Terasem Colloquium, July 7, 2024
Old and new radically optimistic futurisms.
The Terasem Space Day Colloquium of 2024 will be held on July 7, via Zoom, from 10am ET to 1pm ET.
The usual date of July 20 (anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon) has been changed to avoid conflicts with another event.
This Terasem Colloquium will explore old and new radically optimistic futurisms including Italian futurism, Russian and modern cosmism, extropy, and e/acc (the new kid on the futurist block).
There’ll be five speakers, each with a 35 min time slot for a talk and a short Q/A session.
Agenda
10am ET: Introduction by Giulio Prisco
10:05 ET: Riccardo Campa
10:40 ET: Ben Goertzel
11:15 ET: Robin Hanson
11:50 ET: James Pethokoukis
12:25 ET: Max More
YOU ARE INVITED!
CLICK HERE to join the Zoom event.
A related issue of Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, with articles by Giulio Prisco and Alan Kazlev, will be published in July 2024.
Speakers:
Riccardo Campa, author of a treatise on the philosophy of Italian futurism (2012) and many works on futurism, philosophy, and sociology.
Campa is Professor of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and director of the History of Ideas Research Centre of this university. He is co-editor of the academic journal Orbis Idearum: European Journal of the History of Ideas, and editor of the publishing series Divenire: Rassegna di studi interdisciplinari sulla tecnica e il postumano (Sestante). He founded the Italian Transhumanist Association, of which he is Honorary President. His research focuses mainly on philosophy and sociology of science, technology studies, medical sociology, bioethics, futurism, transhumanism, and history of ideas.
Ben Goertzel, author of “A Cosmist Manifesto” (2010) and many works on futurism, science, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Goertzel is a cross-disciplinary scientist, entrepreneur and author. Born in Brazil to American parents, in 2020 after a long stretch living in Hong Kong he relocated his primary base of operations to a rural island near Seattle. He leads the SingularityNET Foundation, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society which runs the annual Artificial General Intelligence conference. He also chairs the futurist nonprofit Humanity+.
Goertzel’s research work encompasses multiple areas including artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds, gaming, parapsychology, theoretical physics and more. He has published 25+ scientific books, ~150 technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles, and given talks at a vast number of events of all sorts around the globe.
Goertzel organized the Beneficial AGI Summit & Unconference 2024 and co-authored the forthcoming book “The Consciousness Explosion” (2024). He writes the Eurykosmotron newsletter on Substack.
Robin Hanson, author of “The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth” (2016) and many works on futurism, science, and economy.
Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and was research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University until that closed in 2024. He has a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology, master's degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA.
Hanson has pioneered prediction markets, also known as information markets and idea futures, since 1988. He was the first to write in detail about creating and subsidizing markets to gain better estimates on a wide variety of important topics.
Hanson has diverse research interests, with papers on a wide range of topics including reversible computation, the origin of life, the survival of humanity, very long term economic growth, growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization. He writes the Overcoming Bias newsletter on Substack.
Max More, extropian philosopher and editor of “The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future” (2013).
Dr. Max More is a strategic philosopher recognized for his thinking on the philosophical and cultural implications of emerging technologies. His contributions include founding the philosophy of transhumanism, authoring the transhumanist philosophy of extropy, and co-founding Extropy Institute, an organization crucial in building the transhumanist movement since 1990. He is the Ambassador and President Emeritus of Alcor Life Extension, after serving as CEO and President from 2011 to 2020. He writes the Extropic Thoughts newsletter on Substack.
James Pethokoukis, author of “The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised” (2023).
Pethokoukis is a a senior fellow and the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he analyzes US economic policy, writes and edits the AEIdeas blog, and hosts AEI’s Political Economy podcast. He is also a contributor to CNBC and writes the Faster, Please! newsletter on Substack.
Before joining AEI, Pethokoukis was the Washington columnist for Reuters’s Breakingviews, the opinion and commentary wing of Thomson Reuters. Earlier, he was the business editor and economics columnist for US News & World Report.
See also:
from 10am ET to 1pm ET is it meant to be Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5) ?
Thanks! See you there