TransVision 2010, October 22-24, 2010

TransVision 2010 is over! I wish to thank all speakers and participants, those who came to Milan and those who participated remotely via Teleplace. Special thanks to Kim for her work at the main Teleplace workstation and for handling many technical problems, and to Cosimo and Jacopo for their work at the HD video camera. I wish to thank the volunteer Italian to English translator (I am not mentioning your name here because I guess you prefer it this way, but you know who you are and thank you so much), who gave also a great unscheduled presentation of the Polytopia Project. And of course I also want to thank Riccardo and Stefano for their support in organizing and running the conference. In particular Stefano should really have stayed at home to recover from recent surgery, but he made a special effort to be with us.

In the first two pictures, Dan Massey and Max More giving their talks. In the foreground, the Terasem 1 O'Neill Island One Space Habitat, a Bernal sphere model built by Simon Deering for the Terasem Movement of Martine Rothblatt and presented at TV10 by Khannea Suntzu. The model is now on its way to Florida to be delivered to the Terasem Movement. We had many great talks, not only about visionary technologies but also about literature, politics, philosophy and art. The second half of the first day has been dedicated to Italian neo-Futurist literary and artistic movement, but strike neo- because Futurism is always Neo by definition. I have been disappointed by not seeing as many people as I hoped: I counted about 65 participants in Milan over 3 days including a dog. The problem is that participating in conferences costs money and time, and in my own presentation (which I shortened to less than ten minutes to make time for other speakers) I proposed online conferences 2.0 as a solution.

We had about 30 remote participants in the in the TVirtual online extension of TransVision 2010, hosted by the teleXLR8 project based on the Teleplace online telepresence platform. Remote participants have been able to watch all talks in realtime, and interact with speakers and other participants. In the picture above, Max More's talk is shown to remote participants in Teleplace, and the virtual Teleplace conference hall is shown to the participants in Milan. We used two Teleplace workstations, one to stream the video and voice of the speaker and to interact with remote participants, and one to stream the speaker's slides. Lesson learned: if the text on the slides is small it is better to upload also the original .ppt or .pdf to Teleplace. We did this in realtime during the conference, but we should have done it in advance. For those speakers without presentations in .ppt or .pdf, we used the second Teleplace workstation to show the audience in Milan to the audience in Teleplace.

In the afternoon of the second day we have reversed the procedure outlined above and shown remote talks from speakers in Teleplace to the audience in Milan. After great talks by Eugen Leitl and Robert Geraci, Natasha Vita-More started her talk (picture above)... but 20 minutes into Natasha's talk all the Internet connections in the conference hall in Milan died, perhaps due to overload caused by too many WiFi connections in parallel (about 10 participants were using the hotel's WiFi connection). The Internet service provider's technicians could not fix the problem. The remote participants in Teleplace continued without us, and we have video recordings of the talks by remote speakers. However, all remote speakers have been invited to repeat their talks to the teleXLR8 community.

In the morning of the third day, not only the Internet connections in the conference hall were still dead, but also the screen projection system was dead! I had a (very) heavy-handed "exchange of views" with the hotel's personnel (wife says I can be quite unpleasant on occasions), and the technical problems were fixed.

This was a very interesting event, with great talks by great speakers. I am happy to have seen again many old friends and made many new ones. In the picture above, some speakers and participants at a dinner after the end of the conference. I was not really able to pay attention to any of the talks including my own, and I look forward to watching the video coverage. We recorded everything on video, both in HD with the cameras on site, and from Teleplace. The videos will be available online and on the conference's DVD proceedings. The videos recorded in Teleplace will be available online in a few days, and those recorded on site in a few weeks.

I have started two blog posts as containers and index pages for material to be posted later. Both posts have the same title as this one. The post on the TransVision 2010 blog will have links to the HD videos recorded in Milan, and the post on the teleXLR8 blog has links to the videos recorded in Teleplace. The Twitter feed created by participants at #TV2010 has the twitting history of the conference.

UPDATE - (almost) full video coverage recorded in Teleplace.
UPDATE - Transhumanist Science, Futurist Art, Telepresence and Cosmic Visions of the Future at TransVision 2010 @ KurzweilAI

My presentation at TransVision 2010: Online conferences 2.0

My presentation at TransVision 2010: Online conferences 2.0

One problem with conferences is that participating costs money and time. Today many conferences offer live video streams of all talks and discussion, which is very important for those who cannot attend physically. Some recent conferences like the ASIM 2010 Conference in San Francisco (satellite to the Singularity Summit 2010) have offered fully interactive remote participation with multi-user video, audio, text and document sharing (“mixed-reality”).

Mixed-reality via modern telepresence technology permits opening conferences to remote participants by merging on-site and remote participants in one virtual group. The 2-way video and audio link enables each participant, on-site or remote, to be seen and heard by all other participants, on-site or remote. Remote speakers and attendees are able to actively participate, follow the talks via interactive video streaming, ask questions to the speakers, contribute to the discussion, and give talks themselves. Of course, modern telepresence technology permits also online-only “conferences 2.0″, and I think this is an important trend. Going back to “one problem with conferences is that participating costs money and time“, it is evident that online conferences 2.0 permit saving a lot of money and time, thus enabling more people to participate in cultural acceleration.

I will present our teleXLR8 project based on Teleplace, recently covered by Hypergrid Business, one of the best online magazines focused on professional applications of virtual reality, “as an online open TED, using modern telepresence technology for ideas worth spreading, and as a next generation, fully interactive TV network with a participative audience.” See also “teleXLR8 Project News – a telepresence community for cultural acceleration“, our mini-manifesto Telepresence Education for a Smarter World on the IEET site and the interview MIND and MAN: Getting Mental with Giulio Prisco, by Natasha Vita-More, on H+ Magazine.

teleXLR8 on Hypergrid Business as "online TED", Teleplace talk on BCI

The teleXLR8 project has been covered by Hypergrid Business, one of the best online magazines focused on professional applications of virtual reality, "as an online open TED, using modern telepresence technology for ideas worth spreading, and as a next generation, fully interactive TV network with a participative audience."

The Hypergrid Business article has the first public indications of the monthly membership fee for teleXLR8: $15, or $10 if paid annually. See this administrative note for more details.

I am organizing the TransVision 2010 conference in good old brickspace, and unfortunately many people will not be able to come for the usual reasons: money and time. Of course, the conference will be open to remote participants and speakers via teleXLR8. I am persuaded that, with Teleplace, telepresence technology has achieved critical performance, usability and immersion for online-only conferences, and I believe more and more conferences will move online.

Later today (or tomorrow morning depending on where you are: Sunday October 17, 2010, at 10am PST, 1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm CET) Max Hodak will give a talk in Teleplace on Brain-machine interfacing: current work and future directions. In the picture above, Max lectures in Teleplace. UPDATE: This was a great talk. About 30 participants attended the talk and contributed to the discussion with very interesting questions and comments. For those who could not attend we have recorded everything (talk, Q/A and discussion) on video.

Brain-Machine Interfacing (BMI), or Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) is one of the emerging technologies which will start having a very big impact in the next decade of the 10s. From the abstract of Max' talk: "Fluid, two-way brain-machine interfacing represents one of the greatest challenges of modern bioengineering. It offers the potential to restore movement and speech to the locked-in, and ultimately allow us as humans to expand far beyond the biological limits we’re encased in now."

See also "teleXLR8 Project News - a telepresence community for cultural acceleration", our mini-manifesto Telepresence Education for a Smarter World on the IEET site and the interview MIND and MAN: Getting Mental with Giulio Prisco, by Natasha Vita-More, on H+ Magazine. Besides the existing Facebook Group and Linkedin Group, we have created a teleXLR8 mailing list on Google Groups. Please feel free to join the mailing list to discuss the project.

Talking to idiots

Amor Mundi - A Few Friendly Challenges for the Robot Cultists: "Prisco is quoted, you will recall, as declaring me "an idiot… so intellectually dishonest that, if you say 2+2=4, he will claim that you said 4+4=2 and insult you for it."

This is true: on Ben Goertzel blog I have offered this advice to Ben:

"Ben, don't waste your time debating Carrico. Besides being an idiot, he is so intellectually dishonest that, if you say 2+2=4, he will claim that you said 4+4=2 and insult you for it.

Some of us used to debate him, also because he was a member of the transhumanist community before being kicked out, but we have stopped bothering. Believe me, better ignoring him."

After calling me an idiot (of course), Carrico continues: "I am happy to propose a challenge to Prisco... to point to actual instances in which I declare 4 + 4 to equal 2"

Now, English is not my native language and I do make mistakes on occasions. But it seems to me that "claim that you said 4+4=2" and "I declare 4 + 4 to equal 2" are two very different things. Perhaps my command of the English language is not good enough, which is certainly a possibility. Another possibility is that this person is not only an idiot, but one so hopelessly idiot that he does not understand his own native language.

Si terra’ a Milano, nel penultimo weekend di ottobre, il congresso mondiale dei transumanisti: TransVision 2010

Si terra’ a Milano, nel penultimo weekend di ottobre, il congresso mondiale dei transumanisti: TransVision 2010.

Sarà un intenso, rapido e appassionante percorso nel pensiero transumanista contemporaneo, le tecnologie in via di sviluppo, e quelle più visionarie basate su conquiste scientifiche ancora lontane. La conferenza, che avrà luogo da venerdì 22 a domenica 24 di Ottobre alla Sala Carmagnola dell’ Hotel dei Cavalieri a Milano, esplorerà le tendenze scientifiche, tecnologiche, culturali, artistiche e sociali che promettono di cambiare il nostro mondo al di là di ogni aspettativa e potrebbero risultare in una “Singolarità” in solo poche decine di anni.

La precedente edizione si è tenuta negli Stati Uniti d’America, con la partecipazione del futurologo milionario Ray Kurzweil e di William Shatner, il celebre capitano Kirk della serie Star Trek. Si annunciano nomi importanti anche per questa edizione italiana della kermesse.

Uno dei principali relatori sarà Aubrey de Grey, il profeta del prolungamento radicale della vita, noto per aver affermato che “la prima persona che vivrà più di mille anni è già nata”. Sembrerebbe una provocazione difficile da prendere sul serio se de Grey, direttore del progetto SENS a Cambridge, non avesse un’ impressionante serie di sviluppi teorici e risultati sperimentali su animali da laboratorio da esibire a sostegno delle sue idee rivoluzionarie.

Non si tratterà di un raduno di soli scienziati e ricercatori, ma anche di filosofi come gli italiani Riccardo Campa e Roberto Marchesini, autori di numerosi saggi sul transumanesimo e il postumano, nonche’ l’inglese trapiantato negli Stati Uniti Max More, Direttore dell’ associazione transumanista globale Humanity+ e riconosciuto come uno dei padri fondatori del transumanismo contemporaneo. Prevista anche la partecipazione di artisti: Graziano Cecchini, noto per aver dipinto di rosso futurista la fontana di Trevi, sarà affiancato da una coppia di artisti olandesi con una scultura dinamica intesa a celebrare il nostro futuro nello spazio. Quest’ opera è stata voluta dalla geniale Martine Rothblatt, transessuale, miliardaria grazie alle sue scoperte scientifiche nei settori dello spazio e della medicina di frontiera e proprietaria di un’importante casa farmaceutica.

Rothblatt sarà fra i numerosi relatori che parleranno di una delle prospettive più affascinanti: l’ immortalità. Non solo grazie al prolungamento della vita biologica sviluppato dal progetto SENS di Aubrey de Grey, ma anche grazie al lavoro d’avanguardia della “nouvelle vague” di ricercatori che si occupano di immortalità cibernetica: il trasferimento del contenuto della mente umana a computer avanzatissimi, il cosidetto “Mind Uploading” che potrebbe offrire una vera e propria imortalità post-biologica alla generazione dei nostri nipoti. E ci sono quelli che si spingono ancora più oltre e ipotizzano la realizzazione, attraverso la scienza e la tecnologia, di tutte le promesse delle religioni. Nell’ultima giornata della conferenza, si parlerà anche di nuove religioni transumaniste basate sulla scienza.

Come è naturale per una conferenza dedicata a tecnologie tanto avanzate, TransVision 2010 sarà aperta anche a coloro che non possono essere presenti fisicamente grazie all’uso delle più avanzate tecnologie di realtà virtuale.

Sito web: http://transvision.cc/

My favorite Dawkins quote

Via the Transcript of Lincoln Cannon's Presentation at Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010: In his book, "The God Delusion", the talented evolutionary biologist and leading voice of the New Atheist movement, Richard Dawkins, writes:

"Whether we ever get to know them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet. As Arthur C Clarke put it, in his Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods . . . In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn't start that way. Science-fiction authors . . . have even suggested (and I cannot think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some vastly superior civilization. But the simulators themselves would have to come from somewhere. The laws of probability forbid all notions of their spontaneously appearing without simpler antecedents. They probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution..."

Of course, I completely agree with Dawkins and these are precisely the arguments that we use in support of a new transhumanist spirituality or, if you like, religion. See for example my own presentation at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010, titled "The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church".

TransVision 2010 Update: program, abstracts, TVirtual online extension

TransVision 2010 Update: program, abstracts, TVirtual online extension

After the change of conference venue announced last week, the preparation of TransVision 2010 is in full swing.

We have updated the conference program with new speakers and the abstracts of Miriam Ji Sun, Francesco Monico, Roberto Guerra, Marta Rossi and Jacopo Tagliabue, Antonio Saccoccio, Randal A. Koene, Danila Medvedev, Valerija Pride, David Styles, Mike Treder, David Pearce, Anders Sandberg, Remi Sussan, Alex Lightman, Khannea Suntzu and Simon Deering, Fiorella Terenzi. Other speakers and abstracts will be added soon.

Those who wish to attend the TransVision 2010 conference and community convention (October 22, 23 and 24 in Milan, Italy) but cannot come to Milan will have the option to participate remotely in the TVirtual online extension, watch all talks in realtime, and interact with speakers and other participants. TVirtual, hosted by the teleXLR8 project based on the Teleplace online telepresence platform, will be a mixed-reality event similar to the recent ASIM 2010 Conference. TVirtual tickets are available at a very reduced price.

TransVision 2010 is a global transhumanist conference and community convention, organized by several transhumanist activists, groups and organizations, under the executive leadership of the Italian Transhumanist Association (AIT) and with the collaboration of an Advisory Board. The event will take place on October 22, 23 and 24, 2010 in Milan, Italy with many options for remote online access.

Register now

post links to Twitter, your blogs and websites, and add your name to the TransVision 2010 Facebook page.

TransVision 2010 Conference to be streamed live interactively in Teleplace

Those who wish to attend the TransVision 2010 conference and community convention (October 22, 23 and 24 in Milan, Italy) but cannot come to Milan will have the option to participate remotely in the TVirtual online extension, watch all talks in realtime, and interact with speakers and other participants. TVirtual, hosted by the teleXLR8 project based on the Teleplace online telepresence platform, will be a mixed-reality event similar to the recent ASIM 2010 Conference.

TVirtual tickets are available at a very reduced price. Those who register for the full 3-days TVirtual before or on Sunday, October 10, including of course those who have registered already, will receive a free yearly membership in teleXLR8. Those who register for the full 3-days TVirtual after this date will be offered a 50% discount for yearly membership in teleXLR8. Current teleXLR8 beta account holders will be welcome to participate in TVirtual.

If you choose to attend TVirtual, you will be able to watch all talks, see and talk to speakers and other participants, and attend special telepresence sessions during, before and after the conference. In the pictures above, a TV10 planning session and several TransVision 2010 speakers giving talks in Teleplace at recent events. Please see the teleXLR8 website for full video coverage of recent transhumanist talks.

For a more detailed description of the objectives of our online events program, see our mini-manifesto Telepresence Education for a Smarter World on the IEET site and the interview MIND and MAN: Getting Mental with Giulio Prisco, by Natasha Vita-More, on H+ Magazine. See also teleXLR8 Project News – a telepresence community for cultural acceleration.

The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church

UPDATE - The video of my talk is online on Vimeo. I also gave a similar talk at the Turing Church Online Workshop 1 on November 20, 2010.

Yesterday I gave a talk on The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010. The conference explored the intersection of religion, science, spirituality and technology, from a transhumanist perspective. Transhumanism advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, and observes that if our rapid technological evolution continues to accelerate then humanity will become a new species before the end of the 21st century.

Abstract: Following the Turing-Church conjecture, minds can be uploaded from biological brains to other computational substrates. Mind uploading research may achieve practical results within decades. Given the technology, humans may live indefinitely, colonizing the universe, and resurrecting the dead by "copying them to the future". Perhaps they will create synthetic realities inhabited by sentient minds; perhaps we are in a synthetic reality. These considerations parallel the tenets of many religions. The Turing Church will be a meta-religion, without central doctrine, characterized by common interest in the promised land where science and religion meet, science becomes religion, and religion becomes science.

I guess the talk can be summarized in one sentence (Slide 4): "A memetically strong religion needs to offer resurrection besides immortality."

I talked remotely to the audience at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and to those who watched the live stream of the conference. I wish to thank the organizers for setting up the live stream, this should be done for all conferences. The live stream worked very well (perhaps the quality was a bit too high for those with slower Internet connections) and I was able to watch the talks and participate in the lively discussion via chat and Twitter.

The slides of my presentation are embedded below and available on Slideshare.

Transpirit2010

View more presentations from Giulio Prisco.

At the end of the presentation I showed the short movie CA Resurrection: "If we live in a simulation, the Mind can copy us to new simulation. This is illustrated by the short movie "CA Resurrection", which I made with a Game of Life program. The protagonist pattern is doomed to certain death by interaction with an environment that, except in very carefully controlled conditions, is very unfriendly to the stability of patterns (sounds familiar?), but is copied before death and restored to life in a friendlier environment."

The movie is embedded in the Slideshare show and also available on YouTube and blip.tv.

My talk tonight at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010

UPDATE with slides and video clip: The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church

Tonight I will give a talk at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010. The conference will explore the intersection of religion, science, spirituality and technology, from a transhumanist perspective. Transhumanism advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, and observes that if our rapid technological evolution continues to accelerate then humanity will become a new species before the end of the 21st century.

I will give a talk on The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church. Abstract: Following the Turing-Church conjecture, minds can be uploaded from biological brains to other computational substrates. Mind uploading research may achieve practical results within decades. Given the technology, humans may live indefinitely, colonizing the universe, and resurrecting the dead by "copying them to the future". Perhaps they will create synthetic realities inhabited by sentient minds; perhaps we are in a synthetic reality. These considerations parallel the tenets of many religions. The Turing Church will be a meta-religion, without central doctrine, characterized by common interest in the promised land where science and religion meet, science becomes religion, and religion becomes science.

I will talk remotely to the audience at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and to those who will watch the live stream of the conference. I wish to thank the organizers for setting up the live stream, this should be done for all conferences. This is the stream URL, please come to watch all talks and participate in the discussions. After the talk I will post my slides here, and I understand that the videos of all talks will be available online after the conference.