Humanity+ UK

Responding to Ray Kurzweil’s “Transcendent Man”

The next meeting organised by Humanity+ UK is a panel review and audience discussion on the afternoon of Saturday 9th April 2011.  The subject of the discussion will be the groundbreaking but controversial ideas and projects of Ray Kurzweil, especially as featured in the film Transcendent Man which has its London premier earlier in the same week:

Ray Kurzweil’s ideas are far-reaching.  They cover many aspects of the ways in which rapidly changing technology is impacting what it means to be human: computers may soon become more intelligent than humans, and humans may soon be able to live indefinitely long.  Biology is merging with technology.  A kind of unpredictable “singularity” in human evolution could be just around the corner.

How credible are these ideas?  What do expert reviewers think about these ideas – and about the way these ideas are portrayed in the film?  What are the highlights – and the lowlights – of the film?  What (if anything) should we do differently, as a result of these ideas? These (among others) are the questions the panellists are expected to tackle.

Speakers and panellists

The speakers and panellists represent a range of viewpoints about Ray Kurzweil’s projects and ideas, and a range of different walks of life:

• Dr Anders Sandberg
• Jaan Tallinn
• Nic Brisbourne
• Paul Graham Raven
• Russell Buckley.

Some online reactions to Ray Kurzweil’s life and work

Recommended as useful background reading:

• Time Magazine: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
• Scientific American: The Immortal Ambitions of Ray Kurzweil
• The Economist: The new overlords: Man and technology are evolving together in radical new ways
• Michio Kaku: The Technological Singularity and Merging With Machines

For some light relief on the subject of the Singularity, this short video is hard to beat:

• Charlie Kam: I am the very model of a singularitarian (with thanks to Gilbert and Sullivan!)

Event logistics

This event will be held in lecture room B34 in the Malet Street building (the main building) of Birkbeck College.  This is located in Torrington Square (which is a pedestrian-only square), London WC1E 7HX.  (Map – PDF)  Torrington Square is about 10 minutes walk from either Russell Square or Goodge St tube stations.

The first speaker will start speaking at 2pm, and the session will close at 4.15pm (although informal discussion is likely to continue for some time in the room afterwards – and subsequently in nearby pubs, for those who wish to explore the ideas further).

Registration

So that the organisers can keep track of likely attendance, please visit the associated registration site for the event, where you will have an option to:

• Register as a guest attendee – for zero charge
• Register as a supporter of the event – for a £10 charge, which will help to cover the costs of room hire and other event organisation.

More details of speakers and panellists

Dr Anders Sandberg is a James Martin research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. As a part of the Oxford Martin School he is involved in interdisciplinary research on cognitive enhancement, neurotechnology, global catastrophic risks, emerging technologies and applied rationality. He has been writing about and debating transhumanism, future studies, neuroethics and related questions for a long time. He is also an associate of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, as well as co-founder of the Swedish think tank Eudoxa.

Jaan Tallinn is one of the programmers behind Kazaa and a founding engineer of Skype. He is also a partner in Ambient Sound Investments as well as a member of the Estonian President’s Academic Advisory Board. He describes himself as singularitarian/hacker/investor/physicist (in that order). In recent years Jaan has found himself closely following and occasionally supporting the work that SIAI and FHI are doing. He agrees with Kurzweil in that the topic of Singularity can be extremely counterintuitive to general public, and has tried to address this problem in a few public presentations at various venues.

Nic Brisbourne is a partner at venture capital fund DFJ Esprit and blogger on technology and startup issues at The Equity Kicker.  As such he’s interested in when technology and science projects become products and businesses.  He has a personal interest in Kurzweil’s ideas and longevity in particular and he says he’s keen to cross the gap from personal to professional and find exciting startups generating products in this area, although he thinks that the bulk of the commercialisation opportunities are still a year or two out.

Paul Graham Raven is a writer, literary critic and bootstrap big-picture futurist; he prods regularly at the fuzzy boundary of the unevenly-distributed future at futurismic.com. He is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Dreaded Press, a rock music reviews webzine, and Publicist and PR officer for PS Publishing – perhaps the UK’s foremost boutique genre publisher. He says he’s also a freelance web-dev to the publishing industry, a cack-handed fuzz-rock guitarist, and in need of a proper haircut.

Russell Buckley is a leading practitioner, speaker and thinker about mobile and mobile marketing. MobHappy, his blog about mobile technology, is one of the most established focusing on this area. He is also a previous Global Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association, a founder of Mobile Monday in Germany and holds numerous non-executive positions in mobile technology companies. Russell learned about mobile advertising startup, AdMob, soon after its launch, and joined as its first employee in 2006, with the remit of launching AdMob into the EMEA market. Four years later, AdMob was sold to Google for $750m. By night though, Russell is fascinated by the socio-political implications of technology and recently graduated from the Executive Program at the Singularity University, founded by Ray Kurtzweil and Peter Diamandis to “educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges”.