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Hugo de Garis interview - part 5 Contrasting Ideologies & Politics - 2010-10-09 009-1

4,625 views · Published 24 July 2011 · 13:55 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Science, Technology & the Future · 2011 · Science & Technology

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part 5 Interview with Hugo in Melbourne after the Singularity Summit Australia 2010, conducted by Adam A. Ford. (3.5 Hours of Hugo Power - Non stop Artilect mayhem!)

Hugo is a Cosmist.  Our humanity is puny compared to what we could become.  There is a whole universe out there that is billions of years old, and we live 80 years.
We could loose our identity.  
Cosmists could look at building god like machines as some kind of non superstitious religion, Hugo calls this Deism as opposed to Theism.
5.15 Building Artilects could be Awe Inspiring - The Deistic argument.
6.55 Curiosity has survival value - evolutionary advantage - built into our genes - Human Striving cant be stopped
7.45 Momentum - two sorts.  Economic and Military
8.03 Economic momentum - incredibly useful AI, so industry will invest in building robotics and intelligent machines
9.22 Military momentum - China has a nasty military history.  West wants china to convert to democracy.  10.44 Global trend in Switching to democracies.
12.55 America is too small - it may loose its pace as world leader even though it has been the most creative and industrious in the past.  May combine with Europe to compete with China


Bio: Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis, 63, has lived in 7 countries. He recently retired from his role of Director of the Artificial Brain Lab (ABL) at Xiamen University, China, where he was building China's first artificial brain. He and his friend Prof. Dr. Ben Goertzel have just finished guest editing a special issue on artificial brains for Neurocomputing journal (December 2010), the first  of its kind on the planet.

He continues to live in China, where his U.S. savings go 7 times further, given China's much lower cost of living. He spends his afternoons in his favorite (beautiful) park, and his nights in his apartment, intensively studying PhD-level pure math and mathematical physics to be able to write books on topics such as femtometer scale technology ("femtotech"), topological quantum computing (TQC), as well as other technical and sociopolitical themes.

He is the author of two books: The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans : A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines (2005) and Multis and Mono: What the Multicultured Can Teach the Monocultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State (2010). Both these books are concerned with the political consequences of future technologies.

He labels his new lifestyle "ARCing" (After-Retirement Careering), feeling freed from wage slavery, spending (probably) the remaining 30 years of his life pursuing with passion those deep and interesting topics that truly fascinate him, without having to waste huge amounts of time writing an endless stream of relatively unread, un-meaningful, short-horizon scientific papers or research grant proposals just to receive a salary. He feels liberated from all that, and can recommend ARCing to anyone with sufficient savings (i.e.. to take up "wage free careering in the third of life").



Hugo de Garis, Singularity Summit, Australia,  interview, Melbourne, 2010, artilect, gigadeath, cosmist, cyborg, terran, Adam Ford, kurzweil, technological singularity, pesimism, accelerating returns, robot, artificial intelligence, ai, nanotech, femtotech, physics, math quantum computing, topological, technology computer electronics

Playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4A40F6FE9582481F

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