In November 2017, shortly before avoiding riots, I had the privilege of speaking at TransVision 2017 about — you guessed it — H+Pedia.

The entire conference is available on a playlist (thanks Mark Roux!) however I’ll just feature mine here.

Because the audio is a little weak, I’m speaking way too fast, and I covered so many diverse concepts, here’s a transcript of the talk — very slightly edited for meaning and readability.

Becoming a Transhumanist

I’m going to give a presentation about my project H+Pedia. I was thinking what to call it, ‘joining the transhumanists’? — no we don’t have membership. Why not go with ‘becoming a transhumanist’ because it’s actually really difficult become a transhumanist in this day and age. There’s so much jargon to know, there’s people, there’s networking, there’s a whole history and frankly is just not the easiest thing to do. So I set about solving this problem and I will show you my main project that’s a part of this.

This is who I am, I’m a cybercrime and security researcher, this is the primary thing I do apart from my IT job as a sysadmin. I am a pirate and digital rights activist so when I have a problem in my life I do two things: one, found a political party and two, I write wikis. So is my second time I’ve had a go at this, involved in Pirate Party UK and I’ve extensively managed a number of wikis and this is my transhumanist wiki.

Of the last few years, I’m a futurist, I do H+Pedia and I’ve co-founded at the Transhumanist Party UK along with David Wood. I’m not focusing that so much, that was a somewhat reactionary move in response to issues with Zoltan if you want to ask me about transhumanist politics, instead I’ve talk about what I’ve mostly done over the last few years.

I’ve asked myself every now and then, and other people ask me ‘what is it?’ Oh well, it’s this complicated thing involving all sorts of ideas from human enhancement, artificial intelligence, life extension, futurist ethics. They say ‘that’s great, where can I find more about that?’ I respond ‘well… you can read some of David Pearce’s fantastic essays, or you can watch a talk by Elon Musk, or you can read the latest happenings about super intelligence’. And they say ‘yeah but where I can I learn about this in just a few minutes?’ This question is really hard to answer, even the Wikipedia pages for the subjects would take quite a lot of time to digest, they’re very technical and unable to answer the questions reliably for many of these issues, and this is the problem I’ve found again and again and again. More people I come across and say ‘yes I’m into transhumanism’ and they have questions, questions, questions — I didn’t have the answers for them, unless they had a lot of time for me sit them down and talk with them for half an hour. So I thought there was a gap for a platform for this.

I started writing down some of the key areas which I thought I would explain to people. There’s only so many areas, there’s your human augmentation side, there’s longevism and there’s futurism.

So I started with that, I thought this would be a good platform to work with. At this point I have to thank Mr David Wood for building the core of H+Pedia which is a project of Humanity+, by starting to fill it with these key transhumanist ideas which I built upon. I’m going to talk with you all about some of the projects I’ve run on it. So that one’s too simple, there’s much more philosophical and technological in the loop there, so let’s build this up.

We have a number of areas of overlapping interests and such, life extensionists, transhumanist, not all transhumanists are life extensionists, biohackers, singularitarians and this still wasn’t working. I was writing page after page, interlinking them and categorising them and I realised that I still don’t understand transhumanism, I don’t understand who’s involved and what shape it is. Ultimately — I won’t spend too much time on it — I reached this.

You can find this on H+Pedia, this is the latest version of 3-modes interaction of longevism, self-modificationism and futurism, including transhumanism areas like cryonics, cosmism, the digital self, mind uploading, body modification, longevity research and so on and so forth. Do go onto H+Pedia and check this out, every single idea has its own article and own description. I’ve created quite a few projects and this is just one of them — and why me why do it, what is might achieve and what it might mean for you.

You guys might be familiar with this guy. Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great, I use it all the time, I hope, I’m sure everyone in this room uses Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a place for original research. Wikipedia is not a place for fringe ideas. You might say ‘no, these ideas aren’t fringe! we all know about them!’, but there’s this concept within Wikipedia guide lines, that transhumanist ideas are fringe ideas not covered in notable sources. These days Zoltan has talked about a number of issues, James Hughes does some great publications on the academic side, but suffice to say, you can’t put most transhumanist ideas into Wikipedia, they’re not notable — and the ideas which fit into them — well they’re not very good summations of transhumanist ideas. An article Elon Musk for example will have pages and pages about PayPal and his business ventures and only a few lines about his involvement in neural augmentation and superintelligence for example.

So that doesn’t answer the question of ‘what does Elon Musk think about transhumanism and superintelligence’ — so again, this is why I chose to do this.

This is the home page right now of H+Pedia, I’m going to show you a bunch of key articles. This is a dynamic page featuring the usual things of ‘featured articles’, ‘random articles’, category relations and so on and so forth. It serves as a portal for anyone who wants to find out about transhumanism to get started straight away in any vein. It works in a number of areas and gets a regular amount of traffic. I’m going to show you some other projects I’ve done.

This is a snippet, I’ve written the complete history of transhumanism, right the way from the pre-history to the modern day, this has never been written before. Every thing is fully cited and you can find out about the role of FM-2044 or Natasha Vita-More or the Extropy institute, Singularity University, early Elon Musk and so on and so forth. There are blue and red links, so every single thing in blue will be covered in more detail, so you can find out about the impact of the Hedonistic Imperative, ‘what is the Journal of Transhumanist thought?’, ‘what was originally the transhumanist manifesto?’ — you can find these things out. Not everything’s finished but more of it is than isn’t.

I’ve even done some projects such as rescuing the Extropy Institute archive. Many of you have been around of many years, so this is formative thing the mailing list. It’s not fully there but we have — thanks to Giulio Prisco and contributions from myself — the most complete Extropy Institute archives are there. This is really good and it’s taken ages to read all of this, I haven’t read it all — I’ve compiled it all, I don’t have time to read everything, but if people say it’s important, it’s here.

I do a lot of steel manning, so a lot of transhumanists can be quick to dismiss their opponents as deathists or inevitabilists. I do taxonomies of arguments and issues with fully cited refutations in some cases, I produce diagrams such as this with the aim to disseminate them as infographics because they’re handy to share online but they’re backed up by full arguments which feature the full sources.

This is another one, against life extension. Too many transhumanists are very poor at understanding or characterising their opposition and will characterise their opposition as fear-mongering luddites for example where there are actually a number of arguments which we should enumerate in order to counter in some cases cede a small amount of ground to be taken seriously. What I hate is being characterised as a utopian, hence I get ahead of this.

If you actually want to know what the state of transhumanist politics is right now, this is as far as I’m aware the definitive list, I think James Hughes might be working on a more up to date version. You can find a complete inventory of all organisations, their media presence, their websites, their alliances, details, founders, politics, controversies — it’s the only place you can find this. If you want to keep up with transhumanist politics, first of all — good luck! and secondly you’re probably going to need this.

Yes, even the definitive article on Zoltan Istvan can be found including the large section on community controversies. You can find out why he wants to chip refugees and why we think this is probably a bad idea. But as far as this in considered for Wikipedia, it’s not considered notable. If you say ‘Zoltan Istvan — you support him right because you’re a transhumanist?’ you can say ‘Well, it’s complicated’. This is the resource that I’ve built in order to explain that it’s complicated, and everything’s cited back to the original discussions, articles and so on and so forth, so one can offer qualified support which is good.

My articles such as this one on deathism have done very well, I believe that if you put ‘deathism’ into Google, that H+Pedia is the number one hit right now, and other issues around jargon H+Pedia will be the major hit. So you can try and say ‘what is deathism’ and attract new users and I’ve attempted to create an aggregate descriptivist definition of what deathism is, including its critiques and utility and so on. I highly recommend again to be cautious about calling people deathists because this may backfire in some cases. If you see other people doing it, make sure they’re using in a constructive fashion. I consider myself a descriptivist in that I will say how words are used and what people are saying and try not to add too much of own judgement, but as the principle contributor to the project you can see a lot of myself coming through. That’s why I want more feedback, so it’s more neutral.

When you start categorising these pages — there’s hundreds upon hundreds of articles on this, from concepts, organisations, people — you get to add categories. For example, I have a decent, not comprehensive, list of all life extensionist organisations.

Every now and then I’ll talk with someone in this sphere, I’ll say ‘Look, have you heard of these people? Have you got in touch with these people?’ and I’m like ‘I haven’t even heard of these people’ so that’s brilliant, ‘get in touch, this is my list, I will update the list’. I try to disseminate this to people who are interested and I highly recommend you do that in the sphere you’re interested in as well.

Again, by nationality, all the key people are categorised by nationality, you know who’s available in your country, we don’t have to be talking ‘Ray Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil’ you can talk about who you can actually see, who you can get down, whose conferences can you attend, who should you follow in the media, I’ve put all these people there by category, I highly recommend it. I also have some basic multi-lingual portals as well, Spanish, Russian and so forth, I’d really love some contributors in non-English languages as well. Humanity+ has been trying to get contents out to non-English languages for quite some time and hasn’t had much success. This would be why I’ve prepared for that, so support there would be great.

I do a lot of entertainment, this is a popular YouTuber Exurb1a, he does really funny really great videos which serve as a great introduction to transhumanism. I index, interlink them, it’s got references to Roko’s Basilisk here and Black Mirror there, aliens and existential risk so on. By the time you’ve written a certain amount of articles you can interlink a set of rich pages which are really great.

Other people such as Rob Miles I know in the UK, AI researcher doing videos on AI safety, highly recommend him. I’m also very involved in the Less Wrong rationalistsphere, I run their wiki, wiki.lesswrong.com, I like wikis, wikis are good.

And here’s Tom Scott. If you know a YouTuber or intellectual person and they’re doing stuff posting about transhumanism-aligned values and things like that, why not write them an article? Or let me know and I’ll write them an article when I get around to it. You can ‘make’ someone a transhumanist by gathering the things they’ve said in the support of the idea and this is a really good platform for promoting these things, not just assuming.

I really like, I’m involved in the Facebook groups a lot which I index as well, so I collect a lot of humour stuff as well, there’s some really funny stuff going on, it’s a lot about robots and bionic penises and such, but it’s fun stuff, and for younger people particularly, it can be really good to create some stuff which can engage with people on different levels.

You don’t have to get talking seriously about ‘ooh, these are really cutting edge issues in human enhancement’, you can say ‘it’s it great, I want to be a cyborg!’ and take the piss out of yourself, no one’s going to say ‘ooh, there are ethical issues to take into consideration here’. It’s Zoltan Istvan, he’s God-Emperor, what’s to dislike?

A very important article here, Aubrey de Grey does have his own article as well I should point out, but Aubrey de Grey’s beard has it’s dedicated article. People say ‘where can I learn more about Aubrey de Grey’s beard?’ and I say ‘I have the place for you…’

I cover a lot of media, so the Deux Ex series and major computer games are covered in terms of thematic transhumanist content, again, lots of wiki links to concepts such as nano-technology, dystopias, AI assistants and so forth as well as external links to more stuff.

We have quite a few film reviews right now, we have a complete list of transhumanism in film is covered, many of which are covered in a fairly short way, but you’ve got your blue-links here, so you’ve got 2001, and you can find more about posthuman transhumanism for example and what does this mean, or AI in fiction, or you can browse that by category. This is much more detailed than you’ll be able to find on Wikipedia.

H+Pedia’s doing all right. We’ve gotten in a couple of news articles where people have cited H+Pedia whereby people have said ‘according to H+Pedia, Mark Zuckerberg is a transhumanist’ — damn right he is. I’ve worked very hard to update Mark Zuckerberg’s Wikipedia page and H+Pedia page to make it very clear that he is. I do this on a number of high-profile individuals too, always updating their transhumanist credentials depending on what they’re doing and saying. I also maintain page links for a number of Facebook groups and subreddits where people are linking back, but it’s quite limited so far as basically what I’ve been able to achieve by myself to drive traffic, which drives some traffic which is nice.

Ultimately, H+Pedia is several projects, it really is doing a lot of different things. It’s a place to organise politics, a place to organise ideas, to set terminology, aggregate ideas, particularly the history of transhumanism and influences. I’ve reached a point now that I need your organisations links, I’m looking for people to work with in terms of promoting the project and getting involved in the project. I can’t keep working by myself. I mentioned I do cybercrime research, this is becoming my main thing I’m doing outside of this, I’m really looking for people willing to, if not contribute to the project, then post it to people with a lot of time on their hands and interest in transhumanism. A lot of people think ‘I couldn’t possibly write about transhumanism, I’m not a expert! I don’t have Ander’s blog with 20 years writing about transhumaism so I couldn’t possible write anything!’. But you can, you can write a film review, you can write a critique of enhancement technology in the media, you can talk about the preferred jargon you use, you can talk about your local chapter in life extension and the international links you’ve built. You can invite David Wood or Ilia Stambler to talk at your event, you can find out who these people are. So there’s a lot of things you can do on this platform.

So thank you very much. That’s H+Pedia, do check it out and do talk to me about seeing what you can do to get involved because I want it to take off and it’s my pet project, thank you very much!