London Futurists

For the latest info:

• London Futurists Podcast
• London Futurists newsletters
• Forthcoming events

For the activist wing of London Futurists:

• Future Surge – revitalising the social and political landscape

For our project to collect, curate, clarify, and (where necessary) create educational resources:

• Vital Syllabus – Education fit for the new future

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The next few years are likely to bring unprecedented change. Humanity is facing:

• Accelerating changes in numerous fields of technology
• Deepening impacts of technologies into many new areas of life and society
• Stresses and strains of rapidly increasing resource usage
• Untested ideas and fads, often with little substance, spreading like wildfire
• Swiftly changing lifestyles, with unforeseeable consequences
• Gridlock in the mechanisms for international collaboration, being challenged by intense pent-up pressures.

As covered in the attached video, major developments are gathering speed in fields such as nanotechnology, genomics, regenerative medicine, brain sciences, ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and geo-engineering. These developments  are going to be very exciting – but also potentially very dangerous. At one extreme, we might witness a “singularity” convergence of new technologies, via the emergence of networked artificial intelligence that significantly exceeds human capability and comprehension.

Thanks to technology, we seem poised to gain god-like powers, such as super-intelligence and super-longevity. But at the same time, we risk losing sight of our humanity, and destroying everything that we used to hold dear.

There are many interconnections between technologies, economies, the environment, politics, cultures, and philosophies. We cannot predict with any certainty how these interconnections will unfold. We must consider, not just one possible scenario for the future, but many.

Hence the mission of London Futurists:

Serious analysis of radical scenarios for the next 3-40 years.

London Futurist meetings and projects explore both the potential upsides, and the potential downsides, of these scenarios.

We aim to set aside hype and sensationalism, over-optimism and over-pessimism. We want to explore and highlight information about future scenarios that is trustworthy and clear. This information can guide our actions, individually and collectively, as we seek to find our place in the future, and even to help create that future.

So, let’s pool our best insights into what’s technically feasible, and what’s desirable. Given the gravity of the changes that may soon befall us, it’s well worth debating, beforehand, what we can do so that technology deeply enhances humanity rather than deeply diminishes humanity.

To contact London Futurists

To join the group online, see http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/.

You can also email the chair, David Wood, on davidw AT deltawisdom DOT com.

See also:

• About London Futurists
• Information for Speakers
• The lead up to the Singularity
• Technoprogressives and transhumanists
• Introducing London Futurists Academy
• Forthcoming events
• Archive of previous events
• Archive of London Futurists newsletters
• Video recordings of previous events
• The “Vital Syllabus” education initiative

Find us on our Facebook Page.

>>> Civilisation’s path from yesterday to tomorrow passes through London <<<