Jim Baen's Universe

What's New in The Future And You

Columns

April 2008

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

My curiosity about the future is too powerful. Try as I might, it’s often difficult to bring the fun and fascinating interviews I have with my guests to a close; and so the show grows longer and longer. I'm now trying to hold them to 45 minutes, but even that’s a strain. Often they run to a full hour. The good news is that I am learning more about the future in the show’s new weekly format than ever before. Hopefully, every listener can say the same.

Featuring a single guest in each episode is allowing a deeper and more detailed examination of each guest’s vision of the future. This has expanded the variety of topics covered rather than contracting it, and has produced a bounty of material too great to fully describe in this column. Instead, a summary of recent topics followed by a list of recent guests seems more in order. So here they are.

Summary of Recent Topics

Topics discussed within recent episodes of The Future And You (those from January 16 to March 5) include all the following.

Human level Artificial Intelligence: The Turing Test; how profits will likely be made with AI applications; Artificial General Intelligence (AGI); “Friendly” AI; and how AI may go far beyond human level and lead to the Singularity.

Nanotechnology: Molecular manufacturing; gray goo; the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology; the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies; and the Foresight Nanotech Institute.

Cryonics: How much public credibility did cryonics lose by being associated with Paris Hilton?

Biotech: Synthetic biology and Craig Ventor's new artificial organism.

Life Extension: Life extension activism, and the founding of the Immortality Institute.

Privacy: We're losing our privacy and may have none left at all in a few decades, even in our own homes.

Catastrophic Dangers to Humanity: Replicating and non-replicating nano-weapon attacks; bioweapons; nuclear weapons; unfriendly AI; devastating asteroid strikes; pandemics; The Lifeboat Foundation; ADC (Asymmetric Destructive Capability in which large scale destruction can be accomplished with relatively small scale resources); SIMaD (Single Individual-Massively Destructive, or as some describe it "The Unabomber on steroids").

Transhumanist Philosophies: Making people far more than just healthy; increasing human IQ; wiring computers directly into the human brain (for linking to the internet and for sharing our thoughts with one another unfiltered and undiluted); singularitarianism and extropianism; negative public perceptions of transhumanism; and the fundamental question of transhumanism: do individual humans have a natural right to augmentation and enhancement?

The Transhumanist Community and its Activism: The World Transhumanist Association (WTA); the ongoing revitalization of the WTA and the new WTA webzine being put together by R. U. Sirius; the general public may be warming to transhumanist ideas thanks to movies and TV, but there remains a lot of fear of transhumanism among the religious right; the betterhumans.com website and the acceleratingfuture.com blog; there seem to be a lot of closet transhumanists but new transhumanists seem to be of all ages, not just young people.

Dirty Bird Secrets: Why official decisions concerning which birds are, and are not, declared to be separate species are based mostly on science, but also partly on politics, emotionalism, local tradition and sentimentality.

Cultural Trends: The ongoing feminization of civilization; how non-lethal weapons might alter the nature of war; and the best and worst that can be expected of the US presidential candidates (John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton).

Virtual Worlds: The prejudice and intolerance against digital people inside Second Life; the concept and philosophy of being a digital person; Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon; college classes within Second Life; future technology may allow total immersion through full sensory feedback directly wired into the human nervous system; Extropia DaSilva’s blog post entitled Snowcrashing into the Diamond Age.

Trends outside of America: English has become the world language for business and technology (the French hate this); trends in Germany, Europe, Turkey, India and China.

SETI: The Fermi Paradox; extrasolar planets; and what it might mean to find another earth.

Energy: Running out of oil; coal is plentiful, but burning it cleanly may be decades away; solar power; nuclear power; and one environmentalists claim that “if environmentalists are going to get serious about global warming they may have to find a way to embrace nuclear power.”

Going Green: Green energy; green investment funds; being Green has become the In thing for corporate marketing; Wal-Mart has become a leader in promoting Green; saving the environment is now widely seen as good business.

Misc Trends: Wikipedia; eBay; PayPal; science fiction; trends in butterfly watching; space exploration; the new F-22 fighter jet which is under production, and the F-35 fighter which is still in development.

Misc People: Randal L. Schwartz, Shaun Ferrell, Rich Sigfrit, Mur Lafferty, Tee Morris, Argent Bury, Peer Infinity, Khannea Suntzu, and Boc Cryotank (your host’s name in Second Life).

Recent Guests

Guests who have been kind enough to reveal their thoughts and ideas about the future in the recent episodes of The Future And You include all the following:

Eric Flint, best selling author of more than 25 novels of science fiction and fantasy, as well as editor-in-chief of the online science fiction and fantasy magazine Jim Baen's Universe.

Catherine Asaro, scientist and Nebula award-winning author, has written 16 novels which have been described as a blend of hard science fiction, romance and space adventure. From UCLA she received a Bachelors Degree in Chemistry. From Harvard she received a Masters in Physics and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics.

David B. Coe the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of nine fantasy novels, some of which have been translated into no less than six languages including Russian, German, Dutch, and French. David has a doctorate in American history from Stanford University and enjoys nature photography, bird and butterfly watching, and playing guitar.

Paul Levinson, author, media commentator and professor, has been interviewed over 500 times on television and radio. He is a professor teaching in New York City and has a doctorate in Media Ecology. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a songwriter, singer and record producer; with recordings by the Vogues, Donna Marie of the Archies and Ellie Greenwich. As a radio producer he worked with Murray the K and Wolfman Jack.

Michael Anissimov, the well known futurist, blogger and transhumanism activist is the Lifeboat Foundation's fundraising Director for North America, and is involved with the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and was recently voted to join the board of the World Transhumanist Association.

George Dvorsky is Executive Editor of betterhumans.com, which is a webzine with News, Articles, and interactive features serving the transhumanist community. He is also the co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association and has served on the Board of Directors for the World Transhumanist Association.

Philippe Van Nedervelde is the international spokesperson for the Lifeboat Foundation. He is also Executive Director for the Foresight Nanotech Institute in Europe, and a Global Task Force Member for CRN, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

Giulio Prisco is a futurist, scientist, corporate consultant and until recently the Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and on the Global Task Force on Implications and Policy for CRN, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

Matt Browne is an IT professional living in Frankfurt Germany. With a Masters degree in Computer Science and Computational Linguistics, he has been involved in projects developing natural language processing (a form of AI) with a strong focus on machine translation systems.

Glen Walkerson writes tech-manuals for the F-16 fighter jet.

Peer Infinity is a digital person and transhumanist resident of Second Life.

Argent Bury, a digital person living exclusively within Second Life, provides an essay concerning the tension between immersionists and augmentationists within her virtual world.

You can learn more about exactly who said what about what at the show's page.

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Recent News

Your Host has Joined Lifeboat Foundation’s Board of Advisors

I have been invited to join the advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation. Here are the first two paragraphs of their mission statement:

The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.

Lifeboat Foundation is pursuing a variety of options, including helping to accelerate the development of technologies to defend humanity, including new methods to combat viruses (such as RNA interference and new vaccine methods), effective nanotechnological defensive strategies, and even self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.

I consider this a personal honor, as well as a vote of confidence in the educational value of the work I have been