NeoFiles Public Forum: The Future of the Future: The Next 10-30 Years

Featuring:

JARON LANIER
DAVID DUNCAN
ANNALEE NEWITZ
ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY

Moderator:

RU SIRIUS

WHAT: NeoFiles Public Forum - The Future of the Future: the Next 10-30 Years
WHERE: Mill Valley Community Center, 180 Camino Alto, Mill Valley, CA.
WHEN: 7:30 PM, Thursday April 28
PRICE: $10 at the door
E-Mail: rusirius@neofiles.com
Phone: 1-707-773-3175

Life Enhancement Products and NeoFiles announce the second NeoFiles
Public Forum. Taking their ongoing, web-based monthly exploration of
edgy, visionary philosophy, science and technology to a live audience,
the topic of the second forum will be “The Future of the Future: the
Next 10-30 Years.” NeoFiles Executive Editor and technoculture legend

RU Sirius will be presiding over the NeoFiles Forum.

Physicist Neils Bohr said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future” while philosopher Simone Weil wrote that, “The future is made of the same stuff as the present.” Meanwhile, avant-punk rockers Sonic Youth kept their prediction succinct, singing, “confusion is next.”

On April 28, we will be bringing together five widely respected commentators on the culture of technology to participate in live panel discussion that will explore the changes that can be expected during the next 10-30 years.

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PANELISTS
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Jaron Lanier was the person most commonly associated with Virtual Reality (VR) when that developing technology conquered the national media’s imagination in the early 1990s. Lanier’s team at VPL (Virtual Programming Language) developed the first implementation of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays and he led the team that developed the first widely used software platform for immersive VR. As a musician who works with a remarkable collection of eclectic instruments from all over the world, Lanier has worked with Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, and Sean Lennon.

NeoFiles Interview
http://www.life-enhancement.com/le/neofiles/default.asp?ID=11

“I like to think of VR as an alternative way of thinking about a ramp of technological progress in the future where instead of making bigger and faster things, you make more intense experiences and more interesting forms of human connection.” — Lanier
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David Duncan writes a column for the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle on ”Biotech and Creativity” where he discusses the social and cultural implications of the biotech revolution. Duncan also conducts a regular interview column for Discover Magazine, and is a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. His most recent book, The Geneticist Who Played Hoops with my DNA: and other masterminds from the frontiers of biotech will be published by Willam Morrow/Harper Collins, May 2005

NeoFiles Interview
http://www.life-enhancement.com/le/neofiles/default.asp?ID=48

“… I’m fascinated by the fact that there may be a few genes that you could alter with a pill that could let you live to be maybe 150 years old.” — Duncan
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Annalee Newitz writes the nationally-syndicated column "Techsploitation." In 1992, Newitz founded the radical leftist webzine, Bad Subjects. She earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from UC Berkeley and was a 2002 recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowhship at MIT. She currently works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and publishes in Wired, Popular Science, Salon.com, New Scientist and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Her forthcoming book, Pretend We're Dead, is about monster movies and capitalism.

NeoFiles Interview
http://www.life-enhancement.com/le/neofiles/default.asp?ID=54

"The problem I have with transhumanism and extropianism is that they seem to have replaced religion with biotech -- transcendence is physical transcendence." — Newitz
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Eliezer Yudkowsky is Director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). “The Singularity” is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge originally coined the term "Singularity" in observing that our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human. The SIAI was founded for the pursuit of ethically enhanced cognition by creating beneficial AI.

SIAI Website
http://www.singinst.org/

“Like a spectator at the dawn of human intelligence, trying to answer directly why transhuman intelligence matters chokes on a dozen different simultaneous replies; what matters is the entire future growing out of that beginning.” — Yudkowsky

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MODERATOR
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RU Sirius is a well-known cultural commentator and co-founder of Mondo 2000, the iconoclastic magazine that defined the digital culture of the early nineties. He is currently Editor-in-chief of NeoFiles. He is author or editor of seven books, including Counterculture Through The Ages: From Abraham to Acid House, Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge, The Revolution, and he co-wrote Timothy Leary's last book, Design for Dying.

NeoFiles Website
http://www.neofiles.net

Posted by paul at April 18, 2005 11:55 AM