J. Hughes

Humanity+ Summit – June 12, 2010 Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Copyright Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 2006

Natural philosophers

1660 Wishlist1.Life extension, anti-aging therapies, transplants, telemedicine

2.Strength and speed enhancement, body armor

3.Glasses, telescopes, microscopes and electric light

4.Flying, traveling under water, GPS locators

5.Speeding up agricultural production

6.Smart drugs, amphetamines, sleeping pills, analgesics and hallucinogens

7.Synthetic biology and genetic engineering.

“D'Alembert's Dream” 1769

Mind = body/brain

Animals can evolve intelligence

Machine minds are possible

Minds can be stored and re-bodied

Science can bring back the dead

Human-animal hybrids OK

Sexual freedom

Copyright Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 2006

Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795)

Reason liberates us from church, authoritarianism, nature

Women’s suffrage Opposed to slavery Radical life extension Freedom from work

through technology

Copyright Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 2006

Marquis de Condorcet

"Nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us."

Copyright Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 2006

Arguments within H+ and between H+ and our pro-Enlightenment friends

A four hundred year-old conversation

Parallel movements and issues

We promote reason, but reason is not self-validating

Acknowledge our pre-rational side

Natural philosophers divided between deists and atheists

If super-intelligence is possible, then god(s) are possible

Why shouldn’t smart people control the things instead of democracy or markets?

How about super-friendly AIs?

Rational planning vs. exchange between rational actors

Democratization of economic power vs. minimizing state power

Faith in the inevitability of progress vs. radical uncertainty

Existential risks Optimism of the

will and pessimism of the intellect

Enforcing ethical universals, while respecting pluralism and the contingent, evolving nature of our values

Evolutionary psychology, Jon Haidt and Sam Harris

Liberal individualism vs. the illusion of autonomous, continuous, discrete selves

If we upload and live for millennia, who survives?

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