Future Current

Bruce Damer is the CEO of DigitalSpace, an international corporation with a leading practice in virtual worlds for industrial design engineering, education and public outreach.  He is also the director of Contact Consortium, a California 501c(3) non-profit organization catalyzing the development of multi-user virtual worlds and virtual communities in cyberspace.  For the 2008 Global Catastrophic Risks conference in Mountain View, he presented on the subjects of mitigating impact risks from Near-Earth objects, and the long-term potential for utilizing the source of these possible threats as stepping stones to a sustainable space program.

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We usually think about growth in linear and exponential models… but the biggest impacts come from discontinuous change, and history is a chain of discontinuities. At the Artificial Intelligence and Society event hosted by the University of Santa Clara and Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Melanie Swan presented on potentially disruptive technologies for the 21st century: synthetic biology, metaverse technologies, robotics, fabbing, quantum computing, intelligence augmentation, personalized medicine, artificial intelligence, molecular nanotechnology, affordable space launch and anti-aging therapies. A multidisciplinary introduction to thinking critically about the ramifications of accelerating technological change, the presentation is one of several open source projects available on her personal website.

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Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google Inc, where he has been since 2001. From 2002-2005 he was Director of Search Quality, the manager of record responsible for answering more queries than anyone else in the history of the world. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field. In his keynote speech at the 2007 Singularity Summit, he argued that the invention of new technology is limited only by the laws of science and by the degree of ingenuity in the lab. But the proliferation of new technology into everyday life is a complex social process involving entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, international corporations, politicians, consumers, and dumb luck.

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Brian Wang is a member of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology‘s Global Implications and Policy Task Force and a scientific advisory board member of the Lifeboat Foundation. At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend Unconference, he gave a presentation called “Converging Technology.” The talk presented proposals for using previously unrelated technologies together for mining the ocean’s $720 trillion in uranium, while further examples of converging technology proposed for revolutionizing space capabilities at lower cost while reducing risk.

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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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Giorgio Gaviraghi, José Cordeiro, and Tihamer Toth-Fejel at Transvision

Tihamer Toth-Fejel earned his Masters Degree from the University of Notre Dame, in the Department of Electrical Engineering. His master’s thesis was on “Self-Test: From Simple Circuits to Self-Replicating Automata” and resulted in his first article on Transhumanist themes: “Angels of Steel”. He is a Senior Associate of the Foresight Institute, where he has been a member since 1987. He was Secretary of the Molecular Manufacturing Shortcut Group, a special interest chapter of the National Space Society. He is also a senior research engineer at the General Dynamics Advanced Intelligence Systems, where he investigates nanotechnology applications for aerospace and other areas. His 2007 Transvision presentation was entitled “Small, Fast, and High: Nanotechnology and Aerospace.”

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George Dvorsky with Charlie Kam, Conference Chairman of TV07

George Dvorsky is the Deputy-Editor of Betterhumans, co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association, and the producer of the award-winning Sentient Developments blog and podcast. He served as conference chair for Transvision 2004 conference in Toronto, the World Transhumanist Association’s annual conference, and is the co-director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies Cyborg Buddha project. He has discussed through print and broadcast media the subjects of bioethics, on topics ranging from disability rights to athletics enhancement.

At Transvision 2007 he gave a presentation entitled “Whither ET? What the Failing Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Tells Us About Humanity’s Future.” The talk addressed the problem of the Fermi Paradox, the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for or contact with ETs.

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