http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/474108

this episode of the C-Realm features a lengthy interview with Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. he talks about quite a bit: how climate change models have heretofore been entirely too conservative, how there are many alternative energy sources which haven't been considered (he mentions algae and a different kind of geothermal), and what he sees as an ongoing transformation of society by tele-work, tele-eduction, and tele-everything. but perhaps the most interesting part was his discussion about the consideration of the Lifeboat Foundation's other concerns for the immediate future:

The purpose of the Lifeboat Foundation is to try to anticipate the potential existential risks to humans going forward as we prosecute what is essentially something that we've never done and seen before which is a simultaneous IT, Bio, Nano, Quantum Energetics, double-exponential tech revolution. All of these tech revolutions are frontiers of the small but feed off one another synergistically and they're all changing things in massive ways. Currently, we have, since 1959, seen computer speeds increase 10 million times. We are currently at about a petaflop. The human brain speed is 20 petaflops. We will be at human brain speed by 2012. So the machines will be as smart as human brains.

Beyond that, as we leave silicon and go on to Bio, Optical, Quantum, Nano, and Molecular computing, we are looking at an additional speed increase beyond human brain speed of somewhere between 10 to the seventh and 10 to the 11th power by 2030 to 2040. That's some massive, massive, machine capability. So the speed will be there to produce an intelligence beyond human. Well, what about the software? The software comes from either the current self computing algorithms and (AGI) or are from biomimetics.

Then there is 'emergence'. As far as we can tell, there is no general intelligence wiring in the human brain. Each piece of our intelligence evolved in the usual billion year evolutionary context over which we developed as today's humans to handle specific problems within that evolutionary context, almost all of which was in the hunter-gatherer realm. Any general intelligence that we have is wholly emergent - i.e. make something complex enough and it wakes up.

So between emergence, biomimetics, and self computing, people are betting that by 2025 to 2030, we will begin to approach or exceed human level machine intelligence. If this happens it may become an existential threat - one of the existential threats that are being looked at by the Lifeboat people. Because once the machines get smarter than us, they can do things that could take us down even inadvertently. You don't even have to postulate an evil machine to do this. And so how do you work this going forward to make sure that in the brain stem of the machines, in the lizard part of the brain, that they understand, and it's built into them from the initial stages, not to harm humans in any way shape or form? So we have to define what "harm" is...

http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/lectures/Technopagans%20at%20the%20End%20of%20History/

an audio transcription of an entire weekend workshop at Esalen lead by Terrence McKenna and VR pioneer Mark Pesce. these two really smart guys tackle a wide range of material related to the arcane aspects of technology in our post-modern era. some choice exerpts transcribed:

In ages where the imagination is empowered, magic rules the world. In ages where the imagination has somehow given way to positivism, empiricism, reductionism or some other form of so-called realism, magic withers on the vine. The realization that code is magical invocation is really a powerful one. Language in the hands of science becomes descriptive and discursive. Language in the hands of a magician creates...and we haven't seen languages like that for several centuries in the west. But when you write code and implement it, this is magical language. When your utterance is iterated in the machine, something happens. Once it is debugged, it is a magical invocation that works. And the world is becoming progressively more and more ruled by invocation.
~Language has some kind of symbiotic relationship to meat and silicon.
~Where the anxiety arises is in people trying to explain to themselves what is happening. The world is now so complex very few people "understand" it. But in whatever area you don’t understand it you generate mythology which explains it to you. So most of us, as the culture becomes more complex, our participation in it becomes more magical, more animistic, more provisional, more mythic. This is both a good and a bad thing. It leads to cults...which I think is a bad thing; in other words, people accept explanations for reality, the only argument for which, is that they are explanations for reality. Their persuasive force otherwise is zilch.
~Modernity was thoroughly existential. In other words, reductionist science tells you you’re the product of a cosmic accident; meaning is conferred; you’re lucky to be here; nature has no interest in your fate; nature indeed has no purpose at all. My own intellectual journey both experientially with psychedelics and through mathematical analysis of history, etc. leads to the conclusion that this existential point of view is able to maintain itself only by ignoring the evolutionary thrust toward complexity and novelty that occurs on every level of being.

And that in fact, if you begin to value novelty, you suddenly have a basis for a new human ethic, because human beings with their languages and their technologies represent a level of novelty never before achieved on this planet, something that builds on animal nature as a platform but goes well beyond it. So suddenly, from being a random accident, a chance-created witness to a meaningless cosmos, we become the cutting edge of the very process that the cosmos itself seems to value or seek to magnify and preserve. So what has crept back into being, for me and anybody else who accepts these overarching metaphors, is value. It’s a different kind of value than we’ve ever seen before. The last time we knew values, they were handed down from a religious hierarchy which talked directly to God and got strange messages. The new values are self-evident from an examination of nature. Anyone can inform themselves about the facts of biology and large scale complex systems, etc.

The new story is a story of recognizing our placement at this breaking wave of novel advance. Suddenly technology becomes a religious enterprise, good for something other than building consumer electronics and small appliances, and actually seen as the path toward some kind of transcendent possibility. The goal is well-formulated in spiritual ontology but the methods are a mess. They either don’t work or require lifetimes or make demands on people’s behavior that are practically inhuman. I think the new story is based on the recognition of our own centrality. We haven’t stood at the center of the cosmic stage for 700 years in our official myth. And now suddenly we’re returned there. Returned not merely as witnesses in a central position, but suddenly as actors. Because these technologies that are coming into our hands are truly promethian. Truly faustian. Truly capable of making us like unto a god. But not in the service of market capitalism and consumer fetishism; more in the service of the emotion of awe.