IN PROGRESS

Where is humanity going? Our technology empowers the individual… but to what end? This is a (growing) list of people, institutions, websites and concepts central in this discussion (from where I stand). People here are listed by year of birth.

I’m very familiar with everything listed here. I’ve read the articles/books, watched the movies, and sometimes even met the people. Use this list to jump into the conversation. We need you. [Larger list of people here]

People (Alive)

Michael Anissimov

• Writes about transhumanism and artificial intelligence
• Prolific blogger
• Created the Lifeboat Foundation

Dan Novack

• teaches Philosophy of Postmodern/Global/Future Studies
• wrote a great overview: Savages, Cyborgs, and Saints (six possibilities for the future of humanity)
• blogger

R. U. Sirius

Jamais Cascio

• author of Get Smarter (a response to Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?)
• blogger
• wrote critique of the Singularity University called Flunking Out
• Gave 98 minute talk at Future Salon NYC, “Putting the Human Back Into Post-Human” in which he states even if artificial intelligence is possible humans will stay one step ahead using “exo-cortical technologies.” [I used a similar term -- 'networked-intelligence' -- to direct the vision of my company GNIC.]

Jane McGonigal (1977 -

• Game designer
• Helped to create The Superstruct Game, a “massively multiplayer forecasting game.”
• Helped to create World Without Oil, a “massively collaborative imagining of the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis.”

Michael Wesch (1975 -

• Assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University
• Created the viral YouTube video The Web is Us/ing (10+ million views!)
• Gave this phenomenal talk (YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity) at the Personal Democracy Forum in 2009. I met him a few hours later, and we spoke for 10-15 minutes. He is awesome. Very creative, mild mannered and humble.
• Personal website

Nick Bostrom (1973 -

• Director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University
• Co-founded Humanity+ (formerly The World Transhumanist Association)

Jaron Lanier (1960 -

• “McLuhan Ramp“
• popularized virtual reality
• personal site

Mark Dery (1959 -

• author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (includes good chapter named ‘Wild Nature, Wired Nature: The Unabomber Meets the Digerati’)
• personal site

Bill Joy (1954 -

• co-founder of Sun Microsystems
• author of Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us
• expressed his worried about technology in a TED talk called What I’m worried about, what I’m excited about

Andrew J. Holden

• Created the Cyberpunk Educator (also available as a free – and legal- download). Here’s the official website.

Kevin Kelly (1952 -

• founding executive editor of Wired magazine
• blogger

Francis Fukuyama (1952 -

• philosopher
• political economist
• 3 hour interview on C-SPANN
• author of Our Posthuman Future

Ray Kurzweil (1948 -

• Inventor, writer and futurist
• Writes about artificial intelligence, transhumanism and the technological singularity

Peter Sloterdijk (1947 -

Donna Haraway (1944 -

Vernor Vinge (1944 -

• professor of mathematics, computer scientist, science fiction author
• popularized the concept of a ‘technological singularity‘

Thomas de Zengotita (1944 -

• author of the book Mediated: How the Media Shapes our World and the Way We Live in It and the article The Numbing of the American Mind

David Cronenberg (1943 -

• Film maker
• Created the movie eXistenZ. Explores reality vs. virtual reality, philosophical concept of realism, future of games, human/computer interaction, etc.
• Created the movie Videodrome (includes a character inspired by Marshall McLuhan).
• Created the movie Crash (based on novel by J. G. Ballard) with James Spader. Explores how our technological environment (especially cars) changes our sexuality.

Theodore Kaczynski (1942 -

• terrorist (aka the “Unabomber”)
• author of Industrial Society and Its Future (aka the “Unabomber Manifesto”)

Michael Gorman (1941 -

• former president of the American Library Association
• wrote the skeptical Google and God’s Mind and the tongue-in-cheek followup Revenge of the Blog People

Stewart Brand (1938 -

• Created The Whole Earth Catalog, “an American counterculture catalog published,” between 1968 and 1972.

Albert Borgmann (1937 -

• Philosopher of technology
• Author of Crossing the Postmodern Divide (select passage online here)

Alvin Toffler (1928 -

• Former associate editor of Fortune magazine
• Author of the 1970 bestselling Future Shock
• Interviewed by Newt Gingrich on C-SPAN2 BookTV (3 hours)

Douglas Engelbart (1925 -

• inventor of the computer mouse
• author of Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962)

People (Dead)

Born in the 20th Century

Terence McKenna (1946 – 2000)

• Speaker (many hours of audio lectures) and writer
• 18 minute description of the future of language
• A great introduction to his thought. Ignore the silly New Age intro and YouTube user. He makes fun of these sorts of things in the first few minutes.

Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996)

• astronomer and popularizer of astronomy and science
• created the famous television series Cosmos (available online at Hulu)

Robert Anton Wilson (1932 – 2007)

J. G. Ballard (1930 – 2009)

• Author of books like Crash (made into a movie by David Cronenberg) which explore how technology (like cars) are changing our sexuality.

Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982)

• science fiction author

Timothy Leary (1920 – 1996)

• Popularized LSD, icon of the 1960s counterculture
• Former lecturer at Harvard

Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)

• Media and communications theorist
• great 44 minute lecture on McLuhan by Terence McKenna

Born in the 19th Century

Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983)

• Inventor, designer, architect, philosopher
• See The Buckminster Fuller Institute (they have an annual $100K design challenge)

Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974)

• Described his vision of the Internet in As We May Think (1945)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955)

• Philosopher and (ex) Jesuit priest

H. G. Wells (1866 – 1946)

• Science fiction author

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

• Philosopher (German) and classical philologist
• Wrote books like Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Born in the 17th Century

Mary Shelley (1787 – 1851)

• Wrote Frakenstein

Websites

fUSION Anomaly

• Repository of eclectic information on eclectic topics (psychedelics, the future, spirituality, philosophy, etc.)
• Wonderful example of how websites used to be designed creatively.

TED Talks

• Hundreds (thousands?) of short, fantastic video lectures
• Relevant talks include ones by Bill Joy and Jamais Cascio

Greylodge Blog

• Source of very weird and awesome torrents (audio, text, video)

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