David Wood, who normally MC's the meetings, gave the presentation, up on the fifth floor of Birbeck College. The conference was set up by a Russian millionaire, Dmitry Itskov, and seemed to be mostly about the advances in cybernetics which seems to be in line with the sponsors aims. He's proposed the idea of moving our minds into Avatars (like the movie) in a five step programme over the next thirty years or so.
It was also a state-of-the-art conference as well, with a heavy emphasis on neuroscience and prosthetics, including a video of a Cambridgeshire man, Nigel Ackland, who lost his right hand and part of the arm in an accident and had it replaced with an advanced prosthesis:
The presentation was well done by David, but, as was pointed out in the Q&A afterwards, his emphasis was on the technological, the "hard" science, rather than the spiritual or psychological, the "soft" science. Also, two of the things missing, which were purported to be amongst the aims of the conference, were future society and culture.
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