What will change everything? 150 scientists, authors and public figures answer this question. You can learn lots. How to sum it up?
George Dvorsky said it best: Edge.org Answers Overwhelmingly Transhumanist.
Having seen George’s collection, I don’t feel like I can top that view of the answers. So what I present here is just a collection of the ideas which were novel to me, i.e. said something I didn’t already know… I’ve also picked a few I think are relevant to the metaciv project. Obviously I think you should read all the answers yourself. But if you want a curated collection, here’s mine.
Kevin Kelly – a new kind of mind. Not strong AI, but ubiquity of intelligence. Fascinating insight.
Chris Anderson – a web empowered revolution in teaching (by video, of course)
George Dyson – Interstellar Viruses – actually, transmitting alien intelligences, and having civilizations “unpack them”, similar to hosting a virus… interesting idea – why send messages when you can send yourself?
Daniel L. Everett – Undoing Babylon: universal accurate language translation
Nicholas Humphrey – this one really sums up WHY transhumanism is the dominate answer. If you change human nature, you change everything in the most fundamental sense.
Freeman Dyson – radiotelepathy
Haim Harari – education is still awaiting revolution
Leo Chalupa – drugs for brain plasticity!
Steven Pinker – thoughts on failed futurism, personal genomics
Keith Devlin – the mobile phone!
Howard Rheingold – social media explosion?
Eric Drexler – carbon emissions problem, nanotech removal
David Gelernter – track & cluster to replace school as we know it
Brian Eno – self fufilling feelings of things getting worse
Sherry Turkle – robots as companions – and dangers thereof
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster – miniaturizing people to reduce their burden
David M Buss – exploitability
Robert Sapolky – people who can intuit in six-dimensions. But such humans may never exist!