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The Diary Of Max M

Captains Log. Stardate 05061999

Well I it is Friday night and I am all set up and ready to go. A little nervous about getting enough sleep aboard the train though. It will be pretty boring to travel by train for 12 hours and then falling asleep at the conference.

I have bought two Cocio chocolate milks and two bags of chocolate. It's a long trip and you never now. You might get hungry.

Also I have brought my laptop, an old Compaq with a P133, which I'm using to write this. For entertainment I brought the latest copy of Wired magazine, two bad Danish computer magazines, which I get for free through my work, a copy of "Software Development" magazine and the January version of Microsoft's "msdn Library" on a 3 CD set. I guess there's no chance that I will get bored although I will be away from a proper Internet connection for several days.

The trip to Copenhagen is fast with the new tunnel, and nothing special happens. I drink some kind of orange juice "power drink". I don't feel like coffee, but do need a little kick of energy.

At Copenhagen central station the train to Stockholm is easy to find, so now there's only about 600 Kilometers left in a sleeping compartment. As it turns out I am sharing the compartment with five Americans. An elderly couple and three sisters with Irish ancestors. They are all "doing Europe".

They are all very nice and quiet. It is easy to get some sleep. I cant help finding it funny how intimate the situation feels. Sleeping in a train with five strangers. I got the top bunk, and as everybody knows, heath dissipates upwards. I cannot take off my clothes as there is no blanket in front of my bed. Soon I am soaking wet.

When the train starts moving it is better though. Although the coupe gets colder, and I start to freeze in my wet clothes. Apparently nothing can satisfy me.

I wake up at around seven, feeling relaxed. I have slept nicely though not perfect. My stomach hurts a bit as I have tried desperately not to let a wind pass in the small coupe.

From the station I take a taxi to hotel Langholmen. It's a pretty short trip and costs me about 85 SKr.

In the lobby Anders Sandberg is waiting. We talk shortly, but are probably both feeling a little awkward about it. He is nice and humorous in his e-mail, so we will probably get along fine later, when we get used to each others body language.

It is always strange meeting someone in person that you have only met online. It's the same with Quake clans. You can have been playing online with somebody for months, and they keep whooping your ass in the game, but when you then meet it's some 17 year old shy pimpled geek. Not that I imply that Anders is Such :-)

In my room I took a bath, and discovered that there where no towels. I had arrived early. I actually first had the room from two o'clock, so they hadn't readied it yet. I called the lobby while dripping on the floor. A nice woman asked me if I needed it now or could wait until later. Well yeah ...

I then had a nice breakfast and went to my room to watch MTV and write some more on this.

At 10 o'clock the conference started, and people sort of came drifting in. I must say, this is probably the most diverse bunch of people I have ever seen gathered in one place.

Anders Sandberg and Waldemar Ingdahl in suits, as the only ones. Ant Brooks in a very colorful African suit and with blue hair. Alexander Bard with a very amusing hairdo and short pants. I was later amused to find out that he is the blond guy in "Army Of Lovers". A very sympathetic and intelligent person. Actually everybody I meet was.

There where people from Holland, Germany, South Africa, England Sweden and Denmark. That's pretty nice. Unfortunately there wasn't many from each country. My own personal ambition is that I will try to double the attendees from Denmark next year. Maybe I should bring my wife.

We drank coffee and where a little late from the beginning. After that Anders Sandberg started talking, and soon he had spoken himself warm and started loosing up. The plan of the Swedish Transhumans was to split into two organization. A profit and a nonprofit organization. They are about 60 members in all, but are spread out all over Sweden so they rarely meet

Bary from Transcedo told about the Dutch Transhumans, of which there are still few. They are working on it though.

He meant that we should not do any advertising for Transhumanism, as we could not convince anybody. They have to find us when they are ready. I partly agree in this, but I do believe that we can tell out view of the world in little pieces, and thus spread our memes. That way we can make more people aware of the ideas and it will be more likely that they will become ready to look for us.

Frank from DE:Trans told us a little about their organization. They are around 15 members. Also spread out all over the country.

Nick Boström, A Swede living in London, told us about WTA (the World Transhumanist Organization). There is between 7-800 members. He seemed worried that they had trouble getting people to actually do anything practical. After this introduction Anders Sandberg talked about "Practical intelligence amplification today." He showed a model of how the brain worked, and came up with some practical examples of how to enhance each part of our cognitive process. The remembrance agent seems to be a good tool.

About that time /kpj came into the room. Looking a bit like a Borg, with shades earplugs and wires taped to his neck. But in his own words "Appearance is not important!" as he replied when I said to him that he looked like he was deaf of hearing. It turned out he was recording the presentation on minidisk. Later he told me of the wast array of computers he had at home. 2 Amigas, 4 Macs, 3 Suns, some laptops and more. I thought that I was a nerd having 3-5 computers at home. Well at least I'm not alone.

I have no idea what /kpj's real name is.

Anders' talk ended and we had received a lot it of interesting information. Until now I have always considered the wearable guys a little nuts. I do take them a bit more serious now though.

The next talk was Ant Brooks, he talked about the state of the net in Africa. I am afraid that the impression I got wasn't much different than what I expected. There wasn't much bandwidth and not many computers.
Luckily Ant Is more optimistic than me. I really do hope that things will shape out for Africa, I just cannot see it happen myself as the infrastructure seem far from ready. One thing though, when you throw technology into the mix, things can get pretty unpredictable and maybe this is just what Africa needs.


Then it was Waldemar Ingdahl who talked about how to make Transhumanism profitable. I don't know about the others, but there really wasn't anything new for me here. Having had my own company for 16 years and currently working in an ad agency.

Generally it was a peptalk to make us all start our own businesses. Waldemar is apparently the most convinced libertarian of us European Transhumanists. He was pretty frustrated though that he could not shock anybody with his libertarian point of views. Anders told him to become a social democrat if he wanted to shock anybody in this crowd. Waldemar seemed a bit reluctant.

Next speaker was Henrik Öhström who talked about the genetics of the common disease and what to do about them. Generally he was very optimistic about what we are able to do with genetics. It seemed though that most of the fun stuff is illegal. On the other hand a lot of the procedures seemed buggy. And as Anders later said. "We don't want buggy food."

With the knowledge acquired about genetics it was time to call it a day. The food had generally been good. Actually the food was very good the whole weekend. After dinner, a bunch of people went to town. They must have had fun because they didn't look pretty the next day. The rest of us stayed at the hotel talking.

Anders, Remi and I ended up in comfy chairs speaking about all the usual Transhuman stuff. Off course these discussions are the best part of a conference and it was really cozy. At 1 o'clock I started feeling tired. I hadn't slept that well aboard the the train. So I said goodnight and went to bed. At TV there was MTV. There wasn't a video I had seen before. Mainly because I haven't watched MTV for a year.

Captains Log. Stardate 06061999

Next day started with a good breakfast after which I went back to my room, packed my back, and made the final corrections to my presentation.


The official program started with Remi Sussan, talking about Transhumans and their enemies. His main point was that they are not actually enemies, but parts of the cultural sphere and the society of mind, which had different angles than us Transhumans. In some things they would agree and in other they would disagree.

It seems that Remi Sussan is a bleeding heart humanist socialist and a nice person. I am glad that we have that diversity among the European Transhumanist. It makes for much more refined discussions than is often seen i.e. on the Extropy mailing list.

A strong point that he came up with was the fact that Transhumanism can remind a lot of Nazism, and we should be very aware about this. "We must not be tempted by the dark side." We should be ready and have a mental defense ready if fascist where ever to try and adapt Transhumanism, so we can keep them out. I totally agree in this.

We want to be posthumans not übermensch.


Nick Boströms speech about Transhumanist bio ethics was very interesting He raised a lot of valid points of how we need a aperture for dealing with ethics in areas like genetic engineering. He had some good examples about how the political system didn't seem to grasp any of it (big surprise), but furthermore he showed how a rational discussion about the subjects could actually take place.

I do hope that he will put an article on the net so I can study it more. The speech was one of this weekends highlights for me.


Next up was Alexander Bard who tried to classify Transhumanism. He talked about a branch of philosophy called Nomad Philosophy. His own term was mobilism.

Alexander is a good speaker and the talk was very informative as well as entertaining. He showed us that liberalism, Conservatism, Socialism and Communism was really part of the same thing. Fundamentalist beliefs combined with etatism. Things stay the same way, and we need a big government. These are the reasons, he believed, that finally the would become out of touch with times and disappear.
.
These ideas are pretty new to me so I have yet to form an opinion. A lot of it seemed valid. I guess I will have to read Focault.

This speech was another of the weekends highlights for me.


The last official event was my discussion. I felt a little nervous starting it. Normally when I do speeches and presentations I am pretty cool about it. But this was an above-normal-intelligence audience. It went OK though. I guess. I started out with some general ideas about marketing and communication. Then I presented my idea of making a portal that all Transhumanists could communicate through. I was generally well received.

We agreed that although it should be under the WTA it should be with a separate URL, public-image and audience than the Transhumanist Journal. This way the Transhumanist Journal could still be a more serious academic publishing

So I will be going ahead with that. An Alpha version should appear soon. And then moving gradually into Beta. By the end of the year my goal is to have version 1.0 up and running under Apache, on Linux using mod_perl.

The software will be open source. This way other Transhuman groups will be able to make their own portals pretty easily. I.e. the Extropians in the states.


Finally Anders summed up the two days, we took a group picture and it all ended. Well sort of.

Most of us went to an Indian restaurant where we had dinner. After that we split up. Most of the Swedes going home, and me and most of DE:Trans went to the hotel where we talked for about an hour.

After that I got into a cab to the central station, where I bought Scott Adams: The Dilbert Future. Usually his books are a great read.

A young Asian woman had taken my place in the sleeping train, but it turned out that she and her husband was in the wrong car altogether. I got a middle bunk on the way home, which had a much better temperature than the top bunk, so I slept pretty well after having read half of the Dilbert book.

Captains Log Stardate 07061999

Back in Odense the weather was just like it had been in Stockholm. I found my bike and rode it to work.