Here is part two of Dr. Ken Hayworth’s discussion of preserving your brain. Part one was posted previously here.

As Hayworth discusses in the video, he is working on the technology to upload your brain.

Would you do it, if you could?

Find out more about Hayworth’s work at the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Will you preserve your brain? If so, upon “revival,” will you live again? Will you still be you? Fascinating questions.

Here’s one researcher who’s really thinking about brain preservation and who believes you should think about it too.

Meet Dr. Ken Hayworth:

A self-described transhumanist and President of the Brain Preservation Foundation, Hayworth’s goal is to perfect existing preservation techniques, like cryonics, as well as explore and push evolving opportunities to effect a change on the status quo. Currently there is no brain preservation option that offers systematic, scientific evidence as to how much human brain tissue is actually preserved when undergoing today’s experimental preservation methods.

Additionally, Hayworth’s organization is offering a kind of X Prize for brain preservation: a cash prize of $100,000 “for the first individual or team to rigorously demonstrate a surgical technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable using today’s electron microscopic (EM) imaging techniques.”

Pretty amazing stuff. How long will it be before we get our answers?

In the history of ideas, it’s no secret that related concepts, events or “discoveries” often arise together, perhaps as an extension of the overall intellectual or cultural zeitgeist or perhaps in some dialectic between or around a component therein. There is some relationship, as a facile example, between enlightenment ideas of the 18th century and the French and American revolutions. Perhaps, it is as simple as the former inspired the latter, but as equally, perhaps, the latter validated the former.

Anyway, seemingly unrelated ideas and/or events that occur closely together in time are interesting. And often have connections. I have been thinking for some time about two contemporary ideas/events: the Internet of Things and Object-Oriented Ontology. I don’t know that they’ve ever been explicitly connected (certainly someone else has put two and two together?), but either way, it’s worth exploring.

First of all, the concept of the “internet of things” has been around at least since 2008 and as a term describes the proliferation of embedded technologies in a wide variety of objects that enable data collection, processing and communication. The idea behind the internet of things is that we are seeing the emergence of an interconnected network of real objects. These real objects and their network capabilities are fairly primitive, or dumb, at present, as they consist of various sensors, RFID tags, cameras, all embedded in buildings, cars, phones, products, public artifacts like streetlights, and so on, but as technology progresses and more things get processors and networks, our shared physical environments will become more and more information-rich, integrated and “smart.”

Processor enabled, send-receive capable, and algorithmically or AI-enhanced, these objects may at some point in the near future facilitate great changes in our human experience of the world around us. It may be that our environment becomes commercialized, as in segments of the film Minority Report, or that we may experience what some (to borrow from the object-oriented ontologists) are now calling “ecology without nature.”

Secondly, the other concept at hand, “object-oriented ontology,” is a philosophical movement that apparently began in 1998. Graham Harman and Levi Bryant are two of the thinkers in the movement. Here is a good, succinct description of it, from a Georgia Tech symposium site on the subject:

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.

One of the key tenets of OOO is that objects have agency, in some form, which is to say that they have the power to act in the world. And thus, thinking of automated systems and objects, existing in a vast network, interacting with the natural environment, humans and each other, what better kind of philosophical grounding could we have for an existence in the midst of the internet of things? Further, OOO often puts things and their relationships with each other on equal footing with the relationships of things to humans, thereby empowering things (and thus demoting humans) in a way to which we’re not (yet) accustomed.

I am simplifying the concepts at hand, but think of it: are not things with the power to act (broadly defined) at the center of the networked world we are building? And will we not be defined by our relationships to these “smart” things in the future? And finally, is it an accident that we can consider an object-oriented ontology and an internet of things at the same time? Do they need each other? And if so, why? Does philosophy (and things like philosophy) provide inspiration or justification for tech-driven ontological change?

In the growing category of companionship and personal assistance automation (or “social robotics”), here is a relatively new entry: Jibo, the “world’s first family robot.” From personal robotics pioneer, MIT’s Cynthia Breazeal, Jibo provides a wide variety of family and household functions, from schedule management, photography and video, to reading to children.

Read all about Jibo here. Also, check out the video:

 

Jibo is apparently in the prototype stage, but very cool, and one wonders whether or not such functionality could be integrated or transferred completely into smart home platforms. Jibo as conceived and presented here is not self-propelled and mobile, but could be carried, so he has the benefit of being transferrable outside the home. Anyway, I’d expect the fundamental concept to take many forms in the future.

Additionally, here’s a Ted Talk video from Breazeal on the general topic of personal robots:

 

Jibo is just one example of the rapidly emerging field of social/personal robotics. Before we know it, robots that care for (and perhaps about) us may be a central part of our lives.

Thanks to everyone who attended the first organizational meeting of the World Future Society Arizona Chapter on September 16, 2014. We had a great group and a fabulous discussion. Thanks also to Rio Salado College for sponsoring our event.

Here is the presentation from the meeting:

If you are in Arizona and want to join us in the future, email me at ekingsbury@cox.net.

I am pleased to announce that we are kicking off a new Arizona Chapter of the World Future Society. If you’re in Arizona and a member of the World Future Society, join fellow World Future Society members for the first meeting of our new Chapter. We will spend the evening meeting and getting to know one another, discussing mutual futurist interests and objectives, and charting a collective course for our local organization.

When:  Tuesday, September 16, 2014, from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

Where:  Rio Salado College, 2323 W. 14^th Street, Tempe, in the Yellow and Brown room in the Conference Center

RSVP:  Join our Arizona Chapter meet up group and RSVP here.

If you have any questions, please email me, Eric Kingsbury, at ekingsbury@cox.net. If you’re not a member of the WFS, you can join easily here. And finally, if you can’t make this one, we plan to meet again in October.

Special thanks to Rio Salado College for sponsoring our meeting!

  

Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination has announced the September 9, 2014, release of Hieroglyph, an anthology of science fiction short stories that imagine positive future outcomes.

To quote the release from ASU:

Inspired by New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson, our first Hieroglyph anthology features optimistic visions of the near future grounded in real science and technology, created by leading science fiction writers, thinkers, researchers and visionaries. To learn more about the stories and authors featured in the anthology, visit the Project Hieroglyph website. 

Mind-bending, provocative and imaginative, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future offers a forward-thinking approach to the intersection of art and technology that has the power to change the world. 

The anthology is being released by HarperCollins and can be ordered here.

Plus, there will be a tour of bookstores in select locations across the country. Check out the new Project Hieroglyph website for details. You’ll also note from the site that the project is more than a book of SF; it’s a collaborative community of thinkers.

If you’re into science fiction and/or the future (and why would you be reading this blog if you’re not), check it out.

Here is a well-done and very lucid video on the impact of automation on future human employment from CGP Grey:

No doubt, big changes are coming in human labor, and coming fast. We will have to reflect, individually and collectively, on where and how humans can create and receive economic value in future economies. The one portion of the video above I find least compelling is the automated creativity section. Yes, bots and robots will be able to execute visual and textual tasks, but I remain optimistically convinced that the real opportunity for the human mind is still the big-picture creative stuff: platforms, large-scale architecture, vision, strategy, analysis, planning, innovation, inspiration.

I think we may need to get more “out there,” more visionary, to compete creatively with automation near term, for one thing, and we must never forget that automation, at this point anyway, is developed and deployed to suit human needs. Coordinating all this technological opportunity, at the micro and macro levels, will be a big task; humans will have to imagine it, design it, and realize it. But I definitely get that this hopeful attitude about the sustainability of human creative value may not prevent millions, perhaps billions, of human beings from one day groping about for their livelihoods, while the creative elites enjoy life in Elysium.

Yet, maybe humans need not apply … as in, they may not need jobs per se. If automation becomes sufficiently ubiquitous and cheap, we could see an eventual dissolution of the current post-industrial socio-economic framework that organizes the global society. It may be, then, that humans will no longer need “jobs,” as historically constructed, in order to survive; they may be able to engineer self-sufficient (off-the-figurative-macro-grid) lives with automated personal energy (solar), food (garden), and water systems that no longer require that they exchange their time and labor for currency to be exchanged with institutions that provide life resources at a profit.

That’s just one possibility. The jury is still out on how automation-driven unemployment (aka structural unemployment) will shake out, but it’s clear, as this brilliant video demonstrates, the disruption has begun.

The future will be a different time and place, there’s no doubt, but tomorrow always begins today. Some geologists say we are now entering a new epoch, the anthropocene, a time in the earth’s history marked primarily by large-scale human impacts. These impacts, of course, are directly related to global population growth.

Check out the following:

We’re already past 7 billion and headed rapidly toward 9 billion. With all these people, it’s obvious there will be even more pressure on environments, societies, economies, and individuals. As resources become scarce, there will be more competition for those resources, and often conflict. One of the many unfortunate outcomes of conflict (and more generally the breakdown of traditional social and economic systems) is the displacement of populations from traditional homes, functional infrastructures and established communities.

The UNHCR estimated that at the end of 2012, there were over 28.8 million displaced persons in the world, and the numbers are on an upward trend. It’s not difficult to imagine, as some sci-fi writers have, a future where distinct and permanently nomadic refugee communities are a common feature of the global human geography. I think of Bruce Sterling’s novels, as one example, where resourceful nomadic tribes (like the “proles” in Distraction) appear in various forms, sometimes in the middle of the action, sometimes at the periphery.

The possible future reality and significance of a permanently nomadic population is demonstrated also by the fact that people are working on solutions and tools for present and future nomads. Often, the solutions aim to reduce displacement, but increasingly, solutions are being developed to help make nomadism work.

A particularly beautiful example is this structural fabric tent by architect and designer Abeer Seikaly. As Seiklay notes, humanity has a long history of alternating between settlement and movement, and with Seikaly’s background in Jordan and the Middle East, she’s certainly familiar with bedouin cultures who even today cling to a desert pastoral nomadism.

Although I don’t think they’re commercially available, these tents are stunning, and perfect for the modern long-term nomad — the concept includes sophisticated lightweight materials, a water management system, and a solar cell for power. It’s right out of a cyberpunk novel. Plus, these things fold up for quick and easy moving-on.

Check out the beauty of Seikaly’s design:

There are more photos, details and a powerful design story on Seikaly’s site here, so check it out. It’s definitely worth reflecting on the possibility of a nomadic future and the potential of design and basic technologies to inform it.

Here’s an interesting futurist site: The Galactic Public Archives. The GPA focuses on the ideas of visionary futurists, especially the late Transhumanist FM-2030. To quote the words of the GPA:

The Galactic Public Archives (GPA) is an online web series that takes an in-depth look at visionaries of the 20^th and early 21st century who presented compelling visions of the future. The GPA gives viewers a glimpse of the mind’s ability for foresight, but also, insight into the hopes, dreams and fears through the words and voices of those visionaries.      

The GPA specifically is focusing on a man named FM-2030. FM 2030 was at various points in his life, an Iranian Olympic basketball player, a diplomat, a university teacher, and a corporate consultant. He developed his views on transhumanism in the 1960s and evolved them over the next thirty-something years. He was placed in cryonic suspension July 8th, 2000.  

FM-2030 apparently once said, “I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.” And so, the Galactic Public Archives site is presented as a future site that remembers the present as the future past.

Here are a couple of instructive videos relating to FM-2030.

First, Who is FM-2030?

Second, Are You Transhuman?

I remember reading FM-2030’s book Are You Transhuman? way back in the 1990s. It was the first I had ever heard of transhumanism, and it fit so well into that transformative era when the Internet was new and people talked about such things “dot-coms” and the “new economy.” Of course, the dot-com era, too, is future past, but FM-2030’s ideas remain relevant and engaging.

I encourage those interested in the future to check out The Galactic Public Archives.