Lifeboat Foundation
The Lifeboat Foundation is a non-profit organization with an explicit mandate of "helping humanity survive existential risks" and anticipate possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, in the event of a technological singularity. Though they claim not to advocate any particular development in these technologies, this is at odds with promotion of space colonization which would almost necessarily rely on some of these technologies to quickly free humanity of the Earth.
The Lifeboat Foundation seeks to develop genetic engineering, nanotechnology and AI and other technologies to defend humanity, including defending it from consequences of its own damage or manipulation of the natural environment. The Foundation does not include in its mandate any role nor need to protect non-human life, except those specific symbiotic life forms (such as gut bacteria or edible plants) that human beings would need to survive in space. In other words the Foundation seeks to create lifeboats not arks which would facilitate survival of entire ecosystems and has been explicitly named "Lifeboat" as as to declare disavowal of the ark idea.
Lifeboat claims to be pursuing new methods to combat viruses (such as RNA interference and new vaccine methods), effective nanotechnological defensive strategies. However self-sustaining space colonies "in case the other defensive strategies fail" is its primary rationale, and when a risk to the Earth's biosphere might be increased by a particular strategy necessary to establish a space colony, Lifeboat's explicit mandate requires it to increase the risk to Earth.
The Lifeboat Foundation was formed with the ethical premise that decreasing the likelihood of human extinction is the activity with the most positive utility on the planet today. In recent years, several prominent public figures have stepped forward strongly in favor of mitigating extinction risks. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom writes, “For standard utilitarians, priority number one, two, three and four should consequently be to reduce existential risk. The utilitarian imperative “Maximize expected aggregate utility!” can be simplified to the maxim “Minimize existential risk!”. [1]. In most conceptions of this imperative the utility is with reference only to human beings or only to human societies, with no reference nor any role for non-intelligent or merely living creatures or habitats except insofar as intelligent beings may depend on the same biospheres for survival.
Administration and Advisory Boards
Current officers include:
- President and Founder Eric Klien
- International Spokesperson is Philippe van Nedervelde
- Fundraising Director, North America is Michael Anissimov
- Director of Long-term Strategy is Michael Vassar
- International Director of Audiovisual Communications is Sergio M.L. Tarrero.
The Lifeboat Foundation is tax exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code.
The organization also has a very large Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), composed of 410 members as of October 2007. This includes philosophers, economists, biologists, nanotechnologists, AI researchers, educators, policy experts, engineers, lawyers, ethicists, futurists, neuroscientists, physicists, and space experts. The SAB includes Ray Kurzweil and Nobel Prize winners Clive Granger and Wole Soyinka. Most of these advisoars are on the record as strongly favouring techno-centric or techno-optimist approaches to resolving human problems even if these have within living memory often resulted in technological escalation of conflict. Kurzweil in particular is very often criticized for advocating "downloading" minds and for granting artificial intelligences legal status equivalent to those humans enjoy, while not adopting any balancing position such as that of Peter Barnes that ecosystems should he protected as a commons with legal trustees of their own. The SAB does not publicly debate nor announce its positions or assumptions and is recruited without input from Lifeboat's opponents, unlike that of most nonprofits with controversial mandates that seek skeptical outsider input.
Lifeboat Foundation programs
The Lifeboat Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board is working on a number of programs to assess risks, negate them ("shields"), and survive catastrophic events ("preservers"):
These projects assume and require development and spreading of knowledge of the exact technologies that the Foundation explicitly warns are dangerous.
See also
Related topics:
- Existential risk
- Molecular nanotechnology
- Utility fog
- Seed AI
- Space colonization
- Space and survival
- Biosecurity
- Survivalism
- Technological singularity
- Technological escalation
- Biocentrism
References
- ↑ Nick Bostrom, "Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development", Preprint, Utilitas Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 308-314
External links
- Lifeboat Foundation
- Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios by Nick Bostrom
- Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development by Nick Bostrom
- How can the human race survive the next hundred years? - question on Yahoo Answers by Stephen Hawking
- Why the future doesn't need us by Bill Joy
- It Was Fun While It Lasted by Martin Rees
- Biowar for Dummies by Paul Boutin
- Accelerating Future - regularly updated blog that discusses existential risks
- [1] - the Atlantis Project. The earlier efforts of Eric Klien