Dear Futurists,

As I write these words, there are just five full days before the main part of TransVision Utrecht. (If you are considering joining the optional extra workshop on the Friday afternoon on open longevity GPT, it’s just four full days to wait!)

Read on for some reflections and provocations on the themes of that conference – and for other ways to continue exploring these themes (even if you can’t make it in person to Utrecht).

1.) Longevity Escape Velocity: Getting there sooner

One of the the five main themes at Utrecht is “Physical rejuvenation and beyond”.

I will be one of the four presenters in that part of the conference. My presentation will be entitled “Longevity Escape Velocity: Getting there sooner”. This image helps to set the scene:

This is such an important topic that I speak about it frequently. For example, toward the end of February, I’ll be giving a different version of that talk in another hemisphere, on Margarita Island in the Caribbean. This will be part of the Ibero Latin-American Congress on Anti-Aging and Longevity.

I say a few words about that Congress in this video:

2.) Anticipating Beneficial General Intelligence

Another theme at TransVision Utrecht is “The coming wave of AI”. That will include discussions about both opportunities and risks. There will also be debate on how soon we might expect the arrival of AI systems that transcend individual domains of reasoning to display a broad common sense understanding of general knowledge. Perhaps even more important: should we expect these AGI (Artificial General Intelligent) systems to be friendly to human wants and needs, or will there be risks of catastrophic misalignment?

I’ve recently published an article on Mindplex Magazine on these same questions. That article is entitled “For Beneficial General Intelligence, Good Intentions Aren’t Enough”. It also carries the subtitle “Three Waves Of Complications: Pre-BGI, BGI, And Post-BGI”.

The term BGI used in this article is short for Beneficial General Intelligence. It is taken from the name of the conference happening in Panama City at the end of February and the beginning of March – another conference where I’ll be speaking, along with a host of AI and AGI thought-leaders. Click here for more details of BGI24.

Here’s one of the key points of my article:

By ‘pre-BGI system’ I don’t particularly mean today’s AIs. I’m referring to systems that people may create, in the near future, as attempts to move further toward BGI.

These systems will have greater capabilities than today’s AIs, but won’t yet have all the characteristics of AGI. They won’t be able to reason accurately in every situation. They will make mistakes. On occasion, they may jump to some faulty conclusions.

And whilst these systems may contain features designed to make them act beneficially toward humans, these features will be incomplete or flawed in other ways.

That’s not science fiction. That’s a description of many existing AI systems, and it’s reasonable to expect that similar shortfalls will remain in place in many new AI systems.

The risk here isn’t that humanity might experience a catastrophe as a result of actions of a superintelligent AGI. Rather, the risk is that a catastrophe will be caused by a buggy pre-BGI system.

I’ll be interested in any feedback to the argument in that article!

3.) Transhumanism Confusion

Two more themes of TransVision Utrecht are “Envisioning and creating transhumanist futures” and “Transhumanism locally and globally”. In each case, as for the other themes I’ve mentioned above, there’s a fine set of speakers and panellists ready to speak.

Sadly, the term “transhumanism” has come under attack from two groups of campaigners, each of whom have some ulterior motivation.

On one hand, groups connected with the QAnon cult, in the USA and beyond, fantasise about a global conspiracy to inject 5G radio chips into everybody, under the guise of a mass vaccination project. That’s transhumanism, according to this sorry confusion. This line of make-believe insists that transhumanist leaders are funded by bizarre shape-shifting reptiles, secretive banking dynasties, and vegan latte-sipping James Bond villains.

On another hand, groups who are trying to carve out a niche for themselves as holier-than-holy critics of colonialism, imperialism, and free market economics, are trying to re-invent transhumanism as a movement that is supposedly obsessed with optimisation, certainty, data accumulation, raw speed, raw intelligence, and the far, far future.

You can see aspects of that latter confusion in this striking recent five-way debate hosted by Humanity+:

All five participants made some important and insightful contributions to the discussion. But, my oh my, the conversation was a wild ride at times. You’ll see some strong disagreements and mutual misunderstandings.

As possible follow-ups to viewing that video:

• For more of my views as a singularitarian – a position I briefly defended during that five-way discussion – see this Vital Syllabus video on the Singularitarian stance
• For a longer analysis of the flaws of the TESCREAL concept, see my Mindplex Magazine article “Against Contractionism: Enabling And Encouraging Open Minds, Rather Than Constricting Understanding With Blunt Labels”
• For broader discussion of transhumanism, and of the confusions that surround the concept, see the Transhumanism page on the Vital Syllabus.

4.) New ways to listen to London Futurists Podcast episodes

Thanks to new features provided by YouTube, all the episodes from the back catalogue of the London Futurists Podcast can now be viewed as YouTube videos.

You can find the relevant playlist here.

If the technology works as expected, new episodes should appear in this playlist automatically.

That’s one more reason for you to check that you are subscribed to the London Futurists channel on YouTube!

Incidentally, the most recent episode in the list shown, “Climate Change: There’s good news and bad news”, is another helpful follow-up to the five-way transhumanism confusion debate I mentioned earlier.

5.) A new owner for Transhumanist Party UK?

As per a recent personal announcement, I’m finally pulling back from occasional thoughts I’ve had about standing as a candidate in forthcoming political elections in the UK.

This is not the place to rehearse the arguments for and against a specific transhumanist political party in the UK. (This video, from TransVision 2021, gave probably the best argument in favour of that idea.)

Suffice it to say I am stepping back from any involvement in a single political party. I’ve cancelled all ongoing membership subscriptions, set some of the related social media to read only, and am in the process of archiving some of the fascinating material that the Transhumanist Party UK accumulated over the years (latterly under the name Future Surge).

But I have been prevailed upon to postpone the action of removing the party from the UK’s register of official political parties.

The idea is that someone else might step forward to take over the registration.

I’m sceptical: the legal side of the registration is time-consuming. And there are some financial costs too. So my response has been: if someone else does want to create a UK political party with broadly similar principles to the Transhumanist Party UK, they should just start from scratch.

Nevertheless, it has been suggested, by more than one group of people, that they would find it easier to migrate an existing registration to new owners, than to create a brand new registration.

For this reason, I will remain open for another couple of months, to any potential approaches.

Incidentally, friends of London Futurists in the US Transhumanist Party have emphasised that they would provide supportive advice to anyone thinking of going down such a route.

6.) The fifth of the five themes at Utrecht

At the beginning of this newsletter, I mentioned that TransVision Utrecht features five main themes. So far, I’ve named four of these themes.

So what about the fifth?

Dear reader, this is where you can view a short video to find out more. This video is something I pulled together as a preview of TransVision Utrecht. I hope you find it helpful.

And if that video, or anything else I’ve covered in this newsletter, inspires you to want to register to attend, don’t delay to click here.

// David W. Wood
Chair, London Futurists