Lifeboat Foundation

We are now on a collision course with the most significant event in the entire history of our planet comparable in criticality only to the emergence of life itself. This “Novacene” event would mark the technological maturity of human-machine civilization, as we are to inevitably transcend our biology, and even more importantly, we are to transcend our dimensionality by achieving the so-called Simulation Singularity.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of the Technological Singularity. While those terms can be often used interchangeably, the ’Intelligence Supernova’ adds a slightly different connotation — it means the Omega Point of Homo sapiens — the convergent point of exponential technologies and on a civilizational scale, progressively morphing into one Global Mind and a phase transition of humanity termed in the book ’The Syntellect Emergence’. This convergent point would signify no less than Self-Transcendence, in other words, engineered godhood.

Within the next few decades, we’ll witness accelerating changes so profound and swift that the linear progression of human history would eventuate as the Intelligence Supernova of astronomical significance, the “implosion” of all knowledge of man and “transcension” outside the dimensionality of “human” universe.

Watch Ray Kurzweil’s talk at this years Singularity Summit live!! Go to http://SU.org/live for all the details. #SUSummit #RayKurzweil #Talk #Live

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This is Part Three of a five-part series by Ramez Naam, Singularity University Adjunct Faculty, exploring the power of innovation to boost our access to energy, food, water, raw materials, and human population. All are based on his new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet

In Part One and Two of this series I showed that we have access to a huge amount of potentially available energy and food on the earth, both stemming from the tremendous input of solar energy to the planet. We have very serious energy and food challenges, which cannot be dismissed. But the challenges are not in the form of a hard limit – they’re in the form of a race between innovation and consumption. Victory in this race is certainly not guaranteed. But the most important variable – how quickly we innovate – is one we can affect through our policies. That’s a topic we’ll return to at the end of this series.

When Fortnite reached stratospheric popularity early last year, there were undoubtedly an awful lot of VCs on the sidelines looking enviously at the massive platform and wondering what opportunities could be gleaned from its rapid rise.

Epic Games went on to raise later that year at a nearly $15 billion valuation so some of those investors decided to invest directly in the Fortnite creator’s continued ascent, but others have been looking to get in on the ground floor of new operations that are aiming to rethink the line between video games and social networks.

Today, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it’s leading the $16.5 million Series A of a stealthy gaming startup called Singularity 6. The startup’s ex-Riot Games co-founders claim their venture is less focused on building a button-mashing competitive shooter than it is a “virtual society” where users can develop relationships with in-game characters powered by “complex AI”.

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I’m excited to share my new 1 hour interview at Singularity University radio with Steven Parton. Also, check out Singularity Hub and the write-up they did of the interview. We talk all things transhumanism, longevity, Cyborgs, and the future:

Singularity University, Singularity Hub, Singularity Summit, SU Labs, Singularity Labs, Exponential Medicine, Exponential Finance and all associated logos and design elements are trademarks and/or service marks of Singularity Education Group.

© 2019 Singularity Education Group. All Rights Reserved.

Continue reading “Where Death Ends and Cyborgs Begin, With Futurist Zoltan Istvan” »

“If you rearrange the atoms in coal, you get diamond. If you rearrange the atoms in sand, you get silicon. How atoms are arranged is fundamental to all material aspects of life,” says Ralph Merkle, currently senior research chair at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. He’s a large, pear-shaped man who, as he speaks, waves his arms far more energetically than his physique would imply. He modulates his tone dramatically for effect, often humorous.

Those words kick off day 2 at the Singularity University Executive Program. The curriculum divides roughly into three days of intensive classroom introductions to critical tech domains, three days of visits to Silicon Valley companies, and two days of workshops devoted to specific industries, plus a final day to wrap up. On Saturday I settled gingerly into a lightly padded metal chair for highly compressed, sometimes super technical, up-to-the-minute overviews of artificial intelligence, robotics, networking, computing, and quantum computing. (Forecast: sunny! With patchy clouds and fog.) That took until dinner time with only a quick break for lunch, which was filled with presentations by graduates of SU’s nine-week summer program.

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The only thing we can be sure of is our own awareness. That we exist. It is from this knowledge that we can infer that survival is important.

In the past I have written about a vision for human civilizational flourishing, and would like to follow up those thoughts briefly now. More to the point, I wish to offer a deeper or foundational basis for those previous ideas. One might consider this to be a simple philosophical basis for action in the 21st Century. These thoughts are also directly relevant to my most recent post, about The Singularity & Convergent Risk.

Assume Nothing

Continue reading “The Imperative & The Circle” »