Future Current

Paul Saffo is a forecaster and essayist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. He teaches at Stanford University and is on a research sabbatical from Institute for the Future, where he has worked since 1985. He was the founding Chairman of the Samsung Science Board, and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation, the Singapore National Research Foundation Science Advisory Board and is an Advisor to Red Planet Capital, and 3i Venture Capital.

At the 2007 Singularity Summit hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he took a moment to look back from our present vantage point at visions of AI from previous decades. Just as William Gibson imagined cyberspace in a way that shaped the 1990s Internet revolution, a poet named Richard Brautigan writing in San Francisco almost exactly 40 years ago penned his model for what a world of advanced AI should be.

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Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist seeking a cure for human aging. He has recently published a book on the topic entitled Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime. He is open and supportive of his arrangements to be cryopreserved with Alcor Life Extension, and at the 7th Alcor Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona he discussed his decision to make it known in a presentation entitled “Is It Safe for a Biologist to Support Cryonics Publicly?”

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Brian Wang is a long-time futurist listed as a Big Thinker on the Kurzweil AI website. A member of the CRN Task Force and an advisor to the Nanoethics Group and the Lifeboat Foundation, he has a column on the Nanotechnology Now website and his own blog Advanced Nanotechnolgy. He has a degree in computer science and an MBA and has worked in the IT industry for twenty years. He created and ran his own professional computer consulting company with offices in Canada and the U.S. and clients in the U.S. and Europe. For the last eleven years he has lived in the Bay Area, where he has been in touch with the technological changes in computer science and nanotechnology. His talk at the CRN Future of Nano & Bio Conference was entitled “Economics in a New Era.”

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Software engineer Emil Gilliam and James Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

How far are we willing to go in our quest to build better bodies? Would we agree to having nanoscale machines implanted in our brains and bodies to make us function better? Interviewed by Dheera Sujan of Radio Netherlands for “The State We’re In,” James Hughes, director of the World Transhumanist Association mentions, “At least a quarter of the population of the United States has one kind of implant in their body already.” Citing several examples from contact lenses to pace makers, scientists are already working on implants, computer chips and nanotechnology in medicine that could prevent diseases, prolong human life and enhance our physical and mental performances. “We [trans-humanists] want to argue that human beings can become more than what people consider to be human and that’s part of our right.”

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BBC – Radio 3: “Life, But Not As We Know It.” A biologist, a writer and a philosopher each explore their fascination with the notion of extraterrestrial intelligence and what such a discovery could imply. Philosopher Nick Bostrom explains why he believes that the discovery of aliens would be a disaster for the future of humanity and lead to the end of civilization as we know it. His portion of the program is titled “In the Great Silence, there is Great Hope.”

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Peter Voss is an entrepreneur with a background in electronics, computer systems, business and technical software, as well as management. He has a keen interest in cognitive science and the inter-relationship between philosophy, psychology, ethics and computer science. Since the early 90′s he has been researching and developing artificial general intelligence, and in 2001 started Adaptive A.I. Inc., with the express goal of developing a commercially viable general-purpose AI engine.

An Extropian, he is actively involved in futurism, free-market ideas, and radical life-extension. In his view, artificial general intelligence (AGI) promises unprecedented advances not only in science and technology, but also in ethics and social systems. Peter Voss’s 2007 Singularity Summit talk explores some of these improvements, making a case for how increased intelligence leads to improved morality.

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