Coverage of the recent H+ Summit is available at Reason’s Hit and Run blog. Here is a funny bit:

Futurist John Smart is wrapping up the Humanity + Summit by noting that human enhancement believers are too focused on pie-in-the sky visions. Instead of making weird flying-car predictions about the far future, transhumanoids should be pointing to contemporary advances.

John Smart is known for predicting that the Earth will be artificially collapsed into an engineered black hole in an effort to compress matter and energy to more efficiently run uploads. I think he is right.

There is coverage of Aubrey and Todd Huffman’s “Rasputin beards”. An informal poll found that three out of three women found Todd’s finger magnet implant hot.

More reporting:

I don’t know enough about transhumanism to say whether the movement is at any kind of crossroads, but I was struck by how modest the claims were at this event — in addition to all the calls for empathy, which I referred to yesterday. Toe shoes seem useful and ergonomic, but don’t these things just beg for a new breed of humans with opposable big toes? If there are transhumanists out there calling for human antennae, wings, pineal gland enhancers and the like, they don’t seem to have been in Irvine this weekend.

The organization I’m with, the Singularity Institute, is claiming to have the potential to quickly wipe out poverty and suffering for all humanity for the rest of eternity if we successfully construct a recursively self-improving Friendly AI that embodies our collective volition. (We consider this feasible albeit extremely challenging and a very long-term project, on the scale of decades but not centuries.) A number of professional ethicists and philosophers agree with us on the plausibility of our arguments. Is that extreme enough for you?

Check out the comments section on those blog posts for some illuminating insights and reflections on the conference.