Hugo de Garis interview - part 3 - 2010-10-09 007-1.mp4

Interview with Hugo in Melbourne after the Singularity Summit Australia 2010, conducted by Aam A. Ford.


Bio: Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis, 63, has lived in 7 countries. He recently retired from his role of Director of the Artificial Brain Lab (ABL) at Xiamen University, China, where he was building China's first artificial brain. He and his friend Prof. Dr. Ben Goertzel have just finished guest editing a special issue on artificial brains for Neurocomputing journal (December 2010), the first of its kind on the planet.

He continues to live in China, where his U.S. savings go 7 times further, given China's much lower cost of living. He spends his afternoons in his favorite (beautiful) park, and his nights in his apartment, intensively studying PhD-level pure math and mathematical physics to be able to write books on topics such as femtometer scale technology ("femtotech"), topological quantum computing (TQC), as well as other technical and sociopolitical themes.

He is the author of two books: The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans : A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines (2005) and Multis and Mono: What the Multicultured Can Teach the Monocultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State (2010). Both these books are concerned with the political consequences of future technologies.

He labels his new lifestyle "ARCing" (After-Retirement Careering), feeling freed from wage slavery, spending (probably) the remaining 30 years of his life pursuing with passion those deep and interesting topics that truly fascinate him, without having to waste huge amounts of time writing an endless stream of relatively unread, un-meaningful, short-horizon scientific papers or research grant proposals just to receive a salary. He feels liberated from all that, and can recommend ARCing to anyone with sufficient savings (i.e.. to take up "wage free careering in the third of life").

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Hugo de Garis
• Singularity Summit
• Australia
• interview
• Melbourne
• 2010
• artilect
• gigadeath
• cosmist
• cyborg
• terran
• Adam Ford
• kurzweil
• technological singularity
• pesimism
• accelerating returns
• robot
• artificial intelligence
• ai
• nanotech
• femtotech
• physics
• math quantum computing
• topological

[Chance411]

The only way it will work is if we merge with them. Does anyone in this day and age believe that we are meant to just sit on this one dinky little planet indefiniately? This is our destiny anyway, so bring it on I say. What upsets me is that true immortality is coming, but I may one of the last generation of our species that dies.

So get this matrix grid thingy built and plug me in already!

[thermalrat]

If I'm cybernetically upgraded, multiple trillions of times greater than my, parents who remain fully biological "Terrans" , why wouldn't I spend a fraction of my brain compute resources to maintain a relationship with them? To abandon them would be IMO inhumane. If "wasting" time is the issue, at the very least, I could create a synthetic cybernetic puppet almost identical to me or my "Terran" version, then use that as an avatar to communicate with them remotely while I do post human things.

[colossusofdestiny]

@Chance411 ya i am cool with meaning to sit on the dinky planet, i like it a lot

[KraussHelmut]

@Chance411

Nice, I'm with ya!

[rmeddy1]

The Cyborgists maybe a bigger problem than the Artilects, given that they may carry across some of the nastier aspects of our lesser nature.

Not to mention the iatrogenics involved

[TheOthoudt]

What about the mental health of cyborgs and artilects? Thinking a million times faster could drive an AI insane. 

[SSJ3Ulcer]

Maybe it's not the Terrans who have anything to fear; maybe it's the Cosmists...

[chronoflect]

I agree with nearly everything Hugo is talking about, and I will definitely be a part of the "cyborg" group, but I prefer the term transhumanist, or "beyond human". (or human+ / H+)

In fact, I'm eagerly awaiting the day I can go to a clinic and have my brain augmented to be smarter, faster, and more resilient and capable of wireless communication. Whether I will be called an android, cyborg, or transhuman, it matters not.