Antarctica Starts Here.

At long last, here are my notes from the Transhuman Strategies conference held by the Brighter Brains Institute on 21 March 2015. It took me a while to find the notebook I wrote them in, so that's why they're a few months late in coming. Anyway, my notes are under the cut.

Hank Pellissier - Transhumanitarian Projects

• Goals: Extending life, increasing mental ability
• Life expectency in Japan is 80, in Sierra Leone is 35
• Hunger is still the greatest killer
• Shipping food or backing projects
• De-worming - parasiting infections in children
• The energy deficit incurred by parasitic infection lowers IQ in children
• De-parasitization treatments are very cheap - 400 people for $25us
• Setting up medical clinics
• Weekly disease reports
• Education - sponsoring kids, starting schools
• Building libraries, hands-on education
• Carpentry workshops to build infrastructure
• The Mormon Transhumanist Organization does a lot
• $100us == several hundred pounds of clothing
• Outfitting physicians and laboratories
• The BiZoHa Orphanage
• The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer
• Altruism has been observed to increase lifespan
• Cuban medical model: Get a medic, task them with a community, pay them

John Smart - Eight Skills of Foresight Development

• The Foresight Company
• Acceleration Studies Foundation
• To be human is to extend one's abilities beyond the natural, i.e. to become tool using
• Technological change - ten areas but only two drive acceleration of progress
• Ten places to get Ph.Ds in futurism, 23 to get a masters' in same
• Good futurists tell weeble stories - they wobble but they don't fall down
• Get critical feedback. If they survive, then tell them to larger groups.
• Professor Jim Dator's four futures model
• Kuznets curves depicting developmental cycles
• As tech enters an environment it creates great economic inequality, environmental degredation, social stability, tech import
• J curve - super-exponential curve of state change
• Energy flow density - Φ (Phi)
• The acceleration of history
• The Birth of Plenty by William J. Bernstein
• Ten areas of change: Infotech and nanotech (which change the scale of information processing), resources, engineering, cognotech, social, health, economic, political, security
• Mind the hype, find what's useful
• Mastering the Hype Cycle by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino
• Three P's of Foresight
• Preferable - what you want
• Probable - what you'll get
• Possible - what might be
• All three are critical in teams
• Kirton's three personality traits: Innovator/Creators, Bridgers, Protectors/Predictors
• StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
• KAI model
• Cognitive diversity brought to bear on hard problems
• Perception -> Decision -> Action cycles
• Relations - the speed of trust
• If people don't trust you, you won't get any traction with them
• Kuznets issues - things always get worse before they get better
• Dehumanization followed by rehumanization
• Human-built knowledge bases
• Crowds and competition
• Crowd-funded companies
• Syndicates on Angelist
• Trustable, transparency, and immunity
• Simulations and fastspace learning
• Machine learning and machine-built knowledgebases
• Edutainment
• New platforms
• Usability - conversational interfaces
• Ubiquity
• Strictly speaking, Google and Facebook are the largest countries on the planet
• The wearable web and global English
• Skype's realtime language translation
• Wearable smartphones
• Graphnets and the valve-mapped web (I don't know what I wrote here...)
• Early hiveminds - symbiont memnets and socnets
• "Did it happen to me, or one of my Facebook friends?"
• Personal software agents
• Lean forward - creating positive chainge
• Lean backward - partaking of positive change
• Extended lifespans
• Groups who include people who disagree outperform those who don't because they force people to work harder
• Technological Cycles and Changes - Carlota Perez
• Evo-devo model of technical ecosystems

Maria Konovalenko & Mikhail Batin - Main Strike

• Where do we find funding for research?
• Abandon wishful thinking.
• Stop talking about the future.
• Are we going to be the ones?
• Tech that works and brings about particular goals for life extension, not life extension as the goal.
• The right to live is a fundamental value.
• Life extension is a political topic.
• Logical extension of the definition of politics.
• Political tasks are necessary.
• Not part of the political agenda yet.
• In 2014, twice as many people reached the age of retirement as the year before.
• Aging is the primary cause of aging. It's a syndrome with well characterized symptoms that collectively lead to the death of the organism.
• Fighting aging is a primary goal.
• Slowing the aging process has to happen first, if only to buy us time.
• Multiple avenues of attack: Gene therapy, cell therapy, drugs (geroprotective compounds), diet, regenerative medicine, exercise, ...
• No funding as a whole so there isn't a complete protocol.
• NIH and NIA have very little budget and very different goals.
• Too few drug tests - 3 of 3000 submitted every year.
• No clear goal.
• Fighting AIDS was more successful due to the amount of work and money applied to it.
• But it shows that we can accomplish complex things. Everybody at this conference working together in concert could do it, in fact.
• Target audience - the population of this planet.
• Medical professionals and lawyers must promote it.
• Leaders will be the first to adopt it. They have the most at stake.
• The solutions lie in basic science.
• Buskiness wants a return on investment on existing drugs, not fundamental hard science.
• No speculative investment.
• Work must be open for maximum benefit.
• Nonprofits most likely.
• Public interest group - 501(c)(3) - social organization
• Political Action Committee - 501(c)(4-6)
• Both kinds must make it their political goal.
• Super PACs have no direct communication with politicians, must engage in social engineering, more avenues of funding and can exert more pressure upward.
• Pressure senators
• Grassroots agitation (anarcho-transhumanists?)
• "Do you choose life or death for your fellow Americans?"
• Member network - activists and speakers
• Advertising and memetic campaigns - PR
• Lobbyists for GR - .gov relations
• Social engineering
• Automation of certain tasks for contacting senators, representatives, et al
• Standard stuff
• Hashtag bombing of socnet presences
• Pandora
• Fax bombing because those are still prevalent within the DC Beltway
• Think tanks with political capital

Getting Funding for R&D - Peter Rothman

• Money is a tool.
• The future doesn't just happen.
• Warren Ellis' observations of the future...
• The early stuff is always crappy looking.
• Stop whining and get busy.
• DIY or it won't get done.
• What do I want to do? What physical properties are involved? What already exists?
• What science has already been done?
• Money is required. Stonking lots.
• How to raise funds to do research?
• Funding sources: Debt; equity investment, grants, contracts, product sales, awards and gifts
• Crowdfunding is one of the other forms that seem to work.
• Things like the X-Prize require lots of work and significant monetary investment up front.
• Debt: Entreprenureship won't work. Don't do it, it won't work. You don't get rich spending your own money.
• Equity: VCs want part of the company in exchange for giving you money. There are many all over the place.
• Angel investors
• VCs are sophisticated operators - they do this more than you do, and you're at a disadvantage. They ultimately want a controlling interest in what they invest in.
• Grants - SBIR, STTR, NIAC Symposium, DARPA
• You provide your work to whoever gave you the money.
• Match your work to the grant.
• Not repayable, no equity required.
• IP restrictions - they usually a perpetual royalty free license, so don't expect a trickle of funds from them after you deliver.
• SBIR - Small Business Industrial Research
• Three phases: Proposal, where you get 50-100k. Development, where you get 500k-1m to finish the research and build the prototype and test types. Market - you finish, bring it to market, and they buy it from you.

Transhumanist Culture and Techno-Optimism - R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell

• Five tips for techno-optimists:
• Doubts must be acknowledged and answered.
• Technology will not save everything.
• Technology is a tool. It's up to us to fix things. Get to work.
• Beware of unintended consequences.
• Things we can't imagine happen.
• The ripple effect.
• Beneficial side effects can happen as well as baneful ones.
• The Singularity(tm) will not be singular.
• Progress is always unfair at first, and will effect everyone but even less evenly.
• Cost of advances.
• Beware of politics.
• This is largely a trap of H+.
• Trotsky - you may not be interested in politics, but you can be damned sure that politics is interested in you.
• Tribalism sets in within parties. Always.
• It hinders, not helps, biotech.
• Keep it simple. Don't give anyone a reason to legislate you out of existence.
• Recentralization and liberty.
• Apple vs. the FDA
• Politics create red tape.
• Think about what's already here.
• Breakthroughs are all around us, just waiting to happen.
• Put the pieces together to build something more.
• Those who broadcast that they are "righteous" and "good" tend to not be good communicators and drive people away.
• Passing memes on is important - get them out there!

• To improve society we need to play politics.
• The Transhumanist Party
• Using a presidential campaign as a social engineering technique.
• Publicity, if nothing else.
• We're scientists, engineers, and supporters
• We've had a lot of impact.
• Until top politicians are publically discussing it, H+ may not be able to grow as far as it should.
• How can the leading candidates address our issues?
• Zoltan admits that he has no chance of being elected.
• Memetic infection of other parties' electoral teams - they'll have to respond to the questions that Zoltan's presence is causing to be asked in response to his position.
• Advancing politics to the degree of popular discourse about H+.
• Al Gore at least has heard of it. That's something.
• Bring the ideas to the table, lock the politicians to it, and force them to face what's happening right now because their constituents are in many ways far beyond them.
• Disrupting politics.
• Challenging front runners.
• Memetic engineering and infection.

• Strategy underlies a successful plan.
• Depends on the quality of the planners.
• Plans are products of the psychology of the strategists.
• We're all fallible.
• Problems of belief.
• Assumptions
• What belief systems are is never taught or examined.
• No critical analysis.
• Assumptions are rarely tested.
• Many prefer comforting lies.
• Meta-analysis.
• Minds move markets; markets move minds.
• By understanding minds and collective mindsets better, we can learn how to move markets better and vice-versa.
• Rational arguments simply do not scale.
• Edward Bernays (also this and this)
• Consumerism as desire
• Manipulating emotions to get people to spend money they don't need to.
• Creating insecurities and satisfying them by buying stuff.
• Understand what people really want and give it to them.
• The Engineering of Consent (online and local mirror)
• Case study: getting women to start smoking
• So much money, so many problems, so few good thinkers allocating the money.
• What matters is who judges the allocation.
• Basic research > philanthropy
• "How does this work?" is never asked
• Intelligent arguments don't scale.
• Understanding one person is hard enough.
• Plans that depend on this will fail.
• Paradigm shifts don't come from hypotheses, they come from breakthroughs.
• One success makes it plausible.
• Social expectations -> policy/agenda -> formalization -> control
• Four year cycle
• Liabilities increase as options narrow.
• Goals are difficult to actualize in such a short cycle.
• We have the responsibility of laying the correct foundations.
• Look at problems from a first principle perspective.
• Most startups and investors act as polyfillers stuffing cracks, when we actually need bricklayers.
• What are the right questions to ask?
• Question -> hypothesis -> solution
• Much needed tools
• How do we test ideas more quickly? More cheaply?
• Disrupt the research cycle.
• Researchgate(tm)
• Speed in itself can be helpful. Time saving adds up to more work done.
• Paradigm cycle
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition by Thomas Kuhn and Ian Hacking
• Basic science
• Basic research
• We're not even sure what some of the basic assumptions are.
• Forced, false models and no instruction in critical analysis and reasoning.
• Disrupt education to create more outlier thinkers.
• Critical thinking
• Our community will not save the world, millions of people working to bring about change will.
• Steve Aoki's latest albums reflect some of these themes, infiltrating them into the overmind.
• "all the names wil lbe erased from the billboards and the theaters and the piers and the magazines and the monuments."
• Make your life valuable.
• Reverse problems to first principles. Work backward.

• Understanding the brain is a pre-requisite for truly transformative progress.
• Person-specific structures encode memory and personality, complicating regenerative medicine.
• Regenerating brains will be significantly more different from regenerating kidneys.
• Regeneration might damage informational patterns.
• We don't embrace a really useful computational model of the brain.
• Or anything like a detailed simulation.
• Or a realistic biophysical simulation.
• What do we actually have?
• What do we need to invest in?
• Coarse-grained brain maps.
• What is all of it doing? We can't really test any hypotheses.
• Computationally relevant molecular complexity.
• Way too many fundamental questions are still open.
• How do we copy with the brain's complexity?
• Activity history
• Behavior
• Connectome
• Development - cellular lineage tree
• Expression - epigenetic cell types and simple synaptic proteomes
• We need to be able to cheaply and rapidly measure one brain at subcellular resolution and whole-brain scope.
• Neurons have long-range connections. Nanometer diameter x centimeter distance.
• Incredibly dense structure.
• Scanning Electron Microscopes (which some private entities have) could be used to scan 5 nanometer slices of a brain.
• c.elegans' 302 neurons took 50 person-years to map with questionable accuracy.
• What about mice? Not a chance. Too complex.
• Each neuron could be given a molecular barcode to uniquely identify it. Cell membranes could be marked with unique repeating sequences.
• Digital 4" color microscopy
• FISSEQ - Fluorescent In situ SEQuencing
• Using RNA to map neuronal connections.
• Rosetta Brains: A Strategy for Molecularly Annotated Connectomics (local mirror)
• 1 cubic millimeter of brain has approximately 100,000,000 neurons