Guest speaker: Bruce Damer

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.]

“I would say it's no more than 500 people in the United States who cause a vast amount of the grief.”

“A crescendo involves everyone. The singularity seems to be this nerd idea of reaching some kind of Omega Point. It's very much the Christian idea of the second coming. It's apocalyptic, etc., a bit of a downer because everything comes to an end, but it's incredibly unlikely.”

“The crescendo will throw off all the old religions. It will throw off the conspiracy theories. It will throw off crusty old corporate jobs. And replace them with self-sufficiency, direct communication with nature, with other human beings, with media, and the creation of opinions directly.

“So if you think of the computing, it's not really computing, but the computing nature is doing all the time, it outstrips all our largest supercomputing grids.”

“So if we can't do even one neuron [computer simulation] how are we going to upload consciousness exactly?”

“You're here not because something put you here and fabricated you and guided the evolution and created the whole planet. It's an emergent phenomenon and so are you. And you are an ongoing story, and the story is written in your genes, but it is also written in your mind. And you have responsibility for this amazing emergent phenomenon.”

“You don't need religion for miracles. The fact that you exist in all this existence is stacked upon miracles, turtles all the way down. So if we grok that, we don't need religious stories any more.”

“The virtual worlds and avatar spaces and multi-player games of now are the Keystone Cops of what virtual worlds will be in twenty or thirty years through AR [Augmented Reality], and big home holodecks, and stuff like that.”

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