Science, Technology and the Future

See web, and agenda.

Session titles and synopses:

• James Hughes – How Billionaires Ruined Futurism
• For decades, futurism promised a horizon of radical possibility—a Star Trek civilization of post-scarcity, longevity, and universal emancipation. But today, that horizon has been enclosed by a caste of tech-billionaires who have curdled the public’s hope for tomorrow into dread. From Musk’s erratic dismantling of the digital public sphere to Thiel’s surveillance capitalism and the generalized retreat into bunkers and seasteads, the oligarchs have rebranded “the future” as an escape hatch for the wealthy and a panopticon for the rest.

This talk argues that the concentration of technological power in the hands of a few erratic plutocrats is not just a moral failure, but an epistemological crisis; we can no longer predict the future because the “trends” of history have been hijacked by the whims of a few dozen men. Techno-optimism is dead so long as it remains a mascot for neo-feudalism. To save the transhumanist promise of liberation, we must move beyond asking billionaires for charity and proceed to the necessary conclusion: we must expropriate their platforms, democratize their firms, and reclaim the machinery of the future for the public good.

• Robin Hanson – Futarchy: Competent Governance Soon?!
• The biggest reason that our world is messed up in so many identifiable ways is that we use pretty broken systems of governance. With a competent governance, we could instead point our systems to the solvable problems we see, and they’d actually solve them. You might think we’ve tried all possible systems, but in fact we’ve hardly tried any of them. I invented a particular promising approach that is now undergoing successful trials.
• Aubrey de Grey – How close are we to robust mouse rejuvenation, and why does that matter?
• The “damage repair” approach to bringing aging under medical control has made huge strides since I first proposed it 25 years ago. However, since it is a divide-and-conquer strategy, we should not be surprised at the absence of progress in the “bottom line” of life extension, even in mice. Can we realistically expect that to change any time soon? I will present reasons to believe that we can, in the form of accelerating progress in proofs of efficacy of individual treatments, together with initial proof of concept that combining damage repair modalities will give additive benefits.
• Christine Peterson – Top 10 Longevity Strategies Today that you may not already know
• A choose-your-own adventure tour.

Longevity research is making progress! But how do we stay alive long enough to reach Longevity Escape Velocity? We’ll explore a few less-discussed strategies accessible to non-billionaires.

• Debate – Ben Goertzel & Hugo de Garis (mod: Adam Ford) – Should Humanity Become the Number Two Species?
• Anders Sandberg – Living inside the cyborg leviathan: artificial intelligence from the 17th century to the posthuman future
• Being human is hard: we are stupid and somewhat selfish, yet need to work together with other stupid and selfish people with their own goals. We survive by building societies, filled with institutions and habits that help us solve these tough coordination problems. These institutions often act as extended cognition, allowing us to go far beyond individual power. We are to some extent living inside artificial intelligence systems, and they have enabled us to take control over the planet… as well as caused the worst disasters in history. As we build AI, we are also making something that can slip inside our extended cognitive systems and enhance them into literal cyborg systems. We need not just enough of “first order alignment” – getting AI to do things we want safely, but also “second order alignment” – AI that plays well with our societies and structures. Otherwise there is a real risk we may lose our own ecological niche and find ourselves in a world that may be safe and prosperous, yet unfit for human flourishing. If we play it right, however, we might become part of something far grander: a cyborg civilization able to reach full autonomy.
• Adam Ford – More Moral than Us
• We’ve built machines that can out-calculate, out-game and out-predict us – and may soon out-think us. But could they ever out-care us – or will it with all that power remain indifferent?