The past weekend saw the ninth Geek Picnic. This is an annual Russian science/sci-fi festival where technologists and futurists come together to hear lectures presentations, see tech exhibits, and do other futuristic things.
I decided to come to this one to see what’s it’s all about. Some of you may have followed my Twitter thread on it – now available as a blog post, updated and expanded.
Appropriately, it was near the Sparrow Hills metro station, a charmingly archeofuturist construction of glass columns surrounded by forested park, looking out on the Luzhniki stadium and skyscrapers from one direction, the occult-like HQ of the Russian Academy of Sciences from the other.
Sponsored by the LDPR? 🙂
Entrance to the Geek Picnic.
The Geek Picnic itself is separated into a few separate areas, including the food court, the Main Stage (for star guests and musical performances), Geek Kids (self-explanatory), the Picnic area (games, books, cosplay), and the Campus area (which features topical lecture tents and exhibits, such as Artificial Intelligence, Outer Space, (Im)mortality, GameDev, and Neurospot.
This year’s main theme was radical life extension.
The Chinese company Unitree Robotics presented their household robot Laikaguo. It’s nowhere near as impressive as the spry specimens offered up by Boston Dynamics, but the difference is that they will actually be within range of household budgets.
The Unitree designer Xing Wang said that he expects household robots to become to the 2020s what smartphones were to the past decade.
Cosplayers.
This was the pavilion devoted to “old school games.”
Incidentally, Moscow also has a cafe + museum of Soviet arcade machines, which I wrote about here.
Prince of Persia brings back memories. My best time on that was 29 mins.
Stellarc is a transhumanist artist who is into body modification performances.
“Nick Land unpublished texts can be seen on the right” – Momino.
His shtick is all kinds of “creepy and uncanny” artistic experiments. One of his performances involved him getting suspended naked by hooks attached onto the flesh on his back. Other performances explore bodily autonomy, in which people connected to him via the Internet get to control his arm for a few days, while his head is strapped into a VR helmet that feeds him the visual experiences of another man half a world away during that same period of time.
But he is most famous for growing an ear on his arm, which anybody in the world can listen into.
Glory to the Haemonculi!
A girl with hair styled in the colors of the Russian state imperial flag.
Anti-ageing researcher Aubrey de Grey was this year’s star guest. He made his standard speech about his core philosophy – namely, that since understanding the mechanics of ageing to the extent where we can prevent it from happening is too hard…
… we should concentrate – for now – on coming up with ways on how to clean up the seven types of damage to the body that our metabolism produces.
I will not repeat what he said in much detail – it was a standard talk, and you can find much more information about SENS online.
Here are the more interesting things I noticed:
(1) Aubrey’s public speaking has improved tremendously since when I last met him at a Transhuman Visions conference in 2014. Good on him.
(2) He says he likes coming to Russia. Apparently, he doesn’t get asked as many stupid questions here.
(3) Most importantly, he has very good news to report on the anti-ageing front. Aubrey now puts what I understand to be Robust Human Rejuvenation at 15-17 years from now, which would translate to 2034-46 (previous estimate this February was 2037). For context, he only became bold enough to start putting out probability estimates last year.
(4) Why the confidence? Because there is a growing avalanche of money going into this sphere, with new companies sprouting up every week (investors don’t tend to bet on moonshots). Moreover, all seven strategies (for engineered negligible senescence) are now under mouse experimentation or will be so by the following year. There is also now a plan to enable human clinical trials of genuine rejuvenation biotech by 2021 (“Project 21”).
I told Aubrey it might be a good idea to carry out an expert survey amongst gerontologists on when Robust Mouse/Human Rejuvenation will happen (like AI researchers have done on AGI). I pointed out while many gerontologists don’t want to publicly associate with his “out there” ideas, this may not hold true in the context of an anonymous poll (e.g. you don’t see many AI experts talking about machine superintelligence, but expert polls show the median projection for that to happen to be around 2050). Having an expert poll showing significant expert acceptance of the legitimacy of the SENS approach would help shake off his reputation as a “maverick” operating outside the scientific consensus.
Hopefully he might give this some consideration.
My transhumanist acquaintance Alexey Turchin, whom I first met way back in my Hipsterfornia days, made a speech on “Digital Immortality: How to Collection Information In Such a Way That a Future AI Will Be Able to Resurrect Us.”
Unfortunately, his lecture coincided with Aubrey’s, so between him and Aubrey I had to choose the latter.
Yandex rep Anton Slesarev: Driverless taxis in Moscow in 3-4 years.
This is corporate PR so I suppose take it with a grain of salt, but he says Yandex is one of the global leaders in this sphere and in the world’s top 3-5. In fairness, that’s not hard to believe.
I got a biography of Richard Feynman for asking the best question.
There was an nVidia demo showing off their latest VR environment, which you can interact with through a pair of remote controllers that correlate to your arms in the simulation.
Very cool.
Very SWPL.
(Performance by the “Desert Planet” bank).
“Tesla Show” rated at 5 million volts, with drone thrown in for good measure.
Day 2. Began with a talk on CRISPR. Unfortunately, the speaker wasn’t great, and there were numerous technical programs with the equipment.
Book prize was selection was based, though… Pinker’s The Blank Slate (only translated into Russian last year), and even Wade’s Our Troublesome Inheritance.
Danila Medvedev, head of the Russian Transhumanist Movement, talked about the modern history of what had begun as Russian cosmism more than a century ago now.
Incidentally, he said he believes that augmenting IQ should be an even higher priority than radical life extension. I happen to strongly agree.
Andrey Borisenko, Russian cosmonaut.
Borisenko is positive about the prospects of the Russian space program, despite much larger economies of the US and China. “Their GDP might be five timer larger, but we can do the same things five times cheaper.”
It’s worth noting that Geek Picnic is very heavily corporate endorsed. Just a short sample of companies that had a heavy presence:
- Volkswagen displayed their cars
- Norilsk Nickel had their pavilion too, also with VR displays (but low quality)
- Tele2
- Vkontakte
- Yandex
- Russian news organizations: RIA, RT, Kommersant, Komsomolskaya Pravda
- nVidia
- Strongbow cider
Final lecture I went to was Alexander Tyshkovsky, a bioinformatician and presenter at a YouTube science channel.
Mouse Biodiversity (MBD): If I understood this right (will try to confirm), only 20% of mouse breeds actually showed longevity improvements from calorie restricted diet.
Interesting takes:
(1) Tyshkovsky is less upbeat than De Grey; thinks next 15 years will merely see visibly effective longevity supplements, but not Robust Human Rejuvenation. But suspects people now in their 20s will live to immortality.
(2) Also said there is little experimental longevity science in Russia since feeding the mice with special supplements daily is expensive. However, much of this is now bioinformatics, and mainly only needs computers, so Russia can still compete.
Incidentally, I also met the executive director of KrioRus here. As I said, this event attracts all sorts of interesting people like moths to a flame. So if things work out, I might be able to personally report on Russia’s Alcor before the end of this month.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
You can find all my travel posts here.
My personal website has a list of all of my travel reviews here.
I’m interested in how lab mice are raised and bred.
Aren’t they given resources and don’t have the same competitive pressures and predation as mice in the wild? Plus, of course, they have short generation time. So, wouldn’t they normally accumulate a lot of deleterious mutations? Or do they have some special sort of purifying selection?
BTW, I have hear the crazy urban legend that they adulterate dog food in the US to test anti-aging technology. But if they did that sort of thing, it would probably be something more nefarious, like making dogs gayer.
Close. Just replace anti-aging technology with cheap Chinese adulterated ingredients that kills thousands of pets.
Protein adulteration in China
Timeline of the 2007 pet food recalls
The show seems a bit empty. Were there not many people or this is a problem with picture framing?
How old are you? Because I heard the same thing word-for-word back when V.I.Lenin was still important. I’m not old enough to know what the hot new innovation talk was about during the turn of the 20th century, but I have my suspicions.
Erm…
What was the male to female ratio of people at this event? Likewise what was the Central Asian/Caucasus to Slavic ratio?
Strongbow cider? Lol.
In Britain, it is known as tramp juice.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/17/cider-industry-protected-expense-alcoholics
I guess they are marketing it as a premium product in Russia, in the same way that Stella Artois did in the UK.
About 2/3 men.
Obviously, almost entirely Russian/European.
Glad to see Russia continuing its long held tradition of imported the absolute worst from the west.
Most common types of mice used in research have been interbred for a very long time, in most famous cases starting before WWII. It’s fundamental for reproducibility that the black mice BL6, for example, have the same genome across time and place. An additional benefit is that most common strains can be bought from outside sources, without wasting researchers time with the tedium of breeding.
Also, there is active surveillance to separate mice that get aggressive at their roommates. There is nothing to gain in upsetting a mouse condemned to life in a shoebox, with “competitive pressures” or any other unrelated troubles, unless you are studying psychology / sociology.
A standard mouse costs some 30 dollars, its standard care in your research facility – about 1 dollar a day. This makes shorter experiments preferable.
i don’t know about life-extension but keeping people much healthier for much longer is looking very achievable – Sardinian elderly vs western elderly.
Glad to see sovoks don’t consider Fyodorov, Tsiolkovsky, and Vernadsky to be Russians.
They don’t deserve them.
Probably just a function of their greater Early European Farmer ancestry.
Any new breakthroughs in cloning and artificial womb technology? The future waits for the mighty clone armies of Russian Galactic Empire. 😉
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1128787298437533703
https://m100group.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/starkiller_clones.png
How to Live to be 200 by Stephen Leacock, 1910.
https://americanliterature.com/author/stephen-leacock/short-story/how-to-live-to-be-200
Strongbow has been in the hard cider business for many years. The new ciders that have a higher alcohol content are made like the super alcohol infused beers (malt liquor, steel beer etc) for the poorer alcoholic community. The regular stuff is quite good, I especially like(d) the ‘dry’ Strongbow (all other versions tend to be too sweet for my taste), although I don’t think that it’s made anymore. I used to have a can of it for lunch along with a burger and fries at a local outside grill joint, very refreshing. The only ‘dry’ hard cider that I’ve been able to locate lately is made by “Angry Orchard”, not too bad either…
And you consider Vernadsky to be a Russian, which one? 🙂
Both of the Vernadsky considered themselves Russian. Karlin of course is referring to Vernadsky Older
Graft Farm Flor cider is exceptional – very dry, rustic, and tart. Their whole line is good.
However it has a high alcohol content at 6.9 ABV.
https://www.google.com/search?q=graft+cider+farm+flor&client=ms-android-asus-wypm&hl=en&prmd=msivn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKgoLk17zjAhWMneAKHTiSArUQ_AUIFygD&biw=360&bih=560#imgrc=sGaxc3jWbdkVGM
Well, it’s not so black & white as you might think, for the Vernadsy clan was of Ukrainian ethnic origin that espoused some pretty strong “svidomist’ views. According to Russian scholar Igor Turbikov, George Verenadsky:
Hi father, Vladimir. the one I think that Karlin is so infatuated with had these things to say about his Ukrainian ethnicity:
These are just a few of the ‘svidomite’ secrets revealed about the Vernadsky clan in this thoroughly enjoyable article.
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/93700/OP302.pdf
The best part about this is the Strongbow Cider sponsorship. I mean the event as a whole sounds great and I’ll be sure to go some day, but Strongbow is a great cider.
Adam, perhaps you should label the author of the piece, Igor Trubikov, as a “troll”. Don’t shoot at me, I’m only the messenger! 🙂
I grew up on tsiolkovski and Vernadski. But who was Fyodorov ?
A link please. Can be in Russian
We need a movie.
Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Queers.
The “original” Strongbow is still made, but for some reason is not widely sold in the US. If you’re there, you may be able to find it in the “slim can” variety pack.
i think that is probably correct but another way of looking at that statement is they have the same diet as their ancestors and so are fully adapted to it.
maybe other populations have got sicker since the 1960s cos they changed what they eat?
i’m guessing tailored diets will turn out to be as transformative as tailored medicine (but faster).
They are aggressively marketing in Portugal as well
Strongbow they sell in Russia is a small glass bottle. While the local English/EU version is a can. Also alcohol content is different (lower) in Russia.
Well, I’m in Russia this week, although to be honest I don’t feel temptation to try to look for this weakened English cider in the supermarket.
What kind of cool televisions this group were using there, and this Twin Famicom:
https://www.facebook.com/retrotechsquad/photos/pcb.1060296160836902/1060295750836943/?type=3&theater
It’s a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Famicom
They also have other nice things according to Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/retrotechsquad/photos/a.1051687235031128/1051693541697164/?type=3&theater
https://www.facebook.com/retrotechsquad/photos/a.566295550236968/612598078940048/?type=3&theater
AK ought to stop hunching his shoulders forward when he stands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov#Transhumanism
influenced other two.
When people do things like standing in an eccentric way, then maybe this represents something interesting about the person.
In general, I don’t wish people should change things like that, as it is part of their personality. Maybe they should rather be proud of their original way of standing.