February 27, 2008 Episode

Philippe Van Nedervelde, international spokesperson for the Lifeboat Foundation, is today's featured guest. (He is also Executive Director for the Foresight Nanotech Institute in Europe, and a Global Task Force Member for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.) Philippe describes the Lifeboat Foundation, its work to define and evaluate the many coming risks to humankind, and how the foundation has already begun formulating specific recommendations on how we may prepare for these risks.

This episode also contains an essay by your host describing the dramatic changes which the internet will experience in the next five to ten years; as well as an announcement of a presentation which will be given on March 9, 2008, at Extropia Core inside Second Life by the esteemed pioneers of international transhumanism and extropy: Natasha Vita-Moore and Anders Sandberg. Their topic: Do humans have a natural right to augmentation and enhancement?

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 27, 2008 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 93 minutes]

Some of the risks include: unfriendly AI (Artificial Intelligence), devastating asteroid strikes, bioweapons and pandemics, replicating and nonreplicating nanoweapons, nuclear, biological, and nanotechnological attacks. But one of the scariest of these has become known as ADC (Asymmetric Destructive Capability), in which large scale destruction can be accomplished with relatively small scale resources. Another scary risk is called SIMaD, which stands for Single Individual Massively Destructive, or as Philippe describes it, The Unabomber on steroids.

Philippe Van Nedervelde is a regular keynote speaker at conferences and other events, and has made presentations throughout Europe to audiences of all sizes and compositions including academic, business and governmental such as European Union parliamentary hearings.

He is the award-winning founder, CEO and majority-owner of E-spaces, a VR production house which has delivered networked or multi-user Virtual Reality or tele-virtuality and interactive 3D graphics projects for customers including NASA, UNESCO, the European Commission, Flemish Government, Ericsson Business Networks, Nokia and IBM.

Philippe holds a master's degree in communication as well as a post-graduate degree in Media and Information Science from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.