AGI-World

Bryan Appleyard’s new book, How to Live Forever or Die Trying, includes a chapter (available online) about ImmInst’s Atlanta Conference, including commentary about Bruce Klein(me!), Ben Goertzel, Novamente and a number of other life extension pioneers, such as Susan Fonseca-Klein, Aubrey de Grey, Martine Rothblatt, James Hughes, Max More and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Here’s a quick excerpt:

Bruce Klein founded The Immortality Institute (Imminst) in 2002 as a non-profit organisation with the aim of ‘conquering the blight of involuntary death’. Klein was brought up in the town of Americus, ‘a jewel of Georgia’, in Bible Belt America, the deep south. ‘Yeah, I’m a southern redneck!’ he jokes. His family was not especially religious, though he did observe the Catholicism of his mother until the age of eleven when he took a phone call from their priest. ‘I said to him I didn’t believe any more. He got kind of upset and I hung up the phone. It was some kind of visceral thing.’

Klein was thirty-one when I met him at Imminst’s conference at the Georgia Tech Conference Center, Atlanta, in November 2005. The conference turned out to be a snapshot of the immortalist front line. It is a movement that is part cult and part serious science. But all were united by the fervency of their belief in the rightness of the project of extending life and by their vehement rejection of deathism and scepticism. The participants saw themselves as visionaries and frequently beleaguered pioneers of the only new frontier left to mankind. Klein is a groomed, fit-looking man. His wife and ‘wonderful friend’, Susan Fonseca-Klein, co-founder and director of the institute, is round-faced and pretty. Together, they have the air not of a threateningly glamorous but of a consolingly ideal couple – young, healthy, good-natured, extravagantly friendly, ambitious, optimistic, glowing. One could imagine them in an advertisement for breakfast cereal.

Most of their work is involved with running Imminst, though Klein does say he manages some property and investments. His degree from the University of Georgia is in finance. He had just moved from Atlanta to Bethesda, Maryland. He is also president of Bethesda-based Novamente, a small firm devoted to the construction and commercialisation of the Novamente AI Engine, an ‘artifical general intelligence oriented software system’, and he wished to be closer to that project and its presiding thinker Ben Goertzel.
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Goertzel, who was also at the conference, is aggressively scruffy with tangled, heavy metal hair and jeans barely clinging to his hips. As he queued to ask a question of one of the speakers, I took him for a bum who had wandered in off the empty downtown streets and was preparing myself for an embarrassing incident culminating in his ejection from the hall. In fact, he was himself a speaker and a maths professor, though whatever normality that implies is swiftly detonated by the discovery that his first son is named Zarathustra Amadeus and his second Zebulon Ulysses. The more restrained Klein is, in spite of his wife’s protests, putting off having children until he has made the world ‘a safer place’, ideally by banishing death.

Along with increasing numbers of people in the immortality field, Klein believes artificial intelligence may be the best way forward, hence his new partnership with Goertzel. There are two possibilities arising from AI. Either a super-intelligent computer could master the medical problems of human ageing that currently baffle us or, more speculatively, we could back-up our personalities by downloading them on to such a machine.

ImmInst Discussion