GAP2007
From UpliftWiki
Workshop on the Good Ancestor Principle
Jonas Salk said, the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?” Given the rapidly changing discoveries and conditions of the times, this opens up a crucial conversation – just what will it take for our descendants to look back at our decisions today and judge us good ancestors? Just what would a Good Ancestor Principle look like? This is a rich topic for discussion, full of complexities of enormous magnitude. We are both creating our descendants and the environment in which they will grow. Until now, our evolution has been characterized as a “fitness landscape”, in which species evolve by climbing higher peaks. Current and future generations are rapidly moving to a position of reshaping the very landscape that controls our evolution.
Salk recognized that we were going through a unique inflection point in the evolution of life on earth, what he called conscious evolution. In the billions of years of years of evolution since the primordial soup, we are among the first generations of the first species to consciously understand the processes that shape our own evolutionary destiny. We are rapidly developing technology that allow us to control our own evolution, and choose our own evolutionary fitness function, giving new meaning to the term “fittest” in the maxim, “survival of the fittest.” Jonas Salk referred to this challenge as survival of the wisest.
Simultaneously, we are discovering that our behavior can have enormous long-term effects on the planet and life on earth, with activities today taking decades or centuries to play out. Our discovery of chaos theory in the middle of the last century pointed out how tiny influences can cascade to major proportions, far outside the orderly “clockwork universe” realm of the time of Newton. Our notions of time, order, and causality are in the midst of fundamental rethinking as science delves into ever-tinier components of the atom as well as the largest scale notions of the origins of the cosmos.
Humanity has not previously faced such rapid change of such enormous significance. The world is connecting itself economically, physically, and electronically in ways unimaginable just decades ago. At the same time, we are opening ourselves to the “bad apple syndrome” – giving an individual or small groups enormous potential to damage the rest of us. We have an increasing array of technologies and mechanisms which have the potential for catastrophic effects on life on earth. Within the next several generations, we will be faced with many decisions that have the potential of leading to a new era of abundance, peace, and harmony. Or we could be taking actions that will lead to the destruction of life on earth. The good ancestor principle, by assuming that we have even have descendants, seeks to ensure a positive outcome for our decisions today.
This approach defines an anticipatory model of uplift - being pulled by expectations of a better future, rather than being exclusively driven by solving the problems of the past. Our expectations and our intentions shape our future now more than ever.
The Workshop
The workshop will be a small, conversational group of people with both a deep personal and professional interest in the complexities humanity faces in working through the decisions of the next few generations. While recognizing the importance of a diversity of opinions and belief systems, the workshop will focus on how science can inform this topic. Participants are assumed to have a strong grounding in the strengths and weaknesses of our current model of science, but also be open to levels of eclectic and inter-disciplinary thought beyond what is typically experienced in departmental academic settings. Participation is by invitation only; participants are likely to have written books and scholarly articles, started organizations, or have developed significant reputations in a field relating to the topics discussed. The Uplift Academy is sponsoring the workshop, with the support of The Philanthropic Enterprise as well as others.
Pre-Workshop Essays and Glossary
Here are some pre-workshop essays by participants and here is a set of terms relating to the topics. Here is a collection of post-workshop essays.
Principles
Here are the Principles that were brainstormed.
Agenda
Saturday, Feb 3
A pre-workshop dinner will begin 6 PM at Tomiko Seafood Bar & Grill, 87 Encinitas Blvd. Encinitas, CA 92024 • (760) 633-3587. (cost to be shared by attendees).
Sunday, Feb 4
8:00 Continental Breakfast begins, registration, informal discussion
10:00 Opening Session
Introductions: Each participant will have a few minutes to introduce themselves and their reason for attending.
Tom Munnecke: The Good Ancestor Principle
General Discussion
Heather Wood-Ion: Jonas Salk's vision of Ancestorhood
Video and text. General Discussion
1:00 Lunch/Open time
3:00 The Future Isn't What It Used To Be
Moderated by Fred Turner, with 20 min presentations by Vernor Vinge, David Brin, and Ben Goertzel.
Computers, communications, nanotechnology, biotechnology, globalization, climate change, discovery of extra-solar planets, artificial intelligence, relativity, quantum physics: things are changing rapidly. Whether or not this leads to the dramatic singularity that Vernon Vinge and Ray Kurzweill speak about, we can definitely assume that these changes will continue, and at an accelerating rate. We can also assume that our capabilities to create global catastrophe, perhaps capable of destroying life on earth, will expand. Within this context, what does it mean to be a "good ancestor?"
6:00 Appetizers, refreshments
7:00 Dinner
Monday, Feb 5
8:00 Continental Breakfast
9:00 Anticipating the Future
Moderated by Tom Munnecke, with 20 min presentations by Judith Rosen, Mihai Nadin, and David Ellerman.
What if we flip our thinking to imagine a positive future pulling us forward, instead of starting with a model of trying to fix the problems of the past? Just what are the dynamics of this "future pull" model instead of the "past push" dynamics that is so prevalent in some circles? What does this mean in the context of being a good ancestor?
12:00 Lunch/Open time
1:00 The Way Forward Machine
Given what we have discussed in the workshop, what can create that would increase our probability of being seen as "good ancestors"? Are there specific activities or technologies that we can pursue today to increase our chances of thriving in the changes of the next few generations? What is the role of philanthropy - as in "love of humanity" - in such a context?
Moderated by Lenore Ealy, with 20 min presentations by Fred Turner, Jamais Cascio, and John Smart
4:00 Closing Comments
Each participant will have a few moments to talk about their experiences, and offer/request future activities.
5:00 Adjourn
Prior Workshops
- Santa Fe Institute, May 2002: Santa Fe co-hosted with Murray Gell-Mann
- New York City, Aug 2004 New York 2004,
- Washington, DC Jan, 2001 DC 2001,
- Washington, DC Nov, 2004 DC 2004,
- Wellesley, Ma. Aug, 2006 Wellesley
- Boston, MA. Nov, 2005 Boston 2005
- Paris, France, April 2006 Paris 2006
Attendees
(attendees are listed according with their prior Uplift Academy workshop attendance)
Ben Goertzel
Ben is CEO and CSO of Novamente and has been involved in Artificial Intelligence research and application development since the late 1980’s. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Temple University, and over the period 1989-1997 held several university faculty positions in mathematics, computer science, and psychology, in the US, New Zealand and Australia. Author of numerous research papers and journalistic articles, a biography of Linus Pauling, and five scholarly books dealing with topics in the cognitive sciences, including The Structure of Intelligence: A New Mathamatical Model of Mind (Springer, 1993), Chaotic Logic: Language, Thought and Reality From the Perspective of Complex Systems Science (Plenum Press, 1994), and Creating Internet Intelligence (Plenum Press, 2001). Most recent publication is Artificial General Intelligence: Cognitive Technologies (Springer, 2005), edited by Dr. Goertzel and Mr. Pennachin, describes the mathematics underpinning the Novamente AI Engine. His current musings are available on The Multiverse according to Ben. Here is a Video introducing his ideas of the singularity and artificial general intelligence, and his talks, Ten Years to a Positive Singularity, Encouraging a Positive Transcension, and Thoughts on AI Morality.
David Brin (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002)
David is a scientist, public speaker, and author. Several of his novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman. His fifteen novels have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Brin's 1998 non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with a wide range of threats and opportunities facing our wired society during the information age. His chief argument, that openness is more effective than secrecy at fostering freedom, sparked controversy and garnered the prestigious Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association.
See also Horizons and Hope: The Future of Philanthropy, Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competitiveness for Society's Benefit, The value - and empowerment - of common citizens in an age of danger
"Ideological clichés only distract from the real struggle between two ways of perceiving time - romantic nostalgia vs. pragmatic modernity. To some, the future seems daunting, limited, and perilous, requiring steady leadership from above. Others see it as a frontier of opportunity where free citizens can thrive, both individually and together."
"It boils down to whether you believe children can and should be better than their parents."
David Brin's papers in scientific journals cover an eclectic range of topics from astronautics, astronomy, and optics to alternative dispute resolution and the role of neoteny in human evolution. His Ph.D in Space Physics from the University of California at San Diego followed a masters in optics and an undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Caltech.
David Ellerman (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Boston 2005, Paris 2006)
David is visiting scholar at UC Riverside, and author of Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (Evolving Values for a Capitalist World) as well as Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life He works in the fields of economics and political economy, social theory and philosophy, and in mathematics. His undergraduate degree was in philosophy at M.I.T. ('65), and he has Masters degrees in Philosophy of Science ('67) and in Economics ('68), and a doctorate in Mathematics ('71) all from Boston University. He has been in and out of teaching in economics, mathematics, accounting, computer science, and operations research departments in various universities (1970-90), founded and managed a consulting firm in East Europe (1990-2), and worked in the World Bank from 1992 to 2003 where he was an economic advisor to the Chief Economist (Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern). Here is a video of his Apr 2006 presentation at the Paris Uplift Academy Workshop and his paper Autonomy-Respecting Assistance: Toward New Strategies for Development Assistance at the May 2002 Santa Fe Institute Workshop. Here is an audio of David's presentation “Helping People Help Themselves: Moving From Failed Methods of Economic Development to Alternative Strategies.” LA Future Salon 4 Mar 2007.
Deirdre Taylor
Deirdre Taylor is president of Vibrance Media, LLC, a company she founded in 2003 to incubate ventures that explore how to live healthy, integrated lives in today’s chaotic world. The company is deeply committed to the exploitation of the media as a powerful force for good in the world. Vibrance Magazine “life when it works,” is the company’s lead project, currently in development.
Dede was the founding publisher and executive editor of Spirituality & Health magazine during its formative years. Spirituality & Health is national consumer magazine which was launched in 1997 to explore the emerging spiritual renaissance in this country, and provide guidance and inspiration for people from all walks of life seeking greater meaning and purpose in their lives. Taylor conceived and launched the project and was the first director of the publishing group of Trinity Church Wall Street, the magazine’s sponsoring organization.
Dede has devoted much of her life to issues of personal transformation and corporate social responsibility. Most recently, she was Senior Vice President of the Garrison Institute, and a member of the Institute’s Executive Team. She was a founding advisor to the Spirit in Business Global Institute, and is a member of the editorial advisory board for Hazel Henderson’s Ethical Markets, a revolutionary television series; she participated in the inaugural UN Millennium Peace Summit for Religious and Spiritual leaders in Geneva, and was one of the founders of the Business Women’s Council for Peace.
Frederick Turner
Fred is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of Genesis, an Epic Poem He was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, he was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (a terminal degree equivalent to the Ph.D.) in English Language and Literature.
See also his essays: Values as Strange Attractors, Unbearable Lightness of Cyberspace, Tat Tvam Asi: A feedback model of goodness and beauty
He has appeared on two PBS TV documentaries, "The Elephant on the Hill" and "The Web of Life", in the prizewinning Smithsonian World documentary series, and on the Discovery Channel's science documentary "Understanding Beauty". As a poet he is known especially for his use of the longer genres, the narrative, science fiction, and strict metrical forms. He is a founder of and spokesman for two recent and influential movements in contemporary American poetry, the New Formalism and the New Narrative (sometimes named together as Expansive Poetry). Another emphasis has been on the relationship between science and technology on one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. He has thus been involved in groundbreaking studies of the neurobiology of esthetics, the ritual and performative roots of the arts, and the humanistic implications of evolution, ecology, recombinant DNA technology, space travel, artificial intelligence, brain science, and chaos theory. His book The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit assesses the chances for a revival of our cultural energies at the turn of the millennium, based on the remarkable new developments in scientific cosmology and technology. E.O. Wilson reviewed this book: "it takes us past the wreckage of postmodernism to revive the dream of the unification of science and the humanities -- and hence of culture. Frederick Turner is an articulate spokesman for the small band of visionaries who know enough, and care enough, to make that dream realizable."
His contributions as an interdisciplinary scholar have been recognized, cited, or published in the fields of literary and critical theory, comparative literature, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociobiology, oral tradition studies, landscape architecture, planetary biology, space science, performance theory, education, the sociology of knowledge, ecological restoration, political philosophy, the physics of computation, theology, the history and philosophy of science and technology, translation theory, Medieval and Renaissance literature, media studies, architecture, and art history. He has been a consultant to NASA's long range planning group, and was invited to the Ames Space Center in California with Carl Sagan, Christopher McKay and other experts in 1991 for a workshop on Mars terraforming. He is a black belt (second degree) in the Shotokan school of Karate. Workshop Essay
Heather Wood Ion (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Ben Lommond 2003)
Heather is currently executive director of the Goldie Hawn Institute, author of Third Class Ticket, and co-author of Against Terrible Odds: Lessons in Resilience from Our Children. Jonas Salk gave her his meditation journals which contained many of his unpublished thoughts on evolution, "metabiology," and the issues facing our times. She will be opening the workshop with a review of Salk's philosophy of "ancestorhood." See Can What Counts Be Counted? and The Missing Link presented at the 2002 Santa Fe Institute workshop. Heather is a Founding Fellow in the Uplift Academy.
John Smart
John Smart is a developmental systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on accelerating change, computational autonomy (human-independent machine learning) and a hypothesis known in futurist circles as the technological singularity (increasingly generalized human-surpassing machine intellignce). He is founder and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation a nonprofit community that seeks to help individuals better understand and manage continuous accelerating change.
He co-produces the Accelerating Change Conference, a place where 350 science, technology, business and social activist speakers and attendees debate and explicate the topic of accelerating change. Prior to ASF he was co-founder and CEO of Hyperlearning, a 50-employee tutorial and test preparation company, sold to The Princeton Review in 1996.
Jamais Cascio
Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, and specializes in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future. His work focuses on the relationships between disparate forces and systems, and the importance of long-term, systemic thinking, particularly regarding the environment and technological development. A recurring theme in his current writing is the importance of openness, transparency and flexibility as a toolkit for social and technological progress.
In 2003, he co-founded WorldChanging.com, the award-winning website dedicated to finding and calling attention to models, tools and ideas for building a "bright green" future. In his time at WorldChanging, Cascio covered topics including urban design, climate science, renewable energy, open source models, emerging technologies, social networks, "leapfrog" global development, and much more. In 2004, Cascio was selected as a founding Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In 2006, he was brought on as the Global Futures Strategist for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.
See his essays Open the Future and Twelve Things Journalists Need To Know to be Good Futurist/Foresight Reporters, Updating GeoEthics, and An Eschatological Taxonomy
Judith Rosen
Is carrying on the work of her father Robert Rosen relating to anticipatory systems theory and integrating biological and physical scientific perspectives. An artist by training, a writer by
vocation, a scientist and "relational thinker" by osmosis (having been
born in such close proximity to the Robert Rosen Life School of
Relational Thinking), and now also a web-designer/developer and
businesswoman (having founded Rosen Enterprises, the definitive source
for Robert Rosen's work and her own). In 2005, Judith launched an
online science journal based on an expanded, relational paradigm,
called BioTheory, which allows thinkers from multiple disciplines to
publish work that mainstream journals are... not quite ready for. Her
hope is that an interdisciplinary approach (which cannot help but be
relational already, at the outset) will lead to breakthroughs that more
highly-specialized science journals cannot easily generate. Judith has
also, without intending to, become an expert in parenting a child with
special needs, as necessity is the mother of invention and her third
daughter was born with necessities. Hobbies include designing and
installing gardens, designing and building a greenhouse using scavenged
materials, and hosting the Rosen/Relational Complexity discussion list.
Lenore Ealy
Lenore is director of the Philanthropic Enterprise, a sponsor of this and previous Uplift Academy workshops. The Philanthropic Enterprise is the public face of The Project for New Philanthropy Studies at Donors Trust, a 501(c)3 public charity whose mission is to help alleviate, through education, research, and private initiative, society's most pervasive and radical needs and to encourage philanthropy and individual giving and responsibility, as opposed to governmental involvement, as an answer to society's needs.
The Philanthropic Enterprise seeks to improve philanthropy in America, by examining more closely the complex ecosystem of voluntary associations, charities, and gift-making organizations and better understanding their appropriate relations to both commercial and governmental institutions. To this end, we engage scholars and practitioners working to better understand the role of voluntary action and philanthropy in enhancing the production of human excellence, prosperity, and social cooperation.
Lenore holds a Ph.D. in the history of moral and political thought from Johns Hopkins University and has taught at both the secondary and post-secondary levels. She earned an M.A.degree in history from the University of Alabama and a B.S. degree in education from Auburn University. She is the founding editor of Conversations on Philanthropy, a periodic journal that explores the role of philanthropy in a free society.
Mark Frazier (Wellesley 2006)
President of Openworld, Mark has experience in developing market-oriented initiatives for private and public sector clients in more than 50 countries. A past publisher of Reason magazine and former Visiting Fellow of the Lehrman Institute, he has specialized in economic reforms, asset building strategies for community self-help groups, and skills diffusion initiatives in emerging economies. OpenWorld is a transnational social venture that specializes in strategies and tools for grassroots initiatives and global good causes to become self-funding. Our aim is to promote free zones and free institutions, in both actual and virtual settings, that enable entrepreneurs to thrive while generating resources for civil society initiatives.
Michael Strong (Boston 2005)
Michael Strong is a pioneer in education and independent learning. He is the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice and the founder of innovative Socratic,
Montessori, and Paideia schools and programs in
Alaska, Florida, California, Texas, and New Mexico,
including a charter school that was ranked the 36th
best public high school in its third year of operation
based on The Washington Post's Challenge Index.
Michael is co-founder and serves as Chief Executive
Officer and Chief Visionary Officer of FLOW, a
non-profit dedicated to "liberating the
entrepreneurial spirit for good."
See his Blog and Web Site
Mihai Nadin
Mihai is Ashbel Smith University Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas. Nadin is an internationally known scholar recognized for his groundbreaking interdisciplinary work that ranges across the arts, computer science and cognitive science. Born and educated in Romania, Nadin was among the very early scholars to address the relationship between computers and human creativity. He is credited with founding the discipline of computational design – the design of products and processes through the use of digital means.
Nadin began his own research into anticipatory systems in the late 1980’s. Upon his arrival at University of Texas in 2004, he established antÉ to study the premise of embedding the characteristics of anticipation -- vital to efficient human functioning – in software for computers and other devices. Examples of future applications of such research might be anticipatory control mechanisms that endow vehicles with the capability to “learn” the driving habits of the owner and make adjustments accordingly, or machines that organize and repair themselves. More of his work can be seen at Anticipation.info and the antÉ Institute and Nadinisms. Here is a list of his many books, which includes Anticipation: The End is Where We Start Froom.
T. Clark Durant
Clark is a graduate student in economics at George Mason University,
but he regularly trespasses into electoral systems design. He is
intrigued by electoral systems that may work for ethnically divided
societies where one group is potentially a permanent majority. He
hopes to develop electoral systems that could frame the accumulation
and adaptation of constitutional wisdoms.
Tom Munnecke
Tom is host and organizer of this workshop. He took an early retirement as vice president and chief scientist at a Fortune 500 company in order to look at the intersection of technology and better world activities. During this career, he was one of the lead software architects of two of the largest hospital information systems in the world, the Veterans Administration's VISTA system and the Department of Defense's CHCS system. Starting an "encore career" in 2000, he founded GivingSpace, which changed its name to Uplift Academy in order to broaden its focus to forms of uplift beyond financial giving. He was a 2003 fellow at Stanford's Digital Visions program, and is a Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures. He was interviewed as part of the Pew Internet Visionaries Interviews at the 2005 Accelerating Change Conference
He has a deep interest in networks of self-organizing, self-propagating systems, which he is exploring in a series of Uplift Academy workshops on the topic of "Infectious Good." He is particularly interesting in exploring evolutionary "search/amplify" models of uplift in contrast to more traditional "plan/execute" models favored by centralized approaches. He is also interested in deeper understanding of the notion of scale, coining the term, "Very Large Scale Uplift" to describe a model of very large number of individuals engaging in smaller positive scale interactions. The Good Ancestor Principle as discussed in this workshop is a way of visualizing a positive future "attractor" which "pulls" us forward, in contrast to a past "push" model that is driven by the problems of the past.
Since he seemed to be off-topic everywhere he went, he started organizing workshops around general topic of how we can translate good intentions into good actions. He named his organization Uplift Academy independently of David Brin's use of "Uplift" noting that the Academy has nothing to do with dolphins (yet).
Vernor Vinge
Vernor is a mathematician (retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University), computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, (review) as well as for his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences. Here is a summary of his Zones of Thought. This is a recording of his 2005 Accelerating Change Conference Keynote Address:
In his keynote address from Accelerating Change 2005, Vernor Vinge discusses the potential for a technological singularity - the event at which the creation of artificial superhuman intelligence changes the world so dramatically that it is impossible to imagine the world after that point. He explains that the singularity is not a given, nor is it necessarily a positive event. Many factors could arise that prevent the singularity from occurring and there is a potential for it to be a catastrophic event rather than a positive revolution.
Vinge suspects that if the Singularity arises after several years of progress rather than as an overnight event, it is more likely to be a positive step in human evolution. He calls this the "soft-takeoff," and offers some ideas that may encourage a longer approach to the point of change. The pace of progress may be exponentially increasing, but that does not preclude a gradual move toward the moment of transition.
See his essays on the Singularity and Evolution.
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