Brighter Brains Institute is producing a “Transhuman Strategies” conference to explore these topics.

What are the transhuman Goals in the near future?
How can these transhuman ideas permeate the mainstream?
Are there ways transhumanism can assert itself in the political sphere?
How can transhumanist ideas and innovations create a better world now, for billions of people on Earth?

speakers:

• Riva Melissa-Tez – Philosopher and Lecturer
• Zoltan Istvan – 2016 US Presidential candidate of Transhumanist Party
• John Smart – Acceleration Techno-Optimist
• Maria Konovalenko & Mikhail Batin – Immortality Activists
• RU Sirius & Jay Cornell – “Trancendence” Transhumanism Encyclopedia Authors
• Anya Petrova – AI Transformationalist
• Hank Pellissier – TransHumanitarian

Riva Melissa-Tez studied Philosophy at University College London. She successfully created two companies before she turned 22, a children’s store in London and, whilst in Germany, a creative digital platform for kids. She is the founder of Berlin Singularity, a group focusing on bringing emerging technology discussions to mainland Europe. Through her efforts with Berlin Singularity, she helped build a consultancy group working with early-stage biotech companies to connect them to funding. She has held teaching positions at the DAB and HTW business schools in Germany, where she encouraged students to use their skills towards humanity’s grandest challenges. Riva was a 2014 Apple Spokesperson on Emerging Technology. Now residing in San Francisco, she’s looking into innovative financial models that support long-term thinking, researching new investment vehicles to channel intelligent capital into transformative technologies. Riva is a regular columnist for The European Magazine and has guest-presented on funding emerging technologies at Oxford, Stanford and Yale.

Zoltan Istvan is a writer, futurist, and philosopher. He is the founder the Transhumanist Party and is its 2016 US Presidential candidate. He writes transhumanist-themed columns for Psychology Today,Vice’s Motherboard and The Huffington Post. He also worked as a reporter for the National Geographic Channel and his writings have appeared in Slate, Outside, The San Francisco Chronicle and websites of Wired UK, Gizmodo, and National Geographic. He is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, a philosophical science fiction novel that was a #1 bestseller in Philosophy on Amazon. Istvan and his ideas have been featured on Fox News Channel‘s Stossel show,CNN‘s Inside Man, RT’s television show Desde La Sombra, and theJoe Rogan Experience.

John Smart is a futurist and foresight development consultant. He is CEO of The Foresight Company (Los Gatos, CA), a source for best-in-class industry foresight speakers, trainers, and consultants, and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, an organization improving understanding and management of accelerating technological change.John’s expertise is in foresight development. His mission is to help leaders and their organizations develop best-in-class foresight process, and wake up to their incredible potential to foresee and create their preferred future, ahead of everyone else.

Maria Konovalenko is a Biology of Aging PhD student at the University of Southern California and Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She is also Vice President of the Science for Life Extension Foundation in Moscow. She is co-founder of The Longevity Party and a prominent life extension activist. She is also an accomplished writer – in two languages – and a frequent contributorh+magazine.com and IEET.org, penning articles like “A Letter to Sergey Brin”, “There Can Be No Healthy Aging”, and “I Am An Aging Fighter Because Life is the Main Human Right, Demand, and Desire.” Her blog is HERE and her essay on “Transhumanism Strategy” is HERE. She is currently working on a Longevity Cookbook.

RU Sirius (Ken Goffman) is a writer, editor, and well-known digital iconoclast. he was co-publisher of the first popular digital culture magazine, MONDO 2000, from 1989-1993 and coeditor of the popular book, MONDO 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge. He has written about technology and culture for Wired, The Village Voice, Salon,BoingBoing, Time, S.F. Chronicle, Rolling Stone, andEsquire, among other publications. He was also the first editor of h+magazine. Sirius/Goffman lectures widely having appeared as part of the Reality Hacking series at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, at the TedX conference in Brussels, and at San Francisco’s popular Dorkbot event. Visit him at StealThisSingularity.com.

Jay Cornell is a writer, editor, web developer, and little-known semi-iconoclast. He is the former managing editor ofh+ magazine, and the former associate publisher ofGnosismagazine. He is currently senior web developer atLandkamer Partners, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending humanity from existential risks. Email him, but note that spammers and scammers will be found and consumed by swarms of nanobots.

Anya Petrova is concerned with how the world is going to be transformed by AI, the most profound invention we will ever make. She is fascinated with how people will perceive AI through the lens of various cultures and religious beliefs. She wonders – what if we create AI, yet we are not aware of this fact? It is possible that true AI can be achieved not as a black box in a lab, but as an implanted and integrated system within the human brain itself? What if humans become “AI” before we achieve a strong AI independent of a human body?

Hank Pellissier is the director of Brighter Brains Institute, and the producer of eight transhumanist conferences in 2013-2015. He is the author of Invent Utopia Now: Transhumanist Suggestions for the Pre-Singularity Era, and Brighter Brains: 225 ways to elevate or injure IQ. He’s written many essays for hplusmagazine.com, ieet.org, and the World Future Society, plus he’s worked as a journalist for Salon.com,NYTimes.com, and GreatSchools.org. In the last year he completed 12 “transhumanitarian” projects in The Philippines and Uganda, establishing health clinics, de-worming children, clothing children, feeding children, and supporting orphanages, schools, libraries, and vocational training centers.