Cold War, do you remember this movie?

People who were adults during the 50s-80s, were you at all ready if the worst occurred? I think that the response of society during the Cold War to the risk of nuclear war is pretty indicative of what we can expect from society in preparation for even worse threats that the 21st century has in store, i.e., not much.

Today, April 10th, is my 26th birthday. If you wish to make me happy on my birthday, you know what you can do — make a donation to SIAI! Thank you for your readership and support of this blog and of the transhumanist movement in general.

I’ve created a group for the Singularity Institute on LinkedIn, to encourage professional networking among SIAI supporters and staff. Consider joining if you are an SIAI supporter and use LinkedIn.