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Out of left field: Nick Bostrom at Activate09

Nick Bostrom is director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. He gets my prize for pulling the rug out from our feet, in terms of the scope of his presentation. The Institute’s four research areas are human enhancement,  global catastrophic risks, rationality and wisdom and future technologies. Bostrom’s talk combined all four, exploring the likelihood of human extinction vs the evolution of humans into ‘post-humans’ (partly along the lines of Ray Kurzweil and singularity and partly in terms of extended lifespan / population growth). He was making me think so much I couldn’t really make notes.

There was some overlap in tenor with Matt Webb’s later presentation, in terms of the macroscopic view of things. Bostrom offered a very macroscopic view of human existence, ‘zooming out’ to put human existence and technological development into a multi-billion year context. It made me think quite alot of the Stephen Baxter sci-fi book ‘Evolution’, which adopts a similarly massive timescale. There was also some tangential  overlap with John Hagel (again), as Bostrom started with the same Breugel painting of Icarus’ fall as Hagel and Seely Brown start their working paper version of ‘From Push to Pull’ (referenced by Werner Vogels just prior to Bostrom’s keynote).

Posted in technology.