Humanity 2.0

Where the tech are we going, and do we want to go there?

A Spark Northwest Experience

As technology permeates our daily lives, it helps, and it hurts. How does our increasing use and dependence on tools such as email, cell phones, iPods, or social networking sites effect our desire for human fulfillment and spiritual transformation? We don’t know… Seriously, we don’t. Do you? In an age of dizzying technological innovation, one rarely has the time to stop and reflect on these changes. It’s clear that our technologies are getting faster, more powerful and more ubiquitous. However, what’s not so clear is: Does the added value outweigh the often unnoticed costs? Isn’t that an important question?

Gathering Together
Take a day (or more) out of your busy lives, away from the technopoly, to join people like yourself for some deeper exploration into these crucial questions and issues. Humanity 2.0 will take place on beautiful Orcas Island, and includes:

• Stimulating dialog about balancing technology and humanity
• Meeting and mixing with other thoughtful people
• Interactivities with practical life-enhancing outcomes
• A delicious and mind-enriching lunch in an idyllic island setting

Where is it happening?
This Humanity 2.0 workshop will take place on Orcas Island , just two hours north of Seattle, in the historic Oddfellows Hall , overlooking Eastsound bay. In addition, we are able to offer a 30% discount at Orcas’ famous Outlook Inn to a limited number of guests wishing to extend their visit. Call 1-877-I-AM-GAME for details.

When is it happening?
Humanity 2.0 takes place from 9:30a to 4:00p on Sunday, September 9th, 2007. Feel free to come out a day early, or stay an extra day, enjoying the pleasures of island life, including kayaking , hiking, beach-combing and dining at great restaurants. Click here for ferry information . If you are planning on coming over the morning of the workshop, you’ll need to take the 7:45a ferry. It’s a good idea to arrive 30-45 minutes early.

How do I register?
Registration is limited, so call soon. The workshop costs $85 and includes a healthy organic lunch. To register, or for more information, call 1-877-I-AM-GAME or go to www.SparkNW.com. We look forward to meeting you and giving you one of the most memorable days of your year!Tags: geekingoutloud, leifhansen, skeptech, conference, workshop, orcas, humanity, transhumanism, conference, technology

Excerpted from an excellent article from LocusMag:

“Lapsarianism — the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each year worse than the last — is the predominant future feeling for many people. It’s easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive behavior.

Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears’ wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get worse, and worse, and worse, eventually they’ll just run out of worseness. Eventually, they’ll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it.

Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment ideal of a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us contributes to improving the world’s storehouse of knowledge (and thus its capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges take our work and improve on it. The very idea of “progress” runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid.

Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition — if only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse:

We call it the Singularity.

Vernor Vinge’s Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to “upload” our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker’s next novel would have it) Postsingular.

The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It’s the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity “the rapture of the nerds,” an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse.

At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present day.

The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn’t send out transporter-equipped drones — instead, it would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn’t hope to explain them.

Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it’s the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality.”

Tags: locusmag, boingboing, wonderosity, leifhansen, futurism, posthumanism, singularity

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