{"id":268,"date":"2008-11-29T08:38:16","date_gmt":"2008-11-29T16:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/11\/29\/convergence08\/"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:58:36","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T21:58:36","slug":"convergence08","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/11\/29\/convergence08\/","title":{"rendered":"Convergence08"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.convergence08.org\">Convergence08<\/a> had an amazing number of interesting people in attendance. No one person stood out as unusually impressive &#8211; it was more that the average was unusually high for a 300 person gathering. I&#8217;ll list many small ideas, which partly reflects the fact that I was trying to sample a wide enough variety of sessions that I didn&#8217;t manage to absorb any one presentation in depth.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.genescient.com\/\">Genescient<\/a> is a new company whose founders include SF author Greg Benford. It has a strain of fruit flies bred for lifespans more than 4 times normal, and has used their DNA to identify substances that might improve human lifespan. It sounds like they will soon offer dietary supplements which have little risk and a hope of slowing down aging by some hard to predict (probably small) amount.<\/p>\n<p>Advice from Eliezer Yudkowsky (responding to a concern that transhumanists have few children): don&#8217;t reproduce until you can code your child from scratch.<\/p>\n<p>Several ideas from a session run by Anders Sandberg:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>AntiGroupware is designed to remove many social pressures from group decision-making<\/li>\n<li>Once it&#8217;s easy to make copies of people, political campaigns will be run by a large number of copies. [This assumes that democracy can attempt to survive &#8211; are copies going to be denied votes?]<\/li>\n<li>Politicians should be selected from losers of the game <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Diplomacy_(game)\">Diplomacy<\/a> [It might be hard to keep them from deliberately losing, but with big incentives winning plus a low probability of any one loser becoming a politician, it might work.]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ideas from a <a href=\"http:\/\/convergence08.pbwiki.com\/Connecting+Feeling+and+Thought++interIntraPersonally\">session<\/a> run by Milton Huang:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Keeping Skype video connections open for hours at a time changes remote interactions between two people in ways that make them seem very different from telephone conversations, and more like being physically together<\/li>\n<li>We should try to implement a way to transmit hugs remotely<\/li>\n<li>We might be able to make people (especially those with autistic tendencies) experience more empathy via an &#8220;empathy machine&#8221; that measures and reports on what others are feeling<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Convergence08 had an amazing number of interesting people in attendance. No one person stood out as unusually impressive &#8211; it was more that the average was unusually high for a 300 person gathering. I&#8217;ll list many small ideas, which partly reflects the fact that I was trying to sample a wide enough variety of sessions [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[94,39,89,64],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science_tech","tag-aging","tag-convergence08","tag-mind-uploading","tag-transhumanism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-4k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":634,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}