- There are a number of high profile speakers lined up, with more being organized as I write this. When things are firmer, I will blog about them here.

- This years event is intended to be smaller and splashier than last: I will let you know when tickets are available for sale. (They will also be more expensive than last year, so those of you with relatively limited means (like myself) may want to volunteer to with preparations. It is, in my opinion, the best way to attend the event.)

To promote the summit, and whet the appetite of those that didn’t attend last year, I’m going to be rebroadcasting videos from the 07 summit, a couple each week.

Words escape me.

A CNN article reporting on the Global Catastrophic Risks conference explains the singularity (or at least, Ray Kurzweil’s conception of it) to its readers.

…Kurzweil is predicting the impending arrival of something called the Singularity, which he defines in his book on the subject as “the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots.”

The real news here is that it’s in the news – the main stream media news. Does that mean the singularity is now last week’s meme? Will we need to find another topic to stop conversations at cocktail parties with?

If anyone is worried that somehow the world is ending because the MSM is actually reporting on news, rather than the missing white girl of the month, fear no more: they missed the whole point of the Global Catastrophic Risks conference which is that other world-ending kind of singularity – the one we all want to avoid. (Well, those of us who aren’t drinking the Brawno.) So, the world isn’t ending because CNN is actually reporting news, it’s ending because of all sorts of things that are being discussed at the conference.

Mankind to ‘transcend biology in posthuman world’ – CNN.com

The information revolution mainly occured in english. Why? Because, being developed in the United States, english speakers had a head start on things before other countries and cultures could get involved. If anything, this has sealed English’s position as lingua franca, quite likely in perpetuity of the human race (is there any reason for another lingua franca to emerge, now that the entire world speaks english, via the web?)

However, the next technological revolutions aren’t necessarily going to happen in silicon valley. They are going to happen where the willpower and resources to make them happen exists. And, increasingly, that is overseas. Like, for instance, Russia, which is taking a diametrical tack to the U.S. in this regard. Take their new nanotechnology program, for example.

Nanowerk reports:

Rosnanotekh was set up last year with a budget of five billion dollars (3.2 billion euros), an unprecedented level of funding for Russian scientists starved of resources since the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The corporation aims to make the creations of Russian scientists commercially viable and, through co-financing, to promote private investment — the main source of technology funding in countries such as Japan and the United States.

With the removal of state funding after the Soviet collapse, hundreds of thousands of scientists emigrated to places such as Silicon Valley. The often remote research institutes they abandoned largely stagnated.

…

Russian officials are hoping all that will change. When Rosnanotekh was set up last year the then president, Vladimir Putin, said nanotechnology was “a key direction” for the country’s economy.

Another current buzzword is “technology clusters,” which the government hopes will be based around research institutes and universities to develop inventions and bring them to market more efficiently.

The global market for nanotechnology will be worth 2.9 trillion dollars by 2014, according to research data shown at the forum. Russia has signalled it wants to be up there with industry leaders such as the United States.

Up there with industry leaders, or biting at their heels? Brain power isn’t an anglosaxon invention, and, thanks to the equalizing power of information age, the thousands of scientists and entrepreneurs that would have been left farming the grandfather potato field (or rice paddy, or cow herd) will get the opportunity to enjoy the pleasures of the cubicle farm :>

And, overtaking won’t take much, with current policital candidates unafraidly (proudly?) admitting that they don’t know computers.

May’s issue of Reason magazine has an interesting interveiw with Peter Theil, one of the major supporters of Transhumanist research. Not too much new information, but an interesting read nonetheless.

Reason Magazine – Technology Is at the Center

It could happen with computers. It could happen with enhanced human intelligence, where you have things that modify humans. There are aspects of the biotech revolution that could represent this. There are nanotechnological versions that could be very, very strange. There are all sorts of very bizarrely different versions of this, and it’s very hard to know which of these trends is a dominant one. Maybe they have natural limits to them. Maybe Moore’s Law [the observation in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors incorporated into integrated circuits doubles roughly every two years] breaks down. If Moore’s Law were to stop tomorrow, then I think the hopes for A.I. and computer science may be deferred by centuries. Then the biotech revolution seems to have a lot of promise, but again maybe there are some strange constraints that it runs into.