and this is what I learned.

Hi! And welcome to my note dump of the latest conference. Read it, don’t read it. Some of it is funny, some of it is terrible. I am not a nice person. No one pays me to do that thing.

EXTREME FUTURE TECH FEST
notes! open and obnoxious commentary from the first tech fest.
im the only guy on a laptop. sorry if i’m a jerk.
i am not a nice person, i’m just some guy with a laptop. i’m sure all these people are nice people.

stream of keyboard mess. i could edit this, but then what’s the point?
this is filled with me being snarky and being full of myself. welcome to the internet!

no quotes are actually probably quotes, im just mashing keys here.
things i think people actually said are in italics
community member bast tagged along (let’s be fair, she drove the car), her comments are followed by (b)
yashgaroth joined us to talk on gdocs about the hard science and to lol, his comments are followed by a (y)
commentary that is mashed into other things is marked

=-=—————————————-
arrived at 1030 in time for the wrap up of the intro stuff. (in theory, it started at 9, i’m lazy)
walk in on a scrawny geek kid hashing out some ux issues and the classic what ifs.
he’s cut off “in the interests of time”
alright then, lets get started.

===============================

5 minute break where i introduce myself awkwardly to the dude (hi david!) running the show and agree to do a flash talk. i have no idea why i did this. no, i do. total attention whore.

===============================

dorothy. she is a design researcher.
she enters hard and fast. poetry?
calm and glassy as a pool of water
i remember the children falling through the air….
recounting a dream. the personal semiotics of recalling a dream
how does becoming extreme tech (sic) influence that?.
understanding how when and why people create meaning becomes an urgent call
goes beyond gaming
what are our roles?
stewards of the technology, providing context

she’s a christian transhumanist evidently. also helps out the mormon transhumanists.
they’re ganging up on us! (g)

how will technology influence our understanding of reality…

interrupted by a lady in the back who asks for a definition of transhumanism. not cause shes out of the loop, but because it’s still such a mish mash of conflicting ideas. fair enough.

i might say this podium is real. what happens then if the podium was a hologram. then it isn’t real, it’s just a projection of light. but if it has purpose and function… or perhaps more importantly, trust and value.

“real” implies functional values, or the inverse.

how will we react when the technology has no boundaries? what does it mean for trust when the experiences of our minds and eyes don’t meet the information of our feet and arms?

she has a tendency to slide into a story voice. like a librarian reading to children and use phrases like “ the amniotic environment of STEM”

i look around i notice that i am the only person taking notes. this is not a lecture. my ability to write and listen is useless here.

we are not here to learn. this is geek church…. (g)

the mystery beyond the explanation
longing, like love, is irrational.

there is no questions to ask. its purely storytelling. you can’t ask a question where everything is just fiction.

what may be real for one person which is a truth, may not be a universal truth

personal reality
may
lead to delusion…

i’m in 5th grade again. i’m listening to someone who can only read, not talk.
i’m not learning anything.

full body sensing technology will allow our environments to adapt to us.
wait wat? i have that. it’s called skin.. you’re losing me

she starts talking about extended sight… waiting for it, waiiiit aw yeah, night vision nod.
evidently, this is the second hallmark of the transhuman age.
expansion and enhancement.
officially a horseman as far as i’m concerned. level up. (g)

both more rapid and less gradual
with ready rapid and reliable design, customizations become just a matter of personal expression.

segue into a brief casual riff on extinction and then straight into literally referencing doctor doolittle.

the inexorable flow of limpid words and lack of point makes the talk itself dreamlike. that cottonball feeling where blinking or moving feels slow and muted. i wonder what is it like to like like this. of course, i suppose i could just take valium…
i can’t type anymore, I’m just gonna veg for the rest of this….

wait, i take that back, talking about video games vs mass shootings. muted and vague AR fears and a generation more comfortable with the technology than we are.

i wonder if they pump stuff into the air here.

It’s not going to be gaming that pushes tech, it’s going to be porn.(b)

tldr:
transhumanism
empathy
real vs unreal and what does that even mean
intelligence
interpersonal skill
unexpected consequences

I’ve read better sci-fi.(b)
it’s not supposed to be sci fi. it’s some weird mish mash where people are talking about something that doesn’t exist in a framework where they are attempting to talk about it like it’s a real thing. we do this all the time.(g)

Cyber reality immigrants! yeah she said that
Anchor babies! (b)

what will be the meaning of the familiar. what will stillness mean?
ah! i get it now. we’re sitting inside a tumblr post. (g)

More tech means it’ll be easy to ignore people who don’t have tech.

the role of designers and engineers as stewards of technology.
Dont be a creator! Be a curator!

Don’t speciate, it will be too easy to be hella racist. (paraphrase)

All the problems she’s describing with technology and the future already exist. (b)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

another break. gonna shake out the cotton balls….(g)
Want coffee. Don’t wanna be conscious. (b)

=========================================

dr feldman. focus in child development and developmental psych

more people are taking notes. all pen and paper. i saw a moleskin and an a2 pad.

she is actually building off from the previous speaker. talking about cartoons as an interface

oh god switch the primary display! we’re in microsoft, surrounded by geeks and programmers. and oh gods we can’t get the displays to work.
I have two dongles… siri!

the crowd dissolves into side conversations about macs vs pc. their own stuff. she’s lost them
everyone focus!
i’m having some social emotional responses.
nice tie in. she is making her slide failure into part of her talk
imagine it’s a black screen… before design and implementation…
how do things integrate into the environment…

she keeps falling back and getting tangled with the computer.

its an impressive metaphor for how hard we fail when our toys are taken away.

how will your products fare?
its good she got people talking. focus groups!
this concept about products tho. i guess its an audience thing…

what aspects of the environment are important to the human experience?
uh… all of them?

my critique of you all, is that you get focused on cognitive things.
she just backhandedly bashed the crowd. it was nice.
you can do that sort of thing with a phd. its like, a job skill

well how do we known that they are learning. well, because we see them learning. not because we tested them.

if i don’t see it, you are not augmenting it.

this is very much not my talk. its about frameworks of behavioural indicators, where she keeps talking about human learning as a product. im at a loss

Ironically low tech event. People have made signs on cardboard boxes pointing to the conference room because maps are broken on campus. Presenter is a Mac user in a Microsoft world and an entire room full of tech enthusiasts can’t run a keynote on the projector. (b)

“imagine up here is a slide with a house”

starting to kinda slide into a outside view here. im really not here for the talk, im here to talk about the talk.

welcome to the extreeeeeeme future tech fest!
held in a building we could barely find, down an empty hall. walk 500meters and turn left after the barista. can we borrow a marker? we need to draw a sign on the back of a flier.

back to this talk.
she’s kinda talking about her job. about why her job is more valid than the audience’s job. which is fair. but she’s also breaking what could be a good talk about a study she did, by couching it in terms that appeal to programmers and ux designers.

we can plan for use contexts that don’t exist by grounding in use contexts that already exist.

back to talking about how hard it is to talk without the slides

Transhumanism needs to focus on the human experience.

if you don’t relate big data to the human experience, how do you make it work for your product?
step one, stop talking about people as products

question from the crowd that just turns into him saying that children are basically more like monkeys than people. dude is, like, 60.

Children don’t level up or evolve like fucking pokemon. (b)

yeah i get it. kids are legitimate humans yet. i mean, thats how we treat them legally. chill out code dude

so you are using personas, which is a field that we developed over the last 30 years… quote from a member of the audience
yah, sure random ux dude. you developed personas. fucking no one ever thought about this stuff before the tech kids got here. jung never discussed this thing.
you monetized it. thats all. you took a history of how people interacted and figured out how to make a dime. thats all.

Moral of the story is, this crowd does not understand children. (j)

this is important for us. it’s like travelling to the deep south. but in the opposite direction. we are in the heart of darkness. I am henry morton stanley(g)

literacy in adults is access to information, access to pop culture and media, examples..
appreciating the difference between a symbol and other perceptual things we see.
learning how to read

do you do a baseline observation?.
acknowledges that control baseline for child development is difficult. we rarely truly neglect children and that itself is not really a baseline.
you need to do day in the life, which is still a complex situation

new term for making an example of something : we’re operationalizing an assumption.

so im digging her points now. like, the human experience assigns importance and it doesn’t care if you can fit 8 billion pixels in that picture, we fill in, we interact the world through the five domains.

BREAK!
=======================================================

missed his name

make an idea, take it to the marketers, make people want this thing.
sometimes it falls flat because people fail to see the connection between their needs and the thing you made for them.
i thought he was gonna bash, but he actually basically said that we need to find to a better way to sell things

the customer centered approach:
measure the experiences they want
unearth the relationship they prefer
decide which touchpoints to use (no! bad touch)
develop design principles
build offerings based on principles.

stop calling people users
because people shouldn’t be users, you need to build a relationship.
argh! i want a piece of tech that works for me. i dont want to have a relationship with my hardware and by proxy, its corporate overlords.

when people find value, it’s not in how the things it’s built, it’s how people feel when they use it.
oh. oh really. really!? im pretty sure i would feel pretty fucking awesome if i had things that worked. instead of having my monkey brain exploited for being attached to garbage and low quality work.

the changes that people want to go through and then design things that evoke that change.
this is creepy.

uncover what you want to feel.
i am so purely over this right now. i have a metric of people who try to tell me how i want to feel. government officials and rapists top that list. you should try to stay as far away as possible from that list.

I dont see how this relates to transhumanism(b)
it does if you think that the future is a product driven event
which is kinda the theme so far.)g)

the Future(tm) how products(people) interact with design experiences to make more money. and be better people of course.

research shows that people like it when large companies give a fuck. we should look into that. Helen, make a note.

looking up to a powerpoint slide.
some meaningful experiences.
i will not record this to spare the audience.
the fact that we are bulletpointing truth and duty….
i got that itching in my blood.

if you are the first ones to claim it, you can own it, even if you didn’t first do it.
yes, you have nailed patent law in the united states pretty solidly. exciting.

think about a company that you love. it shouldn’t be too hard.
we have an impoverishment of meaningful experience so that is why we love companies.
that is the most true thing you have said. its too bad you’re plugging the companies side of things.

replace company with a proper noun. we’re in a conference about how to make a better sociopath.

//at this point we went into a fugue state where we thought about speaking points from a personal point of view

Give me a meaningful experience, Helen. Fight me, Helen.
Dont worry Joel. I’ve done my research and I have unearthed the type of relationship you prefer. Let me give you the things that make you feel good about my interactions in your life.
Keep me around for 20 years and you will be able to rationalize our interaction and it will deepen.
I will develop design principle to evoke the experiences you want through the touchpoints i control *wink*

Eventually, when electrons flow freely, and the light of my technology propagates like fungi blooms, we’ll do this by tweaking hormones in your brain while you power my processors.

I loooove you jooooeell
//fan fic done

side note. dear design philosophies. why are your slides top left justified?

I have a pen. I also have an eyeball. stabbitty stab stab(b)

don’t design, give your things names. call it wonderful so that people known what wonderful means. Trust your gut, but give it a name. I dub thee lunch.

speaking of which, no one is outside the lecture room. this is a group of people who are used to sitting and staring at a wall for hours. this is normal. i start to question how anyone who finds sitting for 8 hours and listening to people lecture can make a significant observation about how to interact with the rest of the world…

Dude’s a sociopath. This lecture is designed with touchpoints to guide my experience of killing myself. (b)

it’s the thing where value lives. 0_0

the first rule of design club is…
=========================================================

OK I’ve had lunch now, thinky time (y)
hey dude!
just a note, your notes will be posted at the end of today. dont stress it, just a heads up.(g)

=======================================

lightning round! 5 minute speeches!
doc feldman is back. i’m digging her. she is good at talking about development.
undergrads write papers on their cellphones. we assumed that they were just becoming more idiots. no, its that they are using a different technology.
they could be smart but they are not articulating themselves
(orrly? thats pretty classist)
typical people who don’t talk to gud, they could be better. because there is the right way to make monkey noises. the queens fucking english. (g)

====
guy talking about magic leap. some ar whatnot.

question, what are the sociological implications? references glassholes.

i’d just like to point out that star trek episode where they had vr game headsets that brainwashed the entire ship, comments? how can we make sure robots don’t muck around in our brains? also borg. Thoughts on the borg pls. (b)

++++++++++++++++++++++

me talking
naaaiiiled it.
talked about how creepy it was, questioned the entitlement, asked for more access
maybe there a video. it’s the same stuff i always talk about, there people just had more money.

++++++++++++++++++++

next up, nervous person
talking about interspecies collaboration
I support your message!

—————–

now we vote! who did the best talk!
i won! i got me a paper book… extreme future tech conference, won myself a paper book. that’s irony right there.

brief intermission as a small group accrues around me to fist bump on my demands for openness and accessibility and the wanting less product talk
=========

dude from 8ninths?
digital agency focused on bespoke mobile applications for big brands

future generations will appreciate your sacrifice in being here today(y)
max, your name will go down in history too. come back and entertain me (b)
we miss you! (g)

branding occupies an important place
emotive response, talked about tapestries and harley davidson.
what does it mean to bring a brand to emotional life in a virtual environment?

…the kinds of clients we tend to service.
see when your language can be taken gently out of context and it makes you sound like a hooker, you need to re examine your life choices

… Most of these talks have been pure media. It’s gonna suck arguing with comcast in 3d vr. (b)

This call may be recorded. Ma’am. Stop choking the representative. Are you satisfied with your customer service? (b)

We’re not the type of client they want to service. 🙁
(small disagreement on whether to use a smiley or a frowny. i want to be pandered too, but i dont want to be the person that comcast services…)

feeling a sense of awe.

the future is full of fee-fees (b)

it’s been ten minutes since i typed anything of value. im dying on the inside. the only thing saving me now is digital representation of fish and some seals.
i dunno,
guy is still talking, i’m not sure about what. its really just a commercial

anyone who isn’t trying to piggy back surf on that blue whale is dead inside

epic music and flying whale begets logo

15 min later
do you remember when people only talked for 5 minutes in the lightning rounds and so they actually tried instead of rambling on about their company for an hours? i miss those days…
b has borrowed my book prize and is now reading. tapping out…

went for a walk. looked at the empty halls and the server rooms. more dream world.
back into the talk. talking about mixed reality design methods.
this talk is a sprawling mess. like, pick a point man.

==========================

i recognize that i’m writing less, but there is very little being said. i mean, there is taking notes, and then there is just asking for a transcript.
sorry.

*looks at Bast* i’ll do you if you do me. *raises thumbs to eyes*

============================

zoltan up next! el presidente!
if he can’t liven up this crowd, he shouldn’t be running for office…

transhumanism means science and technology to change the human body and the human experience
20yrs ago, nobody really was an environmentalist.
now every everywhere is proud to call themselves that.
techno optimism
get on board yo

everyone in congress is religious and believes in the afterlife. it takes away from caring about conquering death. legit

“we need better organs”

there are a lot of technologies that will change how we feel biologically.

good talking about access to technology, how people are full of implants now. nod to the biohackers and grinders. the man is great at covering all the bases.

there is a lady in the back, drawing on a digital board about the talking points. some sort of stylus version of ms paint. its super entertaining. we need this kind of freestyle art ness when other people are talking.
i dont want to look at your slides, i want to see someone freestyling your slides while you talk.

biohacking, cryonics, ai, he’s hitting all the nails. when you are a hammer…
not that im complaining, i think its good. a nice overview.

it’s possible none of this may work.

pro lgbt. acknowledged.

this is why we call it transhumanism. because we arent talking about humans anymore.
to become fundamentally different

sick and tired of walking towards death.

dedicating yourself to not dying.
historically we just kinda run into these religious ideals that kinda rope you into dying at some point. it’s like, necessary.
tbh heaven stops mattering if you don’t die.

it seems unnecessary that we don’t spend time thinking about death. i mean, we all are going to do it.

without changing the culture in america, we are going to continue having the same problem.

genetic engineering is not going to destroy the species, it’s a just a little sketchy at the start.

putting a moratorium on research is something that we don’t want our country doing anymore.

quiet mumbling from the background. questions about the singularity, and worries of one percenters.

the last thing that we want is ai to go live without us being connected to it.

“i’m not a big fan of having another species on this planet that is more intelligent than me.”

he’s really pushing some buttons. you can tell that people care about these issues, because they don’t have questions, they have a bunch of points that they also want to address that they are using the question time for.

one of things about caring about winning an election is that you can say whatever you want

scientists just don’t have the resources.
money is beside the point. we’re all going to die and money just is not the issue any more.

+===================

gerry miller cloudticity.com
he’s talking about health care.

we don’t have a health care system. we interact with the system only when we are sick.

there is an inherent conflict of interest here. doctors only get paid when you are sick. not to keep you healthy.
the sick care system

our health care industry is the 6th largest economy on the planet.
ambulance industry makes more money that the film industry.
3 out of every 4 dollars in the system are spent on preventable chronic conditions.
obesity, smoking, etc
1.2trillion spent on medical errors
64x more likely to be killed from a medical error than a handgun.

shots fired! (g)

now he’s talking about access to information. medical record accessibility. very solid. misdiagnosis and issues reduced from docs having the full info.

hospitals compete. they fight and have no access. hospitals as a biz as opposed as a place to take care of people.

i like this talk. its infrastructure level stuff. talking about making things better for people. rule systems for having tech systems mesh between industries. its about rules and timing for medication and all the things that people should have honest discussions about.

remove the socio economic barrier
85% reduction in er visits by gamifying chronic care modalities

—-
this is boot camp for returning to academia, sitting in one place and not falling asleep
—–

we can dynamically boot up a supercomputer in the cloud.
ok, yeah, thats actually a thing. glad its going to health now.

the computer is actually listening and parsing the data back to the doctor. helping the doctor make good decisions.
leveraging technology effectively
basically, having ar plus a database as a backend

questions about things being banned. regulatory changes.
how do we help the general population get better help?
what are the regulatory ramifications of people actually knowing how healthy or not healthy one is?

on one hand, we want open data set, on the other hand people abuse that information

sounds like we don’t need to regulate information, we need to regulate assholes.

no one is willing to address that we don’t need to protect our information. we need to develop a culture that doesn’t act like jerks.

extra long break and oh shit i just held up the talk….

==============
you wouldn’t run your new phone on an old operating system
we have the same set of genes we had half a million years ago

oh, this is liz parrish btw.
obviously

used the phrase upgrade the genome:)

there are people against this, the not now group, and the we’re doing just fine group.
what’s great about these people is that they make great data sets for the people that come after
(thats hardcore!)
all of these things we call disease, most of them are due to cellular aging.
this is why we dont find a cure for these so called diseases. they are symptoms
the aging cell

scan of old person brain. massive atrophy. cognitive decline in the failure of ventricles in the brain

so “what’s normal?”
asking the hard questions.
honestly the normal way for people to die is from infectious diseases. not anymore
don’t let anyone tell you that normal is a fact.

new pie chart about how people die 1665 vs 2010.

infection
childhood mortality rates

‘illness makes our bodies more broken over time”

the biggest changes in mortality rates come from antibiotics, and the cessation of smoking -_-

we want you to be healthy until you die, and we want to break the bottleneck of when you die.

we think this is in the genome

senescence: grumpy old cells that no longer divide

tell me more about telomereeeees!

clearing of misfolded proteins
reverse atherosclerosis
increase cell signaling
reboot immune response
lengthen telomeres
clear senescent cells

there are more people over 65 than there are under 5 yrs of age. so this is a big issue.
as life expectancy goes up, birth rate goes down
the “silver tsunami” (ok i didnt known that)
they are retired, ill disabled, and the young people can’t prop up all these old people

graph about trend in healthcare costs
basically we can spend all our money on clean water and schools, or on old people
“even if you work at microsoft, this effects you”
chkchk-pow!

you are part of the experiment in gene therapy as in we don’t do it. good data.
we take 75% of the medication and have the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized nation

start with the gene therapy
put it in aav
administer
release
dna makes rna, rna makes protein, and that basically all you are. deal with it.
glad we’re all solid on that point

muscle wasting over time as a metric for being old

lab mice live twice as long as a field mouse.
this is just by putting mice in boxes
exercise them and feed them proper
26-30 months.
we know your genes are important, but your nature can tweak expression

so what if we add a gene on that
calorie restriction mice via gene therapy
shared in human
60 months

this is why they built the company.

actually treated people
monogenic therapies complete, no fails so far (ok she told me one person rejected, but whatever)

aav telomere inducing gene therapy
punched in the noggin.
picture of treated microglia

blasco? need a paper search. name might not be correct, i’m going phonetic.

side effect. treatment reverses aging in every cell applied to… yeah that’s.. awesome!

myostatin inhibitors gene therapy (aav) for treatment of sarcopenia
freakishly impressive before and after pics.

15 – 30 is basically the sweet spot for therapy, cause after 30 you just are tooooo ooooold and death things happen

treat the death stuff before invasive treatments are needed

healthcare should not come at a cost….
interesting, so how much is it? 200k or so… ouch
so they want to make it free tho

and now. some blue sky-ing. gonna not write much about that. the standard transhuman suite of physical, mental, space ready, radiation proofing.

and a nod to the grinder crew again. Yay!

“normal is a slippery slope to not getting anything done”

in clinical trial 3 for muscular dystrophy
link to study: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01519349 for reference
also this one https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02354781 interesting that the antibody titer cutoff is 1:50 for this one and 1:1600 for the other
note that the second study start after the first was completed, and they raised the antibody titer cutoff significantly, i.e. are less accepting of people with anti-AAV immunities I think (y)
the reason that they are off shore, is that they believe that everyone deserves treatment, not just the people who are sick

every disease state needs to be examined differently. you can’t apply one treatment to everything
(whispers- stem cells are not magic)

==========
she ran over. it was great but very little q and a and honestly, it was really outside the rest of the talks so everyone just kinda went uh huh wow
===========================

next guy
idk who this is, im just running out to talk with parrish. but i like what he is saying. tho i think listening to tech talk is easier for me in pieces.

its impossible to do this alone. i dont care how amazing you are, how much you can do with one laptop.
balance entrepreneurial schizophrenia with real life
find the first step.

use one thing to think about the infrastructure of how to do many things.
uber vs taxis
no
uber is about delivering things on demand. so its really uber vs ups and fed ex and taxis and all of it.

ok, im out. bast is in the car sleeping off the tech talk.

++++++++++++++++

all the great stuff happened on the breaks and lunch and outside, but that’s how it always is.

Sorry for the mess, just taking notes for posterity.

g

and this is what I learned. Hi! And welcome to my note dump of the latest conference. Read it, don’t read it. Some of it is funny, some of it...