Waging War on Death! The Immortality Institute's first conference 11/5/05.

Waging War on Death! The Immortality Institute's first conference 11/5/05.

The Immortality Institute's stated goal is "to overcome the blight of involuntary death"( http://www.imminst.org)

 

On November 5,2005, one-hundred and fifty Immortalists gathered for their first conference at Georgia Technology Institute in Atlanta, Georgia, to hear visionaries outline how biotechnology, nonotechnology, cryonics, artificial intelligence and computer science could enable human beings to become the masters of their own fates.

 

Cynics might laugh.  However, the credentials and past accomplishments of several speakers commanded serious respect.

 

The announcement of the first $1,000,000.00 donation toward establishing a scientific prize for extending longevity in mice was a historical landmark.

 

The most prominent speaker, Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., Research Associate, University of Cambridge-SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) outlined a detailed plan for curing human aging.

 

I had the opportunity of spending several hours with Dr. de Grey and two interviews with him will be interspersed with other highlights videotaped during this conference.

 

You can see the profiles of those who spoke by going to 

http://www.imminst.org and looking under "speakers" in their "Conference Project" area.

 

The conference's first speaker was Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D., J.D., M.B.A., who was responsible for launching several sattlelite communications companies including Sirius and Worldspace, who spoke on "The Legal Rights of Conscious Computers". 

 

Like most of those active at The Immortality Institute, I think for myself.  Personally, I've always been openly skeptical about such subjects as Artificial Intelligence, The Singularity,  uploading and downloading ourselves into computers, etc.

 

However, I found Martine Rothblatt's arguments to be fascinating.  They went to the core of what individual identity is really all about.

 

Eliezer Yudowsky, Director, Singularity Intitute For Artificial Intelligence, gave a presentation which caused me to view all the arguments about AI in a totally new light.

 

One thing I have learned in life is that there are many more things I don't know than those that i do know.

 

I'll be filing commentary with each posting.  Hope you enjoy this series.

 

However, I will be interspersing other materials on diverse different subjects.  Stay tuned.  Subscribe to my feed.  Please leasve comments.