Humanity+ Summit 2010 Coverage and Video
The 2010 Humanity+ Summit was held this past weekend. Video from the event is archived at Livestream and you can find a brace of posts covering the event at the Speculist:
- Coverage of H Plus Summit at Harvard
- H Plus Summit Sat. Afternoon Highlights
- H Plus Summit Day 2 - Morning
- H Plus Sunday Afternoon
If you want to browse through the video streams, the links above are a useful guide to finding the presenters and topics of interest. A few items of interest related to engineered longevity:
There is a very ambitious schedule with an A-list group of speakers, full streaming worldwide over the internet...
John Smart announced his new venture to provide a push prize for brain preservation (25% for a mouse brain and 75% for a pig brain) at a nano-scale resolution. They have $100,000 but are hoping to grow that prize with additional donations. He discussed the plastination process in more detail, and his colleague demonstrated via video the extremely high resolution that they get with that now for small brain tissue samples.
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Aubrey de Grey described a role for citizen scientists to aid the work on anti-aging: improve the accuracy of media coverage by evaluating carefully and publicly reacting to press accounts of "breakthroughs" (many of which are not really). This keeps things realistic and reduces the fuel for the anti-hype side which can slow public acceptance.
From the other side of the aisle, the deathists-slash-anti-transhumanists at Futurisms have put together a large set of posts covering the Summit. Just read between the snark:
There's always a strange split at these sorts of conferences between big-picture visionary, scientific, and philosophical talks, and presentations on specific but low-level scientific findings that you'd expect to find at a more focused technical conference. The latter seem designed both to fill space and to give the attendees a sense that they are involved in an organized scientific project, and that they're in touch with what's going on. Given the dizzying pace, I'll probably be focusing on the more big-picture talks.
I can't stand the offensive, pejorative label of 'deathists'. As a passionate supporter of life extension and SENS and, I suppose, what some would call a transhumanist, I just can't take that kind of talk seriously. People who engage in it always make themselves look foolish. Not to mention that the Futurisms blog is actually pretty darn good. Why shouldn't they be critical of the transhumanist movement? Is it above critique? Of course not. I welcome their analysis.
@Jim: what would you call someone who wants the present state of people aging to death to continue?
Deathism seems to a simple, sensible term for such a viewpoint, and by extension its adherents are deathists. It's not a word thrown around lightly.
Bear in mind that people who speak favorably of the greatest slaughters of the 20th century are generally looked upon with disfavor. Yet calling for many times those death tolls to continue for year after year is somehow fine?
There are very few if any who want that, and certainly not at the New Atlantis. Interrogating a notion is not the same thing as directly opposing it. Even Leon Kass attests that he is merely raising concerns. In any event, it is totally contrary to our purposes to label and antagonize those who don't agree with us. The notion of defeating aging is shocking and unusual to many people, however much it may make sense to us. That doesn't make those who express concerns about these ideas 'death worshipers' or whatever else we may think to call them. It makes them members of a society that doesn't yet fully appreciate the urgency of this problem, nor the extent to which a solution is within reach.
As for transhumanist thinking at large, independent of simply defeating aging, it is entirely in need of critique, from within and without, especially in these early days of the movement. We can learn from our critics, and ought be more critical of ourselves.