TRANSHUMANIST VOICES

Rachel Armstrong is a Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Department of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University and a Senior TED Fellow who is establishing an alternative approach to sustainability that couples with the computational properties of the natural world to develop a 21st century production platform for the built environment, which she calls ‘living’ architecture. Armstrong is one of the 2013 ICON 50 and described as one of the ten people in the UK that may shape the UK’s recovery by Director Magazine in 2012. In the same year she was nominated as one of the most inspiring top nine women by Chick Chip magazine and featured by BBC Focus Magazine’s in 2011 in ‘ideas that could change the world’. Armstrong also leads Metabolism research in developing artificial biology systems showing qualities of near-living systems. Her research into protocells is a pioneering effort that contributed to the previous collaboration with Philip Beesley. (This biographical information was copied from the Living Architecture Systems Group website.)

William Sims Bainbridge is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). Dr. Bainbridge is a prolific and influential sociologist of religion, science and popular culture, and serves as co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the NSF. In 1976 he published his first book The Spaceflight Revolution, which examined the push for space exploration in the 1960s. He then went on to publish Satan’s Power, which described several years of infiltration of the Process Church, a religious cult related to Scientology. In the last thirty years, Bainbridge has published more than a dozen more books dealing with space, religion, and psychology. Dr. Bainbridge’s long-standing interest in personality capture, using extensive personality surveys to record individual personalities in software, is reflected in works such as Experiments in Psychology (1986) which included cutting-edge psychology experimentation software written by Bainbridge. (This biographical information was copied from IEET website.)

Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher and polymath with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. (The FHI is a multidisciplinary university research center; it is also home to the Center for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence and to teams working on AI safety, biosecurity, macrostrategy, and various other technology or foundational questions.) He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which helped spark a global conversation about artificial intelligence. Bostrom’s widely influential work, which traverses philosophy, science, ethics, and technology, has illuminated the links between our present actions and long-term global outcomes, thereby casting a new light on the human condition. (This biographic information was copied from Nick Bostrom's website.)

Andy Clark is a Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at The University of Edinburch. Clark was appointed to the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics in 2004. Prior to that he taught at the University of Glasgow, the University of Sussex, Washington University in St Louis, and Indiana University, Bloomington. Clark was Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, and Director of the Cogntive Science Program at Indiana University. (This biographical information was copied from The University of Edinburgh website.)

Robert A. Freitas Jr. holds a bachelor’s degree majoring in both physics and psychology from Harvey Mudd College, and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Santa Clara University. He has written more than 150 technical papers, book chapters, or popular articles on a diverse set of scientific, engineering, and legal topics. He co-edited the 1980 NASA feasibility analysis of self-replicating space factories and later authored the first detailed technical design study of a hypothetical medical nanorobot, the respirocyte, ever published in a referred medical journal. In 1977-78 Robert Freitas created the concept sentience quotient (SQ) as a way to describe the information processing rate in living organisms or computers. Freitas is authoring the multi-volume text Nanomedicine, the first book-length technical discussion of the potential medical applications of hypothetical molecular nanotechnology and medical nanorobotics. Volume I was published in October 1999 by Landes Bioscience while Freitas was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. Also in 2004, Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle coauthored and published Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, the first complete survey of the field of physical and hypothetical self-replicating machines. In 2006, Freitas and Merkle co-founded the Nanofactory Collaboration, a research program to develop the first working diamondoid nanofactory. (This biographical information was copied from The Brain Preservation Foundation website.)

Ben Goertzel is Chief Scientist of robotics firm Hanson Robotics and financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series. His research work encompasses artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds and gaming and other areas. He has published a dozen scientific books, 100+ technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles. Before entering the software industry he served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. (This biographical information was copied from Ben Goertzel's personal website.)

James Hughes is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as the Associate Provost for Institutional Research, Assessment and Planning for the University of Massachusetts Boston. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future and Cyborg Buddha. Dr. Hughes is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of Humanity+, the Neuroethics Society, the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. He serves on the State of Connecticut Regenerative Medicine Research Advisory Committee (formerly known as the Stem Cell Research Advisory Board. (This biographical information was copied from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies website.)

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Kurzweil is the recipient of the acclaimed MIT Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Kurzweil has authored 7 books, most notably The Age of Spiritual Machines ,The Singularity Is Near, and How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. In 2012, Kurzweil became a Director of Engineering at Google, at Research at Google. (This biographical information was copied from Ray Kurzweil's personal website Accelerating Intelligence.)

Hans Moravec is the chief scientist of Seegrid Corporation and maker of vision-guided industrial mobile robots. He had been research professor in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he retains an adjunct faculty position. He received a PhD from Stanford University in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot, remote controlled by a large computer. Since 1980 his Mobile Robot Lab at CMU has discovered more effective approaches for robot spatial representation, notably 3D occupancy grids, that, with newly available computer power, promise commercial free-ranging mobile robots within a decade. In 2003 he co-founded SEEGRID Corporation to undertake this commercialization. Moravec is the author of Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind which considers the implications of evolving robot intelligence. He has also published papers and articles in robotics, computer graphics, multiprocessors, space travel and other speculative areas. (This biographical information was copied from the Carnegie Mellon University website.)

Max More is a transhumanist, founder and thought leader in the extropian movement. In his history of transhumanism, Nick Bostrom credits More's 1990 essay "Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy" with introducing the term “transhumanism” as it is now understood. More founded the Extropy Institute, which seeks to improve the human condition through the application of technology, in 1991. The institute existed primarily online and sustained operations until 2006. In 1995, More obtained his doctorate from the University of Southern California with the dissertation "The Diachronic Self: Identity, Continuity, and Transformation." In 2011, Max More became president and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics organization he joined in 1986. (This biographical information was copied from the H+Pedia website.)

Ted Peters is an American Lutheran theologian and Professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and an author and editor on current Christian and Lutheran theology. Peters received a BA from Michigan State University, an MDiv from Trinity Lutheran Seminary, and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He is also the editor of Dialog, a quarterly scholarly magazine of modern and postmodern theology, and co-editor of Theology and Science. Peters also serves on the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence). (This biographical information was copied from Wikipedia.)

Anders Sandberg is a Senior Research Fellow on the ERC UnPrEDICT Programme. His at the Future of Humanity Institute centers on management of low-probability high-impact risks, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. Topics of particular interest include global catastrophic risk, cognitive biases, cognitive enhancement, collective intelligence, neuroethics, and public policy. He is research associate to the the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Sandberg is on the advisory boards of a number of organisations and often debates science and ethics in international media, has a background in computer science, neuroscience and medical engineering, and obtained his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, Sweden, for work on neural network modelling of human memory. (This biographical information was copied from The Future of Humanity website.)

Natasha Vita-More earned a Ph.D. in media, arts, design, and architecture and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Plymouth, a Master of Science from the University of Houston, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Memphis. Dr. Vita-More’s work focuses on cryonics, advancing long term human memory, artificial intelligence, the promotion of technological advancement for facilitating human evolution, and advocacy for the philosophy of transhumanism. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Humanity+, Inc. Dr. Vita-More’s personal website is available here.