1. Amusing Ourselves to Death 2. Ten Futuristic Materials 3. Top 10 Transhumanist Technologies 4. Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams 5. The Benefits of a Successful Singularity 6. Six Places to Nuke for Multiplier Effects 7. Response to Charles Stross’ “Three arguments against the Singularity†8. How Can I Incorporate Transhumanism into my Daily Life? 9. A Nuclear Reactor in Every Home 10. Wish 11. Terraformed Mars 12. Why “Transhumanism” is Unnecessary 13. Hard Takeoff Sources 14. X-Seed 4000 15. Kurzweil’s 2009 Predictions 16. The Illusion of Control in an Intelligence Amplification Singularity 17. Collaborative Map of Transhumanists Worldwide 18. Continuing Discussion with Mr. Knapp at Forbes 19. Paul Graham’s Disagreement Hierarchy 20. The Final Weapon
“How to Pitch Articles” Now on H+ Magazine Website
My article on how to pitch articles to H+ magazine has been slightly improved and is now posted on H+ magazine.
Topics to inspire you:
How can the transhumanist philosophy be applied to daily life? Quantified Self topics Is change actually accelerating? If so, what is the evidence? What technologies pose major risks and why? What are the next steps for robotics and AI? What is happening in genomics? What is the future of energy? Is culture getting friendlier to the future? What will the year 2020 be like? What will the year 2030 be like? What will the year 2050 by like? What will the year 2100 be like? Book reviews (Robopocalypse) Movie reviews (Limitless) Conference/event reviews Cool new businesses and initiatives in the transhumanist space Philosophical issues Other cultural commentary Space, space stations, spaceships, satellites, planetary colonization Topics similar to content in Scientific American and Popular Mechanics
Send your pitch ideas to editor@hplusmagazine.com. I look forward to seeing your ideas!
How to Pitch Articles to H+ Magazine
I’m the new Managing Editor at H+ magazine, which in practical terms means I need to come up with five good articles a week to publish. The magazine gets a lot of traffic so it’s a good place to share information with other transhumanists.
1. Come up with an idea or coverage of a company/product/news story worth covering. Ideally you have had personal experience with the company/product/news story and are uniquely suited to write about it. If not, you should be ready to quote someone who has.
2. Send the pitch to editor@hplusmagazine.com. That goes into my inbox. Include links to samples of your other writing. (If you want to write articles for H+ magazine but haven’t written serious blog posts yet, you might want to try that first.)
3. If you get the go-ahead, investigate the story, get a quote from an expert in the area you’re writing about. Take notes. The article should primarily be reporting, not speculation or personal opinion. Editorials are welcome but harder to write than straightforward informative articles. If you do …
Collaborative Map of Transhumanists Worldwide
Updating this map is a little tricky, you have to be invited as a collaborator by someone who already is one. If you know someone already on the map you can ask them for an invite, otherwise you have to fill in your email address in form below. Then you can also invite anyone else to collaborate, you just need their email address. I promise I won’t sell it to spammers, this list is only for adding people to the map.
Name:
Email:
View Transhumanists Worldwide in a larger map
My Upcoming Talk in Texas: Anthropomorphism and Moral Realism in Advanced Artificial Intelligence
I was recently informed that my abstract was accepted for presentation at the Society for Philosophy and Technology conference in Denton, TX, this upcoming May 26 Р29. You may have heard of their journal, Techn̩. Register now for the exciting chance to see me onstage, talking AI and philosophy. If you would volunteer to film me, that would make me even more excited, and valuable to our most noble cause.
Here’s the abstract:
Anthropomorphism and Moral Realism in Advanced Artificial Intelligence Michael Anissimov Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Humanity has attributed human-like qualities to simple automatons since the time of the Greeks. This highlights our tendency to anthropomorphize (Yudkowsky 2008). Today, many computer users anthropomorphize software programs. Human psychology is extremely complex, and most of the simplest everyday tasks have yet to be replicated by a computer or robot (Pinker 1997). As robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) become a larger and more important part of civilization, we have to ensure that robots are capable of making complex, unsupervised decisions in ways …
My Scheduled Events for 2011
February 13, 2011. Transcendent Man screening, San Jose, CA. May 10-13, 2011. Cryonics Teens and Twenties Meetup, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. May 26-29, 2011. Society for Philosophy and Technology 2011 Conference, Dayton, TX. July 7-8th, 2011. World Future Society 2011 Meeting, Vancouver, Canada. Dates TBA. Singularity Summit 2011, New York, NY. August 3-6. The Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Mountain View, CA.
Schmidhuber Interview Slashdotted
My recent interview with Juergen Schmidhuber for h+ magazine was Slashdotted. This led to about 322 links from around the Internet. Check out the various comments if you’re interested in various views of AI and reactions to the content of the piece.
Keith Norbury on Ray Kurzweil Response
Here’s a comment from Keith Norbury on the Kurzweil response post that I agree with:
It looks as though Kurzweil and Anissimov are both quibbling. I had similar thoughts as Anissimov did when I scrolled through the predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines. But I also thought, well, Kurzweil is just a little hasty in his enthusiasm. Yes, there’s a danger in setting firm dates for predictions of technological progress. However, because he makes them, Kurzweil gets people’s attention. Even when he is wrong on the exact date, he is still able to point to a trend that indicates he will be right soon enough (in most cases). So far, though, the dates have passed for the easier predictions. It gets harder going ahead.
Kurzweil’s main point is that technology is improving exponentially not linearly. That’s a difficult point to grasp. However, we still don’t know if even exponential growth is enough to tackle some sticky problems, such as simulating human intelligence. Nobody knows where the goal posts are yet. Nor do we understand yet the principles …
Ray Kurzweil Response to “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions”
Today, I received an email from Ray Kurzweil responding to my January 5th post titled “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions”, where I said that I found a list of seven of his “1999 predictions for 2009″ that I thought were false. Below is the letter in its entirety. I have read the letter and am thinking about it. I will conduct further research on all the claims and produce a response with my new thoughts shortly.
—–
January 17, 2010
Dear Michael,
I want to respond to your Blog post “Reviewing Kurzweil Predictions from 1999 for 2009.â€
This starts out “Michael Anissimov notes that Ray Kurzweil had several predictions from 1999 for 2009 and those predictions are in general wrong.â€
You also write “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions. In May 2008, a poster on ImmInst (the life extension grassroots organization I co-founded in 2002) pointed out that it looked like Kurzweil’s 1999 predictions for the year 2009 would fail. Now that 2009 is over, we can see that he was mostly correct.â€
…
Foresight 2010: the Synergy of Molecular Manufacturing and AGI
I will be speaking at Foresight 2010 this weekend in Palo Alto. My presentation, “Don’t Fear the Singularity, but Be Careful: Friendly AI Design” will be both exciting and awesome. You can register here.
If you can’t make it out to Palo Alto, the whole thing will be streamed live by TechZulu, which did the same for the recent H+ Summit. Here is their Alexa data for reference.
Hod Lipson of “computer program self-discovers the laws of physics” fame will be there, along with familiar faces and names such as Rob Freitas, Ralph Merkle, Robin Hanson, Paul Saffo, David Friedman, Brian Wang, and Monica Anderson. Salim Ismail, Executive Director of Singularity University, will speak late on Sunday.
Commenting Matters
Did you know that David Chalmers commented on my recent post analyzing my critique of him? True fact. Also see my recent comment to Vladimir Nesov on why psychedelics can be useful for philosophy, though Vlad wasn’t convinced in the end, and I will be thinking about his points.
You know, anyone can comment on these posts, but I made it a bit more difficult recently because I thought I was getting too many dumb and not-well-thought-out comments. Comments reflect on the blog as a whole. It used to be that all my comments were good, then the blog got more popular, then bad comments started sneaking in. Once people start making short, snide, and stupid comments, it’s a runaway effect where everyone feels they should make them, and the whole comments section goes to hell, like it has on every mainstream site.
I wanted to tell anyone how to register for the site, so you can comment. Just visit this link and you can create a registration specifically for this site, or log …
Guest Post at George’s on Gaianism
I wrote a post at George Dvorsky’s called “Dismiss Gaianism”, where I cantankerously dismiss naive environmentalism and go on a bit about what I think would actually help the environment. I had an excuse to post an image of the Mana Tree, which is always awesome. I am in a rainforest obsession phase.