Review of GF2045-2013 in New York

 Global Future 2045: Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution

A Review of the 2013 Congress in New York City

by Randal A. Koene,

Science Director, 2045 Strategic Social Initiative

(This is the original, uncut version of the review article. The article, as published at http://www.gf2045.com/read/265/ was reduced to meet maximum character limits.)

The 2045 Strategic Social Initiative founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov aims to build and carry out a new strategy for the development of humanity that addresses global challenges to human civilization. The future envisioned emphasizes great spiritual, cultural, ethical, scientific and technological values. Long-term survival of our species and civilization is paramount, but a fundamental question is also where do we want to go from here? Is there more, beyond our current mode of existence, that our civilization can develop towards? The new strategy embraces the continued uniting of biological and non-biological development of humanity and the advent of the cybernetic age. In June 2013, in an effort to introduce all of this, the Initiative hosted GF2045, the Global Future 2045 International Congress: Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution, at the Lincoln Center in New York City. The themes of the congress included android bodies, brain-computer interfaces, cognitive neuroscience, mind engineering and more.

The particulars of the strategy, as Itskov pointed out at the congress, involve an ambitious big-picture project called Avatar to enable the transfer of individual personality into sophisticated artificial carriers. Individually, such an accomplishment will reduce human suffering, extend healthy and active life-span, and free-up our attention to address challenges beyond our mortality, so that we may engage the better aspects of our nature in the creation of new meaning and goals. As a society, it will facilitate a transition from hunger to abundance, from national tension and war to the freedom to create and to concentrate on (spiritual) self-improvement and enlightenment. Where natural selection enabled life on Earth, more rapid adaptation of form through technology will bring it to the Cosmos. The Initiative works transparently and, in order to involve the global population, does so in dialogue with the world's cultural and spiritual traditions. For this purpose, Dr. Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University and co-Founder of Tibet House, opened an Interfaith Dialogue about Science, Spirituality, Evolution of Humanity and the Avatar Project at the congress. Participants were Mahayogi 'Pilot' Baba, Yoga master and Mahamandale-shwar of the Juna Akhara Order of Hindu Monks, Dr. Alan Brill, a Rabbi and Cooperman/Ross Endowed Professor in Honor of Sister Rose Thering at Seton Hall University, Dr. William Bushell, Fellow at Harvard University, Phakyab Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist Lama and Lazar Puhalo, retired Orthodox Archbishop of Ottawa.

Global crises demand global solutions

The growth of humanity certainly has had a number of desirable consequences: Our population and technology directly affects the rate of creative and scientific output; our economic strength can be brought to bear on issues and projects as ambitious as sending space-probes beyond our solar system or probing the secrets of the universe by smashing particles in super-colliders. This was not possible at the scale of civilization in the 17th century or before. But, growth also involves phase-changes in the complexity of society, and interconnectedness means that global crises threaten our entire species. It is easy to see that the resources required by growth and activity eventually must outstrip what a limited environment can sustainably provide. A large and dense population has a high chance of large-scale epidemics, while current social structures combined with competition for resources is likely to lead to conflicts and wide-spread injury, death and displacement. Earthquakes, tsunamis, drought, flood, as well as disasters of our own making also continue to strike portions of humanity everywhere on the globe. In the long-term, humanity faces cataclysmic threats such as asteroid impact and the loss of our biosphere as we enter the next phase of the solar life-cycle. The specter of extinction looms, because our biology is fragile to injury and disease and depends utterly on a finely-tuned environment: temperature, pressure, breathable air, water, nutrition.

The late Dr. James Martin, founder of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University, brought this realization to GF2045 with a survey of interdependent trends in his talk, The Transformation of Humankind - Extreme Paradigm Shifts Are Ahead of Us. According to Dr. Martin, the effects industry and population growth has had on our environment is now close to irreversible, and we should employ technologies and strategies that can avert the worst consequences. Of course, Dr. Martin's recent passing is itself a stark reminder of the devastating effects when death suddenly takes our champions and experts. In her talk, The Goal of Biotechnology is the End of Death, Dr. Martine Rothblatt, Founding CEO of United Therapeutics (pioneering advances such as 3D bio-printed organ replacements), directly addressed the taboe around discussions that all biotechnologies ultimately aim at ending death. Biotechnologists undertake to cure diseases, and because death is generally the victory of disease over life, the ultimate goal of biotechnology is (at least) the end of unwanted, non-violent and non-accidental death.

Evolving our civilization

The interactions in our growing population become more complex and may seem chaotic as we transition from family, to tribe, to village, city, nation, and global society. Methods that worked at earlier phases then lead to problems, such as the rift between the haves and the have-nots, whereby only a subset of humanity benefits from most of modernity's advances. To solve these problems, as well as existential risks, suffering through incapacity, decrepitude and death is a moral obligation.

During past physical and social crises, society has had to mature and reinvent itself, a selection process within a developing civilization. Another stage in this evolution is here, accompanied by the need for significant transformation and scientific revolutions. Dr. David Dubrovsky, head scientific advisor at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy, described the influence of biological biases and limitations that lead to excesses and exacerbate ecological crises and other global problems of anthropological origin in his talk, Human Nature, The Anthropological Crises and the Global Future. With this perspective it is clear that traditional remedies and politics making half-hearted attempts at sustainable development are short-sighted and narrow of scope, because they do not address the fundamentals of today's challenges.

Evolution is gradual, but natural selection is fast! It consists of a never-ending series of life-and-death trials, survived not by those whose biology adapts, but by those lucky enough to already be suited to the challenge. The winners are fortunate sets of genes, all the rest – individuals, families, species, consciousness, love, friendship, and so on – are to varying degrees the losers. For each winner of natural selection there are many dead losers and dead ends piled in eons-old heaps of carnage and suffering.

Mr. Itskov explained that the primary objective of the 2045 Initiative is to invest in a positive transition to a future beyond current crises and suffering while saving lives. That does not substitute for sustainable development, but it addresses its logical broader requirements. In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky opined that an objective observer from Mars would conclude that humanity was an evolutionary dead-end, apparently operating on a course destined to self-destruction. But he also said that it is entirely in our hands to prove that conclusion wrong. The Initiative depends on solid scientific fundamentals and the speakers at GF2045 methodically demonstrated grounding in realistic goals and technological feasibility, as well as technological components already being implemented.

Evolved adaptation or engineered adaptation

Biological systems are extremely sophisticated compared with most engineered systems, yet they are not designed for easy access, diagnostics, back-up, restoration or modification to new challenges. In fact, extending the life of a biological system may further increase the fragility of a species, as it continues to emphasize specialization for one environmental niche. Biological function and components are obscured, and often there are many points of failure in a system of mutually dependent mechanisms. The impact of X-Ray, MRI and similar technologies on the treatment of bodily injury is hard to overestimate. Unfortunately, those cannot solve problems in the brain where specific and microscopic differences within the neural tissue are crucial. So, there is as yet no way to restore the minds of patients who suffer from stroke, Alzheimer's, etc.

A most human characteristic is that we augment our biological selves through technology to extend the range of conditions in which we can thrive. The brain is plastic and the mind creative, so that we can adapt and engineer evolutionary fitness through our augmentations from spears to pacemakers. By contrast, biological evolution is a gradual and brutal process that does not allow humanity to keep up with the pace of social and environmental change we need and desire. If we are able to migrate our minds and personalities to an implementation where access, restoration and adaptation are easily possible then that substrate-independence gives us far more than just extended life and health. In her talk, Substrate Autonomous, Networked Avatar Bodies by Design, Dr. Natasha Vita-More, Professor at the University of Advancing Technology in Arizona, explained that she envisions competition between designers and engineers to build whole-body prostheses. According to Vita-More, "[...] the body is a necessary component of personal identity […] that provides data to the brain in order to be a sentient and sapient being.”

Great purpose and possibility

Developments can come about in different ways. Selective pressures can act on a near-chaotic random-walk, while we expend our resources on conflict, amusement and a consumer society filled with mobile phone apps. Exploration certainly has value, but we can also apply the power of knowledge and reasoning to exceed the performance of instinct-driven and simple action-reward behavior. We can learn from history. A historic vector of human development with transitions between “biospheric”, “pre-social” and “social evolutionary” phases, separated by logarithmically decreasing time-intervals was demonstrated by Dr. Akop Nazaretyan, Director of the Eurasian Center for Big History and System Forecasting and Full Professor in Moscow State University in his talk titled The Mid-21st Century Puzzle: On the Cosmic Perspective of Mind. Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, Founder and Chairman of the X Prize Foundation, proposed a next phase based on our emerging ability to direct our own evolution in his talk, Intelligent Self-directed Evolution Guides Mankind's Metamorphosis Into An Immortal Planetary Meta-intelligence.

Humanity can exhibit great will and exert immense effort when a common purpose is recognized and elevated to a high-priority goal of civilization, e.g., liberation during World War II, reaching the moon, or closing the hole in the ozone layer. We sell ourselves short when we live with our sights cast down at our own feet, concerned, as a pack of apes would be, only with the immediate. Instead, we should acknowledge our capabilities and the great engine that is humanity. That engine needs to be aimed at a great purpose, for which the 2045 Initiative proposes the Avatar project. Looking broadly at being ethically proactive about the 2045 Avatar project and questions of death and identity in his talk, Making Minds Morally: the Research Ethics of Brain Emulation, Dr. Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and Research Associate at the Oxford Neuroethics Center, added, “We want to get to the future, but that implies that the future had better be a good place.” So, “[…] the methods we're going to use to get to the future had better be good as well.”

Our experience of being, personal identity and consciousness depend crucially on individually unique mental processes. Something we value so greatly, should be handled with at least as much care as we use to safe-guard paintings, scientific discoveries, diaries, important documents and now even our DNA. Taking a hard and logical look at the actual problem it is clear that we need to free the mind from its one, fragile and difficult to restore substrate. In his talk, Facing the Future, Dr. Marvin Minsky, Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at M.I.T., made it clear that there is no theoretical objection to the possibility to copy the human mind into other functional platforms (although doing so is not the same as fully understanding the mind or advancing AI). The possibility of transferring mind and consciousness to another carrier, from the perspective of combining cybernetic evolution and teachings of Yoga and Vedanta, as well as the outlook for life in a cybernetic body, were further discussed in Mankind's Desirable Future According to Vedic culture and Cybernetic Technologies: The Evolution of Consciousness in Vedanta Philosophy, a talk by Swami Vishnudevananda Giri Ji Maharaj, Yoga Master and Founder of the Worldwide Society of Laya Yoga.

Augmenting by integrating technology

For decades (or longer) we have been off-loading mental tasks to computers (e.g., memory in data bases, recordings on video, scientific and economic calculations). The performance of such information technology has improved exponentially, as expressed in Moore's Law and more generally by the Snooks-Panov algorithm, as explained by Dr. Alexander Panov, Senior Research Fellow at the Physics Department of Moscow State University in his talk, Technological Singularity and the Penrose Theorem on Artificial Intelligence. Technology that is tied into information technology gains from the same advances, so it is important to note that mental processes can also be expressed through information analysis. Ray Kurzweil, futurist and Director of Engineering at Google, supported this insight in his talk, Immortality By 2045, by pointing to evidence for regular constructs in the neocortex and the significance of pattern recognition in mental functions.

Further integration by a convergence of tools based on biological and non-biological technology was presented in the talk, Bionanotech for Extending Moore's Law, the BRAIN Project I/O & Human Genome Engineering, by Dr. George Church, Professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, Director of PersonalGenomes.org, who introduced the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing and genetic barcoding. Target technologies included: methods for efficient genome and epigenome engineering; nanorobots with on-board sensors, logic and actuators based on hybrid materials (DNA, protein & inorganic); hybrid nanostructures for the manufacture of ultra-fast and complex electronic, optical and quantum computing; and bionano storage a billion times more compact and low-power than conventional digital media.

Brain-controlled prostheses

We are used to interacting with our technological extensions through fingers, eyes and ears, but we are rapidly entering an era of more direct control and feedback. Nigel Ackland, living and thriving example of prosthetic augmentation, who lost his right arm in a 2006 metal smelting accident, vividly described his extraordinary and life-affirming experiences after he was fitted with the BeBionic3 Myoelectric Prosthetic Hand by RSLSteeper in England. His physical demonstration at GF2045 included such feats as tying his shoe laces.

In Brain Control of Prosthetic Devices: The Road Ahead, Dr. Jose Carmena, UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Neuroscience and Co-Directory of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses, described current progress in the field of brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Highly successful examples are cochlear implants that restore hearing and deep-brain stimulators that invasively, but safely, treat a host of conditions from Parkinson's tremor to depression. Experimental BMI enable paralyzed persons to control external prostheses such as a robotic arm, to which Carmena remarked, “The field of BMI emerged primarily with this application in mind, basically to convert thought into action.” But, at present BMI still largely relies on the brain's adaptation to integrate new devices into its body schema, and the bandwidth of the interfaces lags behind the number of parameters that sophisticated robotics make available.

From anthropomorphic robotics to full-body prosthesis

Continuing these developments, it will be possible to restore mobility to paralyzed patients and to treat those where body (but not brain) is medically incurable. Today's technology allows us to furnish patients with telepresence robots, and eventually anthropomorphic robotic developments can provide sophisticated artificial bodies, enabling a full-body prosthesis. In his talk, The Future Life Supported by Robotic Avatars, Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro, Director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in Osaka, Japan, explained that our sensation of “presence”, of existence, physical proximity and interactions can be reproduced through android technology. He demonstrated one of his Geminoid Teleoperated Androids, a replica of himself, through which he has been known to give lectures. Dr. Ben Goertzel, leading Artificial General Intelligence researcher and Founder of the OpenCog AGI project and Dr. David Hanson, Founder of Hanson Robotics and former Disney sculptor and Imagineer, collaborate on another anthropomorphic robotics project with a focus on realistic and emotional robotic faces. Dr. Hanson is constructing the most advanced anthropomorphic robotic head and facial control in a commissioned replica for Mr. Itskov.

The requirements for maintaining the life-support of a patient's head or brain, and the consequent technical feasibility of a full-body transplant by experiencing life through an artificial body were presented and discussed in a Roundtable on Life-extension of the Brain in a Full-body Prosthesis with Biological Blood Substitutes and Brain-Computer Interfaces with Optional Neuroprostheses. The Roundtable included Dr. Alexander Kaplan, Founder of the first Russian BCI laboratory, Dr. Mikhail A. Lebedev, Senior Research Scientist at the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering, and Dr. Theodore Berger, David Packard Professor of Engineering, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neurobiology, and Director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California.

Neuroprostheses: Replacement parts for the brain

The majority of my personal scientific efforts are focused on the essential and technically very difficult part of the Avatar project that involves the transfer of individual personality into artificial carriers for the mind. Therefore, Mr. Itskov's Iniative invited a group of speakers from our network of scientific advisors and contacts to GF2045 with the specific intention to systematically explain work on neuroprostheses and on each of the crucial technology pillars of a roadmap toward Whole Brain Emulation (WBE), a realizable path toward substrate-independent minds and personality transfer.

Simple brain-controlled prostheses have interfaces where the brain does the heavy lifting and learns how to control the device through the interface, but as bandwidth requirements increase and more devices need to be connected, interfaces must understand how to decode the signals of neuronal circuits within the brain. Currently, this problem is being addressed where the goal is not a sensory or motor prosthesis, but a cognitive neural prosthesis that maintains functions within the brain. Dr. Theodore Berger received a well-deserved standing ovation at the congress for his keynote Engineering Memories: A Cognitive Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory Function, where he presented his successful work on a bio-mimetic VLSI implementation containing transfer functions that (under experimental conditions) carry out input-output mappings in the manner of the hippocampus. He explained, "A primary objective in developing a neural prosthesis is to replace neural circuitry in the brain that no longer functions appropriately. Such a goal requires artificial reconstruction of neuron-to-neuron connections in a way that can be recognized by the remaining normal circuitry, and that promotes appropriate interaction." The device detects and produces temporally encoded neural activity, as used to encode short-term memory representations and communicate with other brain regions involved in the memory patterns. Dr. Berger showed that neural prostheses can restore and even enhance cognitive, mnemonic processes. His device, which may be used to treat Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and possibly epilepsy will enter human trials within the next few years.

Whole Brain Emulation and Avatar

Dr. Randal A. Koene, Science Director of the 2045 Initiative, Founder and CEO of Carboncopies.org and Founder of neural interfaces company NeuraLink Co, presented Whole Brain Emulation: Reverse Engineering A Mind, giving an overview of the multidisciplinary field of Whole Brain Emulation that connected the threads of each of the neuroscience talks at GF2045. A program toward substrate-independent minds begins with a clarification of goals: a person's sense of “being”, as produced by mental processes, needs to replicated in another implementation. Where “simulation” aims at a generic model, “emulation” is case-specific, such as for a neuroprosthesis with behavior characteristic of one patient. To capture those characteristics requires “system identification”, a procedure supported by Dr. Berger's successful proof-of-concept. The roadmap to WBE rests on four main pillars: iterative hypothesis testing (results inform us about additional scope or resolution needed, e.g. additional details of glial cell function), tools to acquire structure data (“connectomics”, telling us how neurons or smaller subsystems can interact), tools to functionally characterize each subsystem (system identification for each), and function representations on a platform for emulation (the artificial brain).

Impressive progress on Preserving and Mapping the Brain's Connectome was presented by Dr. Ken Hayworth, Founding President of the Brain Preservation Foundation and Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus. Dr. Hayworth emphasized, “our identity is encoded in the structural connections among our brain's neurons”. He has pioneered work in connectomics, the production and study of comprehensive maps of the brain's neural connectionsm, and he co-invented Tape-to-SEM for high-throughput volume imaging of neural circuits at nanometer scale.

Two talks focused on functional characterization, introduced developments within the BRAIN Initiative and new neuroscience tools. Dr. Ed Boyden, Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and Co-Director, MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, emphasized the complexity of the brain and of the individual neurons and their mechanisms in his talk, Tools for Analyzing and Engineering the Brain. Dr. Boyden pointed out that, in order to answer fundamental questions and address medical needs, his group builds new tools and then disseminates them widely. Medically, Dr. Boyden says, we want to target specific brain circuits instead of bathing the whole brain in a drug's chemicals. Over a thousand groups world-wide now used their tools to analyze, engineer, and construct brain circuits. Dr. Boyden envisions the emergence of synthetic physiology, means for real-time control of dynamic processes. His group has developed automated patch-clamping and ways to analyze many parameters of cells at once (electric, molecular, morphology) in living brains. New 3D arrays enable extracellular recording from and optical stimulation of vast numbers of cells throughout a brain for the study of neural codes and to develop prosthetic neural co-processors for brain regions. Dr. Boyden is well-known as a pioneer of so-called optogenetics, the ability to selectively excite and inhibit specific (genetically modified) neuron types with colored light. He described the discovery and development of the technique as an investigative tool, as well as possible use for behavioral reward-signals, to treat narcolepsy, as a retinal prosthetic, and to directly stimulate memory formation. Dr. Boyden also introduced biological neural circuit construction by lithographic processes, stating, “[...] neuroscience can benefit from constructive approaches, where you try to build brains […] by trying to test our theories of how cells wire up and how they form connections."

Dr. Michel Maharbiz, UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Co-Director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, elaborated the need for reliable and biocompatible chronic BMI. During insertion of implants, capilaries are broken, infection is an ongoing problem and implants lose the ability to detect useful signals. A first improvement is to make implants completely wireless and flexible. Dr. Maharbiz then announced one of the most exciting proposals of tools for functional characterization, Neural Dust, (Seo et al., Neural Dust: An Ultrasonic, Low Power Solution for Chronic Brain-Machine Interfaces, 2013): Thousands of free-floating independent sensor nodes at micrometer scale detect and report local extracellular electro-physiological data, massively increasing the number of simultaneous neural recordings.

Variants of the Neural Dust approach were addressed in Dr. Koene's presentation, using integrated circuits on microscopic probes and infrared light for power and communication (MIT, Harvard) within a hierarchy or cloud of specialized devices. Dr. Koene also described additional developments (and hurdles) in technologies not addressed by other speakers: Connectomics to be done by biological barcoding in work by Dr. Anthony Zador at Cold Sping Harbor Laboratories, the CLARITY protocol by the Deisseroth lab that renders brains light-transparent for microscopy, functional recording by fluorescent microscopy, and the Molecular Ticker Tape approach to functional recording within cells onto strips of synthetic DNA. Many signal modalities are left to explore and effective hybrid systems can be built. Some of the most exciting recent develops came out of a June 12 summit at Harvard with the specific aim to identify technologies that could sample every neuron in a brain at 1ms resolution in-vivo (Marblestone et al, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 2013). That goal is a milestone in the roadmap to Whole Brain Emulation, while WBE itself was recognized as a valid and desirable research target during the Brain Reseachers' meeting that preceded GF2045.

WBE will be preceded by numerous augmentations made possible by new neural interface devices, including detection of stress/anxiety, detection and prevention of epilepsy, control of sleep and waking, direct storage and recall of visual scenes (retinal or visual cortex interfaces), off-line tagging and sorting of episodic memory (hippocampal interfaces), and overcoming paralysis. The technological target for data acquisition is a sweet spot where the resolution of measurements meets model building and parameter estimation capabilities. Judging by the rate of progress in connectomics over the past 5 years, the addition of tools for functional characterization in the next 5 years can mean that, by 2018, commencing a project to analyze and emulate the brain of the fruit-fly Drosophila is feasible.

The 2045 Initiative: A network to accelerate solutions for the global future of humanity

The speakers at GF2045 explored practical requirements in neuroscience and neural engineering, and they proposed and demonstrated technological solutions that, at least in principle, substantiate the scientific and technical feasibility of the strategic Avatar project, as motivated by the goals of the 2045 Initiative. In addition to this necessary scientific grounding and methodical introduction, theoretical work carried out with early funding from the 2045 Initiative was presented at GF2045 in the Current state of the Russian Project on Brain Reverse-engineering REBRAIN 2045, by Dr. Witali L. Dunin-Barkowski, Head of the Neuroinformatics Department at the Center for Optical-Neural Technology within the Scientific Research Institute for Systems Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Alternative theoretical considerations regarding brain matter, consciousness and free will were explored in the talk by Dr. Amit Goswami, Professor Emeritus at the Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Oregon, titled Consciousness and the Quantum: Science, Psychology and Spirituality. Dr. Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist, professor at the University of Arizona, collaborating with renowned British Physicist, Sir Roger Penrose, presented How Human Consciousness Could Be Uploaded Via Quantum Teleportation, describing his controversial hypothesis that processes of consciousness may rely on quantum phenomena and might be mediated by microtubules in the intraneuronal cytoskeleton.

The GF2045 congress presented technological achievements in android robotics, anthropomorphic telepresence, neuroscience, mind theory, neuroengineering, brain-computer interfaces, neuroprosthetics, neurotransplantation, long-range forecasting, future evolution strategy, evolutionary transhumanism, ethics, bionic prostheses, cybernetic life-extension, science and spiritual development. Mr. Itskov stressed that we should look beyond the individual concepts and technologies presented, at a new evolutionary strategy for humanity. It is a strategy that involves both a spiritual revolution, in that levels of public consciousness and regard for safe and beneficial technology are raised, and a techno-scientific revolution, through the development of personality transfer to an artificial carrier that will become more capable.

It is our ethical and moral obligation to seek to alleviate suffering that afflicts every single one of us as we make our way through life. It is a noble purpose to offer an alternative that not only improves well-being, but allows us, collectively, to aim higher. Even more so than during the space race, we presently have global economies of scale, a global scientific infrastructure, and technological capacity with which to tackle ambitious problems of our choosing. We cannot know with certainty if we will have that 20, 40 or 60 years from now. While we can, it is our responsibility to take this opportunity to learn more about ourselves and to better ourselves and the outlook for our civilization.

Among scientists, it is a good habit to under-promise and to over-deliver, but remember that throughout history the thirst for new discoveries and possibilities has driven scientific inquiry, and so the vision at the foundations of the 2045 Initiative may again help drive the science. Short-term financial gain is less important than to achieve desired goals and to insure that the output will not be used for problematic purposes but for humanitarian benefit.

The 2045 Initiative proceeds now, to the next step, by opening our scientific network to global involvement. The Initiative also invites stewards of business to join in the development of our clinical research network for full-body prosthesis, for which the project plan is now available. These activities will bring about a new Cybernetic Industry. We invite business leaders to invest in projects that bring about a prosperous future. At first, there will be opportunity for philanthropy, then there will be opportunity for profitable investment. We invite scientists to investigate the long-range possibilities of the science involved. We invite politicians, public and social figures to help bring about the social change for the Initiative. People need to have a right to live and not to die.

For more about the congress, see Whole Brain  Emulation at the 2nd Global Futures 2045 Congress in New York City and the congress web site at gf2045.com.

This Review is now also included in the Congress Proceedings & Transcripts of GF2045(2013). As part of that volume, here are the navigation links:

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