In preparation for writing a review of the Unabomber’s new book, I have gone through my files to find all the things I and others had said about this iconic figure when he struck terror in the hearts of technophiles in the 1990s. Along the way, I found this letter written to a UK Channel 4 producer on 26 November 1999 by way of providing material for a television show in which I participated called ‘The Trial of the 21st Century’, which aired on 2 January 2000. I was part of the team which said things were going to get worse in the 21st century.

What is interesting about this letter is just how similar ‘The Future’ still looks, even though the examples and perhaps some of the wording are now dated. It suggests that there is a way of living in the present that is indeed ‘future-forward’ in the sense of amplifying certain aspects of today’s world beyond the significance normally given to them. In this respect, the science fiction writer William Gibson quipped that the future is already here, only unevenly distributed. Indeed, it seems to have been here for quite a while.

Dear Matt,

Here are the sum of my ideas for the Trial of the 21st Century programme, stressing the downbeat:

Continue reading “The Familiarity of the Future: A Look Back from 1999” »

“As more and more people around the world live in cities — nearly two in three Americans already do — how well cities are run will affect the future of the planet in profound ways.”

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The following is a selection of points of interest to futurism and forecasts of the political future from the recent Mont Order Conference of July 2016:

STATEMENT 1: NEW SECRET WIKI CREATED

The Mont Order’s secret wiki created via PBworks holds information on the origin and literature of the Mont Order as well as our current structure, ranks and members. Members will be invited via email and will be able to contribute pages or post comments and questions on this literature. The public will not have access to it.

Continue reading “Futurist-linked groups talking at the Mont Order” »

Transhumanists will know that the science fiction author Zoltan Istvan has unilaterally leveraged the movement into a political party contesting the 2016 US presidential election. To be sure, many transhumanists have contested Istvan’s own legitimacy, but there is no denying that he has generated enormous publicity for many key transhumanist ideas. Interestingly, his lead idea is that the state should do everything possible to uphold people’s right to live forever. Of course, he means to live forever in a healthy state, fit of mind and body. Istvan cleverly couches this policy as simply an extension of what voters already expect from medical research and welfare provision. And while he may be correct, the policy is fraught with hazards – especially if, as many transhumanists believe, we are on the verge of revealing the secrets to biological immortality.

In June, Istvan and I debated this matter at Brain Bar Budapest. Let me say, for the record, that I think that we are sufficiently close to this prospect that it is not too early to discuss its political and economic implications.

Two months before my encounter with Istvan, I was on a panel at the Edinburgh Science Festival with the great theorist of radical life extension Aubrey de Grey, where he declared that people who live indefinitely will seem like renovated vintage cars. Whatever else, he is suggesting that they would be frozen in time. He may actually be right about this. But is such a state desirable, given that throughout history radical change has been facilitated generational change? Specifically, two simple facts make the young open to doing things differently: The young have no memory of past practices working to anyone else’s benefit, and they have not had the time to invest in those practices to reap their benefits. Whatever good is to be found in the past is hearsay, as far as the young are concerned, which they are being asked to trust as they enter a world that they know is bound to change.

Questions have been already raised about whether tomorrow’s Methuselahs will wish to procreate at all, given the time available to them to realize dreams that in the past would have been transferred to their offspring. After all, as human life expectancy has increased 50% over the past century, the birth rate has correspondingly dropped. One can only imagine what will happen once ageing can be arrested, if not outright reversed!

Continue reading “Beware the Rise of Gerontocracy: Some Hard Lessons for Transhumanism, Not Least from Brexit” »

“Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.“
–Gustav LeBon, The Crowd (1895)

I’ve gotten no substantive response to my last post on vaccine safety– neither in the comments, nor the TruthSift diagram, nor anywhere else, nor have the papers I submitted to two medical journals… but I have gotten emails telling me I’m delusional and suggesting I seek psychiatric attention. And this of course is integral to the explanation of how such delusions as vaccine safety persist so widely when it is so demonstrably a delusion: the majority who believe the majority must be right because its the majority are emotionally unwilling to confront the evidence. They assume the experts have done that, and they rely on the experts. But the experts assume other experts have been there. Ask your Pediatrician if he’s personally read Bishop et al and formulated an opinion on vaccine aluminum. Neither has the National Academy, except perhaps their members have and decided, perhaps tacitly, not to review the subject. Their decision not to review the animal literature was not tacit, they said they explicitly decided to omit it, although elsewhere they say they couldn’t find human evidence that addressed the issues. So everybody is trusting somebody else, and nobody has picked up the ball. And can you blame them? Because when I pick up the ball, what I receive in return is hate mail and people’s scorn. The emotional response cuts off any possible inspection of the logic.

On most questions where a majority with authority is facing a minority of dissenters or skeptics, the majority is delusional.
In other words, you are living in the matrix; much of what you and people believe is fundamentlaly wrong.

Reason 1, as above, is that the majority forms its view by circular reasoning, and rejects any attempt at logical discussion without considering it seriously, so it is prone to delusion.
Once the crowd concluded vaccines are safe and effective, for example, the question of whether the aluminum is damaging can apparently no longer be raised (even as more gets added to vaccines). And when I or others try to raise it, we are scorned and hated, and ineffectual in changing the opinion supported by circular reasoning. When new research papers appear that call it into question, they are ignored, neither cited in the safety surveys nor influencing medical practice in any way. This paragraph is all simple reporting of what has repeatedly happened.

Continue reading “3 Reasons You Are Living in the Matrix / How to Make a Red Pill” »

“Estonia right now is one of the biggest champions of the digital single market in Europe.”

Blockchain World Government Through a DAO

Imagine a world of unison, unbridled innovation, and international cooperation beyond our wildest dreams, where democracy reins supreme, with each person a voice in every decision, if they so choose –like an election — except for every measure put into practice by the government. Now, imagine this on a global scale, where a world government comprised of elected officials is run through the blockchain and a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

Since the blockchain is a public ledger that can only grow, where the past cannot be changed (just as time cannot be reversed), and this most secure of all technologies allows for a unique private +public key to be associated with every human on the planet (which can be stored offline like a SIN card), all of a sudden, a new era would be upon us. We would no longer be the children waging wars and spats over insignificant issues, or disregarding the ways of diplomacy for unnecessary loss of life and turmoil. Along with a new birth certificate or with proof of 2 pieces of existing identification, we could all have a unique LIFE ID # assigned and voice how such a government would operate. Each decision — instead of the singular election of the decision makers — would be handled by the guardians of the system: each and every human on Earth. With contributions by every country, we could retain our national identity, whilst also recognising the planetary singularity we all share.

Because, after all, when we view the world from space, there are no borders. When we work together on projects like the Large Hadron Collider, we make groundbreaking discoveries like the God Particle, and even invent miniature black holes that evaporate, proving the truth of theories long-since-contested. It may be a scare to some, to have their world turned upside down, in a sense. It might make them feel as if they’re losing freedom, rather than gaining it, when the opposite is the real case. Hence why such a government could combine the voting on issues of a certain nation, and adhere only to those with a LIFE ID # in that geographical region, yet still allow for everyone to vote on issues when it affects the world as a whole. We could still retain our national identities, and the respective pride and voice in them, but we would become stronger as a species, and fund things that truly matter, with the combined wealth of all adding up to immense sums.

Continue reading “Blockchain World Government Through a DAO” »

Definitely been seeing great research and success in Biocomputing; why I have been looking more and more in this area of the industry. Bio/ medical technology is our ultimate future state for singularity. It is the key that will help improve the enhancements we need to defeat cancer, aging, intelligence enhance, etc. as we have already seen the early hints already of what it can do for people, machines and data, the environment and resources. However, a word of caution, DNA ownership and security. We will need proper governance and oversight in this space.

© iStock/ Getty Images undefined How much storage do you have around the house? A few terabyte hard drives? What about USB sticks and old SATA drives? Humanity uses a staggering amount of storage, and our needs are only expanding as we build data centers, better cameras, and all sorts of other data-heavy gizmos. It’s a problem scientists from companies like IBM, Intel, and Microsoft are trying to solve, and the solution might be in our DNA.

A recent Spectrum article takes a look at the quest to unlock the storage potential of human DNA. DNA molecules are the building blocks of life, piecing our genetic information into living forms. The theory is that we can convert digital files into biological material by translating it from binary code into genetic code. That’s right: the future of storage could be test tubes.

Continue reading “The future of storage may be in DNA” »

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. We’re trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to share our plans and capabilities along the way. We’re also working to solidify our organization’s governance structure and will share our thoughts on that later this year.

Our metric

Defining a metric for intelligence is tricky, but we need one to measure our progress and focus our research. We’re thus building a living metric which measures how well an agent can achieve its user’s intended goal in a wide range of environments.