+d1s0

+David Orban

+

+H+ Summit 2010 @ Harvard: Rise of the Citizen-Scientist

+June 12-13, Harvard University

+transcript by Bryan Bishop (back of the room.. typing furiously)

+

+I would like everyone to take a seat as quickly as possible so that we can get started. Maybe the speakers who are speaking first could sit in the front row.

+

+Welcome to Harvard University and to H+ Summit. My name is David Orban. I am chairman of Humanity Plus. I will introduce the conference very quickly so that we can move on to fun stuff and speakers and so on. So, I want to talk about logistics for a little bit. Our conference is extremely packed with interesting information as we raelize it. We will ask that everyone have fun, but be alert to timing. We ask speakers and will be time to be aggressive in keeping you on time. At the least, to realize, at least, for example, if you have, lunch don't get back in time, the conference might start without you. And you'll miss the robot demo. So be sure to be back. Q&A. So, we have a moderated Q&A which will mean that I will ask the questions to the speakers, and Lightman will ask the questions to the speakers. All of you are welcome to send questions by twitter using the #hplus hashtag, both for tweeting and asking questions. Of course, questions are those tweets that end with a question mark. The reason why I decided to do this is because we have a global audience, not only to our individual people on the stream, also in the cities in Moscow, Petersburgh, Melbourne, listening groups that have been organized. Taking advantage of the timezone difference. I want to give them the same opportunity that you have, to answer questions too. We will have a series of nice announcements. I think they are nice. These will come up at unexpected moments, taking you off guard. Another reason to be here all the time. I want to thank of course, all of the people who have helped making this happen. Alex Lightman, our conference coordinator ???, The Harvard Future Society who is hosting and organizing, Christian Anderson, Sarah, Jant Lee, who have helped with promotion and using every possible channel. And of course, I want to thank all of our speakers, and all of you at the least. This conference is for you. Make sure you go ahead and tweet and blog. We have an official blogging site at scientificblogging. You can sign up for a blogging account and start telling your story about the conference as it happens, in real time. The wifi should be available to everybody. Don't worry, we won't do a Steve Jobs, because there are three wired connections. So go wild. That's it for me, the next speaker is Alex Lightman.

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+

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+Noah Goodman.

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+Reverse engineering intelligence.

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+If we're going to make ourselves better, my research is aimed at understanding our minds by answering the very old question: what is thought? More precisely, how are thoughts structured, and how does the structure of thought lead to flexible behaviors that humans exhibit? And let's answer these at the computational and mathematical level. And more precisely, perhaps at an engineering level. What is thought? What are the engineering principles we need?

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+Let me start by describing two important ideas in cognitive science. The first starts with the observation that htought is incredibly productive. It make sinfinite use of finite things. If you read in the newspaper one day, that big green bear who loves chocolate. You have no trouble conjuring it to imagination, the mind is very productive. Even at a bigger scale, mass and momentum, or the concept of a nation. To explain this productivity, cognitive scientists have turned to the term of computational representation. Thought is built up from small pieces combinatorially. We bring up words from a small set of letters. Microphone, oops. We can build up molecules out of a small set of atoms, and similarly, we can build up thoughts from smaller pieces.

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+There's another principle that some people have come to: thought is incredibly useful even though the world is uncertain. So, the uncertainty of the world can come in the form of nosiness, there's rain all over the place. You can still guess what the road-signs mean. Imagine you call your friend up on your phone. Does your friend hang up on you because he wanted to hurt your feelings? Are you trtying to recover? You don't have enough information.

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+Cognitive scientists use the principle of probabilistic inference. We start with a problem like that, A+B+C, and in elementary school you think there's a single answer. In probability, there's degrees of belief and so on. There's a mathematics for dealing with that. The probability calculus is for reasoning under uncertainty. Now, these two principles are incredibly influential in cognitive science. There's the beginning of cognitive science through logical ai, and then certain in reaction to this, probability took over, kind of like in connectionists research programs. These two ideas, composition and probability; there have been few programs and attempts to bring them together.

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+Computational language of thought hypothesis, through probability. To explain this more carefully, let me give the flavor of mathematics. We use an old calculus, like Church-Turing thesis fame Church, lambda calculus. You can combine functions, like double that takes X and adds itself. You can define higher-order functions. The remarkable thing is that by making functions and putting them together, you get the abilities of computation. To add probability to this, we do something that looks simple, like coin flipping, random, etc. We might flip a coin and call that A, B and C, if you do this again, because the flipping of a coin is random, and so on. And if you keep doing this, and making a histogram, and you get a probability distribution, it's degrees of uncertainty, how much you think is going to be one, zero, and that's the flavor. The probabilistic lambda calculus is universal for probabilistic computation. This is all we need.

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+We need this probabilistic language of thought hypothesis more precise. The mental representations of things that make up thoughts, there's functions in a probbailistic lambda calculus. This is great because (1) the thoughts are built up into bigger ufnctions, (2) those representations those thoughts support thinking, but it's probabilistic inference which deals with uncertainty. It's a mathematics that is precise enough to develop a language called CHURCH. You can build models.

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+http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church

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+I want to give you one breif example. How do you use this abstract formal system for explaining how humans think? You have a friend Bob who has this box, he puts it on a table, and the light goes on. How do you think the box works? Maybe you need to put them together. So we ask people, similar to this in an experiment, and people siad, very stronglyh, well you have to push both buttons A&C, to make the light go on. So why do I find this striking? Well it's striking because if you approach this problem from a causal analytical problme, Dr. Spock, a perfect scientist. There's not enough information, you have confounding evidence. That's not what people think: the structure is that you need to press both buttons. Sure enough, if you only take causality into account, you don't know what's going on.

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+What we need to do is incorporate how people reason about other people. We use a probabilistic lambda calculus to say that beliefs and desires combine together to actions, where there are approximations of achievement of their desires. We can compose it together with a model of causality that makes a bigger model about what an agent knows, and okay probability calculus, given that I have seen this evidence. The beautiful thing is that this model now strongly predicates the inference that the people make. Basically what the model is doing is why else has bob pressed both of those buttons unless he needed to to get the lights to come on.

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+Because it's compositional, and the model of rational action, there's a whole variety of different inferences that people draw. Some of my plants have sprouted, you might have inferred that not all of them have sprouted, we can take that same model, and we could say that the desire is his to communicate clearly, we find the prediction that some of them have sprouted, and maybe not all of them have sprouted. Suppose he only checked some, and then he sprouted some, and if you assume that plants sprout, then you could then assume that maybe all of the plants have sprouted. We have this scale of implicature, as the model predicts this goes away if the person who is speaking has partial knowledge. You can use this set of principle to explain complicated aspects of human cognition.

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+What I've done is said that there's two principals that we want to take into account, to understand thought at a computational and engineering level. We can make a formal simple to explain this. We can explore the flexibility and power of human thinking. Once we master how human thinking works, we can go on to build a better system. Thanks.

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+

+Andrea Kuszewski

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+I was told that intelligence was fixed at birth, that it was genetic. I of course disagree. I have been working as a therapist. I had a 4 year old client. His IQ was tested to be in the low 80s. After about two and a half years of working with him, and his IQ tested over 100. That's a significant gain: over one standard deviation, training about how to look at the world, how to think and problem solve, and he achieved things that blew me away. When people tell you that you can increase your intelligence, I disagree.

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+You can increase your intelligence. Working with that child was a life-changing event for me. For a couple of reasons. What can happen when you set the bar high and challenge yourself, and work hard and reach goals that seemed unreachable. This got me interested in intelligence and creativity, but also the high-end and exceptional abilities. It's a matter of tapping into the strenghts to help bring up the weaknesses. So there's a study that came out a couple of years ago about improving fluid intelligence through working memory. This shook up the world in intelligence research, up to that point there had been no study about transferring a new ability to another task. They trained people in working memory, a test where you hold a stimuli in working memory, and they try to distract you from encoding. The trained group was able to increase their scores over different lengths of time. There's a different number of days that they were trained. There was a remarkable improvement in their skills. When they started off the study, they had a test of cognition, and after training, the group that was trained scored higher. There was more to it than that. It wasn't just that they were able to score better on the ENVAC test, they showed that fluid intelligence is trainable, and the more you train, the more you gain. If you train harder and longer, you have an increase in your skill. This was across all ability levels, it wasn't due to low IQ or something to start with. Every group showed an increase. The most important thing was that they weren't training them on test questions, but rather on WM. It wasn't training to the test.

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+So. What you could do is, take the ENVAC test and take it every day for every day for the next 30 years. I don't want to do that. What I did was, I thought we could take one reality theory, and apply that kind of training and skill, to every day life and what's practical. So I produced 5 concepts: novelty seeking, challenge seeking, creativity, networking, and ... and if you do all of those things, you can increase your intelligence.

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+Seeking novelty. Of the five personality factors, openness is the only personality trait that correlates with intelligence. People with higher IQ are involving themselves in more things, they are crossing domains, not just a specialized domain, they sought out other means of knowledge also. They are making more connections, associating ideas with more than one processee path, you have an exponential increase in the ability to understand things.

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+Challenging yourself. There's been a lot of cruft about brain training gains. People play Soduko to make themselves smarter. You watch your skill improve, blah. Well that's good, you have growth. Once you learn how to play that brain, and learn the necessary skill, it goes into hibernation mode. Your brain figures out how to do it, and it stops working as hard. So, you get deficient at it. Once you learn it, you move on to the next game. There's a famous study done, quite a few years ago, the tetris study, they trained people on playing Tetris, and it got more popular after the study, anyway, it got popular, they trained people on how to play tetris. After several weeks of training, but after 50 days of training they became experts, the growth stopped. You can't just keep doing the same thing over and over, you have to push it to the next level. You're not doing any more growth, you're just keeping on.

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+Think creatively. This is my favorite topic. I study creativity, and it's important and often overlooked. When you look at a problem in a multi-modal fashion, you're processing it differently, you're able to come up with new solutions to ideas, and sparking ideas that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Someone that is my big idol, he did a study a couple years ago, a dean at Tufts, at looking how you teach in the classroom. The way that we assess students is not the best measure of ability, or the best way to teach to become better. He had one way that was in one class, and he took the other class and turned it into a multi-modal class room, multiple stories, teaching to learning, problem solving, practical applications for htings, and at the end of the semester, the students scored higher on the course, and on the test, and the pure memory test, they scored higher on that one too. They learned the material, and they were carrying that information over into other tests of memory. It's the same thing going on here.

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+Doing things the hard way. I cannot say enough about this. You need to struggle in order to see improvement in your intellectual capacity. How many people use GPS? I have a terrible sense of direction. GPS is useful. I try to use it as little as possible. When I'm told where to go, I'm not paying attention to what side of town, and other reasoning skills like that. Instead of blindly going through with GPS. I try to not focus on that. It's helping my sense of direction by getting lost, and I learn more skill in navigating myself around Boston. So, trying to quickly get through here.

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+Networking. When you network with other people, you're thinking outside the box, people are encouraging you to think of a new solution, in a different field, and you collaborate, and making new connections, and having multiple disciplines. And that's all I have to say about that.

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+How can we tak eall of these things and put them together and figure out how much we can improve intelligence? How much can you improve? I am inviting all of you to become a citizen scientist, fill out my survey, it's a short test that would take maybe only 20 minutes or 30 minutes top. Be a citizen scientist. (Wait, doesn't this make you a test subject, not a scientist?)

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+

+Andrew Hessel.

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+Altered Carbon. Carbon processing. Programming. Economics.

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+It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you Alex and David. Today's a different talk for me. Normally I speak about drug development. I do a lot of networking. I'm not sure if it makes me smarter. I wanted to share a story about some of the work on the front of Carbon. Now, carbon is the structural material for living things. It's where all carbon.. it's a carbon world. Carbon wasn't on my agenda for the last, what, but on the right hand side here, is a friend of mine. Ted Redelmeier. He is a trader, he observes massive amounts of information about the world. The stack of newspaper and information that comes to his home, is amazing. He's aware of global trends well in advance of other people. In January of 2009, he said carbon, and I didn't know what he was talking about. Ted had realized that this global carbon cycle had started to reach economic importance around the world. It's absolutely necessary that we balance this cycle, this century. And so, that cycle is well understood, and it effects each of us. Ted started to focus on two really simple technologies.

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+One of them is just a simple wood gas stove. Billions of people cook with very simple polluting stoves. It hurts them. It gives them health problems. Moving to a simple stove like this could be not only decreasing energy utilization, but improve global health. On the right is a technique called pyrolysis. Heating and starting a self-sustaining process. This is important for carbon sequestering. It goes a lot deeper than this. Deforestation is a major contributor to changing our atmosphere. We're repurposing the world. Plastics, we're polluting our oceans. This was from Chris Gordan's pop presentation last year. It's dead albatrauzes, photographed on Midway Island, furthest from any continent, and it's showing how we're contaminating our world. You've heard of the great garbage patch, of course.

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+I had no idea how my voice and my activities could have any impact in the carbon world. Of course, I'm flying all the time, I know I'm a contributor. We're all using energy as part of our daily lives. Then something strange happened. In the beginning of March, I got a phone call from 5 of the oil sand companies. These are massive companies. They said Andrew, we want to work up new ways of doing sustainable development. I went to board rooms. These are the halls of power in the energy industry in Canada, and I got to work with these people for almost a year. For those of you who are not familiar with oil sands, they are the largest petroleum reserves in the world. You have to wash the oil off of the sand with giant industrial tools. These are polluting forms of harvesting energy, because it costs so much to wash the sands.

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+Negative industry perceptron hurts them. Dirtiest oil and such. The amount of water that they were using. Toxic tailings, and the third was carbon. Carbon is taxed in Alberta, at $15/tonne, and globally, there are carbon credits programs that are really starting to impact their business. Carbon levels are rising, this is thought to be a contributor to climate change. Whether it is or not, that's not an issue; at some point, we have to lower the carbon dioxide to historical thresholds. You guys are so myopic, all you guys do is look down and drill holes to find carbon, but you just found a global resource. You have to start looking up, it's in our air. It's a resource, not a toxin. The oil companies have very limited ways to use CO2 in their industry. The only economical way to use carbon dioxide is to pump it back underground. They use it to pressurize wells to get more oil up, that works for them.

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+What about the rest of us? The carbon economics are going to change because of this event in the gulf. The overall cost of using petroleum is different. BP is learning this lesson. Every single oil company is looking at this, it's the largest driver of clean energy. This cleanup is going to cost billions, and that's going to be from BP's pockets. How do you capture carbon? We grow it. We grow many things. What you grow is really important. There's the food versus fuel debate. When you start making biofuel out of corn, well, in general agricultural policy keeps corn prices low. I highly recommend the Omnivore's Dilemma. It's generally trucked by the millions of tons to fatten up cows and generating tons of carbon waste. This is the form of carbon sequestering that is causing lots of problems in America and lots of other places.

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+The true cost of doing this type of work with carbon is far greater than is immediately apparent by the food. So, how does this tie into the work that I'm interested in? I am a synthetic biologist, I teach people how to program cells to do more interesting things. It's getting easier to do. A few weeks ago, Craig Venter had booted up the first synthetic cell. This is really interesting. It cost a few millions dollars, these tools and tech is getting really inexpensive. Chemical processes based on exceptionally high temperatures, petrochemicals and energy, toxin catalysists, and other requirements; most of this is going to start moving to biochemical processes. People are going to start programming biochemistry to replace structural materials, and new energy sources across the board. The petrochemical feedstock stuff is just going to start to change.

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+This isn't just for elite scientists. This tech is approachable by diybio, singularity university, we're teaching people how to do this. There was a program at MIT, where thousands of undergrads and high school students how to use the same tech that Craig Venter has. If my thinking is right on this, we're going to have a new IT industry based around on carbon. All living things are carbon processors, we need to learn how to use it more effectively.

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+Last year, I got these 5 oil sands company to bring 30 genetic engineers, their advisors, Rob Carlson, and a diybio representative, to go up to the oil sands, look at the real on the ground problems, and they are big. To see the scale of the operations that litterally, biochemists. Citizen scientists need to start thinking about the problems. This is one of the buckets. The piece of the equipment behind is a digger. It's massive, like something out of Star Wars.

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+Carbon, though, is already offering incredible promise, not just as a simple feedstock. We're learning how to shape carbon into an entirely new form. All of these offer the possibility of using this simple material in really high value forms, from drug discovery, to energy storage, drug delivery, and possibly even to brain-machine interfaces, because these compounds have incredible properties. It makes a simple compound very high value. Just graphene for example - a monolayer - could be the next generation of DNA sequencers. It's becoming very inexpensive and cheaper to do.

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+Let's not forget diamond. I believe we're entering a new diamond age in some way, diamond is one of our most precious and dearly held resources, and now we're manufacturing it on industrial scales. This is a group called Genesis. This is still done with very high pressures and temperatuers, maybe there's enzymatic routes to this as well. The new branch of evolution and tech that Craig Venter has opened up, is a whole new tree of life no longer selected by natural processes,and now we have human selection. These forms of carbon might be able to get into new structures that are much more durable and non-toxic at the same time.

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+How do we drive this forward? We do it through our own human efforts going to work. You have to go drive economy. I watched Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room. Energy trading and how it was manipulated. There is a lot of carbon trading being done in the world today. Last year, 8.2B tons of CO2 was traded as paper derivatives. Groups are aggregating carbon credits, they are getting them certified, there's no cross-rationalization. There was 135B dollars of these derivatives traded. Right now the problem is transparency, certification, and the fact that these are paper products. People think that there's going to be trillions of dollars in carbon trading. For things that grow, there's a new economy, one of the largest biotechnology R&D pushers in the next century. It's also important that everyone has a voice in this.

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+Bryan Bishop and I started to work on a new carbon trading platform this year. It's based on facebook. You don't have to leave facebook to do this. You're not trading derivatives, not paper. We're going to demonstrate this and start looking for partnerships. Anyone can be involved, not just with a few dollars, but apply political direction to start driving change. We need to clean up the world. It's not just humanity+, but also food+, environment+. I want to give thanks to Bryan Bishop, Ted Redelmeier, and Bob Mitchell from the oil sands leadership iniative, and to H+.

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+Thank you very much.

+diygenomics

+melanie swan

+

+DNA sequencing is progressing faster than any other technology, producing large volumes of quantiative data. We as citizen scientists have a critical role in discovering and implementing new findings. There are new tools emerging. We're in a new era. This is the cover of Nature magazine from April 1. They looked at the 10 years since the human genome sequencing, finding a 14,000 improvement in cost. There's a plot of base pair sequenced per dollar, over the last 30 years. There's a steep incline in the past 5 years. This is 10x improvement per year, as opposed to 1.5x improvement per year on traditional Moore's law curve.

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+There's a new construct of biocitizen identity, where the self acts in collaboration with peers, and more distantly, with professionals. Along the bottom, there's a lot of health data streams: genome, phenotypic data, interaction with the environment, diseaseome, and microbiome. And leading up on the left, to a different kind of outcome. Not just cures, but up-leveling to normalization, enhancement and so on. These factors are shaping DIYgenomics: declines in DNA sequencing, the era of big data. Most recently, in 2009, all of human created content, books and film, compromised 1 zetabyte. In 5 years, it will be routine for medical bioinformatics to generate 1 zetabyte of data. Web 2.0 and social networking are also contributing, the 4th paradigm, and has made collaborating with peers more easy.

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+The biocitizenry concept, like Quantified Self, DIYbio, and so on, are enabling this. On the eve of third and fourth generation sequencing, these improvements may continue. 1st generation was breaking up DNA into small segments. Second generation contemporary parallelized sequencing attaches single sided DNA strands to a microfluidic chip, and reads the signature as the bases are incorporated. Third generation is sequencing by synthesis, and the bases are read as they are incorporated onto the strand. Pacific Biosciences expects a 30,000x improvement. Fourth generation is like electronic sequencing, directly reading the electrical signature of the base as it is pushed through a nanopore. The big opportunity is reading and writing. Craig Venter's landmark achievement. On May 22nd, the first ever synthetic chromosome, the team printed DNA sequences with their computer, assembled them, and put them into a cell, and booted it to life and created colonies.

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+How many people here have had a genetics test. There's a lot of early adopters, maybe 25%. With DIYgenomics, we're making personal genomic data useful. We're doing this first of all with citizen science studies. We're leaking genetic data with phenotypic outcomes. This is our first study, where we're looking at 2 mutations at a vitamin D12 deficiency disease that also leads to cardiovascular disease. We're cycling through supplements, looking at blood test results, and analyzing the results. We have 25 other studies articulated. We want to look into cholesteral, neuroplasticity, productivity, personality predisposition, risk taking behavior.

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+We have a suite of personal genome analysis tools. The specific genes in review by a certain company, the mutation variants and the normal type. For drug response, we look at 250 different drugs, like statins, for looking at genes and analyzing which entity, and mutations indicated in red. And a potential interpretation as to drug efficacy. Our mobile app has over 1100 downloads. So please consider participating by organizing a study, joining, contributing, innovating cheaper blood tests, or by being a partner. We have partners in Japan and South Africa, and advisor on consumer genome sequencing businesses in China and Ukraine, and maybe a cancer study at UCL.

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+My collaborators: Raymond McCauley, Lucymaire Mantese, Marat Neponmonyashy, Roland Parnaso, Aaron Vollrath, Lawrence S. Wrong.

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+Ramez Naam

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+Hi there, good morning. I am the author of a book called More than Human, using biotechnology to enhance human performance. I am going to talk about the next 10 years of human ehnancement, and the underlying factors, the motivations, opportunities and the needs. Why do we need to transform humans, why would we invest in hundreds of billions of R&D for this? What can we change about human beings? How can we make a change in human abilities?

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+The motivation for most of the world is medical. Very few people think about enhancement, a lot of people think about healing. Most of society thinks about a baseline, and a human who is below that baseline. There's this human, and lifting them up to baseline, and that's acceptable. But if you have a nomral human, elevating a human is considered questionable. That's just how people think right now. We have gadgets like the iphone that are clear enhancers of human ability, it allows us to do things that we could not do a decade ago. External enhancements are considered different, for some reason, while internal are questionable.

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+Doesn't that mean the idea of enhancement at a serious risk? Well, no. Because technologically and scientfically, the power to heal is the power to enhance. Within the medical motivation, there's a subset of this, where the population is aging. This is the percentage of U.S. citizens over 65 ages, in 2035 it will be about 20%. It is not a phenomenon in the U.S. only, it's not just in the developed world. In China, the median age will pass the U.S. median age in 2025. The world is getting older. This is getting relevant because age is a good predictor. Medical expenditures get larger with age. At the early 20s it's a few thousand dollars per year. Past 75, it's about $16k+. A huge expenditure is on the elderly. A huge variety of abilities are lost: mental,sensory, etc, across the board. It's good news for us, bad for them. Good news for transhumanism because it's a development science to help enhance these abilities in humans as well. It's order trillions of dollars. There's $2T in healthcare spending this year. Worldwide healthcare spending is $4T. There will be 40 to 60T dollars spent on healthcare. Not all of it is going into R&D. That's the size of the market.

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+To visualize this, if you have a stack of $100 bills, a million dollars can fit into a briefcase. A billion dollars is several pallets, maybe filling the stage here. A trillion stage here, would fill this entire room with $100 bills. We're talking about 50 trillion dollars, or 60 trillion dollars in healthcare spending. Just one year of healthcare spending is larger than all of these companies combined, even when BP stock was 30 or 40 dollars.

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+So there's lots of moral and ethical reasons to develop these med techs. What's the opportunity? Gaining knowledge and learning about human construction. Richard Dawkins was asked for an essay to describe biology in one word: digital. Biology is primarily information. It follows hte patterns of information technology. I saw Craig Venter speak a year ago. The number one research tool he has is the computer. The sequencer workstation is mostly a computer. Mostly the sequencing lab is like a data center. There's lots of cost drops for these.

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+Genome costs for the last 20 years have dropped by about a factor of a thousand. It costs about five thousand dollars today. So that's a drop in a bucket even towards that original million. George Church is a polymath in many ways. He wants to sequence 100k human genomes by 2020. He's setting the goal too easy. Full genome costs, all base pairs are going to cost at most $100, or maybe $50, maybe some markup as a consumer. That's a steep decline. For a fraction that we spend on healthcare, we're going to sequence millions of genomes. This applies more than healthcare. We should be able to sequence every species. There's only 5,000 mammalian species,so that's $500k. That's about the deep water horizon- that's.. what? wtf

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+In 2020, that's the cost of sequencing all the species. The actual organism, lots of genes. Lots of data to mine. We'll do large scale genome analysis, association studies, to correlate the factors of these genes. To correlate their phenotypic expression. There's different variants of rice. Here's some known things about what fractions of variance that genes account for. There's height, physical traits, skin color, muscular strength, and then it gets down into mental stuff, like IQ, most assessments find it a litlte higher than this. Extroversion, introversion, personality traits, genetic. How adventerous are you? 60% genetic. There's certain involvement of this. Happiness is about 50% genetic. There's no other factor that comes close to genetics than happiness. Even this slide is a lowball. This is a bell shaped population, how much is variance accounted for. What's possible?

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+If you want an example of that, look at the family tree of dogs. Dogs come from wolves a few thousand generations ago. You see the variation between poodles, retrievers, lab dogs, these are all varfiants on the genes in wolves about 10k years ago, or a few thousand generations. We can make those changes very quickly. Not even inserting transgenes into the human population.. but we'll do that too.

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+As they say in G. I. Joe, knowing is half the battle. You can edit the genome. The synthetic genome. I almost put Venter's head on top of the Economist' cover. He's the nicest, most humble guy. Also a transhuman, I would say. The technical feat was in being able to print a very long contiguous strand of DNA, about 1.1M bp long. A 1000x improvement. In 2020, we'll be able to do 1B bp. There's 250M bp in the largest human chromosome. In 2018, we'll print entire human chromosomes. We'll be able to babies with custom chromosome creations. Viruses are machines in nature that can carry information in the form of genes into living cells, and they are the impetus behind gene therapy. Gene therapy has not gone perfectly, it's starting to working.

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+Last year, a group at Mount Cyanide, had success in restoring vision in retinal damage by inserting genes. Phase two study last month was completed for heart failure, with gene therapy. There's a couple hundred gene therapy studies in progress, and 40 to 50 are in phase 2a, medium scale human safety trials. So, for people with muscular dystrophy, there's IGF1, if you take IGF1 and change it in mice, knockout mice are very small, mice with two copies are very large. This is the cross-section in normal mice. The same genetic changes can be used. Myostatin. It has about double the muscle mass. This is the .. Hugo .. 1964 olympic winner. He generates more red blood cells. That's why he was an excellent endurance runner.

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+Lee Sweeney.

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+"About half the emails I get now are from athletes." - Lee Sweeney

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+There are possibilities beyond that. We're working on the genetic cascades that can take that off, in species like humans. In summary, we're approaching editable genomes, and a huge market. The genes are the bottleneck, printing genes, editing genes in humans. If there's one variable here, it's how good will we get at gene therapy in humans, and I'm optimistic about that.

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+Thank you very much.

+

+Ronald Bailey

+

+I am very concerned about the political and social possibilities to get this tech to all of us. The democratic threat to transhumanism. One of the things I want to point out, for those of us who are living with democracy. There's this current touchstone in current government. Liberal implies limitations on democracy. There's this hu.. human rights, over democracy. The constitutional separation over the democratic legislature. There's certain questions, out of the public sphere, such as religious sphere, as public rights. Minorities against the will of the majority. There's actually limited democracy. It's not social democracy or radical democracy on which the rights get pinned on the will of the majority.

+

+Our friend here, James Hughes, who has done huge amounts for the transhumanist movements, had to argue that we need a stronger to predict who has a right who has the right to experiment with ther mind. I would agree with this, a good idea if it were true. A strong democracy are a threat to the precursor to the transhumanist future that we're hoping for. Here's a recent example.

+

+Two weeks ago, the Ohio State Senate voted to ban minotaurs, sintars, but the bill has gone to the lower house in Ohio. And there were a few things to ban, and one of them was specifically, would be embryo-producing a human nucleus into a non-human egg, or a non-human-lifeform into brain derived from human tissues. Those are two experiments that have actually taken place. In 2008, a british research introduced human nucleas into a hollowed out cow embryo. The other one at Stanford in 2005, researchers injected human embryonic stem cells into mice, and the idea was to create models for human brain diseases. Those experiments would be outlawed in Ohio should the law be passed, but they would also be outlawed in these other jurisdiction. People like Canada? France? Germany? They also outlawed this research, currently.

+

+By the way the images over here are the brains of the mouse, had a condition called Shivering. Human fetal cells were injected and cured the mouse of that disease. Here, I think, is some example of what it is. Majorities overcoming minority preferences in the area of family right: abortion was legal in every part of the U.S. in the 1800s, but in 1900 it was legal in only one state. There was the first eugenics law, in 1907. In 1924, Virginia passes the racial integrity act, this forbade whites from getting married to blacks. As of 2003, gay sex was illegal in 13 states. In 2009, 30 states have adopted constitutional provisions banning gay marriage. This is controlling. They do so, and they do so because they are enacting the will of the majority.

+

+These restrictions, many of them, have already been lifted. None of them were lifted because of democratic votes, but becaues of courts, because of private influence on people's lives. It wasn't because people voted against it, it was because courts said it was wrong. Blacks and whites can get married because the supreme court says that you must allow it. Voters and their representatives are ... a brief look shows that leading democracies, universal health care budget, like Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, banned these, reproduction or research. They also banned genetic modifications in children, which was done in the U.S. like cytoplasmic transfer. Some of them share three parents in the U.S. in a genetic stance. Then the FDA said that you have to stop that.

+

+Stem cell selection techniques are also banned. The one exception is at the bottom, the U.S. doesn't ban any of these at an international level at this point. (applause) Despite the fon-to, of the.. we want to protect the rights.. regulatory history shows that just the opposite occurs. Further elaboration leads us to a transhuman future. The democratic tyranny, is the rule not the exception. Think of it this way, biotech compnaies- what are they going to do for genetically enhanced people, if you look at what they do for GM crops?

+

+Maybe we can form coalition with other marginalized groups. I would suggest that part of the problem with that is there aren't any enhanced humans. The largest group, the largest community that opposes gay marriage, are black people. (wtf?)

+

+To close, I want to agree with.. progress is not inevitable, it is the great work, with which we are all here and engaged. Democracy is not the instrument that will enable this progress, but liberalism is.

+d1s1-alex-lightman

+

+I'm Alex Lightman. I'm very excited to be here. I chose the theme for the conference. I'm going to give Joseph Jackson props. The talk of my talk is the Rise of the Citizen Scientist in an eversmarter world. It emerges out of the call for arms. People will talk to you about ending aging, and the philosophy. I only have ten minutes, so I will be short about it. NIck Bostrom has said that combating aging is that more existential risks will happen in our lifetime. These generations that face these challenges; this is why I write a lot about the deficiet on facebook. You think you're going to be around only for 10 more years? If you live for 150 years, there's going to be peak uranium, peak unstability, peak everything.

+

+Thousands of things are going to have peaks, peak oil utilization, climate change, by 2050 we will possibly lose 25% of all species on earth. Once in a century storms don't bother you if you live 65 years, but if you live to 150, you're going to see this a lot. Tectonic shifts, the world is just sitting on a big ball of magma. The unforseen. So, I think the rise of open science is something that started a long time ago, when Aristotle programmed Alexander the Great to collect soil samples and flora and so on. The answer for this was that Aristotle wanted to collect all of the soil samples, and he couldn't go, and he wanted his student to do it. There was a boom in the 1800s when the mathematicians corresponded with each other, and challenged themselves to compete for prizes. Reputation became the currency for these. If you were the coolest or hottest in Italy, the hegemony might sponsor you. John Smart is going to talk about the brain preservation prize. We're going back to the renaissance, the enlightenment, it was very fruitful. I am going to give some examples. Sir Isaac Newton drove out of the play in 1665, and came up with thousands of tools and techniques for doing things, like how much fuel you would need to take a rocket to the moon. He did it at home, without a university or corporate or government resources. He came up with optics, gravity, and so on. So, why do the planets have an elliptical orbit? Gravity. Benjamin Franklin measured the temperatures in the ocean, and because of the thermal conveyer belt, found a temperature differential. The whuffie was as a citizen scientist. Let's have him help us figure out how to make a nation. Albert Einstein developed relativity as a hobby as a patent clerk. Steve Wozniak and the homebrew computer club were producing hackers and entrepreneurs, they originally got together to share scifi books, so that you could buy scifi books. I have that story from Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. Everyone one of those guys became a millionaire. Apple just surpassed them to become the most valuable company in that sector past Microsoft.

+

+The Manhatten Project. Albert Einstein used his citizen scientist whuffie to get a letter out, yeah here's how to do it. Oppenheimer said that if you put him in charge, he';ll make it happen. The Large Hadron Collider, the scale necessitates the funding from governments. Small science at universities is done by team and communities. What's the basic research budget of the US is? It's $150B per year. It's publish or perish, you're there to win grants. We're about the rise of the citizen scientist. If you want more background, sort of about the infomercial. All of the talks are very short, so we're introducing you to a lot of different talks. There's the return of the individual inventor, the mania for measurement, the facebook ever-smarter friend effect, prizes and grants, all of this are contributing.

+

+Moore's law says that the transistor density is doubling; the vacuum tubes and resistors and so on are similar. Kurzweil is flying from Colorado and then back to LA. The cost of the equipment- an educational thermocycler- the LavaAmp PCR in the hundreds of dollars. Computer simulation and analysis. Theory and experimentation. There was this amazing paper that I like, because I worked in 3D paper, modeling and simulation and visualization are a core part of the science process, and that gets cheaper according to Moore's law. You have disposable bioreactors, you can fit these in a basement lab. Genomic pricing: 2003 it costed $300M to get a human genome. The first personal genome for $2M, in 2008 it was about $60k for applied biosystems, or $5k for Complete Genomics. I think this year we will hit $1k. And next year maybe $500 to $100, and doing this in your basement?

+

+The return of individual inventors. In the early 19th century, individual inventors outnumbered the corporate inventors. In the 1920s, the institutions became the boom in patents. But now we're seeing another boom, where intellectual property rights are about this; Lawrence Lessig suggests that corporations are keeping from happening. Also open source manufacturing that Bryan Bishop has been talking about: creating new tools; new tools can be turned into projects. Mobile microscopes to attach to your iphone.

+

+Also measurement. There's a wonderful book: Quantification in Western Europe. It says that the Europeans were marginal about 1000 AD, but about 1500 AD they took over the world. They had a mania for measurement. Only madmen and englishmen go out during the noonday sun. What did the englishmen do? They were rolling things out, and measuring it. Every single yard in India was mapped. This allowed them to build railroads. You have advancements in measurement and so on.

+

+I am a runner. We both did the San Diago Marathon. I ran the New England Junior Championshimp Team in 1976. Coming back to marathoning is that everyone knows his or her heartrate, there's a thousand times the data that runners are keeping. Also measurement that allow simulations and visualizations. Cheaper sensors and so on, allow the citizen scientists to enhance their mutual measurement capability. Sometimes they track stars from passing off observations from observatory to observatory. Ever-smarter networks.

+

+Social networking gets you to meet like-minded people. Tools like Facebook can be leveraged. Who here is a friend of mine on Facebook. This competency is here. I think there's an interesting effect thing, smarter curators (Jason Sylvia). I had more friends than Jason, wow. Take that Jason. He's on CurrenTV, they get smarter news stories that allow them to get smarter friends. The less smarter friends are playing Mafia Wars, they are spamming about geese for your farm. You start getting your account disabled at 3k, so I look for excuses for someone to get off the island. Okay, so the result is self-emerging R&D teams out of the commentators. Certain people that I like, I've helped extend job offers based on their facebook comments.

+

+You should read Cory Doctorow's book about down and out in the magic kingdom. You help people, you gain reputation. For instance, I would just say, this is just, what David Orban, he is the coolest guy I know, and every so often I give a shout out on facebook. Chris Smedley gave a shout out to David Orban, and that's how people get more opportunities thrown out at him. David Orban is getting so many speaking things, because I've had so much trouble finding the right date. The challenges and X-Prize. Peter Diamandis said that the original policy was this hole in one chance policy, like $10k or $20k for the hole in one that paid $10M, and the teams spent $100M, but because they come to global and national prominence, that's a huge leverage of a few orders of magnitude. Innocentive is a way for people to make teams to get together to make money. Proposal: scientific seed microgrants to bootstrap citizen science. The purpose of this conference is to meet up with someone, to have a project, and have something published, make something happen.

+

+Kudos as currency. Socrates. It amuses me to see how afraid you are, lest the people should accuse you of recommending useless studies. Entry cost of science is going down. Monetization, democritization, ever-smarter world. Citizen scientists are increasingly empowered. All of this will be on slideshare, and just wanted to mention: the next H+ Summit will be on the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th on December.

+

+Also in London, 29th and 30th, we'll have it in Europe. John Wiley changed my book on 4G. The only books that our proof-reader changed it. H+ Summit at Harvard or MIT. The next event that has our endorsement. You can talk to him, the Open Science Summit will be next month at the end of the month, at Berkeley. Thank you for your time, come up and introduce yourself, I want to help you get your project accomplished.

+

+What are embryonic stem cells? What are the implications in medicine, and drug design?

+

+So, first of all, embryonic stem cells have two defining patterns. The cell is able to make copies of itself, infinitely. The second is that it's pluripotency, that cell can turn into any cell in the body. So where do ES cells come from? Well, first the egg gets fertilized, and eventually the cells form a hollow sphere with a knot in the middle. The outside of the sphere forms the placenta. The inside of the sphere- if it gestates fully- forms the body. You can isolate the cells, and they have the properties of self-renewal and pluripotency.

+

+What can ES cells do? Self-renewal. They have the capability to turn into any cell in the body. In the lab, however, this process is called differentiation. We know how to turn ES cells into almost every single type of cell in the body, just by changing the chemical and physical conditions. The question of the programming- going towards more specialized adult cells- back to an earlier stage- back to an ES type, this has always been a question since the 1950s when scientists learned that the genetic material in ES cells was the same as the genetic material in an adult cell. An ES cell has the same DNA as an adult cell. Different parts of that DNA are being used in different amounts. The idea was quite clear. This is possible, even though it's a bit controversial, to what extent the programming occurs naturally.

+

+So, uh, the technologically that I am going to talk to you about is the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells, which is a technique to turn adult cells back into an embryonic state. This was in 2006 with Shinya Yamanaka in 2006. This has been reproduced and so on. How is iPS cells? Well, it started with Rudolf (something) who is now at MIT. You disrupt the virus, you take out the lethal part, and you replace it with DNA of your choice. You then infect the cell, and the virus will put its DNA or rather the construct that you engineered, and directly deposit it, stabily, in the cell. This is just going to sit there, and the cell is not going to be killed by the virus. That's an old technology.

+

+The real science, the part that is clever, is the part where Yamanaka's group found that four genes that cause cancer, can confer properties to the engineered cell. This is, since this time, they have made vast improvements. This is a very simple and general technique. So, uh, again, the properties that they confer to these adult cells, they have self-renewal, and pluripotency. So, what is it that iPS cells can do.

+

+In the near future of scientific discovery, there's a lot of problems in the lab. Parkinsons disease. In older patients, cells maybe spontaneously die, and the cause is not well known. The genetics are not enough to explain the disease. You can dig inside the brain to get these diseased cells, and if you did, from someone who is no longer living, we can't necessarily predict which ones will die and which ones will not. Those cells that you get from a non-living person have a limited life-span in the lab. It might take years to see the effects, like in age-dependent diseases, maybe 50 years down the road.

+

+The iPS solution addresses some of these problems. Take the adult cells of a diseased person, and generate iPS cells from them, and turn them into neural cells. And that way, you have a much better disease model. Once you have a disease model, you can make more progress, even without the genetic basis. You can make more drugs for the targets, you can figure out if therapies are going to be toxic or not, etc.

+

+Live iPS cells though are a long way out from being used in patients body and cells. You have a much higher risk of cancer, actually, and that's generally quite.. but yeah, that was the first one. And, so, the second issue is quality control. So, our iPS cells are completely reprogrammed, or do they share the properties? Is it safe to use them? That's a pretty massive questions. Making iPS cells takes a couple of months to do. In cases where you have a much shorter time span then this might not be practical. Getting the stem cells in the right person in the person, to get the right signals to do what you want them to do, it's always a challenge for iPS cells and ES cells.

+

+Where stem cells do go into play is autologous versus allogenic. Autologous means from your own body, allogenic is from a donor. Your immune system can recognize self from non-self. So, basically, if you've ever heard of, trying to find a bone marrow donor, that's why it's so hard. It's to help preventing an immune system to reject the products going into your body. Patients have had organ transplants from non-family members, these people have to take immuno-suppressants for the rest of their lives. With stem cells, way in the future, you could use iPS cells in their place, to avoid the dangers. There are lots of ethical concerns with ES cells. The iPS cells lift these issues.

+

+There are a lot of current uses of ES and iPS cells. These can change you a lot. That's about it, thank you.

+

+

+

+John Smart

+

+Good morning. My name is John Smart. I am a co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation. We're going to talk today about the brain preservation prize. Roughly 150,000 unique and highly experienced humans die. 57M every year. This talk is about a potential solution to this problem, a grand challenge. Today, medicine contains many frontiers, like epigenetics, nanotech, and it's incredibly daunting. While medical science has barely begun to prevent biological aging and death, computer scientists have learned to create primitively intelligent machines with indefinite time. Molecularists and scientists can preserve brains with chemical fixation and plastic embedding. This is called placination, it's an advanced version of.. recently, neuroscientists have learned to trace neural circuits through small volumes of tissue, and these techniques are likely to be automated in the next year. Humanity may gain the ability to do high fidelity preservation of human brain.

+

+The only obstacle of this at present is the development of preservation and verification protocols, and having it achieved. To motivate this, Ken Hayworth, myself, Jay, and others, have launched a Brain Preservation Prize, for the first team to preserve a mouse brain and publish a full protocol. We have created the Brain Preservation Foundation. When the prize is won, the BPF will advocate for brain afordability and access. An anonymous donor has agreed to pay that sum to the first certified winner. We're today, seeking additional donors to increase the prize first, and any contributions help.

+

+For those of you who wish to preserve your brain today- a price of $30k with Alcor. Circuit preservation necessary for our prize has not been demonstrated. Cryropreservation like vetrification might work if it can demonstrate saving enough of the detail to scale. With respect to the consumer adoption factors, dependability, price and so on, vetrification seems to be.. placination at cost.. might be done for maybe $20k, and maybe less than $10k or less than $5k once the technology has been automated. Regarding dependability and so on, room temperature preservation of brains, at cemetaries, with commercial cemeteries, or even in private homes if the law allows.

+

+Regarding verification, neuroscientists are currently doing this for small tissue pieces. A typical placination process might look like rapidly infusing a cross-linking or fixative chemical through the vasculature after an individual's death. This chemical is so small that it would penetrate the cell walls like water, and the next step which could happen hours later maybe in a non-hospital setting, oxium-trioide. A third step is a plastic resin- a small molecule- in increasing concentration throughout the brain, turning the brain into a perfect fossil. When all of the circuits are preserved, and we can scan with an electron microscope, then we've met our goals.

+

+Why is this important? The advancement of science. Several institutes are developing the technologies necessary to do this- with a connectome- a circuit-level map of the brain. The connectome is a necessary pre-requisite to the goal. Large-scale brain donations will be necessary for understanding the scope of human connectome diversity, and it will allow us to create more biologically inspired computers. Some may preserve their brains to help preserve their culture, or advance our understanding of human experience, or pursuing a more scientific or free society, or some who have some objections to being revived in the future as a conscious person, another one might want their life to be left to their loved ones to be left at a later date, as an extension of a virtual memorial that we see today. Some may be convinced by their children to do this, to lessen the grief. Neuroscientists can reconstruct accurate neurons from very small populations, like 177 neurons from an LGM of a cat.

+

+In the future, we should be able to extract whole experiences from the static connectivity of the brain alone, which comes with a baseline understanding. Some, perhaps a future crash, some will .. integrated into a future biological. This group holds the belief that their identity, experiences are residents are.. they are patterns, not materialist. (something something something)

+

+Our selves could be brought back into a world where our friends and loved ones are still alive. Finally, some being deeply uncertain of future, and aware of the deep loss of complexity that would occur, would be okay with preserving their brains now in a Pascal's wager, and leave it to the future or maybe to their cyber avatars or their CyberTwins or digital selves. Let's get this prize won and done, as soon as possible.

+

+We warmly welcome you to help in any way you can. We've received a matching grant of $2k for a summer intern. We're seeking a similar contribution today, of $20 or more at a time. This last slide leaves you with several steps that you can take to help. If you're willing to donate $50, there's an ipod raffle. Most importantly, you're helping a worthy cause. I'd like to end with a last step. We go into airports and see people stressed and concerned. It helps to remember what Alex said at the beginning of the summit. To see the incredible magical era that we're in, and I think that with technologies like this around the corner, we can be happy. We can recognize that we're incredibly lucky to be alive right here and right now. Thank you.

+

+

+We could measure the way we're beginning to resonance, in a common field. I wanted to let you know that I am one of the non-profit institues here today, and after my talk, if you're interested in me, your contributions and volunteer services. I would like to start by asking everyone to form a self-inquiry, experiment in this room, by noticing your own ___ right now. The movement of the actual breath. The way of addressing a somatic interface. Notice your breath, how it feels to breath- inhalation and exhalation. Now please close your eyes, and do it again.

+

+So we're going to close our eyes together, and notice the physical sensation of breathing, and when you notice the sensation of breathing, I ask you to pay close attention to breathing, the kind of pathotation of movement, maybe movement in your shoulders, movement in your ribs, or in your stomach and back. And then with that sense of breathing, see if you can shift your attention, to picturing a sticky substance, keeping your eyes closed, seei f you can hold that picutre of stickiness in your mind's eye, there's surgical tape, or is it kind of fluid-like liquid glue. Does it feel kind of tacky, as if you can feel right through it, or gummy like the back of the post-its? See if you can savor the sense, the haptic sense, the visual sense, whatever kind of imaginative sensation you're getting, see if you can hold on to that. And then when you're ready you can open your eyes. Let's get sticky together.

+

+I wanted to know what we got in stickiness. How many people here got velcro? Did I get any velcro? Did I get anybody with static cling? How about the gecko? Climbing up the wall with its pads. I am in the room of molecular biologists, so you went right to the loopy molecules. What we have in common here is a metaphor that I want to put before you, I am one of the people here that addresses the perceptual metathinking of bringing art and science together, to think about stickies. What we know about the central nervous system is specifically that stickiness is what happens when neurons fire together, wire together.

+

+Wire together, fire together. Put this into your thinking. When you're developing these technologies, and molecular sciences, but I think when we begin to deal with stickiness, when I deal with it, when you grow to a S.I.T practice- somatic intelligence tracking system. Here's who here from MIT? So you know the semantic interface at TED at 2009. That was the somatic interface outside the body, outside the body world. I am most interested in the world and beginning to look at the world of S.I.T practices that deal with introception, and our own brain's ability to fire and wire.

+

+I want to bring your attention to an argument that took place in 209, neuroleadership summit. We had someone from Australia making the claim that if we can measure it, we can manage it. Then we had Geoffrey Shortts, retorted, if we can manage it, we can measure it. Sparing between two men who made brilliant careers addressing the ways in whcih we can measure and manage our own brain-minds, and integrating them into our body, and make them electric and shine.

+

+Schwartz Formula for developing with OCD sufferers, boils down to a four-step procedure to relabel, reattribute attention, refocus attention, revalue attention. In other words, when I ask you to first pay attention to breathing, and then shift your attention to an image, we had that potential to couple the stickiness of our attention to something other than the wandering mind. Evan Gordon, developing banks of neuroscience research, the largest ever; the Brain Resource Company, which is online. He's most interested in measurement using some form of EEG or fMRI and I want to mention that build your own EEG classes at Machine Project. We have people building their own arduino biofeedback machine. This is the sort of tech that I am pointing to, and beyond that.

+

+Measuring. Here we're talking about questions, growing social bonding, desire, or how we can address how we make decisions, or feel fear, or for those of you who are watching the discussion between (?????). Maybe you're looking into measuring your divergent thought processes in the hypothalamus. There's a group measuring, and I thought I'd bring it up, Bill C. Scott, Brain Paint, or brainpaint.com, and they are one of the examples for how we can measure and manage. How many people know brainpaint?

+

+What we're really talking about are, is is is, not a dualistic argument, but an argument that says look, if we're interested in this medical path, which my colleagues are pointing towards, biotechnologically and so on, but not just as the measurement, but the representation of the measurement. Who are my artists in the room? Excellent. We're really talking about the civilian scientist artist, we're talking about the ability to figure out a representation systme with these technologies. So we've got the fractal as a brand, that comes up as a brand. That's what the brainpaint.com system does- addiction, using neurofeedback to address the suffering, we've got EmWave, out of HearthMath, Dr. Childre. We've got the sine wave in the brand, where you can see the measures of your heart. You also have My Calm Beat, brainresource.com

+

+I say that what we're really talking about is fractals and sine waves, is sticky attention? Marketing with that, as well as developing new science around that brand. Since I don't have much time, here's a chart of these three companies, dealing with mobile graphics, pretty much with frontal cortex and ANS as well as the somasensory area which is really key in somatotrophy, and we're talking about a Life Reboot, where we're taking the most primary survival system - breathing is the most important survival skill- and the scientists and artists in the room- representations, we're talking about augmenting the coherenceo f signals, which actually changes the entire netwroking in relation to the whole body and brain. Talking specifically about quantification systems, and I'd like to see you push those, and specifically the representation of the quantification, so that we have an image with a number, a wave, a fractal, or whatever. I'm really asking you to begin to assist on the unification and connectivity between art and science, and for those of you who know about Brain Awareness Week. This is a good chance to bring this into Hospitals and Schools. Thank you very much.

+

+Timothy Marzullo

+

+Brain is not magic. Um. Okay, so, I'm Tim Marzullo. I'm starting a company, I have venture backing. My motivation is, we have an educated audience in the room. If you go out into the public, and if you ask them how the brain works, you might get some mumbling about serotonin, and something about electricity. Most people have no idea about other organs either. Kidneys are filters, the lung is an exchange mechanism, the heart is a pump. The brain and nerve system is difficult to understand. Most people don't have the faintest idea of neurophysiology. What I want to do is change the perception that the brain is magical. People tend to think that the brain is magical, love and dance. And that there's some magical thing that makes it work, maybe it is perception, but I've always wanted to change this.

+

+In grad school, and my early postdoc years, I went out to secondary schools. Here's showing functional neurophysiology, where they take out ice cream, and then one person is a lesion machine, and then a person is the motor cortex, and they put ear muffs on, and if it's visual you put on blinds, and prefrontal cortex you play games. And it's all very fun. The thing is that we design these demos, with balloons, nerf balls, synapses, and alot of the neuroscientists have done outreach too. You feel good at the end of the day, but do they really understand the neuroscience?

+

+We want to create the tools and students of all ages, from 5 years old to 80 years old. We want them to become the amateur engineers and citizen scientists. Like I said, we design those demos. As an electrophysiologist, I wanted to show students and parents, I always wanted to show a spike, which is an action potential. Those who are familiar, you know that you have to go to a big institution, bang on doors of labs, and even if you're a good student, you're finally allowed into a lab, maybe if you prove that you can wash dishes, and finally you can use this $30k rig to do it on animals, and you're 21 and you finally doing some neuroscience experiment.

+

+I took it upon myself and my colleague Greg to have low-cost, easy tools to do basic electrophysiology. The two main things are off-the-shelf chips and insects. Using something without regulatory restrictions. I'm bringing it out to all over the world. So, this is an early prototype of the SpikerBox. It has a single channel amplifier, with an audio amplifier, and you can hear the neural spikes of the cockroach leg. I'm going to try to show the people in the room, I brought all my gear. I brought the insects, nobody stopped me. They are South American, so they don't move as fast. The prep is totally portable. Let's see if the leg hasn't dried out.. *various sound*

+

+Do you hear this popping activity? Let me plug in an external speaker. I'm blowing on the leg, and there are barbs on the cockroach's leg, and they are playing to the speaker. When you hear the spikes, you've heard your first brain cells. This is a hand-made prototype. We've now transitioned to making boards. This is the first unit. Todd Huffman was one of our first customers, and he's going to walk out of this conference with a spikerbox. This was all home-made. They are intentionally made large enough for students to solder, learn about op-amps and so on. So, let's see if this one works. That's 3G. Go to a modern neuroscientist lab, they tell you to turn off your 3G phones. We're amplifying nerve system activity through speaker. I'm of the generation that thinks laptops are cool. If I can record my nerve activity on my laptop.. as entrepreneurs, you should listen to your end-users, the first comment was, "I want it on my phone".

+

+We've listened to our customers. My advisors told me to listen to that. You can go to the Apple App Store, and you can download our free iphone app. You have now turned your iphone into an oscilloscope. You can see the spikes and thresholds, and if you have an ipad, you can do it. You can zoom in, do this all sorts of stuff, record, listen to files, and go well gee, .. can everyone hear that? That's not all, that's just a random experiment for my friends, email it, show off your spikes. That's the most beautiful sound in the world to me. It makes us what we are. We found that most people think it's really cool. So here's this middle school, this was not staged. THis was the very instant he heard the spiking, and he realized that's what's going on in his brain. We have a tally, and over 1600, have heard spikes for the first time because of our efforts. We've done it on subway, airlines, etc., and we've done it for where it hasn't been done away.

+

+We're trying to make these kits, lesson plans for teachers to use this unassisted in their classroom, I'm 30, I hand-drew these lesson plans. So, uh, when you actually plug it in, you can do thresholding, it's a spike on the right. That's what it looks like, and then here's some more screenshots from the iphone app. This can be used at science fairs, and if you're so compelled, you can go on to the website, and you can buy them. We typically say 3 to 4 weeks, and Todd has been waiting 8 weeks. We're trying to make it more stable. Buy it this summer. We're not a one product company, we're also doing peripheral neuroscience, I developed an inexpensive manipulator stage microscope with built-in microscope.

+

+A big share of the DARPA funding. Try to control bugs remotely. We all want to do that, I'm not the chair of harvard or cornell. So if anyone of you have, it's some electronics, and modified it to do some pilot tests, deliverying biphasic pulses to the antennae, and for less than $100, we're saving the tax payers money to get some insect control. I would love to have this. This is all self-actualizing.

+

+We live like it's without pencillin, but when it comes to neuroscience. We've had people afflicted by tumors, drug addiction, etc., and in my family, almost everyone, my grandfather died by excessive pain. You usually have to wait until you're in your late 20s to do neuroscience research. Let's really bring ourselves into the next century. Let's get all students of all ages to study the brain, and not have to bang on lab doors. We're a startup, always looking for funding opportunities.

+

+Thank you.

+

+http://backyardbrains.com/

+

+

+

+Our group is a neuroengineering group. There's an active volunteer program, where there's half-a-dozen people initiating projects. Some of them have initial origins in retirees or or the part of the head. There's unrestricted research, we give people who don't even donate, there's a nice feedback loop that we're excited about.

+

+The tools allow us to understand the brain at a level to understand it. The brain over the last 100 years has been about looking about the molecular scale and so on. There is also an importance about the diseases related to atrophy, poluttion, and different cells or losses, like epilepsy or disorders. One of the most key ideas is that we can do a new generation of treatments that are about targeted neuromodulations. You can target the circuits in the brain, and there's this immeineslsy complicated 3D microcircuit structure. The trends are pointing towards this being increasingly common. More than 100k people have invasive cochlear implants. More than 50k have deep brain stimulators. There's even in adolescents, not even the traditional population. And so on.

+

+So, why control neural activity? We can reprogram the neural computations that underly disorders. If we just give someone a drug, it will bathe the brain in a substance, and that cause problems. The brain is a very cryptic thing. We want to target information in a targeted area in the brain. There's driving activity in technology, so one of the technologies is the little spikes or action potentials in the brain. So, light's nice because you can point at a population in the brain, or selectively. This is useful.

+

+The experiment begins a decade ago where we were trying to find genomic materials for photosynthetic pathways, to convert light to electrical energy, we put them into cells with viruses, and we make cells with a light. Here's a cell that was coated with the sensors, like coating with solar cells. There's all sorts of reactions happening. We can put them into the brain. One of the big things is trying to do this with 3D optical fiber arrays to beam the light in and do patterns. They can do complex and distributed structures. This is doing the hippocampus; it was compromising the ability to form new memories.

+

+One of the examples that we're doing here, one of the PTSD grant, from the DARPA. Can we find targets in the brain that can ameliorate the pathological fear of events that were previously neutral? We're going back to Pavlov and so on, like operant conditioning and pavlovian conditioning, like enducing fear states using a tone. WE're trying to figure out which ones can amiliorate the different sites in the brain, and then we can find which targets might not treat the disorder.

+

+The other thing that we've doing a lot of is new genomic diversity, so that we can mine it for better things. Nature is good at making things. Maybe we can team up with nature, and find interesting stuff, put them into biological systems, and treat them. Insulin, taxixiciln, you name it. Earlier this year, we had this whole diversity of organisms from all over the planet, and look at the genes, express them into neurons so that we can do other things. We can completely turn off the neurons with one method. This was one of the methods to look at more and more ecology populations and samples, and actually came out and get out some scuba diving. We want to mine the genomic diversity, so that we can connect genotype, and the amount of genome data that we're doing. The genotype that we're doing is not at moore's law rate yet, so we can cure stuff.

+

+There's different classes of models in the wild. One of the proteins is sensitive to blue light, some is sensitive to other colors of light. If we can only figure out how to phenotype it quickly. And the ability to cure diseases. A lot of our work is based on more collaborations..

+

+Which is where I want to start thinking about brain coprocessors. If you look bad at the opening slides, we talked about cochlear implants. If you can mine the data, and then use intelligence, and there's two multi-million dollar projects to merge AI with neuroscience, get the information where it needs to happen, and have maximal clinical benefit in the short term. We can figure out where natural intelligence and ai starts to happen. We can train the software on neural computations in the brain, and that's speculative and we haven't figured out how that would work.

+

+The other interesting thing that could happen with this is that the technologies could be used directly - proteins and light - as we expand the genomic and ecological search- if you think about it, gene therapy, which is required to put its genes into cells. One of the things about this is that there are classes of viruses, adenoviruses, lentivurses, that are very safe to use in humans. Adeno-associated viruses (AAV), FDA trials, and there has been no single adverse; there's payload issues sometimes, of course. It's quite inocculouous. One of the things that we did is a pre-clinical study, and with two groups, Bob Desimone, Ann Graybiel. One of the things we did was pre-clinical studies with inocculant parties. So we gave them some of the molecules, and this was the gold standard for neurological psychiatric standing, there was this pre-clinical; we found we can drive neurons over a long period of time. We worked with phenomenologists, for antibodies, and we found no evidence for immune reactions. These are molecules from algae and so on, one of the things we're exploring is how to use these things.

+

+We're collaborating at USC; there's a company he's funded to see if we can do neural disorders- like blindness. And classical disorders are due to loss of photoreceptors, and they are here, gone here. Why can't we just make this back? Why can't the retina produce the photoreceptors again? one of the things that we've done is taken a model of blindness, and the kind of mice that you find in pet stores, and these are similar to the kind of things that happen in humans. And these are going down in long alleys, and over many weeks of training, they come up with strategies, like don't go the same pathway twice. Untreated rd16. Here's a mouse that was blind a few weeks before, and received our light receptors in a single dose, and he can solve the maze just as well as identical rats that could see all their life. That's what we've been up to.

+

+

+

+

+Hi, I am going to talk about some work in collaboration with Greg and Uri. Okay.

+

+So, communication is naturally an interactive process, the goal of which is to transfer information from one brain to another, and we all understand the importance of communication in our society and forming things, the smaller the world gets, the more importance it is to understand how communication works. We know very little about the underlying neural mechanisms of communication. Two reasons. First, neurolinguistics studies have been restrained by the boundaries of one brain, like the comprehension or production of speech. Secondly, communication occurs in a complex environment. As scientists, we have mostly used simple stimuli such as basic words, isolated from the environment to study such a process. When in reality we are always interacting with different brains, and communication is a really complex thing. In order to assess this, we need to develop new experimental paradigms.

+

+We did this first by having a speaker, in an fMRI machine (me), tell a story, as naturally as possible, about my past, and so measuring the brain responses of my brain, using this microphone, which is this orthogonal optical microphone that cancels out the noise from the fMRI. It cancels the intense noise in real-time. You play this back for 11 listeners in the fMRI machine so that we can capture the neural dynamics from both sides of this communication. During the communication, both of them. We build this model where we have the speakers brain dynamics and we use this in one specific voxel of the speaker brain to predict the corresponding voxel in the listener brain, across the entire brain. We're using the speaker brain as a predictor.

+

+The benefit of this model is that we bypass any need to link to apriori processing. So we can look at interaction between speaker and listener. Further, communication unfolds over some time course, so for some speaker, you have to think about what you're going to say, some motor plan, and execute that motor plan, and as a listener you analyze the sound, and find meaning from whatever sound you're hearing. So in order to hear what you're hearing during your communication, you have to add htis temporal dynamic to the model.

+

+We take the response from the speaker, and we shift it back in time, and we go up to 6 seconds, and this represents moments, where the speaker's brain repressents what proceeds. Then there's the receiver that has this anticipatory effect on what the speaker is about to say. So then, using this new model, and this new methodology, we can ask, what really happens during this interaction between two people during communication?

+

+So, for example, how similar are two brains? Is it possible that in order to comprehend something, you have to also produce. If indeed this kind fo coupling to speaker and listener underlies communication, you should be able to predict the success of the communication by the results of the speaker and receiver. We're going to skip to the most interesting results.

+

+What we find is that indeed a speaker's brain responses are coupled to the listener's responses. Here's a map of the speaker and listener brains when they are doing the same thing. There's a really simple illustration of a raw time course, registered in a brain of a listener. There's a correlation of these raw time course responses. This coupling between a listener and a speaker, like in A1 and Brocca's and Wernike's, and also areas of the brain that are implicated more often in sort of higher-level cognitive areas, like the dorsolaterla and medial cortex, the temporal and (some) junction. What this suggests is that there's a speaker's brain during production, is coupled or there's same brain areas that are coupled, while they are understanding.

+

+So then we answer some basic questions. First of all, is it really tied to the content, or is this a low-level processing effect? We had a russian speaker do the same thing, and with non-russian listeners. So there's no coupling involved with the russian speaker. So is this possible with the result that maybe, the speaker is listening to himself. Each regressor in this model, a different moment in differnet interaction between speaker and listener. There's perhaps the same response in the listener. These moments are equally, on the other side, so synthesizing anticipation, and prediction. In the listener-listener, all of these moments, the moment of the vocalization of the noise. In the speaker-listener, the speaker's main responses, they proceed the responses by about 1 to 3 seconds, which suggests that the speaker induces similar brain responses in the speaker. When we look at the spatial dynamics of these beta waves, we basically see that in early auditory areas, this correlation in this coupling between speaker-listener, is timelocked to the moment of vocalization. When we look at the posterior areas, in blue here, you're looking at areas where the listener proceeds, while in the frontal cortex, the listener preceeds the speaker.

+

+So, next we ask, what can we do with this information? What's the practical usze, and if this is indeed the reason, we should be able to predict the success of the communication by speaker-listener coupling, so we measure the extent of how well each person understands the story, and there's basic assessment. Indeed we find that there's comprehension,l and also the rank of the individual listeners. The degree of neuro coupling does indicate the success of the communication. These areas in red, the areas where the listener brain is preceeding the brain, these are the strongest correlation for success. Prediction plays a very important role in communication. So, in sum, we see that over the course of communication that the speaker and listener brains are coupled. There's similar brain patterns invoked in other individuals maybe gates our communication and understanding.

+

+This recording of an interaction between a speaker and listener, this methodology can be used to assess verbal and non-verbal communication in any sort of model system in general. I think that really understand people and their interaction, as opposed to an isolated brain, is a really exciting next step for how societies interact and form.

+

+Thank you!

+d1s4

+

+Acceleration of progress. Alex contributed to this by limiting the speakers, so everyone is speaking so fast, and we're seeing that acceleration right now. It's a pleasure to be back, I was here as an undergrad at a college down the river. I'm going to talk about why we age, and how to expand your life span by two years. And I am going to be talking about citizen scientists.

+

+I am a founder of Ab Inventio, a company. You can visit our website at abinventio.com. Benjamin Button was born an old man, and got younger every day. The rest of us get older every day. We go from beautiful babies, to decrepid old men. Why? Why does this happen? It happens to us, it happens to every single living thing ever known. The answer to this is commmonly believed to be true: at a certain age there's no selective pressure to stay alive. There might be no positive pressure to stay alive. Scientists at UCSF, at MIT, Harvard, and others at CalTech, have shown there's a specific genetic program that makes us older, that ages us. When you knock a single gene off a c. elegans worm, the worm lives twice as long. Can you imagine in the course of millions of years of evolution, why hasn't this gene been knocked out? These worms have the genes, they have propagated more. How does this make us more fit, or why?

+

+The reason has to do everything with the apple not falling from the tree. Evolution has optimized the genetic distance between generations. If you have two little variation, then evolution cannot go fast enough to adopt to the environment. Too much variation, your children are dead. You don't want to deviate too far from that, unless you want to have a well-functioning human gene. There's an optimal genetic distance between generations, which varies between fitness and environmental change. Some people don't want to change the environment, poor people want to change it as fast as possible. The happier you are in your environment, the less incentive you have to change the environment. The more the environment changes, the more trouble you are having, the more you should be willing to experiment with things.

+

+Gametes, usually the cells that lead to combining to a new line form, and a sperm fertizlizing. The mutations over the lifetime. That's the reason women are not recommended to have children over a particular age, because of mutations after a number of years of life. It doesn't increase with time only. It's not a linear process. I was talking with a friend recently. I was showing him.. there's this face recognition feature where you can see all of the pictures of the same person, and you can see a person age as you look at their pictures. It's a horrible feature. There was this huge stressful period in my life where all of my aging occurred. That seems to be the same case, most of their aging when her son got sick, and so on. This is true in the public life as well. Our presidents had a lot of stress. Clinton for instance. You'll be able to see the before and after of all presidents, and they all age a tremendous amount.

+

+If there is an optimal genetic distance between generations, and the optimal distance decreases with age, then it follows that mating must initially increase and then decrease with age. And then decrease with age. That's exactly what happened. Mating indeed decreases by age. Aging-related inability to mate, aging-related decrease in attractives, aging-related decrease in libido, which hasn't happened to me yet, and aging related to death. The most attentive of you might ask, if the old progeny are less fit, why doesn't natural selection just take care of that?

+

+The reason for this is illustrated in the national geographic cover. All of the kids of this one man. That's exactly where most of evolution happens: living in closely related clans. Everyone is very closely related genetically in clans. The inferior fitness may not manifest itself in early days. Food, parenting, that fits the sibling's chances of survival. That's why you need to stop them, in order to save your fitter kids.

+

+Can we do anything related to expand our enjoyable life span? I've been working on this for the last 3 years. A professor at MIT, Richard Larson, the average American spends 2 years of their life waiting in line. This is not something new. We've been doing this forever. I was standing in a theme park line, and isn't there a better order to serve people in. Queue List. I created a system that lets people use a cell phone enter into a mobile, virtual line, and get a call or text message when there turn arrives. We've already saved more than 10 years through this. QLess. Please check it out.

+

+http://qless.com/

+http://waitinginlinesucks.com/

+

+I thank you for being here instead of watching the world cup. I know it's a sacrifice. During the duration of the World Cup, QLess will offer all new customers who mention H+ 2 installations for the price of 1, and will donate 50% of proceeds to somewhere that Alex helps us figure out.

+

+Getting the human body to achieve 100% uptime. QLess, even as a new company has greater than 99.999% uptime. We haven't had millions of years of evolution. We have redundancy. One server goes down, another goes up. I'm proposing we launch an aggressive research program to apply redundancy to human organs. Fail over systems, wireless sensors. Imagine if you had two hearts, and time to fix the first one, when you have a problem.

+

+In order of the theme. I want to talk about Citizen Scientist. For the last 6 years, I have been a citizen scientist, I publish everything I discover, on the wikipedia, for people to read freely. It's really worth it. People have read my postings, tens of thousands of time, as opposed to the nature paper that I published, which was cited only 100 times. Scientific publishing is outdated. The world needs a wikipedia for researching, it shouldn't need to be peer reviewed first. The minimum publishing unit needs to be as small as possible. Ideas need to see the light as soon as they are conceived. I am announcing today, the nascent, site that I am creating for the community, with Wikipedia-like.

+

+http://everybodyscience.org/

+

+It's a wiki, hosted by Wikia. It will be free for everyone. Thank you very much.

+

+

+d1s4

+

+New technologies to enrich your mind. Expanding consciousness with brain-machine interfaces. My talk about is improving brain function, and the brain, as if is functions. So, what is the best way, conscousness. Conscoiusness is our unique ability to experience brain processes. Different processes give different rises to qualia. When .. this.. smell.. taste.. pain. And uh, all this experience forms consciousness. Richer using new technologies. I think that this is possible, to make a brain, even to rise to some new consciousness in your mind, like neurons in your brain. But, uh, synthetic qualia.

+

+Somehow to synthesize consciousness.

+

+

+Mikhail Shapiro

+

+Thank you David. Thank you for having me. I am excited to be a part of this. There are a many a Saturday morning where I wake up thinking about how to enhance myself as human beings. But my wife is like a captive audience, so she doesn't count.

+

+So, I think my favorite thing, my perspective here comes from the point of view of a scientist, but also someone who has spent some time on the commercial side, innovative companies that pursue this kind of tech. This potential as human beings that we have- in 80 years, to really enhance ourselves. Brain-machine interfaces, uploading, learning more efficiently and quickly, greater sensory powers. There are lots of other things that can be done with life extension, stem cells, etc., they seem very far away. There are multiple things standing in the way. There are multiple things that are going to be needed.

+

+Performance requirements for making healthy humans even better, the benefit needs to be high, and the safety margin needs to be large. Depending on individual customers, it's a difficult tradeoff. The performance of these systems needs to be robust. Whether you're thinking thinking of investment from venture capital, societal, VC is part of my perspective, it's a long and expensive investment proposition. Risk adjusted and time adjusted, it's just not justified.

+

+What I would like to talk about today, and I think a lot of speakers have touched on this, let's think of diseases as stepping stones to the ultimate technological goals. This is based on neuroscience. There are millions of people who are suffering from these diseases. They are suffering, as well as their loved ones. I am going to use my experiences as an example, and initially we're applying these to diseases.

+

+Brain-machine interfaces. When I think of this, robocop always comes to mind. You take a brain, you put it in, motor and sensory inputs and outputs allow you to be a part of this motorized system. I would argue that we would fruitfully focus on locked-in syndrome, spinal cord syndrome, where people have lost the ability to control movement, and we have the ability to regain them. There's a nice perspective on this condition (movie reference).

+

+In 2001, 2002, at Brown University. But really, the problem with spinal cord syndrome, the brain generates movement signals. The signals do not get approved, because there's a transection in the spinal cord. The idea behind brain-computer interfaces as applied to people with these diseases, and you can do this with technology like a chip, and you can re-route them for going directly from the brain to the limb that you are trying to control. There's a lot of science over many decades, there's a relatively simple mathematical code for controlling a cursor on a screen, and things like robotic arms and wheel chairs. This was some of the work, just some. I guess not. Some of the time. 2001. Happening at Brown, you can have brain-computer interfaces in their cortex, and they can play video games directly with their thoughts. You can look it up online in Nature. The dot appears in different parts of the screen. What we did was form a company called CyberKinetics that would take this tech into human beings.

+

+A lot of people would be familiar with the BrainGate story. There was a gentleman with a spinal cord injury. There's a patient with Leugs Erik Disease. All of these people were able to gain significant amount of control. There was a demonstration of a robotic arm, and a wheel chair. How this tech will progress, well, against healthy humans, we need to think about what it offers at different points of time. We focused on people that were very paralyzed- people who couldn't control their human head movement, or maybe an eye blink, or a control of your sphincter. Some people have made interfaces based on that, control of your sphincter. Ultimately, if you want to expand people who are less paralyzed, you need to offer more, multi-dimensional control, performance, etc., movement in another arm. Ultimately, if you think about healthy people and brain interfaces, you have to ask, what are you offering? There has to be a practical.. I don't know how many of you would put a brain implant in your head just for the hell of it.

+

+We talked about brain reading and uploading. You want to look at specific molecules in the brain, human being, ideally in real-time, and you want to read them out, and recompose what that human is doing. There are other approaches and some people next will talk about it. Imaging specific molecules in the brain, that's important. There's a dye to look at dopamine levels. Epilepsy, and rare genetic diseases. You want to look at specific molecules with non-invasive imaging. You don't want significant operations. Viral vectors, sensors that's encoded in the gene, inject it, travels up to the brain, and then beams out information about dopamine. We've started to do this, like at MIT.

+

+We borrowed a concept from fMRI. A lot of the results that you see with fMRI are accidental: the oxygen protein (hemoglobulin) has iron in the center. Whether or not it has oxygen attached to it determines whether or not it sends a signal. They just happen to have an oxygen sensor in all of us. What we did was to create another protein that also had an iron center, and it's sensitive to something other than oxygen. It's a sensor of dopamine. We can sense dopamine activity in the brains of rat. We want to deliver this protein to the brain. There's all sorts of tech for delivering this. There's lentivirus, there's so on. We recently invested in a company called Genetics, and do glial cells that migrate to the brain as the vector. Now, through this tech, patients that die at age 5 or 7 with this rare disease, can be cured.

+

+You can make real progress with rigorous science that will lead to the kind of ideas that we want to talk about. The tech is being developed. When you stimulate parts of the brain, the learning session, you can enhance learning. I think Ed Boyden's work with channelrhodpsin is a wonderful example of how tech can be useful, like by making blind people see again. It helps us gain additional information, orthogonal to our normal visual reception.

+

+This is my last slide. Success factors for commercial clinical ventures, this is the best way to finance this. Look for a disease that isn't served by existing tech. What population is willing to try out just about anything? And you need to have high quality science, it can be from people in the garage, or where-ever- MIT or Harvard. You need rigor. Scientific rigor. You need to get onto the market in 3 to 5 years. You need strong backing, and great management to make it happen.

+

+Let's look for those appropriate stepping stones. Develop rigorous science. I want to get to those goals.

+

+Ray Kurzweil<br />

+<br />

+The Power of Hierarchical Thinking<br />

+<br />

+Thanks for that. I see many friends in the audience. My travel schedule is not always this busy. I am frustrated that I can't take in more of the conference. I am trying to go through 101 to present very quickly, so that we can have some dialog. Aubrey just left. Okay. I think in that 2075, I'd tell him that he's too conservative about longevity escape velocity. We dialog about that issue in our movie that opened up last night in Brackenridge. He's a little more conservative than I am.<br />

+<br />

+Um, yeah. I did give a presentation to the SETI folks. They have this steady assumption based on the formula, a scientific formula for assessing how many intelligent radio-capable computational-capable civilization there are in a typical galaxy like the Milky Way, there's like 15 different variables, Brackenridge is actually 10,000 feet which seems to have effected my voice. There's 15 different variables, and orders of magnitude difference of opinion on what the likelihood is that a lifeform will become intelligent, will develop radio technology, destroy itself, etc.<br />

+<br />

+I have two different reasonably analysis, that can be extrapolated to a million different civilizations in the Milky Way according to SETI. I wanted to point out that if you take the standard SETI assumption that there are thousands if not millions of advanced civilizations capable of radio and computational technology, they would be spread out across cosmological time. They might be ahead of us by tens, hundreds, thousands or millions of years. A civilization could be a million years ahead of us, they might be like us, but the cell phones might be a little smaller. There's a linear assumption of the law of accelerating returns.. from 1850 we've gone from ponies being the fastest way to send a message, to 4G, we've increased trillions fold over the last century, very smoothly, smooth exponential growth for a hundred years. It would only take a few centuries at most to go from primitive radio tech to galaxy-wide engineering. Maybe it would be harder to interpret their language than say Hebrew, but it would be hard not to notice galaxy-wide engineering. If you apply the law of accelerating returns to the standard SETI assumptions, there should be thousands of civilizations doing engineering beyond the galaxy.<br />

+<br />

+I kind of came up with a soft conclusion. You can't conclude that there's not a civilization out there other than ours. Yes, maybe they destroy themselves, maybe there's the Star Trek ethical standard not to disrupt the civilization and such. There's a doubt that a million civilizations are doing galaxy wide engineering, and they are all following a ethics code to not interfere with us.<br />

+<br />

+I think that by the anthropic principle, with this antiquated model of physics that allows evolution to take place, and that's a reflection on SETI. I did point out that I think the project is very important, even if it results in a negative result, and so far it has. Of course, they describe their work as looking at a very small slice of the frequency and as many other frequencies and places in the galaxy that we could be searching. None the less, it would be hard with even our primitive way of looking at the univerise today, it'd be hard not to notice them.<br />

+<br />

+The negative finding is significant, even more significant. We are really in the league, with these exponential technologies, we have a greater responsibility for being a steward of not only this planet, but perhaps of intelligence in our galaxy and this universe. These are the points in the story, and earlier in the movie I have dialogues with Marvin Minsky, Aubrey de Grey, etc. about the law of accelerating returns.<br />

+<br />

+These are all of the points I'd like to make. Are there any questions? (laughter)<br />

+<br />

+Technology is getting smaller, getting faster, getting more powerful. When I was student down the street at MIT, I went there because it was so advanced at the time that it actually had a computer. It was tens of millions of dollars, took up an entire building. You had to take a class to get to it. The computer that I carry around, and it's a million times less expensive, it's a thousand times more powerful, it's a billion fold improvement in price-performance. This is not just wild conjecture about the future. As a result of the exponential growth of information tech, the adoption rate is getting faster, partly because we communicate much more quickly. I took at the 550th of University of Basal, which was founded just a few years after Gutenberg started his press. Oh yes, they had some, just a hundred years later. So things happen much more smoothly in those days, it needed 400 years for the Gutenberg press to reach everyone, tell phones was 50 years, cell phones was 7 years, wikipedia took 3 years, the paradigm shift rate is getting faster and faster.<br />

+<br />

+30 steps exponentially gets you to a billion. The linear expectation is our intuition, that's hard-wired into our brain. People's intuition includes scientists, that change will continue at its current rate. Only one percent had been collected. Uh, the skeptics told you that this wouldn't work. Only one ten thousandth would be sequenced.. only 1% is inaccurate of the genome now. Now it's just a fraction, only a few more orders of magnitude to get to 100%. That's what happened. It's continuing to double every year. In the last 7 years of the project, it was finished a year ahead of schedule. When I said it doubled, that was not an approximation. It exactly increased by 10% every year. It's really incredible how these exponential trajectories really are.<br />

+<br />

+We always use the greatest tools to create the next. Today we use computers to design next generation computers, and so on. That's one of the reasons why things are going more quickly. The same phenomenon is the same of everything, even biological evolution, which did not have humans guiding it. Human capability and adoption, so over the next 80 years. The first step, life itself, DNA took a billion years, and then biological evolution used it ever since, the Cambrian explosion, 10M, and then a few million years for cognitive functions, and then a few hundred thousand years for hominids, and then the key innovation - a neocortex, the size of a table map - to do hierarchical thinking at a sufficient level to do language and technology and tools. I want to talk about neocortices later. I want to do a book on how the mind works, and share a few reflections about that. The neocortex can take a whole bunch of symbols, call that an idea, and get a new symbol, and you can take that symbol and build it up into a pattern, and call that one a symbol. We have this nested hierarchy called patterns. The neocortex is a bunch of pattern recognizers organized in a hierarchy, a lower level pattern recognizer feeds into a higher one, and so on. Interestingly, it's the same module which recognizes patterns like the cross bar in the capital A, in printed letters, we can recognize it in different forms and shapes. The same pattern recognizer is in different levels to recognize irony and humor and sexual attraction, and uh, and sentiment. And so on. And, it's basically a billion of these, you have some idea now of how it would work, and the simulation itself. I'll come back to that.<br />

+<br />

+The next stage, evolution adopting homo sapiens is really the next stage, and then human technological evolution. Fire, the tool, the wheel, tens of thousands of years. We're really at an infliction point now where things get faster and faster. This graph was critized, and I chose things that gfit on a straight line, and if it didn't, I didn't use it. What did the encyclopedias think the key events were? There were some disagreements, and not much happened a billion years ago, not much happened a thousand years ago, and so on.<br />

+<br />

+The adoption rate is getting faster and faster. It took decades, about a century ago, with the telephone and TV, and now adopted and in just a few years time the cell phone was adopted. Three years ago, most people didn't use blogs, tweets, etc. In 2004, when on this campus, a couple of students, these books, you used to get printed books with thumbnail books with a picture of a freshmen, there was a glee club. If you had a blind date, you'd look up your blind date to see what she looked like. So someone said, hey, we can put this online. Students can add additional pictures, they can say who their friends were, they talked about this and then implemented it on a $1000 USD laptop and now six years later they have a $50B IPO. There's $150B/day- that's really transformed our access to knowledge.<br />

+<br />

+We all know that exponentials don't take off forever. That's true for specific paradigms. In information tech, there's pressure to create the next paradigm. That's happened five times for computers already. So, we noticedf that the exponential growth of the price performance of computing was going on for decades between Moore's.. Moore's paradigm was not the first paradigm. This is not just Moore's law. Moore's law is going to end, and that's not the end. In the 1950s, they were shrinking the size of vacuum tubes - that was the third paradigm. Then they were shrinking the size of vacuum tubes, smaller and smaller into tiny vacuum tubes, to a point where they couldn't shrink it any more and couldn't keep it. It's not the end of the exponential growth of computing, it just went to transistors, and then Moore's law about transistor density. When you hit 20 atoms, you can't shrink any more. The 6th paradigm is 3D molecular computing, there are prototypes of these computing power that they expect to get out there before the end of the fifth paradigm.<br />

+<br />

+Every level is 100,000 times more powerful than the one before it, in terms of price point performance. It's a double exponential, straight line on a log log scale, it's exponential, slow exponential, it took 3, 2 years 1950, 12 months in 2000, 11 months.. none of that is the most remarkable thing about this graph. It's not the only graph. It really applies to anything we can measure, even biological technologies. Look at how smooth and predictable this is. This is over a century, through thick and thin, through boom times and ressessions, you don't see any impact of WW1, WW2, or the great depression, or the gulf war. Why not just sit back and relax about this? Well, then it wouldn't happen. There's a pre-requisite to this.<br />

+<br />

+You need millions of people who are passionate about their projects, you need that for this kind of progress. But it's still pretty remarkable. You think that information would be the least predictable access, measuring human innovation, competition, entrepreneurship, there's things in science where you see something similar. You can model each particle in a gas that does a random walk. This includes the laws of thermodynamics, the overall properties of the gas are highly predictable. The law of large numbers works out to be very reliable. When we can measure it, when we have some basic measure of the information content. It follows this predictable trajectory.<br />

+<br />

+30 years ago I realized that the key is _____. It was quite surprising how remarkably predictable this aspect is, it doesn't tell you what company is going to succeed. You needed some key insight to be able to tell, reverse engineering, and the engineering were, would be the one. But you could tell that the technologies were coming into place, for enough computation, enough speeds to do something like that. I don't want to dwell on these examples. Many examples, the price of transistor for one dollar in 1986 per dollar, then to a billion per dollar. This is not some government mandated program, it's not table top physics. The cost of the transistor in cycles comes out by half.. that's a really key point, that's a 50% deflation point in the price of electronics. Apple can do an iphone today, it's twice as good as the one four years ago for half the money. This improvement in price performance is something that we all benefit from.<br />

+<br />

+Some economists have expressed concern that as more of the economy becomes information based, then by 2020s, at the 50% deflation rate, that would lead to a contraction not of the universe but of the economy. Some of them have good reasons. Anyway, that would not be a good thing. If you get twice as much stuff, in the next year, for the same price, you're not going to double your consumption. There's emerging tech, like 3D printers, these features, the scale of these features are shrinking by.. decade.. shrinking in 25 yyears, that would get us to a nanoscale, I could email you the spec for almost any 3D spec, and you just print it out, like clothing and so on. I do mean stuff, I could email you a movie, a book, or a sound recording. And, if you could get twice as much stuff for a year later, you're going to increase your consumption, but not double it. With respect to currency it might shrink.. but not really. There's been 18% in dollars in every form of information technology despite you getting twice as much every year. People did do search engines, people did do buy ipods, This is what is providing economic growth. That's not Moore's law.. different engineers, different companies, it's the law of accelerating returns. Moore's law is one example.<br />

+<br />

+Biotechnology is very significant, the costs are dropping (Carlson curves). The slope of that graph is doubling each year, the amount of genetic data. How to express the proteins, simulating things like protein folding, I don't want to dwell too much on this, because it's not the topic of this talk. It's another example and a very important one, this is actually what we call bridge 2, bridge 2 is is the reprogramming of our biology, and this is what Aubrey focuses on. How long do you go when you update your software on your phone? I am walking around with software, not a metaphor, it's literally- evolved millions of years ago- I'd like to tell my blah gene, don't hold on to every calorie, I'll have food tomorrow. It was evolved thousands of years ago. Some of these genes were turned off in an experiment with an animals.. this can bebrought to the human market. That's just one of the 22,000 genes. You can use RNA interference to turn off genes. So, these are technologies that are generally staged, now that they are subject to law of accelerating returns, now that they are information technologies, they will be a million times more powerful in 20 years. MIT announced the first.. in 39 years.. Department of Biological Engineering. The first new department in 39 years at MIT was the Department of Biological Engineering.<br />

+<br />

+This is the basic graph of teh amount of hits on the internet, doubling every year. I had this graph on the left. Just a few points with the internet, when it was called ARPANET. I projected it out, WWW in the 1800s, with mails, and 1990. People thought that was ridiculous. The entire defense budget, a few thousand scientists, it happened, that's the power of exponential growth. We do adjust, eventually. These things will seem very daunting, and now that we have them, it's just a part of every day reality. How did life ever exist without facebook? So, shrinking tech and exponential rates.<br />

+<br />

+We'll have plenty of computation going through the 21st century. We'll simulate the human brain and ai. I'd like to spend some more time on this topic. Reverse engineering the brain. I'm writing a book now on reverse engineering the brain. The ultimate source of the templates of intelligence. Consciousness and free will. Some people dismiss this, they are not scientific, I agree, but I don't think we can dismiss them, because our whole moral and ethical system is based on that. If I cause harm to some other conscious entity, that's considered wrong- that's the one golden rule. The question is then, what's consciousness? Causing pain and suffering to consciousness, that's a crime. So, we can't ignore consciousness so easily. There's a lot of new theories, on somehow consciousness is somehow related to quantum computing, and people pointed out that neurons were large messy environments, and maybe it's the tubules, and the structures for quantum computing, and I do think that the motivation is that consciousness is mysterious, because it's not identifiable to any identifiable means. This one is conscious, this one is not, it's philosophical. Biological neural system, then operations, entity has some model of its own performance and its own decision making, it wouldn't matter what the substrate is. Different models would have different assumptions, purely objective scientific measure, exceptional gap between objective measurement in science, and subjectivity which is a synonym for consciousness. So, consciousness is somewhat mysterious. Quantum computing is somewhat mysterious, so there must be a link between the two. That was an assumption, there's a new theory of his theory now, that it's now cellular automonon, within the tubules, within the cells. I'm reading his paper, and it promises to explain the source of consciousness, and I've read a number of papers like this, and it's a very scientific paper, it describes the tubules, and the atomic mechanisms that could be like little computers, computations, mathematical analyses, what these would be capable of, we think this is the source of consciousness, and then it's just "woah, that's a leap of faith". It's no less a leap of faith than any other, like of religion, that there's some entity called God, and a soul, and that it's consciousness, at least that's attributed as a leap of faith. At least they admit it, it's not presented as a scientific paper. It looks like a scientific paper, in the paragraph it doesn't advertize itself at all, it's a little leap. What's the basis for believing that this has anything to do with consciousness? Maybe it does, but there's no demonstration, and it's very hard to imagine what that demonstration could be. There are other theories like this, algorithms having to do with consciousness, so all these different frequency ryhthtms.<br />

+<br />

+But, and sometimes it's a little bit of evidence that is presented, goes away in anesthesia, and that's the test bed for consciousness, under anesthesia. There's two points to be made there, lots of things are not working under anesthesia, like the whole mechanism cerebral cortex, billion pattern recognizers, which are constantly firing and looking for firing and irony, and looking for concepts, that's not working under anesthesia, I would actually think that consciousness would have more to do with that, because that's the content of our thinking. You can't even conclude that we're not conscious under anesthesia, all that we know is that we have no memory of our experience, that doesn't mean we weren't conscious. There's definitely a difference between conscious and memory. There's lots of things that I can't remember now, that I am pretty sure I was conscious for at the time.<br />

+<br />

+There's this issue, and I try to bring it up to issue to what we know now. My ultimate conclusion, the cahper is called "you got to have faith"- there is no scientific experiment that we can even imagine- that can definitively demonstrate consciousness. Turing intended his test to be a test for consciousness, it's not testing consciousness but rather whether or not an entity seems like human life. But that makes a few assumptions. My leap of faith, that's an assumption that I would make, if I was interacting with another person. If it seemed like the thing was conscious, then sure I could make that leap. And if not, I'm not so sure. We're making exponential gains in understanding these phemoemon, but you have to understand the nature of exponential growth. Halfway through the genome project, we had 1%. At that point, it gained real traction. There are 20 different regions that have been simulated, even in full or in part. And a lot of things are growing exponential, like the resolution in brain scanning is doubling every year, and we're simulating various regions, the most important one is the cerebral cortex, which is where we do our hierarchical thinking. It's not exactly unique to humans, it's unique to mammals, only mammals have a neocortex, it's about the size of a postage stamp in a mouse. It's a structure. It's capable of hierarchical thinking, we can see how one pattern recognizer and a whole bunch of them leading to another, and you can actually re-assign them, re-learn material, we can see this with brain scanners now, we can read thoughts and read our brain and see it creating new structures, part of it gets swept away with a stroke or brain damage. We can relearn material using completely other regions of the neocortex. It takes time to develop that. Blue Brain Project images.<br />

+<br />

+One of my critics wrote a paper saying that we would never simulate a brain, and it would require a trillion line of codes. He looked at the vast complexity of connections, and this is just a small slice of connections. John Vorgan. So I looked up the picture, it's not a pic of the neocortex, it's a picture of the simulation of the neocortex.. so I guess his point just self-destructed. The point is that we have figured it out, and these are scaling up exponentially. I was at a panel a few months ago, and I was conservative. The head of the Blue Brain Project that he would have a few human scale simulation of the human cortex of 2018. I told him that he may have something by 2018, that has the billion pattern recognizers, but it's not going to work, it's going to take time to get it to function, so I said 2029. But there are other people who have simulated the auditory cortex, the visual cortex, the cerebellum, which has at least half the neurons of the brain. Large scale simulations. Some of them are taken over by the neocortexx, a lot of it is by the cerebellum. It has to solve several simultaneous differential equations to catch a ball in seconds, and ten year olds haven't taken calculus. The cerebellum uses something called basis functions, and that's how it solves the equations. Where are the trillion lines of code? The design of the brain is general, along w..<br />

+<br />

+The genome has a lot of redundancy. Including the junk DNA to not be junk, to be meaningful, it has redundancies, sequences, 300000x times, you have lots of redundancy, lossless compression, and you can compress it to about 50 million bytes, or maybe 25 million bytes, that's maybe half a million lines of code. How could that be? There are trillions of connections in the cerebellum, and trillions in the cerebral cortex. How could you get that out of the lines of code? Well, redundancy. The cerebral cortex has modules repeated a billion times. I use this as an analogy, the uh, Mandelbrot set. Picture of which is on the .. local complexity. It's going to be .. very complicated image, and uh, it would take trillions of bits to represent it at the whatever level which is what the brain is. The design of the mandelbrot is just six lines long, it's a fractal, and if you iterate it, you get those images. The structure of the brain is a probabilistic recursive fractal. The brain isn't six letters long, it's 25M letters long or something.<br />

+<br />

+This is the source of economic growth, the adoption of these technologies is exponential. People sometimes ask, how come we don't see the boom and bust of the .com. Well, that was a Washington thing. Exponential growth could be sublinear, doubling looks like tiny numbers, it could look like nothing is happening. Washington came back and looked at 2000 and said that, it didn't look like anything changed. Meanwhile, it was growing exponentially. You had Google, which was really a .com, got hundreds of millions in real revenue. Century ago.. more .. skill latter is moving up. We've increased ten-fold over the .. in investment per .. 60,000 college students in 1870, 6M today. Sometimes people talk about wealth.<br />

+<br />

+Longevity tech. Aubrey talked about these, like biotech, reprogramming the information processes, which now considers information technology will progress exponentially, and nanotech, we're going to run out of resources. Biological population. We're wat.. we have 10,000 and energy we need from the sun, this happens to be in the wrong form, not in the form of electricity, it's modestly useful. We're applying information tech to solar panels, so that's going down for the moment. If you look at the lower right-hand graph, the cumulative solar energy in the world has been doubling every 2 years and has been for 20 years. It's only 8 doublings for hitting 100% of the world's energy needs. These technologies always look like fringe players. The internet wasn't going anywhere when it was just 1% of potential users, it's only 8 doublings at 2 years each for meeting 100% of the world's energy needs.<br />

+<br />

+So I shared this report with the Prime Minister of Israel a couple months ago, he said great we have enough sun light. Yeah, we have 10000x we have than we need. So, the next day the president announced an israel initiative to replace the world's fossil fuels with solar energy to use these scientists. It's going to take 16 years to do it, but whatever.<br />

+<br />

+Computers are starting to disappear. Images directly to retina, I've seen early products of these. A virtual screen that's a big as high resolution. carrying around a big screne, that's the emerging, virtual display, overtaking your whole visual field, you'll be immersed in games, Microsoft for example, pick up all of your movements and moving in a .. or elm-related.. or music-related interactive game, it's .. really.. we will see. These technologies are getting closer and closer to us, when I was a student down the street, I had to take.. people put them in their bodies already, putting computers inside your brain. Time is a pressing concern, people hacking into the brain, and it was not a humor piece. That is today. These technologies will be a billion times more powerful in 25 years, and a hundred times smaller, and you get some kind of idea of what would be feasible.<br />

+<br />

+This is what we've done, before alpha medicine and information technology. This was when it was hit or mix, it was progressing linearly, not digitally, so that's been useful. This is going to come to height here. Any other kinds of limits, we can engineer, re-engineer those, now that health and medicine is becoming an information technology, beyond biology by introducing nanotechnology, we're going to become a hybrid of machine and biological and nanobiology heritage, my mind is not going to.. transcending our biology, not our humanity. Hang in there, and thank you for the remarkable future.<br />

+<br />

+

+Good morning, how are you? Hey, he's good. Two thumbs up. Who else is two thumbs up? Alright, excellent. Um. World cup news. USA wins 1 to 1. I find that amusing. Aubrey what do you think? Metro goes out to 500k people. 2010 H+ Summit Harvard Science Center. Transhumanism is the belief that humans can evolve through technology, the apparent dangers about the notion. Who believes that? The subjects to be discussed are ai, elimination of disease, ages, and mental problems. I'm in Santa Montica, I'm surrounded by people with mental problems. It is my good pleasure to re-introduce Kevin Jain. There are also the Harvard Student Volunteers, who I think have done great.<br />

+<br />

+I am Kevin, this is Christian. I am the president, he's the vice president, of the Harvard College Future Society. Welcome to Harvard. Harvard's our home, we take classes in this hall, we're delighted to see this event. It matters so much to me, to Kevin, we're so happy that you could all come here to Harvard. Earlier this year, we started the Future Society, the group of students who conceptualized this vision of the club, and by extension this club. We have volunteers to the right, these are the guys who are making it happen behind the scenes. There are others that can't be here today. Thank you guys, and the club members who are back in their home states, who worked all semester to make this happen, but they're doing their own research, to make the future happen according to their own visions. The original purpose of the club was to critically evaluate these emerging technologies, and crucially consider where we are headed, and what we can do to help to make this a future we want it to be. Transhumanism, agi, longevity research, and all of these, critically assess and shape the vision of the future. We're more than happy to partner with Humanity+ to host these conferences, so that we can criticially integrate them. We'd like to see more student clubs rise up around the world in other universities. We have a facebook page. Get in touch with us to make stuff like this happen in other schools. Thank you for coming. David has something cool to show you guys. Thank you very much for coming.<br />

+<br />

+(now David). Surprises and announcements, you've heard a few. I want to introduce you to David Polinsky, he's doing the world premiere in scientific visualization. Hi guys. I have a small animation called XVivo, we do scientific and medical animations, you might have done Inner Life of the Cell. I've been so pleased and privledged to work with Robert Liu, a director of molecular biology here at Harvard. They have been just amazing in allowing us to visiualize science in a cinematic ways. Howard Hughes for financing this. The new animation we're showing today is a world premiere, it's the next chapter in the Inner Life of the Cell series. It's a small segment on mitochondria. We'll be showing that today, thank you.<br />

+<br />

+BioVisions at Harvard<br />

+Powering the cell - mitochondria<br />

+Alain Viel<br />

+Brett Murrah<br />

+Howard Hughes Medical Institute<br />

+<br />

+I love that. Thank you so much. Great. Okay. I have in my hand, the book of all books. Ending Aging: the rejuvenation breakthroughs that could reverse aging in our lifetime. When we talk about transhumanism, the first thing that is always listed is life extension and longevity. One of the most beloved figures in this area is Aubrey de Grey, you can find his 60minutes presentation on youtube. You don't have to do that to see Aubrey, because he's flown in from England. We appreciate your consistent support. He's dedicated his time and money, he puts his own money into this. His engineering approach is spectacular. If you haven't heard him speak before, you're in for a real treat. Go to SENS4.<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+

+It's early. First, I don't have any money. We're always in need of much more money to do what we do. So, um, today I am not going to talk about the stuff that I do, most of my time, because I know that most of you know about that already. I have this foundation that is focused on aging, and who are particularly in the possibility of applying rejuvenating tech to the problem of aging, and not just slowing down the molecular damage, but actually repairing and reversing that damage. Most of you know that I have historically divided the problem into seven sub-problems, or highlighted, potential solutions for these things. I don't claim that this will be a complete solution to aging, but we do have a respectable chance in the next three decades to give us extra life. This might also work for middle-aged people, which has implications: if we continue to improve these therapies at a modest rate, termed longevity escape velocity, we'll get the functional equivalent of complete repair of aging, even though the tech we have will never be perfect. I always make sure to emphasize that the longevity consequences are a side-benefit. The purpose is to keep people healthy, and disease free from the pathologies of aging. I am not going to talk about this today.<br />

+<br />

+I am going to be talking about what I see as an important issue, for people who are self-trained, who do not work within the regular academic system, who do know about different areas of science, like areas that have momentous consequences for the future. I am going to focus on areas of relevance to the biology of aging. The essential message of aging. We need more accurate understanding on behalf of the general public and policy makers, as to what breakthroughs are important and which ones are not. In what ways are they important? I am going to focus on telomeres. Probably a lot of you know that the end of the chromosomes, the telomeres, get shorter as a side-effect of cell division and replication, just as a consequence of the way that DNA replication works. If you make cells divide really often, unless something happens to combat this, enough chromosome is lost that the cell doesn't work any more. Hailflick called this "replicative senescence". Telomerase combats this process in some cells. Because of the problem of replicative senescence, telomerase has gained reputation as something relevant to the defeat of aging.<br />

+<br />

+The problem with the term "replicative senescence", is that it refers to DNA replication and cell division. Therefore, it sort of confuses the issues. The way that cell works, and aging, are conflated. This has caused a few problems about this over the years. There's a general belief that telomerase is the fountain of youth. Here's a friend of mine, Mike West, he ran Geon (?) a while back. And because it was a company, ahead of anything else, he had to have subtle self-promotion. Here's one of the low key paper:<br />

+<br />

+Extension of Life-Span by Introduction of Telomerase into Normal Human Cells<br />

+<br />

+And the resulting avoidance of the phenomonon of replicative senescence. You need to read the title carefully. It doesn't say extension of replicative stuff, but rather it's talking about in vitro cells, not just cells in humans. So, this confuses it. It gets worse than this. Here's a paper which also refers to replicative senescence, it's recent.<br />

+<br />

+Feedback between p21 and reactive oxygen production is necessary for cell senescence.<br />

+<br />

+It identifies just one small part that cells get into and maintain the state of replicative senescence. Here's the press release for that paper. "Scientists solve ageing puzzle". They don't go into anything outrageous. It was sufficiently cloudy that when the mainstream media got into it, it became somewhat more. "Scientists discover the secret of ageing". Just from you know, a really minor piece of work- a good one, but overall minor. This is a bit of a problem. It's not just hype, it's also anti-hype.<br />

+<br />

+Here's another good friend: Shoal Shansky. He's known for his vocal and frequent, and vocal skepticism about aging. He says things like that: "Don't age, don't grow old, and don't die- that's what they promise you- how ridiculous is that? The one common characteristic of all anti-aging practicioners of the past is that they're all dead." Olshensky.<br />

+<br />

+Why is this a problem? I don't think it's really a problem that scientists are engaged in self-promotion. You've got to do that, sure. It's really easy to engage in the biology of aging self-rpomotion. You have to do that to get money, sure, it's so close to self-preservation. You have to carry on and get funding. The real problem is the last of these things: the short-sightedness. You may gain in the short term, like the prestige of one's work. In the overall long-term, people may fretter.<br />

+<br />

+Gerontologists say that "aging is not a disease". I have a problem with this. If aging isn't a disease, then why should we throw any money at it? Well, there's some small wins, and stuff. That's the mantra- aging is not a disease. Everyone who works on the biology of aging knows that it's ridiculously vastly underfunded, given that the intervention into aging constitutes preventive medicine. There are other preventive medicines that are vastly over-funded. So, this mantra has been a crippling effect, the distinction between aging and diseases of aging.<br />

+<br />

+Craig Venter was recently heavily in the news because he produced a new real tour-de-force version of DNA synthesis via creating a genome of a small bacterial cell with a cytoplasm, and he inserted it into the vicerated shadow of another cell, which was a similar but not identical species, and the new DNA altered the old cell into the new cell, and demonstrating that the DNA was where we thought it was. It was definitely interesting. It got publicized interestingly, like in reasonably respectable magazines, like "scientists create synthetic life". Creating life is a pretty ridiculous thing for this. Craig Venter is not any less public than I am I guess. You had plently of media coverage in the mainstream press, in which it was pointed out that it was a big deal, and some people said it wasn't a big deal. This was fine. You had scientists actually tempering each other's enthusiasm or lack of enthusiasm for a piece of work that was very important, but had been distorted and described as much more important by people who weren't thinking very hard.<br />

+<br />

+I had a similar thing happen to me, because in 2005 there was an article called "Do you want to live forever?". Some people describe my work as pseudoscience. The MIT Tech Review did a rather nice feature on me in February of 2005 which, um, with some editorials that were down-right insulting, and they were allowed to do this by some careless remarks off the record remarks by some of my colleagues. A lot of people like you didn't like that, said this was superficial treatment, and nobody was being told what was wrong with Aubrey's ideas. They ran a prize competition called the Life Extension Pseudoscience and SENS Plan, which is where they described why they thought that SENS is pseudoscience. They were forced to write it down, because I was able to write a response. A lot of real interesting and very prominent technologists and biotechnologists- including Craig Venter- were asked to evaluate whether or not my ideas were worth discussing. They came to the review that they were discussing, and the pseudoscience claims were just ad hominen. So that was a success. SENS is now much more perfected within the scientific world tahn 5 years ago. The evaluation of it has been improved as a result of interventions like this. <br />

+<br />

+In closing, citizen scientists can make an enormous difference in the rate of tech. They can do it by the improving the accuracy of media coverage of scientific advancements, and the quality of public and policy maker's understanding. Look out for hype and anti-hype, and figure out how to articulate in an authorative way, in what's wrong, when people engage in it. If you do that, in just as the SENS challenge, you can make a difference as to what happens, and speed up progress. Thank you very much.<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+And he's the founder of 18 companies, like Snap Schools, a re-invisioned education system. <br />

+<br />

+I didn't invent the video game. A guy named Willy Higgenbotham, in 1958, did a unit that looked like this. It was a ping pong game on an oscilloscope, using resistors, capacitors and relays. In 1961, the guy right down the lbock named Steve Russell, programmed the PDP1 to do a game called Space Wars. That was shipped with every PDP1. As an undergrad, I played this game and was mesmorized by it.<br />

+<br />

+It so happened that, at the time, the University of Utah had Dr. Evans, he was one of the early computer graphics guys. There was four places in the world in the 1960s where you could see a computer next to a graphics screen. Basically, he brought an awful lot of graphics stuff to it. This is a PDP1. Big computer display. I was working in amusement parks over the summers. Knock-down milk bottles. I'm a carnie. What it did, I became manager of the department, I knew the economics of the coin-operated video game business. If I had this game at the university, in the amusement park arcade, people would play it. Million dollar computer, 25 cents a throw, that's probably not going to work. I decided that the tech is right, and I started working on it. <br />

+<br />

+What I want to say is that, I didn't plan to work in an amusement park, with my engineering degree- boom, video games. I licensed my first game to the company that did this. Computer Quiz. It was a slide show, there was no computer. This was Computer Space (1970). I molded the design on my kitchen table out of modeling clay, and we blew it up in a fiber glass thing. The girl in the langerie, she was actually a topless dancer in a local bar. That's another story. This was the founding team. The guy with the beard did the work for pong. Fred, the other guy was the accountant, got fired. Ted was my partner. We ran the manufacturing.<br />

+<br />

+There were two innovations there. One was pong, the other was the polkadot shirt. The polkadit shirt did not catch on. Magnavox came on, did a consumer game, nobody liked it. We did pong, everyone liked it. We did the VCS. We did a whole bunch of other games. And then I did Chuck E. Cheese's, all kids love it, parents hate it. I sold that when we were at 250 restaurants, then I did a robotics company (Androbot). I did a few demos, a bunch of orders, I couldn't make stuff work. The problem is the robots. In the computer world, if you crash, it's a blue screen of death. If you have a robot, and it's running across the floor, and the computer crashes, you have an uncontrolled 50 pound missile. We called the Mo the Baby Mower. I did then ETak, the first automobile navigation company. I sold that to Rupert Murdock, and we wrote this business plan in the middle of the ocean. I did ByVideo, it was a shopping system with Kiosks. We were a little too early. Microwave company. uWink. Toy company. Customer-facing terminals at uWink / restaurant. Martini on your table in under 3min of sitting. And then you can play games in groups or with the whole restaurant.<br />

+<br />

+I have ADD. I have to sell a company, and then I have to start something new, or else I get bored. I decided what's needed is a new look at education. Let me tell you some things about education. In the landscape of education, computer education is an unmitigated disaster. Why? It turns out, if you put even normal classroom, if you try to put 35 students on 35 computesr, all the teacher can do is do sysop, and get behind. Business computers are horrible, in the environment of school. The problem is that they are too fragile. They can be stolen, I can't tell you the number of times I've gone into a computer lab, and half the computers are down, someone stole the memory, or you pick up the mouse, and we've had to glue in the bottom because people keep stealing the mouse balls. To fix things, I decided to re-invision it.<br />

+<br />

+Classrooms are obsoletes, creativity can be taught, video games show the way, exercise/learning are linked. This sounds like a hodgepodge. How do you fix schools? You do it by coin-op tech. Coin-operated games have a couple of characteristics. They have to be built so that they cannot be destroyed by human hands. A kid who can shut down a network by putting a pin through a network cable, it's not a bad kid, he's just 14, and yeah that's a cool thing to do. You should make it impossible to shut down the network. A lot of that is tech. The most important thing is that you have to take off the doors to the lab. The software and hardware has to be a walled garden.<br />

+<br />

+We can basically have, put an arcade together, in the middle of hte meanest streets of any central city in the world, I've been treating creativity to students for years. There's pretty simple things to do to deal with that. ADD and ADHD, and what you have to understand is that school almost works. That's because it's not the most interesting place in town. The alternative to was watching a river flow, watching corn grow, it turns out that in today's class room, it looks like, less than half the class is paying attention after 10min. So, everyone else is somewhere else.<br />

+<br />

+This is the competition for interest. All of the sudden, look at the bottom, it's school. One of the reasons is the cost of media production. Class room is $30/hour. Just does not compete. A good concept poorly produced is not as good or compelling as a crappy concept with a whole bunch of production values.. like $500k/hour of a video game.<br />

+<br />

+Disruption is very boring. There are all kinds of tests.. if you .. public schools were created in the 1800s.<br />

+<br />

+*ridiculous laughter*<br />

+<br />

+Every school needs an ...<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+I'm fundamentally convinced that the opportunities that lies ahead is tremendous. It's not just a business opportunity or a scientific research, to create a movement, if you will. At scale. The combination of information technologies and other scientific research that has been discussed here, with biology, as a massive opportunity. However, I also see some formidable obsticles in wide-srpead consumer adoption. <br />

+<br />

+A couple of years ago I spoke with Marshall Cohen for the marketing guy for the mass adoption of American Online. It came in every magazine, and so on. He was the guy on that, they spent billions of dollars on the marketing. It was very hard to sell something that they couldn't imagine. What you're trying to do is to convince someone, I'd like you to walk through that door over there. But they want to stay seated, and it's really great on the other side. Most people aren't willing to make that step, to open the door and figure out what's going on behind that door. You have to speak to the merits, you have to find anecdotal evidence, testimonies, etc. This was very instructive. He was a master of selling the invisible. If you consider what transhumanists proposal is, it's not to walk through the door, it's about stepping into the void, into the future.<br />

+<br />

+Take that leap, the tech is probably going to work, we're pretty confident. Take that step. Throughout human history, there has been two responses to the massive changes: joy, a general positive expectation. You're here because you're enthusiastic about this. There's another group, they exist, they are afraid of the future. On the middle, is the group who doesn't know, they are uninformed, they are uninterested or don't have neough information, they are unsure.<br />

+<br />

+If this was a political situation, and I guarantee you, this will become a political situation, political strategists will narrow this undecided group to be as small as possible. The firmly committed pro/con groups. Social change, at the scale that you are proposing with transhumanism, generates fear. Look at the GM crops riots. There's hysterical fear around the world that persists to this day. The fear triggers resistence. They get more entrinched, they feel that this is being forced upon them, and sometimes irrational expressions of this fear occurs. To surmount this existence, something is required.<br />

+<br />

+I believe transhumanism fits into a long tradition of social progress in the U.S. It did not come easily in the U.S. though- like abolition. John Brown was able to frame the debate in moral terms, he used examples from the bible, it was so compelling that his captors were pursuaded about the moral rightness of this cause, those were for and against, and he set the moral terms of the debate, so that they had god on their side, the moral right on their cause. The worker's right movement happened. Workers spoke up. It seems unthinkable that workers had to face armed resistence to demand working conditions that didn't kill them. Reasonable rights. <br />

+<br />

+Around the same time, the child labor movement. Children in eastern europe were almost enslaved basically. Sufferage movement, same thing. You had a debate that seems unthinkable today, but of course it seems that women should have rights today. But at that time, it was a major debate, not just an intellectual debate, the moral high ground had to be defined as the proponents of sufferage.<br />

+<br />

+Evolution theory, this debate about evolution remains with us today. The civil rights movement started with non-violent approach with forceful resistence, it gave them the moral high ground, and thereby the prevailing position in the debate. The women's liberation movement had less movement. Today we have massive social change. We have pro-life and pro-choice debates. They linger, it takes a long time for democratic society to come to terms with these issues. The right to die movement. The marriage equality movement, and they are very much alive. With respect to transhumanism and massive social change, there's a large number of undecided people in the middle. The obligation of us is to convince as many people in the middle to take the rightness of transhumanism, that this is indeed a birthright of humanity, and is our destiny.<br />

+<br />

+I don't suggest that we have to take to the streets in armed in insurrection. There will be people who resist. Within that group in the middle, and while they might be unaware of the great breakthroughs in science, guess what- they already have an opinion of you. Take a survey of pop culture and transhumanism, starting with HAL 2000. The idea of the bad robot has been with us for a long time. This is the invention that is smarter than us, takes us over, and then screws us. Blade runner. Scary cyborg, Terminator. In the first movie, he was the bad guy, on the second one he was the good guy. This creature, is he really on our side? Another variant of that form was the Violant Mutant Meme, where the violant mutant is the scientifically bred offspring is quite off, not just like us, but you can't quite trust them.<br />

+<br />

+Another version is the celebrity robot meme. A thousand of these photos, the idea that these people are not quite like us, they might be robots. Another notion that has been prevelent in pop culture in thrillers is the idea of the evil corporation that is somehow seeking to patent DNA and control our human heritage, and that's linked to the notion of the nazi conspiracy that is rooted in the muddy eugenics movement of the early part of the last century. When humans start to talk about perfectibility, it has this over-tone about the Third Reich. This idea of playing god gone wrong makes reference to Jurassic Park. For the citizen science movement, one scientist could cause us all to make a major step backwards. Jurassic Park is the bumbling scientist example, attempting to play god.<br />

+<br />

+Another evil corporation version is genetic determinism. Once they understand your genes, they will predict which insurance you will, your role in society. So Gattaca put that into a movie, and what roles people play in society. Another idea that scares people in pop society, this is a grotesque picture, a mouse is bred to grow a human organ on their back. There was also The Island, the clones that are grown just to bred to be organ donors for the masters.<br />

+<br />

+Another negative meme is unfair advantage memes. People will react. There's something inherently unfair about this- steroid scandals. That's very much alive and with us. What about the scary idea of the Rich Methuselah Meme - that these technologies will be first available to the very rich and powerful, they will maintain their youth, and financial advantage, and reep double their financial advantage, and thereby the rest of us won't have access to those technologies. This is a real fear. Some of these people push body modification to a real extreme. These are hardly the best proponents for your cause, and that's not great. There are thousands of photoshopped photos. Some hybrids of animals. Some unnatural and awful thing, and hopefully it doesn't exist. Unnatural monster meme. Some sort of weird human dog thing. It's really disturbing, the most repuslive image of them all is that image from Alien.<br />

+<br />

+My message to transhumanists and the proponents here today is that you're already losing the pop culture game. The voices of fear are winning. That's a very easy target to play. Who's against transhumanism? Rob, who's against it? There's a resistence built in.. behind it are real organizations who are threatened. When you talk about radical change, it's about root, about uprooting. Who has roots that are going to be uprooted?<br />

+<br />

+Government agencies<br />

+Insurance companies<br />

+AMA<br />

+Big pharma<br />

+hospitals<br />

+health maintenance orgs<br />

+religious groups<br />

+cultural conservatives<br />

+bio-ethicists<br />

+<br />

+To you, it's about science. To them, it's about survival. It's about the preservation of an existing status quo, a business model that is tried and true. Take for instance, an insurance company. Why not, keep people along longer, don't pay out the death benefit? Well, they have 100s of years of acturial models, so anything that represents change is going to incur beauracratioc resistence. They have every reason to resist- those tables are huge. In the wider spread community, the masses of people around the world. Their idea of a human being is very much rooted in their beliefs and traditions. This is what makes up our cultural identity. Anything that suggests a change, or threatens a change, that's a threat called Ego Annihiliation. That will incur such a tremendous amount of irrational resistence. Not at the level of intellect or awareness, from some gut level, ego preservation at all costs. Anything that is a threat to all identity to us as a human being, will incite that resistence.<br />

+<br />

+I want to find an example of something that promotes radical life changes, in some aspirational life style, which is a positive change, but something that you can embrace, and derive lasting benefit from. Now, in my career, I've worked with some of the leading proponents of life improvement. The self help movement, personal growth movement. These groups have touched millions of people with messages of positive growth, to make positive changes in your group. They are in the business of promoting radical change life style changes. I have developed digital programs for these folks.. like Oprah.<br />

+<br />

+MAKE IT EASY TO FOLLOW<br />

+<br />

+Your stuff is just too complicated. There is a very complicated subject matter. Very difficult to follow. Make it easy to follow. This movement needs to define what it stands for, what it will accept, what it will take to get kicked out of the transhumanist movement. What does this group find unacceptable in transhumanism? I've gone through in the many many examples in pop culture. I believe it's the responsibility of this group to define what's factually true, a repository of data, a wiki, where we can gather the news articles, dispell those media myths, and provide more accurate data. Keep that data live. If you're interested in talking with Humanity+ about that, Alex is your man. I think another important aspect is making easy this to follow, make it easy to show the challenges. An investor would call it a hand-wave, and then we're off to that brilliant new future. You're side-stepping the challenges, who wants to talk about it? You diminish your credibility. When the delay occurs, and it's a bigger problem then you thought, you lose credibility. You should be honest about the real challenges, and a realistic timeline.<br />

+<br />

+Establish a rappport. Put a friendly face on it. Create that human connection, eliminate all of the jargon. The jargon is what designates an expert, and people who are non-expert. If you want to gain the broad undecided group. Get people to buy into this, make it easy. Don't set the freaks forwards. Minimize amount hte weirdness, there's going to be some but just try to minimize it please. Emphasize the practical benefits, what's here and now? Talk about diseases and situations that regular people are going to face, like caring for an elderly parent. Tell the human story. The great religious teachers always use human stories to convey their stories, not just facts and numbers and definitions. The human brain does remember stories, and we can derive the lasting benefits from those. Tell the stories of success cases, of real people, by applying transhumanism philosophy to their lives. Link your values, your defined mission, to their values.<br />

+<br />

+Harness emotional energy. Don't resist it. I know, emotion and logic doesn't fit. This group of researchers, they are very comfortable making an argument using logic, and using the argument in the intellectual sphere. When you're talking about fear, existential anxiety, you're not talking about that, you're talking to someone who will respond only to emotion. Don't deal with the emotion with contempt. Respect the fear. Embrace it, emotional energy is the most powerful energy to drive change. If we can find a way to harness emotional energy, that's how we can galvanize this. We will go to any length to avoid pain, to gain more pelasure in our lives. The more you can show how breakthroughs and transhumanism are going to increase our pleasure and decrease pain, you're going to get people to buy into these concepts, and harness emotional energy to drive change.<br />

+<br />

+Inspire action, it's not going to be a movement if everyone just sits around. You need to give them things to do. Don't talk about the singularity, too much of the discussion is stuff talking about stuff 50 years from now, I might not be around at that point. If you talk about stuff in the future, it just doesn't sound very urgent, talk about today. Show how today's actions, even if they are small actions, will lead to tomorrow's bright future. It's necessary for us to serve as role models. Apply your transhuman values to yourself. If you can't commit to this, you might not be ready to be a leader. I like Alex because he keeps talking about himself and steps he's taking to be a role model. If you want to be a leader, harness other people, your actions are going to take..<br />

+<br />

+You need to inspire a mission much greater than an individual life. I've heard tech abilities and statistical probabilities, we need to elevate that discussion, we need to talk about human destiny, a moral imperative, seeze the moral high ground. This is our birthright as human beings. We've been privledged with consciousness and intelligence to engineer our destiny, and treat other living creatures more humanely than we currently do. That's the moral high ground. Step up to that level in your leadership of this movement. I welcome any comments and feedback from this group.<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+

+Tony Greenberg.<br />

+Building a Services Market for the Transhuman Era<br />

+<br />

+Veytzel<br />

+Pullier<br />

+<br />

+ONe man, one army. So we're going to count down what we do. Honored to be hanging out here with Tarcek, Lightman and a bunch of buddies. When Alex said, come to Harvard, I said, I better bring some backup. I called some brilliant guys that I know. Built dozens of companies, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, exited multiple times, trendsetter in IT, current companies, ServiceMesh, DeskTone, and so on. Really changed the game every day. Thank you very much. Alex my company, Ramp Taste, my personal guru. He's from ..<br />

+<br />

+Boiling the Human: Convenience and Confusion on the Path to the Singularity<br />

+<br />

+How do service markets go and how do they build up and stuff? So, basic challenges. Tomorrow is becoming tomorrow faster than yesterday is becoming today. The frequency changes. We have to catch up as we rocket towards Singularity. We're fueled by new laws for tech, development, exponential. Virtuous cycle. There's a serious disconnect. We talk about today, we do have to change, tax reform changes, that's how we deal with personal private data, more choice less freedom, better prioritize fear and risks. The reptilian bits of our brain rules our brain. We have to harness the decision the evil purposes to guide our path and future. We worked around the physical limits of a shrinking transistor and higher storage capacities. A humane singularity is possible if we recognize obstacles. We're entering into the land of lost, the difference between what we're capable of achieving evolving and let's just say, the bad stuff which are exploited business models. We've entered the world of Madoff's law: anywhere profit can be made, will be made. Profit has driven business models. We have 25 years to correct Madoff's Law. What laws exist today that we can correct?<br />

+<br />

+Our big concern is that Madoff's law will thrive. We're looking at the exponential curve of technology. And we're very excited. So, as we start to talk about what's actually growing on the exponential curve, a lot of people are getting excited about Moore's law, nanotech advancements, advancements in nanotech and biology. All of the things that are not advancing exponentially, what about step functions, or so on? Our basic instincts, our human biology. So, our basic instincts are easily manipulated in light of the rapid change sweeping up on us. Rob was saying why it's important to focus on today, to kind of ground it, instead of just the exponential curve. In the next 12min or so that we have, really ground it on the phenomenon today. The land of the lost and the exploitation that's possible within that, we're seeing signs of that, and it's gradually creeping up on that. <br />

+<br />

+We speak in terms of boiling the frog, or boiling the human. The reality is that the frog jumps out, and as transhumans in the evolved state, let's say that humans are evolved in the conclusion, let's say that we're really taking.. time of global warming.. economical reprieve and problems.. we're now faced with many things that turn up the temperature.. privacy laws. Do we end up boiling the frog or making frog bites? Which, I can't pronounce. So, as we take a look at drawing the line.. look at yesterday's revolution, relying on the strenght, and talk about the revolutions.<br />

+<br />

+So, it's really important to look at where we're coming from. There was no email, no browsers, where connectivity was fleeting, and this was changing rapidly, people-to-people, what's interesting about this, information-information, people to information, each time there's an innovation, everyone laughs at the business model, and doesn't think it's going to be fundamentally important, that allows things to sneak up, that allows the temperature to heat up as you get more cooked up. As you go from browsers to exponential connections between people.<br />

+<br />

+The phenemonon of sharing is going to sneak up on you. When you talk about sharing, you have to talk about the speed at which information is flowing between individuals and systems. There's a couple red herrings that people are.. that's allowing people to become complacent. What's the cost to actually move information around, and if you look at that, and you believe that those are gaining factors, then it allows your brain to become complacenet, and stay in that boiling pot; cost of bandwidth, cost of storage; explosion of information. <br />

+<br />

+Moore's law<br />

+Metcalfe's law<br />

+Zuckerberg's law: the amount of information shared between people doubles every 12 to 18 months.<br />

+Eric Pulier's law: the time and cost to launch a venture that reaches 100M people havles every 12 to 18 months.<br />

+<br />

+It fails in comparison as facebook, which is now at 500M people. Zynga in the last 6mo, and things happening with Foursquare. <br />

+<br />

+The danger that we talks about is that .. the default options, when we talk about boiling the human. The exploitative business models, entering the frey. Privacy becomes a process, probably all of you spent X number of hours to cancel your AOL account. The default is that you're stuck forever. This is happening with everything. Privacy settings and the way people are sharing your data and by default, and so on. Little by little. If you think back to Amazon, everyone laughed at the business models. The volume would never rise high enough. Soon people were ok with doing credit card transactions online. Convenience is the single most powerful and dangerous driver to how you mitigate an example that seems intractable. You cannot govern it, you cannot tell people what to do, the people won't do it.. but if you make the convenient solution the solution that you'd like them to use. This is what's happening in the world today. Google made it hte most convenient place to find information. Now they just make more and more targeted ads with your information. Facebook then comes out, it became popular not for any other reason over what was really existing with myspace, or friendster. Facebook, felt more privace, it started here. And then went to other campuses, and it felt like you were in the zone that was separate and safe from the rest of the world. You got the feeling of comfort, and then they started to sell the data. The privacy settings, dangerous. Facebook is at over 500M. Twitter did the same. Foursquare is now the final step, where your actual physical location is being broadcasted. Each of these are notching it up additional levels each time, taking you into the additional layers. The minute we release our powers and so on, our responsibilities.<br />

+<br />

+Innovation. Some markets are wildly successful. <br />

+<br />

+The human brain does not quite catch up with technological innovation. The innovation itself. In the 1940s, someone got misquoted about the potential size of the computer model. A PC in every home, and a smart phone in every pocket, and Tony has four in his back right now. This is how innovation will work. You think of an idea and it explodes beyond imagination. The other promise at the same time- at the 60s, everyone was going to have a flying car. In 1985, we got a definite timeline: in 2015, where we're going we don't need roads. Instead we got 13 versions of Canyonero. Innovation got derailed because of the way we structured the businesses, profit motives. The first and simplest form of failure was failure of innovation, where business models don't catch up to the pace of technological innovation. You don't even see what you're missing.<br />

+<br />

+The business model can outspand the human brain's ability to expand the assault and start exploitation.<br />

+<br />

+The paradox of choice. As we get more choices, we get less happy, we get stuck in decision paralysis. This could become exploitative, this is where we go- we run away from fchoice. We run into conformity, we run into specific low-brow, low-class, lowest common denominator solutions, and we get stuck there because we're too afraid of everything else that is available to us. What do these 32 companies have in common? They were the nominees for the worst companies in America. 21 of those, including 3 of the 4 finalists and the eventual winner, was a services company.<br />

+<br />

+Transhumanism is a services market. Regardless of the general trend, everything as a service. The specifics out there. Virtual reality, uploading, service, cryonics, heritage in terms of the business model. Even nanotech.. kids any more.. we likewise can't probably hand out nanotech kits to because of security concerns. It's a services model, and it's not always.. the services model is predicated on managing costs better. When you think back to your last interaction with your credit card company, insurance company, or cable ISP. What about a company that holds your brain hostage? That's exploitative.<br />

+<br />

+What about the people who are out to do harm? Twitter accounts are worth more than credit card numbers. We've looked at the good, the bad, and the horrible. Now let's figure out how to avoid something terrible like the QWERTY keyboard. The thought leaders and investors will shape how tomorrow looks. We're kind of moving into, what's to much ado about nothing.. <br />

+<br />

+There's a lot of fake cures out there. There's fearmongering, like "I'm not going to take that, and I'm going to shut off my facebook account". One of the decisive campaign issues was that someone had designed the facebook privacy policy. People are aware of this, and they know it's a problem. It's dangerous to raise the topic, and nothing systematic to change it. You feel like someone is doing something, but in reality, fact is nobody is doing anything about it. Just a lot ado about nothing. We have to step forward and put something in place. One statement as to why this is so important. If you really think about how much there is in the public today, around identity theft, it's a huge problem. Not a huge problem in comparison.. black market for facebook and twitter accounts. Those people are generally wired to trust anyone who are within a certain degree on their social market.<br />

+<br />

+How do we reshape the market? Capital of tomorrow. What is the score coard? What are the libertarians doing today? There's a variety of solutions. More innovation. Regulation. Tax cuts, government regulation, and the counter-argument was that it's most often co-opted by the people who it is supposed to regulate, and that's used to move the line of business innovation down, and that's how we get stuck with the failure to innovate. The guy who made craigslist. If you want to benefit humanity, and not just line your pockets, give people an incentive to behave. Dictators will arise, l.. of course you have to get.. facebook. So we're going to list our big ideas. <br />

+<br />

+Create a singularity bill of rights for humans and machines.<br />

+<br />

+Singularity stock exchange SSE rates companies against its Bill of Rights. Capture the conscious capitalist!<br />

+<br />

+You have certain religious movements, and they boycott things that don't believe in their basic fundamental principles. There's more basic to the future of the humanity. There are such things as the profit motive, the planet, the basic tenants of economics of transhumanism. It has to come together to become a bill of rights of things we believe in.. a ranking against companies.. in real time, if we can have a ranking where the stocks of these companies are going up and down, based on there adherence to these principles, and through a little crowdsourcing and voodoo to make it hard to game the system, we can make a correlation between their score and the actual stock price. That will create an incentive.<br />

+<br />

+Divorce political organization from geography. Not just technology and business, the idea is to model more goods into the maqrket.. including political goods. Joint citizenship with people across the world, if you're still.. lso.. Clinton didn't win.. still can be your president. If we get market structures right, if we can prevent them from being exploitative, we can become free of geographic boundaries. How do we get there?<br />

+<br />

+How do we move to the services market without the salesmanship and exploitation? I've been trying to eliminate the sales process. If there's true value exchange based on value and understanding. We create awareness, expectations, accountability and so on. What are the boundaries on turning ythe power off for southern California? The software that meshes people and tech, our possibility of creating and understanding new service markets are critical for us at this time.<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+

+Natasha Vita-More.<br />

+<br />

+Hello. Thank you, I am happy to be here. I am delighted to thank the Harvard College of Future Studies and Kevin and putting this together with Humanity+, and Alex, our executive director, and David, our chair, and other board members who are here and not here. It has been an exciting conference. I would like to take this time to respond to the last two talks. I would love to have an engaging conversation with all of that. What I am here to talk about is human enhancement, I have been involved in human enhancement in the 1980s. <br />

+<br />

+I didn't build a future body design until the 1990s, where I created something called primo-posthuman, Vita in my name means more life. The italian aspect in it has some certain sensibility in the sense of ergonomics. There are all sort of aesthetic ways. It would be nice to have bodies adapted to our needs. I designed primo post-human as the idea of bringing together nano, bio, info and cognitive sciences and technologies. We don't have that yet. I've taken a pause in that work, and I agree the speaker who said that we need to think more about our current situation. I think that many of the speakers have approached that, but maybe not with the sensibility that I'll use. It's not new, it's just a matter of staying alive and sustaining ourselves.<br />

+<br />

+From primo post human, and dealing with the far out emerging and converging sciences and technologics, the NIMBIC quartet, but there was a type of news sphere, where we will become a connective intelligence, through a metaverse, through robotics, and through all sorts of combiations that we want but don't have. This dream has been around for some time. It's been a dream of many different societies and civilizations, to engage in life, in an after life, or in some mythological structure. Looking at a cell in my body, and building this primo posthuman prototype, and going to where I am now, the issue of our brain and plasticity. Not the plasticity that was talked about earlier, which was a wise and smart idea, or cryonics plasticity which is also good. But the plasticity of our knowledgebase, how we're acquiring information and how we're assessing it, and making sure we're applying critical thinking skills and socratic method.<br />

+<br />

+This was my brain by the way. I had an MRI. I have an ill life all my life, I have been supportive of developing new types of bodies. My particular brain suffers from vertigo, where I suffer from dizzy spells, hopefully I will outgrow that as I mature more. As John Smart earlier mentioned, the vulnerability of human life. Every second, about 2 people, or about 1.8 people die. It doesn't matter to me if it's from a disease or accident. Perhaps those people do have an after life, and that's to be expected to be sure. In my estimation, and according to the philosophy that I helped create, those lives are precious to us, and precious to every living being on this planet. It's life, and it's a breath of our universe. <br />

+<br />

+The predicament that we face now is that life is important to transhumanism, and we don't know what we will become, maybe one big Vernor Vinge singularity, or a Kurzweilian singularity, or a Max More singularity of distributed spikes that go up and down over time. It doesn't matter if it comes suddenly, it will come and we don't know what it will be. My primo posthuman design is just one, and there has been many. For human enhancement, the control factor is to stay alive. For those who are apposed to transhumanism, whether philosophically or not, the control factor is to keep death alive - and to do that - we have to keep disease alive. We have to stop it. We have to stop disease from taking over, not only the body, but the mind, and the mimetic framework from which we gather our knowledge base.<br />

+<br />

+This type of framework, from which we develop our knowledge base, I develop it from the cybernetic system perspective. Margaret Mead and so on. Second order cybernetics that puts the observer in the system that is being observed. A hard science puts the system over there and observe that. We as citizen scientists must include ourselves, we are the masters of our fate, and captains of our ship. We need to look at what it is that we desire, and what it is feasible. I take this from Dr. Gregory Stock. Gregory Stock is an engineer in biology, and a cultural catalyst, and has a number of different qualifications and is at UCLA, running conferences and whatnot, the issue that he brings is this concept is what we desire, and what is feasible. With primo posthuman, my desire was to control what is feasible. I desire to look at what we can do in the future. As a pragmatic person, I need to figure out what it is feasible right now. Like controlling our own minds, our physiology.<br />

+<br />

+We need to look at the society, our society and belief systems, to accept and integrate these belief systems. We need to take a look at ethics and biopolitics, look at organizations at IEET and James Hughes, and the bioartists and their phenomenal work with cell structure and whatnot. To take a look at the marketing and capabilities at what our consumer structure is. How we market transhumanism is important, how we will do it. It's been around since 1989 as a movement, and modern transhumanism is looking at where we're going and how we're going to get there. Looking at it from a second order cybernetics, as a type of cognitive cognition quotient, instead of an emotional intelligence quotient. What's the cognitive understanding of this future. The plasticity of this brain is essential, and the adaptability of our bodies, taking control of how we talk to doctors, what our medical knowledge is, how we take what the doctor says and do our own research. Thinking about our perceptions and accept different belief systems, which si important since we're a world. The ideas and methods are crucial for transhumanity staying alive.<br />

+<br />

+When we look ato ur own bodies, and look at what we desire, we can look at the social ecology of our system, we can look at what's available now for augmenting our body for enhancement. Here's some designs that I think is very interesting, in an area that has yet to be tapped for transhumanism. Industrial design makes the types of chairs, cars, cell phones, computers that we use. It's the design methodology that looks at how it works to enhance our human capabilities, the car for mobility, phone for communication et cetera. It's a social process to achieve where we want to go with enhancement. <br />

+<br />

+How often do we say we are going to look at nutrition, or at that apple pie, we take a few moments to think how it's going to keep us alive? Within body, if we could know what's going on in our bodies each moment, I've had cancer twice, but I'm the one who discovered the cancer, not my doctors. I may not be that smart about my body but at least I know enough to take responsibility for my body. I think that a transhuman enhancement project to look at what kind of contract with ourselves we can make for staying alive. Here's another image.. a desktop of what kind of attributes will be the variables for staying alive and so on. What to know, need to know, to make our cognition quotient.<br />

+<br />

+Now, I'm not going to go into the next three slides because they are on the websites, on the flikr images and the slide presentations. I want you to look into how cybernetics fits into here. How these different particles fit together. Cybernetics is a part of link into transhumanism, and future studies being one type as a way to study future enhancements and different types of practices. Within that transhumanism is the issue of philosophy, behavior and consciousness. Health, physicality, fitness, emotional, physical, mental and health fitness. We don't know where we're going, of course, so the next is unknown. The thematic areas are domain oriented. Each domain does have the variables. The agents are the actors within them, for relating back to your own knowledgebase, for your own staying alive.<br />

+<br />

+In closing, it takes fun minds, excited minds, collaborative minds to come up for ideas for what the future will be. Whether it's a future prototype thing, or a take on any of the ideas on the future, it's juyst recycling the knowledge with new technologies and new scientists. What's important for us today is that our brains and bodies and behaviors speak louder than our worlds, and how we treat each other is essential to our future. Thank you.<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+

+Mark Hatch<br />

+CEO, TechShop<br />

+<br />

+We are starting our afternoon session. This is an important session. The best things are kept for last. So, we have good speakers. We have Ray Kurzweil of course, as the keynote speaker of the afternoon, closing our conference. I know everyone is looking forward to him. I also know that you want to pay close attention to the others that are coming. Especially happy to have Mark here. Mark Hatch is the CEO of the TechShop. TechShop is part of the Maker Revolution. I believe that as we are going towards making an impact with our technologies at an accelerated rate, and closer and closer to our lives, it's going to be important that we pay attention to what the maker movement is about. Welcome Mark Hatch.<br />

+<br />

+Thank you, thank you very much. Shut out to Singularity U, Alex, David. Thanks for getting me here and giving this conference. So, um, I'm mark Hatch, I'm the CEO of TechShop. TechShop is the largest membership-based open access machine shop, fabrication studio and maker space. Let me give you a quick video tour of what it looks like.<br />

+<br />

+(video here)<br />

+<br />

+That's a quick video clip. TechShop is 15,000 sq ft of every machine, tool, wood working tool, fabrics lab, plastics lab, 3D prototyping, laser cutters, plasma cutters, welding machines, open auto bay, and about 4,000 sq ft of workshop with compressed air, electrical and water, and most importantly, over 600 people who gather together to create their dreams.<br />

+<br />

+What if innovation were free? The largest untapped resource on the planet is not natural gas, and it is not energy, it's not wind energy, it's not solar energy. It is the free time creativity and disposable income of the creative class. The creative class in the USA represents 40M people that control 474B dollars in disposable income. They are spending it on mansions, urban assault vehicles and crapachinos. What if we were able to get them out of their seats and into a shop like this for beginning to build their dreams? More importantly, helping them to start dreams about the world's biggest problems.<br />

+<br />

+Let's talk about what's starting to drive this. A couple of things that are driving TechShop. For 240 years since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the common man and woman have lost access to the tools of innovation. At the beginning of the industrial innovation, the tools of innovation and creativity moved beyond the reach of all but the most driven and crazy inventors and entrepreneurs and creators. That's about to change.<br />

+<br />

+With Chinese capital tools coming down the cost, by 80 to 90% in the last 15 years, and Moore's law applied to CNC machines, driving those costs down by 95% in many cases, we're on the cusp of the largest period of physical innovation. This is the cheapest access to tools ever. 15 years ago, just to use a CNC machine, you had to code gcode, it's a little harder than Visual Basic, easier than gcode. Now inside of 3 weeks I can teach you to drive a CNC shop, and sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of these products out.<br />

+<br />

+I want to get out to the people that are actually working inside of TechShop. Let me introduce you to some extreme makers, like Andy Filo. That's an extreme maker. Andy felt that science promised him a jet pack back in the 60s and 70s. He's working on it. That is not photoshopped. That's a pilot over 200 feet. He broke one leg and two ribs on the landing, a small price to pay. Ken is a co-inventor (Ken Hawthorn) he machined the frame and carbon fiber for the current record holder for electric motorcycles (166 mph). He got 70% throttle. <br />

+<br />

+Danny Fakuba is a 19 year old kid who built a segway. He innovated, he decided the problem with the segway was that you couldn't sit on it. It's the world's first two wheel self-balancing electric bar stool. It does 18 mph. That's the best thing about it.<br />

+<br />

+Not everyone is always trying to solve transportation issues- like Chris Chalmers- who is just trying to inspire us. He did an installation, he thought he would lose 2 or 3 thousand dollars, found TechShop, did the manufacturing, and made money on his first installations.<br />

+<br />

+Karen Synders launched a bamboo needle gauge company. In the first 6mo, her brother in law quit their job, then her job, and she amde more money in 6mo selling on ebay to crafters than she ever made before. Desktop manufacturing device.<br />

+<br />

+Roy Sandberg - telepresence robot company. Two years, two brothers, patents, trials, Europe, nursing home market.<br />

+<br />

+This is James McKelvey, he's Jack Dorsey's partner, Jack is one of the co-founders of twitter. He used the mills and lathes to build a prototype for the p2p iphone payment processing thing, and then raised 10M in their series A funding round.<br />

+<br />

+I'm going to talk about four that are fundamental. This is what happens when you provide the community with tools. Phil Hughes and his partner Bob built a liquid-cooled server rack. Datacenters use 3% of all of the energy in the US, and if you liquid cool it, it will save 15% to 30%, they used $20k and 2 years, they solved 1/2 to 1.5% of all of the US energy's needs all by themselves. With a DARPA grant for 2.8M, they are going a long way.<br />

+<br />

+Trevor Boswell built something called DripTech, there's 200 villages in china and 40 villages in India.<br />

+<br />

+Nick Koshnick have built a fertilizer detection device. It helps subsistence farmers reduce about 50% of the mass of fertilizer that they have to use on their fields.<br />

+<br />

+Naganad Murty - world health organization identified some of the top 10 problems in the globe. 40% of that problem is India. Another problem is keeping the children warm. Incubators cost $12k to $20k. That's the absolute cheapest. That's way beyond what a villager could afford. These guys went to TechShop, tapped into the community, uplinked the IP, and have launched a blanket company with a polymer phase-changing device in it that keeps the child warm. They charge $25, a little bit better than $12k.<br />

+<br />

+What happens when you give people access to tools and information? Boom. You get a creative revolution. I believe we're going through a creative revolution to get to the singularity.<br />

+<br />

+

+An introduction that started out quite well, and ended quite strangely. At least for my tastes. As soon as we have the microphone, I will start talking to you about my hopefully interesting things. I hope that you will find the right balance between what you have been hearing for something that projects you to go out into the future, and something that on the other hand that you can act upon very quickly within our not only lives, but within our means, in days and weeks of time. Perhaps months.<br />

+<br />

+I want to talk about the evolving data sphere, and what will keep us human when we decide and define humanity and human beings in a broad manner. Our human-machine hybrids, our posthuman transhuman successors. I am chairman of H+, I am advisor of Singularity University, I am the founder and chief of widetag. We deal with the internet of things.<br />

+<br />

+We know that answers are easy. What is hard is questions. But finding the right questions and finding the answers is an unevening move of discovery and curiosity that lets us understand why the Romans built a colloseum that survived more than 2000 years after its original life span target. Our planet is going to survive, but it can't survive without humanity quite well, unless we learn to watch what must be on radar.<br />

+<br />

+The radar that I am watching is the internet of things as defined by Bruce Sterling. The world of spimes. The world of evolving devices, where not only do we surpass of thousands and millions of computers, mainframes, mini computers, workstations, we are cut out to surpass the billions of mobile phones in the next generation of devices which will have to be very different in their nature. I want to tell you why.<br />

+<br />

+The granularity of the world that we are designing around, is going to icnrease drastically, when we get billions of devices, to assigning addressable understandable information to tens hundreds and thousands of billions of objects around us. We will not quite reach the possible maximum of the atoms of the universe with ipv6, but we will get very close.<br />

+<br />

+This necessity of drawing finer lines around us, it's very important, but brings with it something that we must be prepared for. Is it it the antonomity that these devices will have, and their decision power. This is already happening around us. And the third is that as these sensors are covering the world, we will gain redundancy that we sorely need, we cannot afford not to have redundancy if we want to achieve our goals.<br />

+<br />

+The way that these devices are going to communicate among themselves is going to be radically different. The dialog that we are having and thriving on is going to be a vanishlingly small percentage of the communication of the planet. We have extremely expensive and extreme devices that were built understanding this, which daunts the surface of the information that don't listen in on what's going on but in a few precious moments.<br />

+<br />

+We've been able to afford to be blind to the world. This will not be the case any more. The sensors that we are building into the products and objects around us are the capital of seeing, understanding and deciding like when a car decides to break if you don't do it by yourself; this is object now, out on the streets, and interconnected nature of the decisions that we have to make that technology .. as rapidly as we can.. must go in lock step with the legal and policy frameworks that have to be developed or else there will be chaos.<br />

+<br />

+There are a lot of people that are working on this already. For example, the roadmap of the next 10 years of intercorporation, as expressed by their chief technology officer, is that of developing claytronic sensor networks, composed of seven billion, seven trillion units (7000 billion units). My company is working on the software iinfrastructures that unprecedented networks need for collecting and analyzing the data from these networks. The reason why this is needed is quite apparent.<br />

+<br />

+In 10,000 years we have gone from representing 1% of the biomass on the planet, together with our house bats, cattle, to being totally the opposite, 98% and more. This is evidently unsustainable, as we start to understand and sense the world, which is today indistinguishable from what we called.. nature, and the technium as well. We must adapt because if not, the world will just as well go ahead without us. So we have things that are going in the right direction. Larry Smarr. There are examples that are current that we can analyze to figure out how to take advantage and leverage all of the expertise and passion that drives people. There are apps that are very exciting yet very challening, like transportation, 4G communications, energy and smart grids, quantified self, healthcare, making people responsible for their own bodies and health, both in the body and in the mind.<br />

+<br />

+And, this is going to take a lot of time. There will be people that will be easily convinced that this cannot happen because their expectations are going for it to happen tomorrow. It will take something like 20 or 25 years to look back and say that we've accomplished what we set out to achieve. It is going to take unprecedented levels of advanced communication, and there's huge challenges by itself in these things.<br />

+<br />

+But what really should happen is something that is going to be very surprising, I think, very interesting. Because we're really living in a broader strange place and time, with earth being a complex adaptive system, in a planetary co-evolution, which we cannot ignore but we have to embrace, for the past 10k years that we have lived here, we didn't realize, we went gone down a path where we are enslaved our machines, when we bring them to be autonomous and self-sufficient, we embrace them to be a part of our environment, our bodies, our decision making, empowering them to shape our civilization. We are going to be free to be human, and more than human again.<br />

+<br />

+Thank you very much.<br />

+

+I've been a citizen scientist for most of my life, I've been here to describe a superb thing for life extension, using something as a life span extension system. HACCP was developed for NASA for food safety. It reduces the need for sampling and testing. HACCP adds value to food by consistly safe product. There are steps to practically deliver an integrated server. Here's my partner, and medical director, for leading edge medical integration. HAACP is not a quality or efficiency system. It's within six sigma . Open source access to knowledge facilitates lean and quality control. You assemble and develop your assembly and lifespan team. Your capacity to personalize your systrem is only as good as your depth and breadth of data that you have to work with. What you plan to do with your life determines how aggressively you apply your system. Now you relate your domain matrix with cell, tissue and whole body functions. You take time to reflect and see if you got it right. Then you define and address, mitigate and periodically review, and verify and evaluate that all procedures are appropriate and effective. Your plan must be doable. Do what you say, say what you do. I respectfully submit that cellular memory, and distributed biofilm be considered an additional CCP as the metagenome. How effectively can we manage sub-clinical and how can well can we manage idiosyncrynices? The punishments for doing the deeds? We have seen the enemy and they is us. The system we are defining are defining the moral hazards. The patient driven helathcare law that Melanie Swan describes is the carrot. The issue here is the consumers to accept the pervasive measurement of so on. Such as enforcement of social crimes that are not related to health. How much can you control the tech and resources that you are allowed or have to work with? When I graduated from my diploma course at HACCP, I told them that I would apply this system to human health someday. The issue here is the willingness of the FDA- and top of the food chain regulators - to turn them selves into a servant for citizens. Citizen Scientists managing their own self life plan, must be treated as creditors or investors, and they must have the final say. Your body is the most valuable piece of property you will ever onw, so you must be allowed to manage it appropriately. A separate cryptic identity database, there can be whole population database for optimization so that tyou can work with the statistics. How about 7 billion asynchronous biological entities managed by an AGI? Effective product has to be reworked or disposed of. Adding periods of work, recreation, to the 25/30/35, which makes rescore 10, is the new green and sustainable life system choice. Each audit control levels leads to improved process control. Regulators must be service providers, not enforcers. Writing the code into an upgradeable operating system, which downloadable apps, is the key to putting life to this science. I see this as inevitable, it's just a matter of time for who or where this will occur. The body has everyhting required to modify and expand your life-span, and into various -omics domains, and justified by system-wide audits. Vitamin D, the marshall protocol, this is a supplement and a drug. This describes it to a tee. As a result of profiling, we will drill down to the metabolic loops that need management. Enhancement will be ever-more user defined and driven. Our human cells are outnumbered by microbiome. DIY microbiome componentss are removable and so on. I trademark the lifespan clock to graphically depict how it stresses our life span. With the epigenomic error, this classic experiment, dramatically explains and demonstrates the power of genomics. Using simple components, like Vitamin D, phenolic acid, results in dramatic outcomes. What could have been a whole conference on this part alone, on Fukitol, if we don't get this part right we're totally screwed. Cryogenic statis, before death, who owns your body? You versus regulation. Sentient definitions of cell types. Immortality makes war obsolete. The biology of mind over matter. For us baby boomers, it's not science, but mortal hazards which might be the ultimate deliniator between demise and super-longevity. In today's economy, you are all worth more.. realigning the economic systems will take 20 years to ramp up to mass commercialization of universla accessible self-steady directed evolution. Longevity dividends. Acturial evaluations will drive the big value to drive the longevity dividend more valuable than the death benefit. This plan has to be bankable. HAACP is a robust system. I have taken it one more step, to allow global citizen scientists to make full use of information technologies to give life a new measure of richness. It will be more wonderous when we can stay alive for a length of time entirely of our own choosing. The HAACP creates a comprehensive set of records and data set. Open source access allows individuals to self-direct their own self-directed program in a six sigma and lean manner. Current systems do not empower you. With HAACP, you control everything. Become a citizen scientist, and experience the longevity dividend with me. I'd like to thank Alex and H+ for inviting me, and my sponsors, company and shareholders. On some of these slides, I have shamelessly promoted my product. Today is the official product role out. It has converted this problem into a solution, an innovated patent. Regulatory methods to harvest derivative functional products for human and veternareial use. As I prepared this presentation, I've used this e.. giant focus group.. how others react to the ideas that I wanted to elaborate on today. From our gally, my son greg and daughter leah, and my soon to be new son godman, I've named Y-7, because he's due in Y-7, live long and prosper.

+George Dvorsky. He's a former board member of Humanity+. He's also a cross-fitter, so he's fitter than you could imagine. Jolly too.<br />

+<br />

+When the Turing Test is not enough. I have yet to have a cup of coffee. You're looking at an unenhanced human. A very common thread has been neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and the emergence of consciousness. How about some ethical considerations as it pertains to this subject. Machine consciousness is a neglected area. It does get conflated with artificial intelligence, and it gets mixed together. Machine consciousness is a subset of AI research, it's the branch that thinks specifically about cognition, and subjective awareness. What are the neural correlates of consciousness? That's its particular focus. In a way that a calculator or Wolfram|Alpha works, or purely computational, or through algorithms, that's more the AI than the artificial consciousness side. That's what I am speaking about today.<br />

+<br />

+Machine ethics as it pertains to this is further behind, the whole idea of artificial consciousness. We're behind the moral issues and ethical issues, like subjective awareness in our machines. We have to think about it now, not when we're having a subjective awareness emerge in low level brain emulation projects. The potential for harm is significant, we could be infringing on some subjective lifeforms. If we don't do this now, it's going to be harder to over-turn later. This is something that the animal rights people know. There's thousands of years of presedence for how we're accustomed to treating non-human animals. There are cultural and human expectations. There's a multi-disciplinary approach that will combine science, ethics and love. This is an issue from robot ethics. Robot ethics is defined by the rule and conduct of autonomous robots and vehicles engaged in combat for instance. If we have robot engaged in combat in the field, what could it do within the context of war and rules of war? That's different.<br />

+<br />

+In addition, we're not talking about these guys. None of these are really part of the discussion. Robots, Big Dog, predator drones. The tendency is to project some kind of consciousness or awareness on to it, we're infamous as humans to project on to others that these are worthy of moral consideration. You can kick Big Dog as much as you want. How dare you kick this robot. It doesn't matter, there's nothing there. There's no subjective core with which to experience indignity, care or suffering. This distinction has to be made. There are things that we are talking about. Basically, we're looking at moral worth. Take Hal9000 for instance. We're to assume for instance that it did have a conscious base, that you were interacting with a human if you will. We're not talking about something that is sophisticated or advanced as HAL, but what about human-equivalent life, or even instectoid subjective awareness?<br />

+<br />

+Why is this a problem? There's a lack of development in this field, a sense of possibility. The sense of vitalism is still present. Roger Penrose insists that there's something non-computational, something non-tangible about piecing together a consciousness in a machine. Routed very lcosely to that is the persistence of scientific indifference, something about consciousness in the machine, creating analogs in human or animal bodies. There's a defeatism about it. Who gives a crap that there's an emergent awareness in my code, or that I'm investigating a brain that is half-biological half-synthetic, that there's a sense the ethics have been divorced. That's the fixation on ai. Everyone is content to wrok on the ai problem, not the consciousness issue. <br />

+<br />

+Fundamentally, the whole issue of human exceptionalism and substrate chauvinism. Human exceptionalism is the idea that the only animals worthy of human rights and moral considerations that the degree humans are afforded, are humans. That there is something intrinsically valuable about humans that is worth protecting. So for example, granting a non-human animal person (like elephants, great apes, etc.), personhood status is apparently a violation of the natural order, or it's spitting on human dignity. By definition, it's transhumanist: there is potential for greatness, for personhood, outside of the human spirit- transhumanism. Beyond that, personhood could extend to non-human animals. The whole idea of substrate chauvinism. The only thing that matters, morally worthy, is the stuff that you're made out of. You must be composed of biological matter for me to grant you ethical consideration, or if you're made out of chips or some synthetic crap, you're less important.<br />

+<br />

+The last point: empiricism itself versus scientific understanding. The idea that through obversation and empiricism we're trying to understand consciousness. We're starting to get a little bit of a sense of how consciousness works, but it's still largely an empirical endeavor. The Turing test definitely has its disadvantages. The problem with the turing test is that it's purely behavioral, it's autonomic response of questions. There's no proof of subjective feelings in the background. There are many traits about human intelligence. There's stuff that we wouldn't necessarily equate with intelligence. Anthropomorphic fallacy, it's really easy for us to extend person-hood when it so suits us. There's also a failure to account for the difficulty in articulating conscious awareness. The problem really, is that just because it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, just because something passes the Turing test, it doesn't mean anything at all. Feynman famously said that "what I cannot create, I cannot understand", that's why we need to build a cyborg duck.<br />

+<br />

+There are ethical implications that I have already touched upon. Experimentation in the lab, when we start to get sophisticated in ai research, and we have sprung life into matter, and they are now observing the universe around itself. That's now something that we can't experiment on it, but it deserves laws and protection and our consideration. There's a point through brain enhancement or neural analogoues in our brain, where we may be more synthetic than biological, and we may have the concept that you are somehow less morally worthy. I have nightmare scenarios with great apes and other creatures, for modeling the brain, slicing the brain, and creating pockets of awareness and moments of absolute terror and anguish. Some developers will be fine with this, but ethically we need to be on top of this.<br />

+<br />

+Because of the space of all possible persons that may emerge within or outside human civilization; if we set the laws to respect all persons, even things that might not yet be a person, we need to have these laws in place. Moving along quickly, we need some solutions. We need to adopt cognitive functionalism, the idea that we recognize that there's nothing mysterious about the brain, we just need to figure out about how the brain works. We need to figure it out, develop the functions for bringing about subjective awareness, and then expand the protections in the legal realm because they are a part of our reality. Cognitive functionalism will be the proofism- we know the stuff that is responsible for creating conscious awareness. We know what it looks like in a human brain, so we'll know what it looks like in an artificial brain. To get there, we need to map the organs of consciousness, the neural correlates of consciousness. Half of the human genome is maybe about the nervous system. There are tons of neural correlates, and we need to figure it out; we need to identify when we create neural correlates of conscioussness.<br />

+<br />

+There are some individuals that have started on this path. Intelligence is different, like being able to calculate math and trajectory. This is the kind of approach that we need to start mapping out, the bits of cognitive function. Igor Aleksander (1995) had his own list of organs of conscious functions. I put this in here as well. It needs to be mapped against personhood as well. These are terms that we could describe for what a person is, take a quick look at that - like concern for others, knowing, communication, talking with others. So, again, the legal aspect of things. What we're talking about is epxpanding protections in the legal realm, laws to protect machines, and if they do qualify as persons, then we have no choice but to grant them fundamental rights. The right to not be confined, not experimented on, and definitive artificial consciousnesses will have the right to not be shut down, to own its own source code, to have its own access to its source code, the right to privacy and the right to its own mental states, and the right to its own direction.<br />

+<br />

+Animals are not property. Advocate for the legal binding rights to protect animals, and oppose the ownership by others for the code of your genome and gene patents. Thank you, guys.<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+<br />

+

+Heather Schlegel, VP Product Development, DebtMarket<br />

+<br />

+I am speaking today on something I don't usually speak about. In my day job for the last 15 years, I build products, I launch them and help people understand. As I do this, I thought a lot about our customers, about the impact of tech on society. One of the things I thought about a lot for 25 years was identity, and how we create I. That's what I'm going to be talking about.<br />

+<br />

+My interest in this is a bit, I've had this interest for quite some time, for over 25 years. Not many people are about their identity creation. A lot of people just go through life, and more proactive identity creations is happening under the guise of the personal brand. How do structures encourage certain behaviors? Some people have touched on this. But, an environment, virtual online or meatspace, where we're here today, has a set of rules for behavior. People behave within these rulesets, and my most recent interest, based on creations and experiences on my personal brand, most people know me online as HeatherVescent. I'm not the first person to think about this stuff.<br />

+<br />

+Marshall McLuhan<br />

+Douglas Hofstadter<br />

+Jaron Lanier<br />

+<br />

+The medium is the message. The medium is the massage. As you communicate the message via the medium, it changes it. More recently this was explored by Jaron Lanier, "You are not a gadget". Within a musical concept, and the limitations that technology put on tech. Douglas Hofstatder explores identity concepts in "I am a strange loop"- where you create copies of your friends and loved ones, you create a library of replicas of your best friends, amused loved ones up here. Last week, NY Times had articles on multi-tasking and attention impacts on the brain. Multi-tasking changes your brain, whether for the better or the worse. The medium is changing us.<br />

+<br />

+How I think about this is how we experience and create and respond to technology. I like to look at the underlying value sets in the systems. I have to understand where I am coming from, because I have my own value sets that I am looking through. Who am I? Who are you? It's a fallacy to think that we're always the same person. We have facets of our identity that we bring out at appropriate times- I am not the same person at work, on stage, or talking with you right now. I experience these moments fluidly, in the present moment, and are linked to my corpeal state, my physical form in front of you. Online, these identities can grow and expand without the limitations of being associated with other potentially conflicting identities.<br />

+<br />

+Our fragmented identities have exploded online. I am not going into the pros/cons on anonymity, however it's a defining characteristic, a meta-value of the internet technology system. Pen names and pseudonyms gives the wearer a sense of security. These fake identities give the wearers to act beyond traditional and accepted laws, they become tricksters and accepted fools.<br />

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+Sometimes these identities take on a life of their own, they become bigger than the person they are representing. Success equals stagnation when a pop star.. it's as if a pidgeon holed for their identity. Many of you might have been experienced as being pidgeon holed based on past success. He shocked the music industry about his sexually explicit songs. I've already mentioned Hofstadter's strange loops, you might just be a jerk, but you might just be having a bad day. We extend our identities in many ways, we do it with brands, cars, devices, objects, how many will identify with brands of Apple? We also identify with groups, institutions, movements, communities, and musics, and musical types, and sets the stage of our mentalities.<br />

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+We have multiple identities, some may choose to segment them, while some want some that are open and integrated, and some might remain private to keep their aminineity. Express an identity, explore these through avatars and games and role playing. Physical and beauty modifications change our identity for external and internal reasons. Adderall, modafinal, caffeine changes our intenral state. As a conference, scientists can participate in the experiment itself. We've opened the doors of expression.<br />

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+Citizens of second life are not limited to the biology of the meat world. You create characters and then go and experience in this other world. You can try all of these constmes, with blogs and twitter and myspace, which are all systems that encourage self-expression. Some of these pseudoynms become personal brands, are created in response in conjunction with an audience. Contrast this with facebook which connects with your real identity, which limits the way you want to limit it. Co-opted parts of identity via identity thefts. In the Pirates of the Carribean, Jack Sparrow is based on a real life guy. He's this crazy tattoo artist guy. Here's a picture from Second Life, it's really immersive, visually, and you can see how you can fit and evolve in it.<br />

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+So do we get lost? I get lost. People become enamored by their avatar selves. I've got caught up in my own identities, and caught in feedback loops that reinforce mindsets ideas and behaviors. Has anyone ever become the experience of becoming someone else when the cameras turn on? What's the motivation for participation? Is it to get attention, to communicate, to bond, to distract? And why are you participating, or why do you not participate? It's because you want to remain private?<br />

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+Then there's questions about self-value, let's skip that too. Let's talk about ownership. Who has your ownership when you expand it with brands? I'm me, and I own my identity, but when I project it, I don't have control over how you interpret me. Which parts of those are truly ours? It changes us in a way that no longer identifies with us, and that makes us feel betrayed. The truth is easier ever to know.<br />

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+We can use these technologies to know ourselves up. Twitter capture, real life capture, if we go back to experience them and read them. We create a history collectively with many people documenting stuff with their perspectives. Physically we can learn more than ever.<br />

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+Identity is not created in a vacuum, it evolves in response to a changing environment. The medium is a massage, if you are created with a system and the tech of the environment, you may create you. I encourage.. what values are being encoded in what you create, and how those values are being impacted by the people that use your products. How are your interactions with these technologies defining others as well as yourself? <br />

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+Lewis Carrol: I - I hardly know, sir. ....<br />

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+I know it's okay, to have these identities, several times each day. Thank you.<br />

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