Notes from the Transhuman Strategies conference, 21 March 2015

At long last, here are my notes from the Transhuman Strategies conference held by the Brighter Brains Institute on 21 March 2015. It took me a while to find the notebook I wrote them in, so that's why they're a few months late in coming. Anyway, my notes are under the cut.Hank Pellissier - Transhumanitarian Projects

• Goals: Extending life, increasing mental ability
• Life expectency in Japan is 80, in Sierra Leone is 35
• Hunger is still the greatest killer
• Shipping food or backing projects
• De-worming - parasiting infections in children
• The energy deficit incurred by parasitic infection lowers IQ in children
• De-parasitization treatments are very cheap - 400 people for $25us
• Setting up medical clinics
• Weekly disease reports
• Education - sponsoring kids, starting schools
• Building libraries, hands-on education
• Carpentry workshops to build infrastructure
• The Mormon Transhumanist Organization does a lot
• $100us == several hundred pounds of clothing
• Outfitting physicians and laboratories
• The BiZoHa Orphanage
• The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer
• Altruism has been observed to increase lifespan
• Cuban medical model: Get a medic, task them with a community, pay them

John Smart - Eight Skills of Foresight Development

• The Foresight Company
• Acceleration Studies Foundation
• To be human is to extend one's abilities beyond the natural, i.e. to become tool using
• Technological change - ten areas but only two drive acceleration of progress
• Ten places to get Ph.Ds in futurism, 23 to get a masters' in same
• Good futurists tell weeble stories - they wobble but they don't fall down
• Get critical feedback. If they survive, then tell them to larger groups.
• Professor Jim Dator's four futures model
• Kuznets curves depicting developmental cycles
• As tech enters an environment it creates great economic inequality, environmental degredation, social stability, tech import
• J curve - super-exponential curve of state change
• Energy flow density - Φ (Phi)
• The acceleration of history
• The Birth of Plenty by William J. Bernstein
• Ten areas of change: Infotech and nanotech (which change the scale of information processing), resources, engineering, cognotech, social, health, economic, political, security
• Mind the hype, find what's useful
• Mastering the Hype Cycle by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino
• Three P's of Foresight
• Preferable - what you want
• Probable - what you'll get
• Possible - what might be
• All three are critical in teams
• Kirton's three personality traits: Innovator/Creators, Bridgers, Protectors/Predictors
• StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
• KAI model
• Cognitive diversity brought to bear on hard problems
• Perception -> Decision -> Action cycles
• Relations - the speed of trust
• If people don't trust you, you won't get any trac