[extropy-chat] singularity conference at stanford

[Fred C. Moulton]

My take on the event was that I had heard most of the speakers before
and while there were some good presentations I did not see anything that
was overwhelming.

I had hoped to see some rigorous critical analysis but what appeared was
McKibben.  I had hoped for an insightful critique and instead we could
some platitudes about death giving meaning to life.  He did some sort of
hand waving about democratic processes and control yet never seemed to
address the issue that in this country a significant number of voting
age believe in angels and creationism and other ideas.  Exactly how are
these same people are going to understand the concepts well enough to
cast any kind of meaningful vote on issues related to AI, robotics,
nanotech, bio tech, etc  was not explained.  I found a lot of what he
said almost unintelligible perhaps that could be partially explained
because he was not physically present.

It is important for there to be a critical examination of all of the
ideas surrounding transhumanism, singularity, etc.  Unfortunately we did
not get it from McKibben.

One bright spot that I really enjoyed was seeing so many people there.
Some of whom I had not seen recently.

Fred