As usual, I’m several weeks behind the curve on current events (which really is not a good thing for an aspiring science fiction writer), but things have just been very hectic again. But here are some belated notes on my recent summer holiday in Finland.
Having recovered from my start-of-holiday hangover (which resulted from my friend Antti quitting his job to work on his master’s thesis the day I arrived to Helsinki), I went to check out the TransVision 2006 conference. If you haven’t come across the idea of transhumanism before, suffice to say that its adherents believe in enhancing human abilities — both physical and cognitive — using emerging technologies. TransVision is a yearly conference on related matters, usually attracting a lot of academic high-profile speakers, this year the Finnish philosopher Timo Airaksinen, among others. Since the conference lasted the whole weekend and thus overlapped with Finncon, I wasn’t able to register and only attended the public lectures, but as befits the general attitude of the movement, many of the talks and presentations are available online. In addition, there was even a shadow virtual conference in Second Life. It would be fun to see this kind of thing in more mainstream scientific events as well.
(As a random note, Charlie Stross won the H. G. Wells award at the conference, although he was unable to attend: hopefully that does something to soothe the pain of missing out on the Hugo awards this year…)
Some comments on the talks I attended after the cut.