Greetings from sunny California. I’ve arrived for the Humanity+ Summit. I will be presenting on the Resilient Community Construction Set, this time emphasizing the technological aspects for a technophilic audience.
I think that the transhumanists generally diverge from general systems theory that we promote with the work of Open Source Ecology. At the same time, both camps run deep with notions of post-scarcity, open source development, and creation of new systems.
Here is my talk. 
The message is distilled to the core motivation for the Resilient Community Constuction Set, which goes as follows.
Imagine that we could take all that society has learned to date and apply it to making a better world. Then we would come up with post-scarcity, resilient communities. This can be done by miniaturizing civilization – or building a complete community on the smallest possible functional scale while retaining prosperity and autonomy. This is a well-defined problem statement – and one worth trying. That is the nature of our experiment. Why is this important? Because the whole world is made up of communities – and if we can get one right – we could get them all right.
I should make a further note on what it means to build a community. The idea is actually radical – the concept that you can turn dirt and twigs into advanced civilization. The prospect is real, with advanced technology – that is now – for the first time in human history – making it possible to use local resources to distill all the trappings of society from immediately available, abundant resources. It takes some time to get used to this notion and take it seriously. It is not easy to do so, because, in general – we lack the technological literacy to assess the possibility in a meaningful way. It is worthwhile to ponder this point, however – because of the real possibility of achieving the naive-sounding goal.
My goal for the conference is to connect with potential collaborators. There are some familiar faces at the conference: Edward Miller and Joseph Jackson, also on the speaker list, and True Fans. Then there’s Patri Friedman from Seasteading – the experiment of creating communities at sea. Bryan Bishop and Ben Lipkowitz are area also on the speaker list – discussing their work related to Open Manufacturing. I don’t know anyone else – but there are tons of other speakers. My second goal is to come out of the summit with expanded horizons on other work related to post-scarcity.
Overall, things are going well. Since FSCONS 2009, we’ve pulled in another 10 True Fans. We got our first sale of The Liberator. We’re proceding with the RepLab crowd funding website, and beginning to spawn the Open+Pario project management platform.
suggestion: get a SlideShare account, then embed talks in the blog.
Hello Marcin
The link to your talk does not work:
http://http//openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Humanity_Plus_Presentation
Best regards
Toke
Sorry, the correction is:
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Humanity_Plus_Presentation
My experience at the conference was mind-blowing. I’ll post a link to the videos of the presentations – as some are really worth watching. We picked up a couple more True Fans. All in all – I was disappointed at the technological escapism in most of the people. There are pressing issues to be addressed now, while most poeple talk only of wonderful technologies coming out tomorrow. I felt that the response to my talk was positive but lukewarm – since most people at the conference did not appear overly concerned with existing pressing issues. I do hope that my discussion sparked some new perspectives – and at least a couple people were really swept away by the content.
I am left feeling that there is much great work to be done, and we are certainly moving forward. Also, Joseph Jackson and Edward Miller carried the post-scarcity thread in the conference – so it was good to hear them as well.
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