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"Engines of Creation 2000
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nanotechnology | life extension | patent abuse |
nanoweapons | abundance | uploading |
transparency | space expansion | AI |
What: | Foresight's Annual Brainstorming-Planning-Actionfest & NanoSchmoozathonThe 21st century: every day in every way, weirder and weirder. Think the net has changed the world, economically and politically? You're right, but compared to what's coming, we ain't seen nothin' yet. As kids, we'd calculate our age in the year 2000, expecting things to be futuristic by then. We were right, they are, and getting more so every day. Not to worry there's still time to tweak this early phase of the "run-up to Singularity". In the next one-to-three decades we expect to see these capabilities:
Such a future is so different from human history that we can barely imagine it. Some call it a "Singularity" beyond which our best projections are useless. Foresight disagrees, and at this event we'll be exploring what can be known about the world we're being pushed intocloser every secondand how we can influence the outcome by influencing initial conditions. Our tools? Memesinfectious ideaswhich we create and launch, with excellent success to date. Come help improve the next batch, and help design open-source software to refine and spread them. We'll be aiming to influence:
Join Foresight and our special guests as we picture our preferred future, design a pathway there, and implement using all the tools available:
When you leave you'll have the clearest picture possible of what's on the horizon, who's stepping up to the challenges in each area, and what your options are for optimizing how nanotechnology and other powerful technologies play out. Find this all a little overwhelming? Not for us as a group. While it might feel intimidating to sit alone, watching as this future comes charging at us, we've found that jumping in and trying to tweak things for the better is great fun. |
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Who: | 200 of the most forward-looking people around those who are paying the most attention to what's coming and how it will affect you and yours over the next 10-30 years and beyond. | ||
When: | May 19 evening through May 21, 2000 Friday 7-10 pm, Saturday 8 am-9 pm, Sunday 8 am-5 pm |
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Where: | Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, the eye of the technological hurricane | ||
How: | We're using a maximum-interaction process inspired by the DesignShop of MG Taylor a group-achievement process so powerful, so seductive, that it lured two key Foresight leaders away to write a book about it. Purchase the book. Free online version of the book. Format Most conferences have "talking heads", with a little Q&A discussion if you're lucky. Not this time: instead, launch yourself into the topics of your choice in workshop-style sessions of 10, 25, or 80 participants. Explore the edges of what we know today and can reasonably project over the coming decades:
Think we've missed a major issue? No problem add a session on that topic. Your group's output gets folded in as input to the next stage of the process, equal in priority to output from pre-scheduled groups. How the process works:
Background to the PatchWorks Process |
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Why: |
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For those unable to attend the Gathering, the expanded topics page serves as an extensive primer on the issues behind "Engines of Creation 2000: Confronting Singularity"
Special thanks go to Matt & Gail Taylor and friends at MG Taylor, and to Christopher Allen and team at Alacrity Ventures, for underwriting the 1999 Foresight Group Genius event, on which this year's meeting is modeled. (Group Genius, DesignShop, and PatchWorks are trademarks of MG Taylor.)
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