I just got back from the European Futurists conference in Lucerne. It was very educational, but not in the way I had expected. Let me explain.
As probably all of you know, there is this concept of a “technological singularity”. It has a few definitions, one is that it is a point in time at which technological change becomes so fast that people can no longer keep up. Of course some people are less technologically inclined than others and so it’s not really a point in time, but rather a transition period. The transition is essentially complete once even the futurists can’t keep up with what is going on.
This morning I attended a 30 minute lecture at this conference about this new thing called “blogs”, and in particular this really great thing for reading them, called an RSS reader. We even got a five minute video telling people about RSS readers and how to use one. That’s right, what you’re probably reading this with, and have been using for the last 5 years, that is what the future is going to be. Mmmkay? Other speakers told us about how the internet is challenging traditional media. No! Really? People now collaborate online to create content, and some companies are even using the internet to get new business ideas from their customers. Wow! And on it went. Talking to many of the attendees was about the same. I had serious arguments with people about whether blogs are a valuable way to get information about new developments in science and technology. *blink blink*
If these people are futurists, then in Europe the singularity happened about, um, five years ago. These people aren’t boldly voyaging into the uncertain future, they’re struggling to catch up with the past.
At least Ian Pearson from British Telecom closed the conference with a blast of ideas about the coming wave of machine and augmented human intelligence, among other things. It was a fun talk with quite a few laughs, but I suspect that almost nobody took him at all seriously. At one point he asked whether anybody in the audience had even thought about whether it might be possible to live forever. I was reasonably close to the back and I only saw one hand go up. That, in a nutshell, is the state of futurism in Europe.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Alex // May 6, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Living forever might be seriously boring. I’ve thought about it in the context of the captivating “Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” short novel.
If you had the machine cater to your every wish, you would probably end up ordering the machine to massage the brain’s pleasure center directly. After all, every activity we crave to be doing is nothing more than a source of pleasure, so one might as well tap at the source instead of going through intermediaries.
If, however, immortality would mean nothing more than ‘living forever’, I wonder what patterns people would settle into. Keep exploring the physical world until it is fully understood? Grow spiritually? Try to squash the remains of “bad” human nature? (Remember, normal evolution no longer helps.)
It would probably be pretty boring, what with the stars dying out on you. And people aren’t designed for immortality anyway. Whatever is in ample supply holds no appeal.
2 Cale Sweeney // May 7, 2008 at 3:46 am
You’re out of your element Alex! Here are just two of the many variables to exponentially expand.
1. The size of the brain’s pleasure center.
2. The mechanical brain massagers pleasure per second output.
And that’s just from ideas from your entry.
Imagine a body with the capacity to withstand massive BAC levels while hooked up to a state of the art viking simulator.
3 Shane Legg // May 7, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Alex: I think a good answer to this kind of question was given by Peter Voss at a recent Singularity Conference (at start of video):
http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007/secondpanel
4 Nicole Simon // May 7, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Quark. (which is the german nice term for bullshit).
It may have been what they understand about futurism and they may very well be out of sync, but europe has a few more people running around who actually are up to speed on this. A conference where you really should be able to feel ahead of time would be reboot, with several others happening as well.
Are there people behind? of course. But so are people in the states if you just go to the right ‘conferences’.
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