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Contents 1 2010 Good Ancestors Principle Salon: The "Good Apple" effect 2 The Good Apple Effect 3 The Workshop 4 Background Materials 5 Some videos from 2007 Good Ancestor Workshops 5.1 Video recording 5.2 Travel arrangements 5.3 Attire 5.4 Expenses 6 Agenda (tentative) 6.1 Weds, April 7, 2010 6.2 Thurs April 8, 2010 6.3 Fri, April 9, 2010 7 Prior Workshops 8 Attendees 8.1 Nora Bateson 8.2 Joanne Deluca 8.3 T. Clark Durant (Encinitas 2007, 2008) 8.4 David Ellerman (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Boston 2005, Paris 2006, Encinitas 2007, 2008, 2009) 8.5 Robert Foxworth 8.6 Martin Latterich 8.7 Mary McGuinness 8.8 Tanya Munnecke Moreno 8.9 Tom Munnecke 8.10 Sarah Murray 8.11 Nancy Tomich (Epidemic of Health, DC, 1997) 8.12 Frederick Turner (Encinitas 2007, 2008, 2009) 8.13 Vernor Vinge (Encinitas 2007, 2009) 8.14 Heather Wood Ion (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Ben Lommond 2003, Encinitas, 2007,2008, 2009)) 8.15 Judith Zissman 9 Sponsors

2010 Good Ancestors Principle Salon: The "Good Apple" effect

Jonas Salk said, the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?” Given the rapidly changing discoveries and conditions of the times, this opens up a crucial conversation – just what will it take for our descendants to look back at our decisions today and judge us good ancestors? This is the fourth in a series of small, conversational salons I hold at my home in Encinitas near San Diego, CA. each year. These salons are by invitation only, limited to people who are well-grounded in one discipline but also able to think laterally in an eclectic group.

The Good Apple Effect

Given the rapid spread and growth of networks around the world, we are discovering the value of the "network effect." The first person to buy a fax machine has no one to send faxes to. The second one adds value to the first, and so on, so that each new machine increases the value of each preceding one. How can we apply this effect for positive, uplifting activities, translating good intentions into good effects? If one bad apple can spoil the whole barrel, then as we build ever bigger global "barrels," we 1) increase the number of apples, and 2) increase the spoilage potential that a bad apple might want to cause. Is there some way to flip these dynamics, so that a good apple can uplift the whole barrel?

Social network web sites today have memberships in the hundreds of millions which, if they were countries, would make them larger than any in Europe. A video on YouTube can appear and get more views that a prime time TV series. These instant global connectivity these networks provide create an unprecedented opportunity for rapid growth. Are there innovative ways to use this new capability for uplift activities? We recognize that in any group, the person who talks the most is not necessarily the one with the most to say. How can we maintain quality conversations with increasing connectivity?

We will also be looking at Jonas Salk's theme of "Creating an Epidemic of Health" - a self-propagating, self-organizing, evolutionary process. In particular, we will look at recent activities in the National Health Information Network initiative, and ways that we might employ the examine the success of Alcoholics Anonymous over the years, to see if there are lessons learned that may be applied in a broader context of computer and information networks. See Tom and Heather's 1995 paper on Epidemic of Health and 1999 Meeting Notes as well as the Valeo Health Care reform efforts

The Workshop

The workshop will be a small, conversational group of people with both a deep personal and professional interest in the complexities humanity faces in working through the decisions of the next few generations. It is a successor to the 2007 Good Ancestors Workshop and the 2008 Workshop on Resilience and 2009 Workshop on The Complexity of Good Intentions

Background Materials

• Historical conferences
• Papers and references

Some videos from 2007 Good Ancestor Workshops

• 2007 Good Ancestor Workshop Summary
• Tom Munnecke's opening presentation
• Heather Wood Ion's presentation on Jonas Salk's Good Ancestor's questions
• Judith Rosen's Presentation on Anticipatory Systems
• Frederick Turner's Closing Discussion

Video recording

We will be videotaping the sessions. Guests will be asked to sign a video model release form. We record these sessions in order to make an archive to share with those who weren't able to come, but we don't want the camera to inhibit anyone's conversation. Anyone wishing to speak without being taped can simply ask the videographer to stop recording, and they should see the recording light turned off.

Travel arrangements

San Diego airport is the closest airport. We recommend the Best Western Encinitas Inn and Suites, a short walk from the beach as well as the Coaster Train station in Encinitas. Ask for the "Munnecke Rate" - which should be about $98/night. The workshop will be at the home of Tom Munnecke, a 10 min drive from the motel.

Attire

Casual. Depending on the weather, sessions will be held outdoors (some shade), in a cabana (semi outdoors), or indoors. You may want sun protection as well as something to wear during cooler evenings. Thurs night dinner will be a beach restaurant, still casual but perhaps a bit more formal. (Tom will be wearing shoes) The pool/spa will be available for swimming.

Expenses

Participants will be asked to contribute $100 towards food and drink expenses.

Agenda (tentative)

Weds, April 7, 2010

11:00 Early arrivals. Participants are free to arrive early to hang out. Depending on the weather, the pool may be between 75 and 82 degrees.

• 2:00 PM Beginning of Workshop: Introductions
• 4:00 PM Session 1: Positive Genomics - Genomics is one of the fastest growing areas in science today. Understanding our genes and how they influence our behavior, and the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate is a critical topic for us and our descendants. Understanding how things fail - the disease model so prevalent in our health care system today - is a fundamentally different way of looking at things than understanding how things are resilient and adaptive. Positive Psychology, Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Deviance, Asset-Based Community Development are all models of the "Positive Flip" - examining the positive, life-affirming values we seek to amplify to balance more traditional models that seek to fix problems. This is a little like a Martian trying to understand a television set, pulling out a tube, noticing that the set starts squealing, and then labeling the tube the "anti-squeal tube." Investigating the full network of all "anti squeal" components will not lead to the full understanding of how the set works. In other words understanding and negating all that is wrong with a complex system is not going to make it "whole." This relates to a common theme from past workshops: the contrast between models of "search/amplify" vs "plan/execute."

Further adding to the interest in Genomics is the fact that are the first generations of the first species to evolve to the point of understanding our own evolution - a theme Jonas Salk called "Conscious Evolution." Whatever the evolutionary mechanisms of the past, the fact that homo sapiens are in the process of consciously changing them is a discontinuity in the way that nature works. See previous workshop discussion on the Technological Singularity, first identified by workshop participant Vernor Vinge (who will be only attending the Thursday sessions of the workshop).

Sarah Murray of the Scripps Wellderly study will talk about their research into the genomics of successful aging ("healthspan").

Tanya Munnecke Moreno will talk about the state of Personal Genomics testing, and the Munnecke family genomics study (at the moment, 18 people over 4 generations)

David Ellerman will talk a bit about the theoretical aspects of comparing search/amplify dynamics to [1] genome-wide association studies.

• 6:00 refreshments, BBQ dinner

Thurs April 8, 2010

• 8:30 AM Coffee and pastry. Cheryl Munnecke is cooking her usual extravagant pastries, that may or may not be suitable for a complete breakfast. (The hotel offers a free breakfast buffet)

• 9:00 AM Session 2: "Good Apple" network models. If one bad apple spoils the whole barrel, then ever-larger barrels create an ever-greater risk that the bad apple will appear, as well as amplifying the damage it could do. Can we flip this dynamic to the positive? Is it possible that a good apple could improve the whole barrel? As we move from hierarchical to networked based control and interaction structures, how do we introduce network-based "search and amplify" models rather than hierarchical "plan and execute" models?
• 10:30 AM break
• 11:00 Heather Wood Ion, background on Jonas Salk's thinking on Creating an Epidemic of Health. Is there a "viral" model for the spread of the positive? Are their opportunities in the current health reform and national health information network to introduce innovative models? Are there lessons learned from the success of Alcoholics Anonymous that might be applicable to health care in general?
• 12:00 Lunch
• 1:30 Session 3 Great Global Conversations Learning through conversation (dialog) rather than lectures or papers (monologs) has a long history that is intensified by the global communications capabilities (and tensions) we see today. For example, TED offers "Riveting talks by remarkable people" done to very high professional standard. YouTube offers billions of videos with much lower production quality, some of which "go viral" to be seen by hundreds of millions of viewers. Conversations, such as those of this workshop, are much smaller and interactive. Dialogs do not scale the same way as monologs. While it is simple for 1 million people to look at the same YouTube as a monolog, trying to hold a conversation with 1 million people is a different problem altogether. If we accept that "people with the least to say often do the most talking," then open conversations are subject to the bad apple syndrome. How do we use communications technology to support great global conversations, retaining and amplifying both the value of conversation with the global reach of communications today? Is there a way of applying the good apple effect to conversations?

There have been many organizations and conferences in the past that have had notable conversations. There seems to have been some golden years for these kinds of groups from the 1950's to the 1970's. What were these conferences, and can we do "conversation mining" of them as "good ancestors" to current and future conversations with today's generation? Can we prepare these conversations for the future, seeking to become good ancestors for the future? Is there a way of creating Slow Conversations that support conversations over time (Diachronic) and size (Scale). We will be introducing a prototype of the Way Forward Machine as a experiment in supporting such an approach. We will also be looking at lessons learned from previous groups.

• 4:00 PM Leaky Future Conjecture: What if information from the future could influence its own past? Thought Experiment on Anticipatory Systems: How would we maintain a self-consistent future if the future could influence the past? (Invited guest: Dan Sheehan from USD, who held the first conference on Retrocausality at the 2006 AAAS meeting at USD)
• 7:00 Dinner at local restaurant

Fri, April 9, 2010

• 8:30 AM Coffee and pastry. Cheryl Munnecke is cooking her usual extravagant pastries, that may or may not be suitable for a complete breakfast. (The hotel offers a free breakfast buffet)
• 9:00 Session 4 - Where do we go from here? Is there a way of expanding the "Good Ancestor" discussions to a broader group? Nora Bateson, who is producing An Ecology of Mind, a film on her father Gregory Bateson's work, will participate in a conference call, talking about his participation in some of these conversations and what has happened since then. We also leave this time open discussion.

11:00 Closing discussion: Time for folks to discuss what they've learned from the workshop, as well as make offers/requests for the future.

• Noon - formal Adjourn

(participants are free to stay out until 4 PM for continued discussion)

Prior Workshops

• Santa Fe Institute, May 2002: Santa Fe co-hosted with Murray Gell-Mann
• New York City, Aug 2004 New York 2004,
• Washington, DC Jan, 2001 DC 2001,
• Washington, DC Nov, 2004 DC 2004,
• Wellesley, Ma. Aug, 2006 Wellesley
• Boston, MA. Nov, 2005 Boston 2005
• Paris, France, April 2006 Paris 2006
• Encinitas, Ca. Feb 2007 Encinitas 2007
• Encinitas, CA. Feb 2008 Encinitas 2008
• Encinitas, CA. May 2009 [[2]

Attendees

(attendees are listed according with their prior Uplift Academy workshop attendance)

Nora Bateson

Nora will participate via conference call to talk about her experiences with innovative cross-disciplinary groups. Growing up at Esalen, she is now producing a film about her father Gregory Bateson, An Ecology of Mind. She will reflect on some of the groups she knows about first hand and through her father's participation, as well as discuss possible future activities for "retrospective futurology" archiving technology. (Portrait by Tom Munnecke)

Joanne Deluca

Joanne is a co-founder of Sputnik.org She was creative director and co-founder of D&D, a design and advertising agency. Her work has been recognized with awards form Graphis, Print and Communication Arts, the Advertising Club of New York and Adweek Critic's Pick. Today, as Co-director of Sputnik Observatory, she counts herself among the lucky ones who gets to work with people that she admires on ideas that can make a simple day fantastical.

T. Clark Durant (Encinitas 2007, 2008)

Clark is a post-doctoral fellow in the Economics Department at New York University. His research is in constitutional design, with a focus on experiments with alternative electoral systems that try to maintain impartial politics in otherwise divided societies and to frame the accumulation of wisdoms in otherwise static constitutional systems.

David Ellerman (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Boston 2005, Paris 2006, Encinitas 2007, 2008, 2009)

David is visiting scholar at UC Riverside, and author of Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (Evolving Values for a Capitalist World) as well as Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life He works in the fields of economics and political economy, social theory and philosophy, and in mathematics. His undergraduate degree was in philosophy at M.I.T. ('65), and he has Masters degrees in Philosophy of Science ('67) and in Economics ('68), and a doctorate in Mathematics ('71) all from Boston University. He has been in and out of teaching in economics, mathematics, accounting, computer science, and operations research departments in various universities (1970-90), founded and managed a consulting firm in East Europe (1990-2), and worked in the World Bank from 1992 to 2003 where he was an economic advisor to the Chief Economist (Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern). Here is a video of his Apr 2006 presentation at the Paris Uplift Academy Workshop and his paper Autonomy-Respecting Assistance: Toward New Strategies for Development Assistance at the May 2002 Santa Fe Institute Workshop. Here is an audio of David's presentation “Helping People Help Themselves: Moving From Failed Methods of Economic Development to Alternative Strategies.” LA Future Salon 4 Mar 2007. Portrait by Vlasta Radan

Robert Foxworth

Bob Foxworth is an eclectic/actor, currently preparing to play King Lear at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. On Broadway he has featured in The Crucible, Love Letters, Ivanov, Honor, Judgement at Nuremberg, Twelve Angry Men and August: Osage County. He also starred in the national Broadway tour of Proof. He has performed the classic canon from The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and Center Stage in Baltimore to The Geffen in Los Angeles and Arena Stage in Washington DC. His voice work includes a dozen classic and new plays for Los Angeles Theatre Works radio series. Among his movie and TV roles, such as in the TV series The Storefront Lawyers (1970-1971), Foxworth is best known for his stints on Falcon Crest (he played Jane Wyman's long-suffering nephew, Chase Gioberti, from 1981-1987) and Six Feet Under (he played Bernard Chenowith from 2001–2003) as well as a starring role in Gene Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes. He also had a guest starring role on the seventh season of The West Wing and a guest spot on Law & Order. He has also guest starred in seaQuest DSV, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Outer Limits, Star Trek: Enterprise, Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5. He has done voice acting as the corrupt Professor Hamilton on Justice League Unlimited. He appeared in Syriana and was the voice of Autobot Ratchet in Transformers. (Portrait by Tom Munnecke)

Martin Latterich

Martin has more than fifteen years of industrial and academic experience in pharmacogenomics, proteomics, and the biochemistry of proteins and small molecules. His research and teaching focus on understanding the molecular basis of individualized drug response, an area essential for the development of a personalized medicine approach. Prior to joining Beth Anne in San Diego, he held a faculty appointment jointly between the University of Montreal, Faculty of Pharmacy, and the Montreal Heart Institute’s Pharmacogenomics Center. He has previously served on the faculty of McGill University (Montreal) as a Tier I Canada Research Chair and at the Salk Institute (San Diego) as an Assistant Professor. Currently, Martin is a Professor at Proteogenomics Research Institute for Systems Medicine focusing on understanding the systems dynamics of disease processes through genomics, epigenomics, expression profiling and proteomics. Martin has also held senior management and executive positions at several biotechnology companies, including Illumina, Inc., a company focused on commercializing technologies to enable personalized medicine. Martin has made seminal contributions to the field of integrative proteomics and pharmacogenomics, using innovative mass spectrometry and array-based biomarker detection techniques. He has authored peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals, edited several books, including one on systems biology, and published over 10 patents. His grant-funded work has been recognized by the 1998 Pew Scholar Award and the 1997 Basil O’Conner Starter Scholar award. Martin received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Durham (UK), and performed postdoctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was an American Cancer Society Fellow. In addition to his academic and administrative duties, he serves as consultant and board member to VC firms, pharmaceutical, and biotechnical companies. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Proteome Science and has served on numerous international discussion panels regarding biomarker discovery, diagnostics and personalized medicine.

Mary McGuinness

Mary McGuinness is a journalist, writer and cultural analyst. As a journalist, Mary has had the pleasure of interviewing amazing minds around the world, including artists, architects, authors, academics, biologists, designers, economists, entrepreneurs, inventors, physicists and technologists. Focused on contemporary ideas emerging in society, Mary's written work has been featured throughout various cultural and business media. A former Ivory Snow baby (1972), Mary received her BA from Binghamton University and finished her academic career at Oxford University, England. Mary currently lives in the West Village, NYC. Mary is co-director of the Sputnik Observatory,a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.

Tanya Munnecke Moreno

Tanya Moreno is Director of Research and Development at Pathway Genomics. She received her BA from UCSD and PhD in Developmental Neurobiology at CalTech, as well as a Post Doc at Salk Institute. She is doing a family genomic study of her family, including 18 members over 4 generations.

Tom Munnecke

Tom is host and organizer of this workshop. He took an early retirement as vice president and chief scientist at a Fortune 500 company in order to look at the intersection of technology and better world activities. During this career, he was one of the lead software architects of two of the largest hospital information systems in the world, the Veterans Administration's VISTA system and the Department of Defense's CHCS system. He was one of the original "Hardhats" featured in Philip Longman's Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours. After seeing his software evolve to support about 12% of the US Health Care system, he began to have doubts about the role of technology and health care. He considers the current health care system to be a slow moving train wreck, and attempts to make it more "efficient" will serve to make it get worse faster. The current system can best be seen as a "Disease Industrial Complex"; significant change will not come until we make the "positive flip" towards a new vision of health. To that end, he was one of the first champions of the Personal Health Record. He contributed the opening chapter (with Rob Kolodner) to Person-Centered Health Records : Toward HealthePeople. He is currently active as an investor and consultant in a number of startup companies in the Personal Health Record space.

Starting an "encore career" in 2000, he founded GivingSpace, which changed its name to Uplift Academy in order to broaden its focus to forms of uplift beyond financial giving. He was a 2003 fellow at Stanford's Digital Visions program, and is a Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures. He was interviewed as part of the Pew Internet Visionaries Interviews at the 2005 Accelerating Change Conference. He is on the board or consults with of a number of non-profit organizations.

He has a deep interest in networks of self-organizing, self-propagating systems, which he is exploring in a series of Uplift Academy workshops on the topic of "Infectious Good." He is particularly interesting in exploring evolutionary "search/amplify" models of uplift in contrast to more traditional "plan/execute" models favored by centralized approaches. He is also interested in deeper understanding of the notion of scale, coining the term, "Very Large Scale Uplift" to describe a model of very large number of individuals engaging in smaller positive scale interactions. The Good Ancestor Principle as discussed in this workshop is a way of visualizing a positive future "attractor" which "pulls" us forward, in contrast to a past "push" model that is driven by the problems of the past. He blames our 500 year old accounting system (which presumes that we can break complex interactions down to predefined transactions categorized at an instant in time, and then aggregate them linearly to a meaningful "bottom line." The problem is not that we don't have enough bottom lines, but rather that we are using bottom line thinking in the first place. After a 500 year run, he thinks we need a replacement for our accounting system.

Since he seemed to be off-topic everywhere he went, he started organizing workshops around general topic of how we can translate good intentions into good actions. He named his organization Uplift Academy independently of David Brin's use of "Uplift" noting that the Academy has nothing to do with dolphins (yet).

This is a video of his presentation at the 2007 Good Ancestors Principle Workshop and This is a video of his presentation to the 2007 International Symposium for the Study of Time. (Self Portrait by Tom Munnecke)

Sarah Murray

Sarah Murphy was director of the Genotyping Science Group at Illumina, a San Diego biotech, Dr. Murray played a large role in developing that technology. Now, with micro arrays that can rapidly analyze as many as a million SNPs, researchers can get better information on individual genes, giving them the data to conduct complex statistical studies to determine how gene variations lead to complex diseases. Though Dr. Murray had an important role in developing superior gene arrays, she was a bit wistful for lab work. Now that the technology had evolved sufficiently to decipher some of the fundamental relationships between genetics and disease, she wanted to be back in the trenches, using the technology she helped develop. The Scripps Genomic Medicine Program was the perfect opportunity. “I was making all these tools and looking at all these people doing such exciting work with these tools, and I wanted to be a part of it,” says Dr. Murray. “Our goal is not to publish a science paper, though I’m sure we will publish many. Our end game is taking this information and really helping to identify populations that will respond to specific drugs. But even that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We need to understand the metabolic pathways and enzyme pathways of disease and how to disrupt them.”

Nancy Tomich (Epidemic of Health, DC, 1997)

Nancy E. Tomich is Managing Director of the Institute of Federa Healt Care, a nonprofit organization devoted toward enhancing communication between federal agencies and the private sector. In this position, Ms. Tomich organizes roundtable discussions and forums on topics of vital interest in healthcare today, with the objective of promoting collaborative relationships that can lead to solutions and new ideas. Ms. Tomich also has served as co-chairman/organizer of several colloquia organized by the Sabin Vaccine Institute to address vaccine issues: the 2003 colloquium on ”Feasible Solutions to Global Vaccine Shortages,” the 2003 colloquium on “Chlamydia Vaccine Development” and the 2002 colloquium on “The Global Vaccine Shortage: The Threat to Children,” proceedings of which she edited. On March 29, 2001, Ms. Tomich retired as editor and publisher of U.S. Medicine, a publication serving health professionals working for the federal government. In that position, she exercised day-to-day executive management and oversight of all of the publication’s editorial and outreach activities. The publication maintained a worldwide circulation of approximately 45,000 during her tenure and achieved a reputation as the objective, authoritative source of information on federal healthcare issues. Ms. Tomich also established the Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Medicine, a $10,000 award designed to honor a significant advance in medicine originating in the federal sector. She is editor of and a contributing author to Medicine in the Gulf War. Ms. Tomich is a member of the scientific advisory council of the Center for the Study of International Medical Policies and Practices at George Mason University and co-chairs the Friends of OSAP, an organization which promotes infection-control practices. Ms. Tomich began her career at U.S. Medicine as a general reporter and advanced into the top editorial position in 1980, assuming the additional role of publisher in 1995. A native of Illinois, she attended the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and is a fellow of the Washington Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.

Frederick Turner (Encinitas 2007, 2008, 2009)

Fred is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of Genesis, an Epic Poem He was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, he was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (a terminal degree equivalent to the Ph.D.) in English Language and Literature.

See also his essays: Values as Strange Attractors, Unbearable Lightness of Cyberspace, Tat Tvam Asi: A feedback model of goodness and beauty

He has appeared on two PBS TV documentaries, "The Elephant on the Hill" and "The Web of Life", in the prizewinning Smithsonian World documentary series, and on the Discovery Channel's science documentary "Understanding Beauty". As a poet he is known especially for his use of the longer genres, the narrative, science fiction, and strict metrical forms. He is a founder of and spokesman for two recent and influential movements in contemporary American poetry, the New Formalism and the New Narrative (sometimes named together as Expansive Poetry). Another emphasis has been on the relationship between science and technology on one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. He has thus been involved in groundbreaking studies of the neurobiology of esthetics, the ritual and performative roots of the arts, and the humanistic implications of evolution, ecology, recombinant DNA technology, space travel, artificial intelligence, brain science, and chaos theory. His book The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit assesses the chances for a revival of our cultural energies at the turn of the millennium, based on the remarkable new developments in scientific cosmology and technology. E.O. Wilson reviewed this book: "it takes us past the wreckage of postmodernism to revive the dream of the unification of science and the humanities -- and hence of culture. Frederick Turner is an articulate spokesman for the small band of visionaries who know enough, and care enough, to make that dream realizable."

His contributions as an interdisciplinary scholar have been recognized, cited, or published in the fields of literary and critical theory, comparative literature, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociobiology, oral tradition studies, landscape architecture, planetary biology, space science, performance theory, education, the sociology of knowledge, ecological restoration, political philosophy, the physics of computation, theology, the history and philosophy of science and technology, translation theory, Medieval and Renaissance literature, media studies, architecture, and art history. He has been a consultant to NASA's long range planning group, and was invited to the Ames Space Center in California with Carl Sagan, Christopher McKay and other experts in 1991 for a workshop on Mars terraforming. He is a black belt (second degree) in the Shotokan school of Karate.

This are Fred's Closing Remarks at the 2007 Good Ancestor Principle Workshop and A Roadtrip Interview on Time with Tom Munnecke Portrait by Vlasta Radan.

Vernor Vinge (Encinitas 2007, 2009)

Vernor is a mathematician (retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University), computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, (review) as well as for his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences. Here is a summary of his Zones of Thought. This is a recording of his 2005 Accelerating Change Conference Keynote Address:

In his keynote address from Accelerating Change 2005, Vernor Vinge discusses the potential for a technological singularity - the event at which the creation of artificial superhuman intelligence changes the world so dramatically that it is impossible to imagine the world after that point. He explains that the singularity is not a given, nor is it necessarily a positive event. Many factors could arise that prevent the singularity from occurring and there is a potential for it to be a catastrophic event rather than a positive revolution.

Vinge suspects that if the Singularity arises after several years of progress rather than as an overnight event, it is more likely to be a positive step in human evolution. He calls this the "soft-takeoff," and offers some ideas that may encourage a longer approach to the point of change. The pace of progress may be exponentially increasing, but that does not preclude a gradual move toward the moment of transition.

See his essays on the Singularity and Evolution. Portrait by Tom Munnecke.

Heather Wood Ion (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Ben Lommond 2003, Encinitas, 2007,2008, 2009))

Heather is currently executive director of the Goldie Hawn Institute, author of Third Class Ticket, and co-author of Against Terrible Odds: Lessons in Resilience from Our Children. Jonas Salk gave her his meditation journals which contained many of his unpublished thoughts on evolution, "metabiology," and the issues facing our times. She will be opening the workshop with a review of Salk's philosophy of "ancestorhood." See Can What Counts Be Counted? and The Missing Link presented at the 2002 Santa Fe Institute workshop. Heather is a co founder of the Uplift Academy. This is a video of her Presentation at the 2007 Good Ancestors Principle workshop presentation

Judith Zissman

Judith Zissman is currently working on projects related to social, technical, and philosophical issues around personal digital archiving with a select group of individual, institutional, and corporate stakeholders.

Currently based in San Francisco, Judith works as a product strategist, helping large companies, startups, and arts organizations make abstract concepts and processes concrete and actionable. Her experience across disparate subject matter areas (a recent sampling: consumer credit, pandemic preparedness, rapid hardware prototyping, online gaming, search engine facilitation, and feature film production) enables Judith to make unique connections, pose provocative suggestions, and engage in fascinating conversations.

Judith's interests in questions of narrative construction, memory, and technology have been a persistent theme in both her consulting work and in her work as a visual artist. Her newest installation project, "Battle", will open in San Francisco in June 2010. She is active with efforts to create personal archiving technology.

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