Sonia Arrison (born September 8, 1972) is an American author of books and articles relating to the impact of technology on human life, [1] including national bestseller 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, a book on research into life extension. [2] [3]
Born in Alberta, Canada to a pharmacist mother and a chemical engineer father, Arrison studied political science at the University of Calgary in the mid-1990s. [4] She became interested in the political impact of the internet, [4] which eventually led to her becoming director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute, a libertarian think tank headquartered in San Francisco, in the early 2000s. [5]
In 2000, Arrison published a column in the San Francisco Chronicle opposing San Francisco's adoption of an "open access" policy for cable operators. [6] She also criticized San Francisco's 2006 decision to provide free wireless telecommunications access throughout the city, writing that "[a] city administration that cannot fix our streets, run an effective public transport system, address the tragedy of the homeless and reduce taxes has no business monopolizing the Internet." [7] In 2007, Arrison described the transparency in pledge and donation amounts to be an important open-source element of moneybomb success, stating that "[t]hose revelations stand in direct contrast to traditional campaigns, which tend to be silent and proprietary about who is donating." [8] Arrison was also Chairman of the Board of Governors of Lead21, through which she met her husband, Aydin Senkut, [4] who was "one of Google's first employees". [9] [10]
Arrison was an Associate Founder of Singularity University. [9] [10] In a 2010 New York Times interview, she described her motivation for writing 100 Plus, which was then a work in progress, and which was described along with Singularity University as "her attempts to ready people for the inevitable". [9] "One day we will wake up and say, 'Wow, we can regenerate a new liver'", Ms. Arrison says. "It will happen so fast, and the role of Singularity University is to prepare people in advance". [9] 100 Plus "outlines changes that people can expect as life expectancies increase, like 20-year marriages with sunset clauses". [9]
100 Plus was published in 2011, with a foreword by Peter Thiel, a longtime friend whom Arrison had introduced to leading life extension researchers. [2] Arrison was a speaker at the October 2011 Singularity Summit in New York, and appeared as a guest on Stossel on December 22, 2011. [11] In a 2012 CBS News interview, Arrison stated that she was inspired to write 100 Plus after viewing an episode of the U.S. reality TV series, The Swan , in which participants were overjoyed to receive a makeover involving relatively minor plastic surgery procedures. Arrison stated that this got her to thinking about the possible societal changes accompanying the much more substantial changes becoming possible through new medical advances. [12]
Another interview noted that while critics worry that increased longevity will spur overpopulation, "Aubrey de Grey and Sonia Arrison, two leading advocates of life extension and advisers to the Palo Alto Prize, brush these concerns aside". [1] The piece continues, "Arrison notes that the rate of global population expansion is slowing", but "claims that increasing the healthy life span, by extending the sweet spot of adulthood that combines vigor with the wisdom of experience, will give the world's best minds more time to innovate solutions to humanity's problems". [1]
Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health technology, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel is an American writer, best known for her romance novels. She is the bestselling living author and one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time, with over 800 million copies sold. As of 2021, she has written 190 books, including over 140 novels.
John Frank Stossel is an American libertarian television presenter, author, consumer journalist, political activist, and pundit. He is known for his career as a host on ABC News, Fox Business Network, and Reason TV.
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Singularitarianism is a movement defined by the belief that a technological singularity—the creation of superintelligence—will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity benefits humans.
Faith Prince is an American actress and singer, best known for her work on Broadway in musical theatre. She won the Tony Award for Best Actress in Guys and Dolls in 1992, and received three other Tony nominations.
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Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin. Sanchez is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
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Cynthia Jane Kenyon is an American molecular biologist and biogerontologist known for her genetic dissection of aging in a widely used model organism, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. She is the vice president of aging research at Calico Research Labs, and emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Identity tourism refers to the ways in which travel ties into different dimensions of identity. It covers travel motivated by interest in ones own or others' racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, sexual or gender identity. It also concerns the construction of cultural identities and re-examination of one's ethnic and cultural heritage via tourism.</ref>
Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles.
A centenarian is a person who has attained the age of 100 years or more. Research on centenarians has become more common with clinical and general population studies now having been conducted in France, Hungary, Japan, Italy, Finland, Denmark, the United States, and China. Centenarians are the second fastest-growing demographic in much of the developed world. By 2030, it is expected that there will be around a million centenarians worldwide. In the United States, a 2010 Census Bureau report found that more than 80 percent of centenarians are women.
The Singularity Summit was the annual conference of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. It was started in 2006 at Stanford University by Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Peter Thiel, and the subsequent summits in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 have been held in San Francisco, San Jose, New York City, San Francisco, New York City, and San Francisco respectively. Some speakers have included Sebastian Thrun, Rodney Brooks, Barney Pell, Marshall Brain, Justin Rattner, Peter Diamandis, Stephen Wolfram, Gregory Benford, Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg, Juergen Schmidhuber, Aubrey de Grey, Max Tegmark, and Michael Shermer.
Sonia Livingstone is a leading British scholar on the subjects of children, media and the Internet. She is Professor of Social Psychology and former head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. While Livingstone’s research has evolved since the start of her career in the 1980s, her recent work explores media and communication in relation to society, children and technology. Livingstone has authored or edited twenty-four books and hundreds of academic articles and chapters. She is known for her continued public engagement about her research areas and has advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, OECD, ITU and UNICEF, among others, on children’s internet safety and rights in the digital environment. In 2014, Livingstone was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to children and child Internet safety".
Katy Butler is an American journalist, essayist and author of Knocking on Heaven's Door, the Path to a Better Way of Death, and The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life.
Laura Deming is a venture capitalist whose work focuses on life extension, and using biological research to reduce or reverse the effects of aging.
Vivienne L’Ecuyer Ming is an American theoretical neuroscientist and artificial intelligence expert. She was named as one of the BBC 100 Women in 2017, and as one of the Financial Times' "LGBT leaders and allies today".
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