TransVision 2005

On July 22-24 I was at the TransVision 2005 conference in Caracas, Venezuela. The conference is the main annual transhumanist event. This time it was organised by the Transhumanist Association of Venezuela and the World Future Society Venezuela. The topic was "Towards a New World: Better, Longer and Healthier Lives for Everyone." It was an amazing opportunity to socialise with people, who share transhumanist ideas and are not freaked out by them. A nice change indeed.

My presentation was entitled "Predicting mid-range global futures" and was mainly concerned with mocking futurists for their pathetic attempts at peering into the future. It was a hoot. :) Get it here: http://danila.spb.ru/papers/transhumanism/Danila TV2005.ppt. I presented before the Closing address by Nick Bostrom, but apparantly managed to make quite an impression on the tired delegates. It wasn't particularly controversial, but it was very direct and sincere at demonstrating why some of the existing "approaches" to predicting future are worthless. It was also quite emotional. :)

• "Official" photos from the conference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/transhumanism/.
• My own photos from TransVision: http://www.flickr.com/photos/91822944@N00/tags/transvision/

The hotel sucked and we couldn't really get out into the city much, since every Venezuelan seemed bent on telling us how dangerous it is in the city. Fortunately, the conference itself was quite interesting, with the majority of the talks being rather good (only 2 or 3 were complete content-free fluff) and there wasn't much free time anyway. Kudos to organisers for pulling it off.

Links:

• A critical review of the conference
• and a calm response to the criticism
• Thoughts on TV05 from Greg