Humanity+ UK

Note: Virtual Futures 2.0 is organised at the University of Warwick with support from the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, and the Centre for History of Medicine, in association with Humanity+ UK.

About

Cyber Conference on Art, Performance, Philosophy and Emerging Technology

Virtual Futures is an interdisciplinary conference. This year’s highlights will include presentations on artificial intelligence, bioengineering, bioethics, cybernetics, net security, performance art, social media, the future of copyright and virtual reality. Returning speakers will be joined this year by a fresh array of world-renowned practitioners.

Pass the word: Virtual Futures has rebooted!

We look forward to seeing you in June!

Register Now

You can purchase your tickets for the conference weekend here:
http://virtualfutures.co.uk/vf2011/registration/

Availability is limited and we highly recommend pre-booking to avoid disappointment.

WEEKEND TICKETS
Warwick Student £10 | Student £12 | Academic/Waged £35

DAY TICKETS
Warwick Student £6 | Student £7 | Academic/Waged £18.50

Speakers

Virtual Futures will gather together leading academics and practitioners to discuss the implications of emerging communication and information technologies. The conference promises to reconnect audiences with one of the most important intellectual and cultural developments of our times – the technological extension of the human condition, and will serve to raise awareness about the continuing significance of the issues addressed by the original conferences.

The speakers bellow will be joined by a host of panel sessions and performances. A full list is available here:
http://virtualfutures.co.uk/vf2011/speakers/

Stelarc (Keynote Speaker)

Stelarc is a performance artist who is interested in the post-evolutionary architecture of the body. He has visually probed and acoustically amplified his body. In 1975-1976 He made three films of the inside of his body, 3 metres of probes into his lungs, stomach and colon. Between 1976-1988 he completed 25 body suspension performances with hooks into the skin, in different positions and varying situations and locations. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body… Read More

Become a fan of Virtual Futures on Facebook

Follow Virtual Futures on Twitter:@VirtualFutures

Copyright © 2011 Virtual Futures

Interested in an evening discussing the future of the human species & society? Aided by a drink or two?

This is the first “salon” event for the London branch of “Humanity Plus”, or H+ for short. It’s going to be an informal evening event involving a stimulating guest speaker, Q&A and lively discussion, all aided by a couple of drinks. It fits alongside H+UK’s larger Saturday afternoon lecture sessions, and occasional all-day major conferences.

It’s taking place on Wednesday, April 13, from 7:00pm - 10:00pm.

This first event will feature Russell Buckley. As well as being a leading practitioner, speaker and thinker about the mobile, Russell recently graduated from the Executive Program at the Singularity University, founded by Ray Kurzweil 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”.

This meeting will be held in Marylebone, in Central London, downstairs at Wood Pub (former Hobgoblin), 21 Balcombe Street, NW1 6HE.

Please contact Dean Bubley (facebook.com/bubley), the convener & moderator, for more details.

Thanks to Adam Summerfield, a complete set of videos of Humanity+ 2011 are now available here.

We asked a few Humanity+ supporters in the UK for recommendations on books that had made a big impact on the evolution of their own thinking about transhumanism, the technological singularity, and related topics.

Here’s what they had to say:

<To be added>

Video credits

Video Trailer Edited by Luke Robert Mason

Music by XYKOGEN

The 21 questions, in text format:

1. How close are emerging technologies to making people radically smarter, stronger, healthier, longer-lived, kinder, more fulfilled, and more sociable?
2. Which technologies offer the best hopes for improving human life expectancy faster than “one year per year” – that is, to achieving a “longevity escape velocity”?
3. If people tend to live longer and longer, how should society change, so this becomes something to be welcomed, rather than something to be feared and resisted?
4. What do recent changes in technology and business practice imply for the opportunity to travel away from the earth into the wider solar system?
5. Can synthetic biology be the basis for new sources of energy, or for new kinds of megacities, in which people live more harmoniously in the midst of a “living technology”?
6. When will it be practical to use technologies such as implants (of sensors, processors, or extra neural cells) to carry out self-enhancement?
7. Can human brains and/or minds be transferred into robotic bodies?
8. How soon will computers be able to convince observers that they are conscious?
9. If computers become much more intelligent than humans (possibly via a near-overnight “intelligence explosion”), where will this leave humans?  Could humans survive in the “margins” left behind by super-intelligences, or might they want to keep us as pets?
10. As we understand more about the varieties of human intelligence (including emotional intelligence and social intelligence), how should this change the way in which we program computers and robots?
11. How is our engagement with pervasive digital platforms and ubiquitous technologies (such as mobile devices and social media networks) affecting the neuro-plasticity of our brains?
12. How we can preserve and extend the insights and benefits of age-old techniques such as meditation, in the midst of the hectic, always-on technologies of social networks?
13. Might we be able to awaken new intuitive abilities through meditation, if we have a better understanding of the brain, networks, synchronization, and emergence?
14. What are the implications of rapidly changing technology for what it means to be human?
15. In the midst of technological progress and greater scientific understanding, why do some societies seem to become less rational, less functional, and less humane?
16. What are the most serious risks facing humanity over the next few decades, and what is the role of technology in both worsening and solving these risks?
17. Given the potential of rapidly growing inequality from selective adoption of new technologies, what are the best ways to ensure the widest possible benefits from these technologies?
18. How can we engage more people, from all walks of life, in serious discussion of where these technology trends could – and should – take us?
19. What is the role of the arts to effectively inform, educate and engage the public in the legal, ethical and philosophical debates that are raised by the possibility of a transhuman future?  And what roles should we hope to see played by politicians, regulators, church leaders, and businesses?
20. What are the pros and cons of aspiring to a “Humanity+” phase of evolution, with powers and experiences as far above those of present humans as human experience exceeds that of pre-human apes?
21. If people want to become involved in activism supporting “Humanity+”, what are the best steps they can take?

These are hard questions – but important ones!

For some leading-edge attempts to answer these questions, attend Humanity+ UK 2011.

The Humanity+ UK 2011 conference, being held at London’s Conway Hall on Saturday 29th January, is an opportunity to meet some of the most interesting futurist thinkers in the UK -  to listen to their ideas, hear about the progress of their projects, ask them questions, and debate with them.

The principal theme of the conference is “Making a human difference”.

The speakers have been announced as follows (in alphabetical order by first name):

• Ajit Jaokar – Meditation as a transhumanist technology;
• Dr Amnon Eden – Scientific notions of Technological Singularity;
• Dr Anders Sandberg – The future of ideas on machine intelligence;
• Anna Salamon – Survival in the margins of the singularity?
• Dr Aubrey de Grey – Approaching the human longevity escape velocity;
• David Pearce – What is empathetic superintelligence?
• David Wood – Five key questions for futurists;
• Dean Bubley – Session chairman;
• Professor Kevin Warwick – Human Enhancement: A Practical Guide;
• Luke Robert Mason – Traversing the Transhuman: Bridging the Gap Between Biology and Technology Through Art;
• Dr Marios Kyriazis – Achieving human biological immortality;
• Michael A. Woodley – How clever-sillies might thwart the singularity;
• Pieter Bonte – Estranging ourselves from nature: from existential principle to transhuman practice;
• Rachel Armstrong – Living megacities: the forthcoming habitat of synthetic biologies;
• Richard Osborne – The next steps to the solar system;
• Tom Michael – Evidence based cognitive enhancement: a neuropsychological perspective.

See http://humanityplus.org.uk/speakers/ for more details.  The agenda for the day is at http://humanityplus.org.uk/agenda/.

To cover the costs of hiring the main rooms in Conway Hall for an entire day, there will be a small entry fee for attendees.  This is described at the page http://humanityplus.org.uk/registration/ – which links in turn to an EventBrite page.

Examples of the kinds of questions that will be explored during the day:

1. Setting aside hype, what are the realistic scenarios for progress with emerging technologies that have the potential to make us all smarter, stronger, healthier, longer-lived, kinder, more fulfilled, and more sociable?
2. What are the most serious risks (“existential risks”) facing humanity over the next few decades, and what is the role of technology in both worsening and solving these risks?
3. What are the implications of rapidly changing technology for what it means to be human?
4. What are the pros and cons of aspiring to a “Humanity+” phase of evolution, with powers and experiences as far above those of present humans as human experience exceeds that of pre-human apes?
5. If people want to become involved in activism supporting Humanity+, what are the best steps they can take?

// David W. Wood