Please distribute to others who may be interested... You are hereby invited to a seminar in our tenth interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108>(ECCO 2013-2014)
Time: Friday Oct 18, 14h-16h. Place: f5.212* - not the usual room!* ------------------------------ * Return to Eden?* *Promises and Perils on the Road to an Omnipotent Global Intelligence* * * Francis Heylighen <[email protected]> *Global Brain Institute* * * The concept of Singularity envisages a technology-driven explosion in intelligence. I argue that the resulting suprahuman intelligence will not be centralized in a single AI system, but distributed across all people and artifacts, as connected via the Internet. This global brain will function to tackle all challenges confronting the "global superorganism". Its capabilities will extend so far beyond our present abilities that they may be best conveyed as a pragmatic version of the "divine" attributes: omniscience (knowing everything needed to solve our problems), omnipresence (being available anywhere anytime), omnipotence (being able to provide any product or service at negligible cost) and omnibenevolence (aiming at the greatest happiness for the greatest number). By extrapolating present trends, technologies and evolutionary mechanisms, I argue that these abilities are likely to be realized within the next few decades. The resulting solution to all our individual and societal problems can be seen as a return to "Eden", the idyllic state of abundance and peace that supposedly existed before civilization. In this utopian society, individuals would be supported and challenged by the global brain to maximally develop their abilities, and to continuously create new knowledge. However, side effects of technological innovation are likely to create serious disturbances on the road to this utopia. The most important dangers are cascading failures facilitated by hyperconnectivity, the spread of psychological parasites that make people lose touch with reality, the loss of human abilities caused by an unnatural, passive lifestyle, and a conservative backlash triggered by too rapid changes. Because of the non-linearity of the system, the precise impact of such disturbances cannot be predicted. However, a range of precautionary measures, including a "global immune system", may pre-empt the greatest risks. ------------------------------ Upcoming Seminars * **Oct. 24 (Thursday!) ** * * *Dirk Helbing (ETH Zürich) * * * A Planetary Nervous System, and What to Do with It * *Nov. 8 * Cliff Joslyn (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)* * * ? (data mining and distributed cognition) ? * * * *Nov. 15** * Viktoras Veitas (GBI) * * *ChallProp: an agent-based modelling framework for simulating the Global Brain* * * *Nov. 22** * Jon Echanove (ECCO) * * *Inclusiveness and Exposure: the experience of becoming global and the impact on organizations* * * *Nov. 29** * Wolfgang Hofkirchner (Technical University of Vienna) * * *Global Consciousness – the global brain in the perspective of a global sustainable information society* * * *Dec. 6 ** * Lotte van Lith * * *Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration* * * *Dec. 13 ** * Atanu Chatterjee (Indian Institute of Technology) * * *? (the principle of least action as foundation for the theory of self-organization) ? * More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108 -- Evo Evo Busseniers - Seminar Coordinator ECCO Group (VUB) <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/1> Email: [email protected] Website: http://vub.academia.edu/EvoBusseniers<http://be.linkedin.com/in/weaver9/>
