TransVision 2006, August 17-19, Helsinki, Finland

TransVision06 conference, August 17-19

University of Helsinki, Finland, Europe

http://www.transhumanismi.org/tv06/

The annual TransVision conference brings together leading transhumanist thinkers, technologists, scientists and philosophers from around the world. This year's conference is held under the theme "Emerging Technologies of Human Enhancement". The conference will be held in Helsinki, Finland, one of the world's leading high technology centres. TransVision06 is organized by the World Transhumanist Association together with the Finnish Transhumanist Association.


Keynote speakers

* Dr. William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation (USA)
* Dr. Aubrey de Grey, University of Cambridge

Other speakers

* Prof. Timo Airaksinen, Ph.D.
* Anatoli Bogdan, Ph.D.
* Nick Bostrom, Ph.D.
* Riccardo Campa, Ph.D.
* Jose Cordeiro
* Anastasiya Gacheva, Ph.D.
* Ben Goertzel, Ph.D.
* James Hughes, Ph.D.
* Prof. Hannu Kari, D.Sc.
* Prof. Bruce Lloyd, Ph.D.
* Sky Marsen, Ph.D.
* Danila Medvedev, Ph.D.
* Giulio Prisco (FutureTag Ltd)
* Anders Sandberg, Ph.D.
* Harri Valpola, D.Sc.
* Philippe Van Nedervelde (E-spaces nv)
* Natasha Vita-More, Extropy Institute
* David Wood (Symbian Ltd)

Speaker abstracts are available at the conference website.

For those who are unable to attendt personally, TransVision 06 will have a full-fledged Virtual Conference. This includes a live video stream as well as static video files from the conference, an IRC channel and a Second Life environment for discussing the event and sending the speakers questions in real time, and a regularly updated conference blog.

More information at: http://www.transhumanismi.org/tv06/

Edited by vizikahn, 15 August 2006 - 08:46 PM.

Hmm don't you think having these events in the US or some other not-so remote, more densely inhabited place would likely boost attendance...? No disrespect towards Finnland or Venezuela, but these are simply not the places to where most transhumanists or interested others can get reasonably priced airfares.

Nice lineup, I wish I lived in Finland.

Hmm don't you think having these events in the US or some other not-so remote, more densely inhabited place would likely boost attendance...?

But you know, there are more WTA members in Finland than in India and China combined

I am attending.

But you know, there are more TA members in Finland than in India and China combined

Hei! Mitä kuuluu?
Minä en osaa tai kirjoittaa suomea hyvin. [sad]
englanilainen:

1.) How many members of the Finnish Transhumanist Association maybe interested in cryonics?
2.) Do you think that the cryonics movement could grow in Scandinavia?

Kiitos
(kirjailijanimi)Neurosail

Hei! Mitä kuuluu?
Minä en osaa tai kirjoittaa suomea hyvin. [sad]
englanilainen:

1.) How many members of the Finnish Transhumanist Association maybe interested in cryonics?
2.) Do you think that the cryonics movement could grow in Scandinavia?

Kiitos
(kirjailijanimi)Neurosail

No heipä hei,

Hyvää yritystä kuitenkin.

Regarding your questions:

I have not personally been that active transhumanist other than cursorily following the mailing list (mostly for LE stuff). However, I don't ever recall a discussion in cryonics in the list, nor do I ever recall discussing it seriously with any other people either. The cryonics movement could definitely grow because a) there isn't any yet b) as we have seen, Scandinavia is probably the most overrepresentented area in the world in Transhumanist/life-extension movements and thus I presume it could be so in cryonics too. The reason for the low cryonics growth in Scandinavia is probably economics, Scandinavia as a whole hosts a total 20+ million people, each individual country 5 mil, and as we know intercountry (especially outside Scandinavia) businesses tend to confront all sorts of problems. A realistic plan would probably be to work together with the German cryonics movement, it's not that far away.

Personally I am not big on cryonics, mostly just because I don't see it as viable strategy just yet, and more importantly, I'd like to think of it as my last resort that is not a topical subject for me just yet.

Edited by opales, 12 May 2006 - 12:05 PM.

Like Opales said, there practically isn't any cryonics "movement" in Finland. There definitely is interest towards cryonics, but most of the core members of FTA are more interested in Singularity Institute and SENS. It's like cryonics is on the to-do list, but it's always at the bottom of the list.

I have actually written an article about cryonics for FTA's zine that will be published before TV06 (in the 'net, at least), and I would be happy to sign up for vitrification if I'd live near Alcor. Teaming up with Russian and German cryonicists to get things going here would be nice, but first there would have to be at least one FTA member who is ready to sacrifice more time and energy for cryonics.

Despite how American conservatives and libertarians bad-mouth Scandinavian social democracy, Finland scores well in quality of life surveys:

http://www.economist...ITY_OF_LIFE.pdf

http://en.wikipedia....velopment_Index

TransVision LiveJournal community can be found at:

http://communities.l.../transvision06/

I was thinking of adding some comments myself during the conference

PS: my LiveJournal (currently blank)

http://opales.livejournal.com/

TransVision 06 virtual avenues

As a reminder to all - TransVision 06 is rapidly drawing close. Held on August
17-19, some of the most important speakers of the transhumanist scene will be
coming together to hold presentations on varying subjects. This is an event you
don't want to miss - and since not many of you have a chance to come to Finland
to join it in flesh, here's a recap of the ways you can participate virtually.

WEBCAST. There will be an online streaming video directly from the conference.
Watch each of the speakers in real time! Detailed instructions on this can be
found at http://www.transhuma...tv06/stream.php . You can also find the
conference program at http://www.transhuma...v06/program.php ; it's
given in Finnish time, UTC+3.

STATIC WEBCAST. In case you miss your favorite presentation or otherwise can't
access the live stream. As time allows, saved video files will be made available
for regular HTTP download shortly after the presentations. Other extra material,
like slideshow files from the speeches, will also be made available on the
TransVision website. For more information on this, watch
http://www.transhuma...tv06/virtua.php .

VIRTUAL DISCUSSION. There are two ways to discuss the event in real time
together with other people from around the world. The official TransVision IRC
channel is #transvision at IRCNet, accessible through an IRC client or
alternatively through the webchat interface at
http://webchat.xs4all.nl/index.php . The IRC room will also share its chat space
with an area in the Second Life virtual environment - anything said in either
medium will also be relayed to the other. The Second Life environment can be
found by booting up the SL client (download one at http://www.secondlife.com ),
finding the "uvvy" region at its map and teleporting there. SL will have some
extra features that the IRC space won't, including some slideshows and a
possibility to watch the streaming video from there.

Regardless of the program used to access the chat space, it will be a fun way to
follow and discuss the event in real time. People in the chat can submit
questions to any of the speakers in the real event and have them relayed
onwards, and any new files that get uploaded to the site will be announced to
the chat ASAP. See http://www.uvvy.com/...sVision06_in_SL and
http://www.transhuma...tv06/virtua.php for chat details.

WEBLOG. As announced earlier, http://community.liv.../transvision06/ is
TransVision's official weblog community. Information about the conference gets
posted there, and we are encouraging all participants to post their TV
experiences there afterwards. If you want to read detailed event reports after
the fact, this is the place.

WEBCAST. There will be an online streaming video directly from the conference.
Watch each of the speakers in real time! Detailed instructions on this can be
found at http://www.transhuma...tv06/stream.php . You can also find the
conference program at http://www.transhuma...v06/program.php ; it's
given in Finnish time, UTC+3.

STATIC WEBCAST. In case you miss your favorite presentation or otherwise can't
access the live stream. As time allows, saved video files will be made available
for regular HTTP download shortly after the presentations. Other extra material,
like slideshow files from the speeches, will also be made available on the
TransVision website. For more information on this, watch
http://www.transhuma...tv06/virtua.php .

Nice! [thumb] Only 2 days away, I will definitely be checking out some of the videos from this.

I also like the concept of the conference happening simultaneously in Second Life, that is really making good use of technology if I have ever seen it.

Ok, the conference got going about 2 hrs ago. Luckily I was 15 min late from Nick Boström's opening speech, had to sit in the back row, right next to Aubrey de Grey [thumb] where I am sitting right now. I even had the pleasure to talk a little bit with Aubrey between Nick's and Timo Airaksinen's presentation.

I believe Nick's presentation is somewhat related to life extension too, I definitely recommend watching the webcast.

Sweet! keep us updated, Opales. I am trying to view the stream of it, but it doesn't seem to be working at the moment. (either that, or they aren't broadcasting right now for lunch or something.) I will try again in a little while.

Conference resumes again. I had quite the lunch, sitting in the same table for two hours with Aubrey, Nick Boström, James Hughes and Anders Sandberg, all belonging to the small (super) intellectual elite of this planet. Needless to say, discussion was extremely interesting, I was just happy to keep up with it as much I could, especially with Aubrey talking with speed of light (assisted of course by couple of tasty beers [lol] ).

Unfortunately I did not remember to take a camera with so no picture were taken for future generations about that event.

Pictures!
http://www.flickr.co...57594240803284/
http://www.flickr.co...57594240936722/

Here is a nice photo; I'm the one in black with the bag, Opales is the one in pink shirt.
http://www.flickr.co...57594240936722/

Thanks for posting these pics, Vizikahn... and thanks for the updates, Opales.

Dude! Why didn't you tell me about this? I think I have some extra frequent flyer miles laying around somewhere and I could have made it. Probably not all the way out to where Finland, but maybe close! I would have really enjoyed participating and having the opportunity to meet Aubrey de Grey and Nick Boström. I am not familiar with the others you mentioned though.

That Nick Boström clip you linked us to several months ago is probably the best (and most accurate and up to date with modern science) presentation of what we know about cognitive enhancers. Did you randomly find that clip, or did you already know who Boström is? You should have told me you were going there. At least I would have asked you to ask Boström for the contact info for Dr. Danielle Turner (Cambridge University) -- or if he might have been able to ask her if she could, perhaps, run the same battery of psychological tests on healthy subjects for the so called "nootropics" (racetams, centro, pyritinol, and maybe even Viagra) that she used for her earlier testing of modafinil and ritalin. Then we'd REALLY know what they do (or don't do). I would assume we would need A LOT of money to afford Cambridge level research to assess the efficacy of the so called "smart drugs!" And I don't even know if she would even want her name in the same publishing of racetams...it would be worth a try, though!

More about Dr. Turner:

Danielle Turner is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Psychiatry, and works within the University of Cambridge Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute. She completed a PhD in psychopharmacology at the University of Cambridge in 2005, under the supervision of Professors Barbara Sahakian and Trevor Robbins. She was supported by an MRC research studentship, with research funds from the Wellcome Trust.

Danielle is best known for her work on cognitive enhancement.  She has presented her work at numerous national and international conferences, in addition to publishing eight first-authored scientific articles in high quality journals. Indeed, her article on cognitive enhancement in healthy volunteers was the most highly cited research paper of the year in the journal Psychopharmacology. Her research has received widespread recognition and has been discussed in public forums such as the Guardian newspaper, The Today Programme and the BBC World Service. Danielle has also contributed to initiatives such as the Department of Trade and Industry's Foresight project in Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs and DEMOS and the Wellcome Trust's joint Better Humans debate.

If you don't know who she is, she's the speaker after Boström in the clip:

Nick Boström on cognitive enhancement, webcast presentation at the Oxford conf.
http://streaming.oii...6/16032006-1.rm

Keynote speakers

* Dr. William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation (USA)
* Dr. Aubrey de Grey, University of Cambridge

Other speakers

* Prof. Timo Airaksinen, Ph.D.
* Anatoli Bogdan, Ph.D.
* Nick Bostrom, Ph.D.
* Riccardo Campa, Ph.D.
* Jose Cordeiro
* Anastasiya Gacheva, Ph.D.
* Ben Goertzel, Ph.D.
* James Hughes, Ph.D.
* Prof. Hannu Kari, D.Sc.
* Prof. Bruce Lloyd, Ph.D.
* Sky Marsen, Ph.D.
* Danila Medvedev, Ph.D.
* Giulio Prisco (FutureTag Ltd)
* Anders Sandberg, Ph.D.
* Harri Valpola, D.Sc.
* Philippe Van Nedervelde (E-spaces nv)
* Natasha Vita-More, Extropy Institute
* David Wood (Symbian Ltd)

Oh, now I see who was there. I would have enjoyed to meet Dr. Ben Goertzel too. Among all those Ph.Ds...if they aren't speaking in laymans terms, I'd be lost. Did you understand everything okay, Opales?

Edited by nootropikamil, 18 August 2006 - 08:37 AM.

Bostrom, Hughes and Sandberg are the leading figures in the transhumanist movement (Nick and James might be even more famous than Aubrey in fact), so obviously I have been familiar (and a huge fan) with them for quite a while. I must say I am quite impressed about the scope of Nick Bostroms knowledge. He is a philosophy professor at Oxford (his day job is to think about the stuff we think here) and gives excellent presentations about such wide ranging transhumanism related issues such as his cognitive enhancement, evolutionary heuristics of human enhancement, the moral imperative of life extension etc. In his discussion with Aubrey he also presented his familiarity with and deep knowledge of problems of human aging too.

Anders Sandberg I believe is currently some sort of research assistant for Nick.

Quite interestingly, even though these people are mostly known in transhumanist circles, I was suprised about their considerable agreement that life extension is the most pressing and important issue at the moment and must be prioritized accordignly. After all, although I am somewhat familiar to transhumanism (being WTA member and all), my imporession has been that transhumanists (as opposed to mere life extensionists) are more interested in (even) more speculative technologies and concepts such as artificial intelligence and singularity. I know in principle life extensionist are by default transhumanists but at least in practise I have found that people identifying themselves foremost as transhumanists do not put as much weight to life extension as to say discussing about the aforementioned issues. At least from what I have gathered following couple of transhumanist mailing lists.

In fact, in his presentation James Hughes explicitly mentioned that he is not a believer in singularity or the sort, at least of it actualizing anytime soon.

Nicks bio

http://transhumanism...ers.php#bostrom

[quote]
Nick Bostrom, Ph.D., is a philosopher at Oxford University, and the Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute. He co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 and is a frequent spokesperson and commentator in the media. He has been a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency (Washington, DC), and for the European Commission and the European Group on Ethics (Brussels). Dr. Bostrom’s research interests include the philosophy of science, probability theory, and the ethical and strategic implications of anticipated technologies. He has a background in cosmology, computational neuroscience, mathematical logic, philosophy, and artificial intelligence, and is the author of the book Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (Routledge, New York, 2002).
[quote]

James Hughes bio

http://transhumanism...kers.php#hughes

[quote]
James Hughes, Ph.D., the IEET Executive Director, is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut where he teaches Health Policy. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Westview Press, 2004), and produces a syndicated weekly radio program, Changesurfer Radio. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. Dr. Hughes speaks on medical ethics, health care policy and future studies worldwide, and appears often radio and television.
[\quote]

Anders Sandberg bio

http://transhumanism...rs.php#sandberg
[quote]
Anders Sandberg is a Swedish neuroscientist, science debater, futurist, transhumanist, and author. He holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University and is currently postdoctoral research assistant for the Oxford group of the EU ENHANCE Project at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute (Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University). He has also been scientific producer for the neuroscience exhibition "Se Hjärnan!" ("Behold the Brain!"), organized by Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, the Swedish Research Council and the Knowledge Foundation that is touring Sweden 2005-2006.
[\quote]

PS Sorry about the lacking quotes and otherwise poor use punctuation, I am writing this on a public computer that for some reason has keyboard settings all messed up and I cannot seem to find some punctuation marks at all.

I got interviewed by an Italian TV crew making documentary about the post-human condition. They said the documentary will probably have couple of million viewers. It will be aired in November, the program is called "C'ERA UNA VOLTA" which I have no idea what it means. The interviewer said the documentary will donwloadable from the tv-station website www.rai.it (the Italian equivalent of BBC, the specific channel is RAI 3) once it comes out.

They said they have interviewed many known transhumanists/technology visionaries in the US (Vernor Vinge etc.) so I am not exactly holding my breath that I will actually appear in the documentary. Also, I think the questions were kind of vague and mostly not well thought beforehand, so I am not sure if my replies made any sense either. Anyway, they me gave the opportunity to give some closing remarks and thus I got a good chance to mention the Immortality Institute and the MPrize.

I posted info about Danila Medvedev's very interesting presentation on cognitive enhancement in the nootropics forum:

http://www.imminst.o...&t=12055&hl=&s=

I got a good chance to mention the Immortality Institute and the MPrize.

[thumb] [thumb] [thumb] [thumb] [thumb]

Dude, Opales...are you like ignoring me bro?

Dude, Opales...are you like ignoring me bro?

Joke?

Just in case it was not, no, I am not ignoring you, I don't think you made any comments that called for my comments.

Just FYI, Opales, nootropikamil did say the following:

Oh, now I see who was there.  I would have enjoyed to meet Dr. Ben Goertzel too.  Among all those Ph.Ds...if they aren't speaking in laymans terms, I'd be lost.  Did you understand everything okay, Opales?

Not that I care, but you technically did not respond to his question. Not trying to be an ass by any means (I think you are doing an excellent job iob of reporting on the conference to us!!), only pointing out what I think he was referring to.

Just FYI, Opales, nootropikamil did say the following:

Oh, now I see who was there.  I would have enjoyed to meet Dr. Ben Goertzel too.  Among all those Ph.Ds...if they aren't speaking in laymans terms, I'd be lost.  Did you understand everything okay, Opales?

Not that I care, but you technically did not respond to his question. Not trying to be an ass by any means (I think you are doing an excellent job iob of reporting on the conference to us!!), only pointing out what I think he was referring to.

Well, ok, I actually did have few times trouble following the discussion, but not so because of what they were talking about but well, hmmm, because of who was talking (Nick, Anders both are origininally Swedes and thus have more less of eccentric accent and Aubrey just speaks REALLY fast). In those situations it's just best start leading the discussion yourself [tung] . We had quite the speculative fest with Aubrey about the reasons why big pharma companies have yet to take on the issue of anti aging despite the tremendous potential of making major cash and their obvious advantage on that area.

My above comment was made under the assumption that Adam was referring to my lunch with transhumanist hotshots, instead of the actual lectures. The lectures are usually pretty easy to follow, even with funny accents and fast talkers, because of slides giving additional information etc. so you don't have to hear every single word to keep up.

Also note that Ben Goerzel was not actually in Finland but appeared through video conference. I unfortunately missed that presentation, I am going to have to watch it later on.

Hi Opales, Here is one version of Ben's talk:
http://video.google....132223226741332

I guess it was my bad for not reading every topic in the forum to realize this conference was going down. I often (I guess by habit) find myself mostly in the health forums, so I didn't even know it was going down until I saw this post...which was what I saw only a few days ago:

I must have posted a link to Nick Boström's webcast from the webcast presentation at the Oxford conference 10 times in nootropic forums. That's why I thought if you knew he was going to be there (especially considering he seems to know Dr. Turner), you would have let the nootropic forum know you were going to a conference where he was speaking.

Ok, the conference got going about 2 hrs ago. Luckily I was 15 min late from Nick Boström's opening speech, had to sit in the back row, right next to Aubrey de Grey thumb.gif where I am sitting right now. I even had the pleasure to talk a little bit with Aubrey between Nick's and Timo Airaksinen's presentation.

I believe Nick's presentation is somewhat related to life extension too, I definitely recommend watching the webcast.

So, in the future I guess: please let the health forums know about such events so we can try our best to advance the field of "nootropics" to the next level as soon as possible (do they work in healthy people...or not?). We need to find out, if possible, who might do the research to study these compounds in healthy subjects -- and if so, how much cash we are talking about...so we can try to raise the money. Once we know how much $ we are talking, we can get to work. [thumb]