DOCSLIB.ORG

H+ Magazine Fall 2008

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text

Load more

Halle’s accessories: Data display contact lens Configurable permanent makeup Personal cell, PDA facial stud Solar, climate controlled hoodie Probing de Grey Matters AUBREY DE GREY The Reluctant Transhumanist CHARLIE STROSS Don’t Leave Your Memory at Home BUILDING BETTER BRAINS Billionaires Funding the Future Editon #1 SCIENCE FICTION GETS FUNDING Fall 2008 H+ Magazine Advertising Specifications General LIVEHealthier Longer & H+ Magazine is published digitally online Full Spread Full Page after layout is finalized. Since H+ is an online format, print resolution images are not required at this time. However to provide maximum flexibility we suggest advertisers send ad mechanicals in bitmap form at 72 dpi at exactly TWICE the physical size of the final ad plus 1/4” inch margin on all sides. For example, an H+ Magazine full page is 9” x 11”. The required submission size for a full page ad would be 18.5” x 22.5” at 72 DPI. File Formats Accepted 36.5 in x 22.5 in 18.5 in x 22.5 in 92.71cm x 57.15 cm” 46.99 cm x 57.15 cm Most bitmap file formats are accepted. Photoshop native (PSD, no layers) or 1/2 Page 1/2 Page 1/4 Page Photoshop PDF files are preferred, but Horizonal Vertical JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and BMP formats are acceptable. Formats not accepted at this time are: GIF, SWF, PPT, Word, Targa, EPS, and AI. No vector or page layout formats are recommended and any files sent that require fonts, file conversion, or other intervention will result in production charges or may not be used. Ad Submission Specifications Ad layouts should be designed to the ad 15.5 in x 9.5 in 8 in x 19 in 8 in x 9.75 in size specified in the illustration on the right. 39.37 cm x 24.13 cm 20.32 cm x 49.26 cm 20.32 cm x 24.765 cm Full bleed ads are available in Full Page and Full Spread only. All ad sizes given to the right include .25 inches margin so please plan on a live area .25 inches from any edge. Specific placement or other information should be noted in the submission email. 2/3 Page 1/3 Page 1/6 Page Ads created with a document size different Vertical Vertical from the sizes suggested in the illustration Vertical to the right may incur production charges. Production Charges File or layout intervention required to conform an ad to H+ Magazine specifications will result in production charges to the advertiser. Ad production rates are $125.00/hour for one time advertisers and $100/hour for repeat advertisers. Minimum 10.5 in x 19 in 5.5 in x 19 in 5.5 in x 10 in Join the Life Extension Foundation, the largest anti-aging organization in the world, production charge is half an hour. 26.67 cm x 46.26 cm 13.97 cm x 46.26 cm 13.97 cm x 25.4 cm for the latest in advanced therapies to extend your healthy life span. Submission Deadlines s Maintain optimal health for as long as possible H+ Magazine is a quarterly publication. Please email our advertising department at s State-of-the-Art Supplements Please email our advertising department [email protected], attn: Dave Latimer ([email protected]) for submission if you have questions regarding rates or the s Toll-free Access to Knowledgeable Health Advisors dates. Blueline Charge $50/day is charged to the advertiser if artwork is not received mechanical requirements of H+ Magazine. s Massive Reference Book on Integrative Therapies by an agreed upon drop-dead date. Call us toll-free at 1-866-606-9803 or visit us online at www.LifeExtension.com/Alcor for more information. H+ Magazine Advertising Specifications General LIVEHealthier Longer & H+ Magazine is published digitally online Full Spread Full Page after layout is finalized. Since H+ is an online format, print resolution images are not required at this time. However to provide maximum flexibility we suggest advertisers send ad mechanicals in bitmap form at 72 dpi at exactly TWICE the physical size of the final ad plus 1/4” inch margin on all sides. For example, an H+ Magazine full page is 9” x 11”. The required submission size for a full page ad would be 18.5” x 22.5” at 72 DPI. File Formats Accepted 36.5 in x 22.5 in 18.5 in x 22.5 in 92.71cm x 57.15 cm” 46.99 cm x 57.15 cm Most bitmap file formats are accepted. Photoshop native (PSD, no layers) or 1/2 Page 1/2 Page 1/4 Page Photoshop PDF files are preferred, but Horizonal Vertical JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and BMP formats are acceptable. Formats not accepted at this time are: GIF, SWF, PPT, Word, Targa, EPS, and AI. No vector or page layout formats are recommended and any files sent that require fonts, file conversion, or other intervention will result in production charges or may not be used. Ad Submission Specifications Ad layouts should be designed to the ad 15.5 in x 9.5 in 8 in x 19 in 8 in x 9.75 in size specified in the illustration on the right. 39.37 cm x 24.13 cm 20.32 cm x 49.26 cm 20.32 cm x 24.765 cm Full bleed ads are available in Full Page and Full Spread only. All ad sizes given to the right include .25 inches margin so please plan on a live area .25 inches from any edge. Specific placement or other information should be noted in the submission email. 2/3 Page 1/3 Page 1/6 Page Ads created with a document size different Vertical Vertical from the sizes suggested in the illustration Vertical to the right may incur production charges. Production Charges File or layout intervention required to conform an ad to H+ Magazine specifications will result in production charges to the advertiser. Ad production rates are $125.00/hour for one time advertisers and $100/hour for repeat advertisers. Minimum 10.5 in x 19 in 5.5 in x 19 in 5.5 in x 10 in Join the Life Extension Foundation, the largest anti-aging organization in the world, production charge is half an hour. 26.67 cm x 46.26 cm 13.97 cm x 46.26 cm 13.97 cm x 25.4 cm for the latest in advanced therapies to extend your healthy life span. Submission Deadlines s Maintain optimal health for as long as possible H+ Magazine is a quarterly publication. Please email our advertising department at s State-of-the-Art Supplements Please email our advertising department [email protected], attn: Dave Latimer ([email protected]) for submission if you have questions regarding rates or the s Toll-free Access to Knowledgeable Health Advisors dates. Blueline Charge $50/day is charged to the advertiser if artwork is not received mechanical requirements of H+ Magazine. s Massive Reference Book on Integrative Therapies by an agreed upon drop-dead date. Call us toll-free at 1-866-606-9803 or visit us online at www.LifeExtension.com/Alcor for more information. Section Head Editorial But please -- don’t just be a consumer. As Humanity Plus: with any initiatory effort, there is plenty of room for improvement via feedback and The New Synthesis participation. So we ask you to increase the value by spreading the word and by adding Contents RU Sirius your own ideas and content to the mix. The Chinese epigram “May you live in Lately, I love it when people out there in the interesting times” was considered a curse. 5 Humanity Plus: The New Synthesis general population ask me what I do. I tell But that’s old thinking. More recently, them that I’m working on a transhumanist Americans have been reasurring them- 6 I Am Ironman! webzine and then pause -- offering no selves with the straightforward saying “Life 7 Skin Phone further explanation -- as if a transhumanist is good.” Indeed. But it could be a whole magazine were as comprehensible as a lot better. PETA Wants Meat! magazine about real estate or pet monkeys. 8 Here’s Jewels in Your Eye It’s a sort of test. Will anybody ever Make it so. H+ Magazine 9 EPOC Neuroheadset have a clue as to what I’m talking about? So far, the answer is no. Not one stranger Addendum: H+ Magazine is published We’re All Edge Cases -- or person outside certain in-the-know by Humanity+. However, not all the views 10 Open Source Robotics Looks Better Than Ever social circles -- has had even a nano-hint and ideas expressed in this publication are Publishers of a clue. the views of that organization. While the 12 Simple Questions/Challenging Answers Humanity Plus By the way, I’m not talking here only general mission of this online periodical is 13 Manipulating Evolution about people who barely know how to turn longevity or high-quality performance to spread transhumanist news and ideas, Editor-in-Chief on a computer. The conversations I’m ref- -enhancing drugs, the body politic is likely this periodical will also enclose dissenting 14 Post-Darwinian Hedonic Engineering to experience the near future as a series of RU Sirius erencing have included those with people views, darker visions, irreverent humor, and 15 The Eye who work at Google and Microsoft, people isolated shocks to prior assumptions unless quirky observations. Anything less than Art Director 17 Engineering an End to Aging who make digital art, and even one guy we suffuse the public discourse with a that would be stiff, boring, and dishonest.
Recommended publications
  • 1 COPYRIGHT STATEMENT This Copy of the Thesis Has Been

    1 COPYRIGHT STATEMENT This Copy of the Thesis Has Been

    University of Plymouth PEARL https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk 04 University of Plymouth Research Theses 01 Research Theses Main Collection 2012 Life Expansion: Toward an Artistic, Design-Based Theory of the Transhuman / Posthuman Vita-More, Natasha http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/1182 University of Plymouth All content in PEARL is protected by copyright law. Author manuscripts are made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the details provided on the item record or document. In the absence of an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher or author. COPYRIGHT STATEMENT This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognize that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the author’s prior consent. 1 Life Expansion: Toward an Artistic, Design-Based Theory of the Transhuman / Posthuman by NATASHA VITA-MORE A thesis submitted to the University of Plymouth in partial fulfillment for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of Art & Media Faculty of Arts April 2012 2 Natasha Vita-More Life Expansion: Toward an Artistic, Design-Based Theory of the Transhuman / Posthuman The thesis’ study of life expansion proposes a framework for artistic, design-based approaches concerned with prolonging human life and sustaining personal identity. To delineate the topic: life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists.
  • Eclipse Phase: After the Fall

    Eclipse Phase: After the Fall

    AFTER THE FALL In a world of transhuman survival and horror, technology allows the re-shaping of bodies and minds, but also creates opportunities for oppression and puts the capa- AFTER THE FALL bility for mass destruction in the hands of everyone. Other threats lurk in the devastated habitats of the Fall, dangers both familiar and alien. Featuring: Madeline Ashby Rob Boyle Davidson Cole Nathaniel Dean Jack Graham Georgina Kamsika SURVIVAL &SURVIVAL HORROR Ken Liu OF ANTHOLOGY THE Karin Lowachee TRANSHUMAN Kim May Steven Mohan, Jr. Andrew Penn Romine F. Wesley Schneider Tiffany Trent Fran Wilde ECLIPSE PHASE 21950 Advance THE ANTHOLOGY OF TRANSHUMAN Reading SURVIVAL & HORROR Copy Eclipse Phase created by Posthuman Studios EDITED BY JAYM GATES Eclipse Phase is a trademark of Posthuman Studios LLC. Some content licensed under a Creative Commons License (BY-NC-SA); Some Rights Reserved. © 2016 AFTER THE FALL In a world of transhuman survival and horror, technology allows the re-shaping of bodies and minds, but also creates opportunities for oppression and puts the capa- AFTER THE FALL bility for mass destruction in the hands of everyone. Other threats lurk in the devastated habitats of the Fall, dangers both familiar and alien. Featuring: Madeline Ashby Rob Boyle Davidson Cole Nathaniel Dean Jack Graham Georgina Kamsika SURVIVAL &SURVIVAL HORROR Ken Liu OF ANTHOLOGY THE Karin Lowachee TRANSHUMAN Kim May Steven Mohan, Jr. Andrew Penn Romine F. Wesley Schneider Tiffany Trent Fran Wilde ECLIPSE PHASE 21950 THE ANTHOLOGY OF TRANSHUMAN SURVIVAL & HORROR Eclipse Phase created by Posthuman Studios EDITED BY JAYM GATES Eclipse Phase is a trademark of Posthuman Studios LLC.
  • SESSION: Archaeology of the Future (Time Keeps on Slipping…)

    SESSION: Archaeology of the Future (Time Keeps on Slipping…)

    SESSION: Archaeology of the future (time keeps on slipping…) North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) New York University May 22-24, 2015 Organizer: Karen Holmberg (NYU, Environmental Studies) Recent interest in deep time from historical perspectives is intellectually welcome (e.g., Guldi and Armitage, 2014), though the deep past has long been the remit of archaeology so is not novel in archaeological vantages. Rather, a major shift of interest in time scale for archaeology came from historical archaeology and its relatively recent focus and adamant refusal to be the handmaiden of history. Foci on the archaeology of ‘now’ (e.g., Harrison, 2010) further refreshed and expanded the temporal playing field for archaeological thought, challenging and extending the preeminence of the deep past as the sole focus of archaeological practice. If there is a novel or intellectually challenging time frame to consider in the early 21st century, it is that of the deep future (Schellenberg, 2014). Marilyn Strathern’s (1992: 190) statement in After Nature is accurate, certainly: ‘An epoch is experienced as a now that gathers perceptions of the past into itself. An epoch will thus always will be what I have called post-eventual, that is, on the brink of collapse.’ What change of tone comes from envisioning archaeology’s role and place in a very deep future? This session invites papers that imaginatively consider the movement of time, the movement of archaeological ideas, the movement of objects, the movement of data, or any other form of movement the author would like to consider in relation to a future that only a few years ago might have been seen as a realm of science and cyborgs (per Haraway, 1991) but is increasingly fraught with dystopic environmental anxiety regarding the advent of the Anthropocene (e.g., Scranton, 2013).
  • Between Ape and Artilect Createspace V2

    Between Ape and Artilect Createspace V2

    Between Ape and Artilect Conversations with Pioneers of Artificial General Intelligence and Other Transformative Technologies Interviews Conducted and Edited by Ben Goertzel This work is offered under the following license terms: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC-ND-3.0) See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ for details Copyright © 2013 Ben Goertzel All rights reserved. ISBN: ISBN-13: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman – a rope over an abyss.” -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra Table&of&Contents& Introduction ........................................................................................................ 7! Itamar Arel: AGI via Deep Learning ................................................................. 11! Pei Wang: What Do You Mean by “AI”? .......................................................... 23! Joscha Bach: Understanding the Mind ........................................................... 39! Hugo DeGaris: Will There be Cyborgs? .......................................................... 51! DeGaris Interviews Goertzel: Seeking the Sputnik of AGI .............................. 61! Linas Vepstas: AGI, Open Source and Our Economic Future ........................ 89! Joel Pitt: The Benefits of Open Source for AGI ............................................ 101! Randal Koene: Substrate-Independent Minds .............................................. 107! João Pedro de Magalhães: Ending Aging ....................................................
  • Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel

    Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel

    Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel Andreas M. Hein1 and Stephen Baxter2 1Initiative for Interstellar Studies, Bone Mill, New Street, Charfield, GL12 8ES, United Kingdom 2c/o Christopher Schelling, Selectric Artists, 9 Union Square 123, Southbury, CT 06488, USA. November 20, 2018 Abstract The large distances involved in interstellar travel require a high degree of spacecraft autonomy, realized by artificial intelligence. The breadth of tasks artificial intelligence could perform on such spacecraft involves maintenance, data collection, designing and constructing an infrastructure using in-situ resources. Despite its importance, exist- ing publications on artificial intelligence and interstellar travel are limited to cursory descriptions where little detail is given about the nature of the artificial intelligence. This article explores the role of artificial intelligence for interstellar travel by compiling use cases, exploring capabilities, and proposing typologies, system and mission archi- tectures. Estimations for the required intelligence level for specific types of interstellar probes are given, along with potential system and mission architectures, covering those proposed in the literature but also presenting novel ones. Finally, a generic design for interstellar probes with an AI payload is proposed. Given current levels of increase in computational power, a spacecraft with a similar computational power as the human brain would have a mass from dozens to hundreds of tons in a 2050 { 2060 timeframe. Given that the advent of the first interstellar missions and artificial general intelligence are estimated to be by the mid-21st century, a more in-depth exploration of the re- lationship between the two should be attempted, focusing on neglected areas such as protecting the artificial intelligence payload from radiation in interstellar space and the role of artificial intelligence in self-replication.
  • Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures

    Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures

    Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures Eric Schwitzgebel Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 1 Dear Reader, What follows are a few dozen blog posts and popular articles, on philosophy, psychology, culture, and technology, updated and revised, selected from eleven hundred I published between 2006 and 2018. Skip the ones you hate. Eric Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 2 Part One: Moral Psychology 1. A Theory of Jerks 2. Forgetting as an Unwitting Confession of Your Values 3. The Happy Coincidence Defense and The-Most-I-Can-Do Sweet Spot 4. Cheeseburger Ethics (or How Often Do Ethicists Call Their Mothers?) 5. On Not Seeking Pleasure Much 6. How Much Should You Care about How You Feel in Your Dreams? 7. Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Love 8. Aiming for Moral Mediocrity 9. A Theory of Hypocrisy 10. On Not Distinguishing Too Finely Among Your Motivations 11. The Mush of Normativity 12. A Moral Dunning-Kruger Effect? 13. The Moral Compass and the Liberal Ideal in Moral Education Part Two: Technology 14. Should Your Driverless Car Kill You So Others May Live? 15. Cute AI and the ASIMO Problem 16. My Daughter’s Rented Eyes 17. Someday, Your Employer Will Technologically Control Your Moods 18. Cheerfully Suicidal AI Slaves 19. We Have Greater Moral Obligations to Robots Than to (Otherwise Similar) Humans 20. Our Moral Duties to Monsters 21. Our Possible Imminent Divinity 22. Skepticism, Godzilla, and the Artificial Computerized Many-Branching You 23. How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot Part Three: Culture 24.
  • An Overview of Mind Uploading

    An Overview of Mind Uploading

    IOSR Journal of Engineering (IOSR JEN) www.iosrjen.org ISSN (e): 2250-3021, ISSN (p): 2278-8719 PP 18-25 An Overview of Mind Uploading Mrs. Mausami Sawarkar1, Mr. Dhiraj Rane2 Dept of CSE, Priydarshani J L CoE, Nagpur Dept. of CS, GHRIIT, Nagpur Abstract: Mind uploading is an ongoing area of active research, bringing together ideas from neuroscience, computer science, engineering, and philosophy. Realistically, mind uploading likely lies many decades in the future, but the short-term offers the possibility of advanced neural prostheses that may benefit us. Mind uploading is the conceptual futuristic technology of transferring human minds tocomputer hardware using whole-brain emulation process. In this research work, we have discuss the brief review of the technological prospectsfor mind uploading, a range of philosophical and ethical aspects of the technology. We have also summarizes various issues for mind uploading. There are many technologies are working on these issues will be summarize. These include questions about whether uploads will have consciousness and whether uploading willpreserve personal identity, as well as what impact on society a working uploading technology is likelyto have and whether these impacts are desirable. The issue of whether we ought to move forwardstowards uploading technology remains as unclear as ever. Keywords: Mind Uploading, Whole brain simulation, I. Introduction Mind uploading is an ongoing area of active research, bringing together ideas from neuroscience, computer science, engineering, and philosophy. Realistically, mind uploading likely lies many decades in the future, but the short-term offers the possibility of advanced neural prostheses that may benefit us. Mind uploading is a popular term for a process by which the mind, a collection of memories, personality, and attributes of a specific individual, is transferred from its original biological brain to an artificial computational substrate.
  • Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures

    Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures

    Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures Eric Schwitzgebel Schwitzgebel July 23, 2018 Splintered Mind, 1 Dear Reader, What follows are a few dozen blog posts and popular articles, on philosophy, psychology, culture, and technology, updated and revised, selected from eleven hundred I published between 2006 and 2018. Skip the ones you hate. Eric Schwitzgebel July 23, 2018 Splintered Mind, 2 Part One: Moral Psychology 1. A Theory of Jerks 2. Forgetting as an Unwitting Confession of Your Values 3. The Happy Coincidence Defense and The-Most-I-Can-Do Sweet Spot 4. Cheeseburger Ethics (or How Often Do Ethicists Call Their Mothers?) 5. On Not Seeking Pleasure Much 6. How Much Should You Care about How You Feel in Your Dreams? 7. Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Love 8. Aiming for Moral Mediocrity 9. A Theory of Hypocrisy 10. On Not Distinguishing Too Finely Among Your Motivations 11. The Mush of Normativity 12. A Moral Dunning-Kruger Effect? 13. The Moral Compass and the Liberal Ideal in Moral Education Part Two: Technology 14. Should Your Driverless Car Kill You So Others May Live? 15. Cute AI and the ASIMO Problem 16. My Daughter’s Rented Eyes 17. Someday, Your Employer Will Technologically Control Your Moods 18. Cheerfully Suicidal AI Slaves 19. We Have Greater Moral Obligations to Robots Than to (Otherwise Similar) Humans 20. Our Moral Duties to Monsters Schwitzgebel July 23, 2018 Splintered Mind, 3 21. Our Possible Imminent Divinity 22. Skepticism, Godzilla, and the Artificial Computerized Many- Branching You 23. How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot Part Three: Culture 24.
  • Globálne Existenciálne Riziká V Informačnom Veku Global

    Globálne Existenciálne Riziká V Informačnom Veku Global

    GLOBÁLNE EXISTENCIÁLNE RIZIKÁ V INFORMAČNOM VEKU Ivan KLINEC GLOBAL EXISTENTIAL RISKS IN THE INFORMATION AGE Abstrakt Postupujúca globálna kríza a rast počtu globálnych hrozieb presahujúcich hranice jednotlivých štátov vytvárajú negatívny synergický efekt, ktorý môže vyústiť do negatívneho scenára zániku ľudskej civilizácie alebo vyhynutia človeka ako druhu. Globálne existenciálne riziká v rastúcej miere vstupujú do života človeka v informačnom veku a v predtým nebývalej miere ohrozujú jeho existenciu. Informačné a transhumánne technológie urýchľujú pozitívne rovnako aj negatívne aspekty vývoja spoločnosti a civilizácia stávajú sa motorom existenciálnych rizík v informačnom veku. Kľúčové slová: globálná kríza, existenxciálne riziká, transhumánne technológie, transhumanizmus, informaćný vek, futurológia, scenáre Abstract Advancing global crisis and growth in the number of global threats beyond national borders creates a negative synergistic effect, which may result in a negative scenario extinction of human civilization and extinction of mankind as a species. Global existential risks increasingly come into a person's life in the information age and previously unprecedented scale threaten its existence. Information and transhuman technologies will speed up the positive as well as negative aspects of the development of society and civilization become the engine of existential risks in the information age. Key words: global crisis, existential risks, transhumanism, transhuman technologies, information age, futurology, scenarios Úvod Postupujúca
  • Fermi Paradox from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia Jump To: Navigation, Search

    Fermi Paradox from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia Jump To: Navigation, Search

    Fermi paradox From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the absence of evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence. For the type of estimation problem, see Fermi problem. For the music album, see Fermi Paradox (album). For the short story, see The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model. A graphical representation of the Arecibo message – Humanity's first attempt to use radio waves to actively communicate its existence to alien civilizations The Fermi paradox (or Fermi's paradox) is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity's lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations.[1] The basic points of the argument, made by physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael H. Hart, are: • The Sun is a young star. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older; • Some of these stars likely have Earth-like planets[2] which, if the Earth is typical, may develop intelligent life; • Presumably some of these civilizations will develop interstellar travel, as Earth seems likely to do; • At any practical pace of interstellar travel, the galaxy can be completely colonized in just a few tens of millions of years. According to this line of thinking, the Earth should have already been colonized, or at least visited. But no convincing evidence of this exists. Furthermore, no confirmed signs of intelligence elsewhere have been spotted, either in our galaxy or the more than 80 billion other galaxies of the
  • The Singularity: a Philosophical Analysis

    The Singularity: a Philosophical Analysis

    The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis David J. Chalmers 1 Introduction1 What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of ma- chines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the “singularity”. The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I. J. Good in his 1965 article “Specula- tions Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will 1This paper was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 17:7-65, 2010. I first became interested in this cluster of ideas as a student, before first hearing explicitly of the “singularity” in 1997. I was spurred to think further about these issues by an invitation to speak at the 2009 Singularity Summit in New York City.
  • Bimonthly Progress Report

    Bimonthly Progress Report

    Bimonthly Progress Report Issue 1 April 2006 Message from Nick Introducing the Future of It is exciting to be able to send out Humanity Institute this first Bimonthly report on the activities of the FHI. As you can The FHI is an interdisciplinary research institute and is part of the new see from this report, we have got James Martin 21st Century School at the University of Oxford. It is off to a vigorous start even though located within the Faculty of Philosophy. we are not yet fully staffed. Established on 29th November 2005, the FHI aims to become The agenda for the Institute is humanity's best effort at understanding and evaluating its own long- ambitious indeed, and the problems term prospects by looking at how anticipated technological we want to tackle are colossal. To developments could affect the human condition. There are currently be effective, we will need to build a three broad research areas: human enhancement, global catastrophic larger team of top research talent. risks, and methodological issues that arise in the study of ‘big picture’ Finding the resources to do this is a issues. Our research is outlined in more detail on page 3. priority. The FHI takes a multi-disciplinary approach, using scientific I want to express our gratitude to research methods, philosophical techniques, ethical analysis, and the benefactors who have made it policy evaluation tools. We pursue an opportunistic research agenda, possible to get started: James in that we focus on those questions that are amenable to analysis, and Martin (who is mentioned again on where new insights would bring the greatest payoff in terms of page 2 of this report); and the improving humanity's ability to navigate its future.