To the uninitiated, the “”https://hplussummit.com/“>H+ Summit” at Harvard this weekend seemed a bit of a puzzle. It was hard to envision what unified the mix of inventors, futurists, techno whizzes, environmentalist, Internet zillionaires, “citizen scientists”, and animal rights activists. The schedule was broken down into the following categories: AI & Singularity, Brain, Biotech, Citizen Science, Education, Entrepreneurship, Fun!, Longevity, Media, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Physics and Robotics.
Thanks, then, to the NYTimes for explaining the concept behind much of the meeting: “Singularity”:
“…a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.
At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past
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Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process.
The story includes an interview with one of yesterday’s keynote speakers:
…On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.
“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”
H+ has already tweeted a comment on the Times story: “It was factually accurate…well-balanced article.” 60+ people interviewed by journalist"
On Sunday afternoon, the meeting room was aflicker with screens – on the podium, on the stage, on most laps and in many hands. The event was streamed, Tweeted (#Hplus) and live-blogged.
Harvard post doc Justyna Zander explained her project: The Computation of Things for Sustainable Development. A computerized life coach and then some? We’ll let her explain in this abstract from her website.
Today’s society is confronted with many challenges that result from the rapid development of different trends, threats, and dangers. This is mainly because of the increasing complexity of our surroundings, technological advances, changes in climate, and health implications; the growing number of alternatives to select; and the set of options to choose from. This paper outlines a technological solution to allow for a quick and reliable assessment of people’s possible decision paths and how this affects sustainable development. The framework, called Computation of Things is available to everybody and enables predictions of future scenarios based on sustainability criteria. As such, it engenders the promise for a fundamental breakthrough in terms of computational semantics the result of which is to increase the quality, reliability, and accessibility of predictions of the future human life scenarios.