The Terasem Colloquium on July 7, 2024 explored old and new radically optimistic futurisms including Italian futurism, Russian and modern cosmism, extropy, and e/acc (the new kid on the futurist block).
Speakers: Riccardo Campa, Ben Goertzel, Robin Hanson, James Pethokoukis, Max More. See this post for more about the speakers.
This video is also on YouTube, with links to individual talks.
Of course we also discussed the ongoing acceleration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology (see Ben’s last book “The Consciousness Explosion: A Mindful Human's Guide to the Coming Technological and Experiential Singularity”) and, needless to say, politics and culture.
Cultural issues are paramount. We must find ways to recover the wildly optimistic culture that we had, for example, in the 1990s. The AI explosion could bring that optimism back, and good science fiction can help. Max closed with a recommendation to read the writings of Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci on cultural engineering. This cross-partisan reference suggests to me that petty partisan left/right politics has outlived its utility and must go.
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VIDEO: Terasem Colloquium, July 7, 2024