Bill McKibben on Singularity & Superintelligence

Bill McKibben speaks to us via teleport at today's Summit. A man after my own heart, he has a cabin in New York's Adirondacks. How can he not truly understand the value of nature, spirituality and life itself? It's a magical place.

I grew up in these remarkable mountains and constantly rely on its spirit to ground and re-ground myself when technology starts to take 'too much' control of my life.

It was expensive to set the teleport capability up: when is this kind of technology, to bridge those at a distance with us in a room, going to get cheaper?

His perspective is so different from the rest of the panelists given his background and his published books that dig deep into nature and the spirit.

In his book Wandering Home, he describes a meditative "long walk" from the pastoral Vermont town where he lives to a remote cabin in New York's Adirondacks, where half my heart remains(the other half has to be Africa, at least for now).

He talks about fuel inefficiencies, and that perhaps superintelligence and supercomputers can help solve this problem. He says, "A main problem is not technological but behavioral." He notes that the average European uses half as much energy as the average American. Not news to any of us. Americans seem to abuse everything in quantity and its even worse on the west coast.

He talks about the need to set limits on our desires. He says, "Meaning counts more than building."

In his book "Enough," which has been out for awhile, he extends his view from an earlier book (published in 1989), where he talks about the true cost of global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer and other man-made ills-the loss of wild nature and with it the priceless aspect of our humanity that evolved to listen to and heed it.

His thread today, as he talks to his fairly technology-savvy crowd, remains about the value of being human and what that means. His exploration is that subtle moral and spiritual boundary that he calls the "enough point."

He re-emphasizes his point about the human need (and capacity) for restraint-and even for finding great meaning in restraint. Some of his views are largely contrary to the speakers on the Singularity Summit stage.....obviously why he was added to the agenda.

He ends with a question which he says is profoundly uninteresting: "What's the meaning of conscious existence?" Hmmmmm. Profoundly uninteresting. I wonder what others in the audience thought? It's something to think about.

Tag: Singularity Summit
Tag: Singularity
Tag: Bill McKibben