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Last month, I created and moderated a series of IONS webinars on collective consciousness. The social backdrop couldn’t have made it more timely. Still in the midst of a global pandemic, in the United States the triumph of the human spirit demonstrated by entering a new golden age of space exploration stood in harsh contrast to the nearly simultaneous, devastating tragedies on the ground that inspired a newly invigorated, global Black Lives Matter movement — making clear, yet again, that if there is a shared mind of humanity, it’s not united.

Guest Bloggers Evalina Everidge and Marc Blesoff are part of A Tribe Called Aging, heartfelt activists and thinkers who are trying to understand and change our culture’s outlook, policies and fears about aging and dying.

We may very well be at an evolutionary tipping point in human history. With the global pandemic affecting people all around the world, it illuminates where our systems and social structures are failing and it makes clear the need for a new way of being with self and others. The IONS Team had a chance to sit down and talk with Dr. Geneen Marie Haugen, author and nature guide with Animas Valley Institute. She spoke to us about this moment in human history as a collective initiatory journey. In her blog titled Chaos, and a Collective Initiatory Journey, Geneen writes:

Our mission at IONS is to reveal the interconnected nature of reality through scientific exploration and personal discovery. We understand that it is not enough to illuminate ideas and research about our interconnectedness, but together as a community we must stand for integrating these ideas and ways of being into the social structures of our time.

IONS is proud to support the work of up-and-coming noetic explorers who are uniquely positioned to take this field to new heights. With our NextGen Consciousness in Action Awards, we honor people who seek to uplift culture — change makers who seek to make a positive impact in the world, and whose work extends into domains well beyond anything we could have conceived.

We are at a crossroads in humanity, an evolutionary tipping point. Our collective hearts have been broken open by recent events of senseless violence, and we have seen millions of people standing together in solidarity — calling forth a world in which true justice and equality can be established for all people.

Safety in artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic these days. How can we ensure that an AI system would not harm humans? Let’s imagine an autonomous AI robot which is programmed to help humans by doing housework. Now let’s imagine that while the robot is cleaning the house, guests arrive with children who are curious about the robot. The primary utility function of the robot is to clean the house, not engage socially with people, so the AI robot might push or even harm the children in order to fulfill its task. A simple solution is to have a “kill-switch” on the AI robot body, which, if activated, would cause the AI system to turn itself off in situations where it may cause harm. However, pressing the kill-switch would also prevent the robot from completing its primary function, housework, so it might attempt to prevent or even fight any person trying to activate the kill-switch. This is obviously not an ideal solution.

The world as we know it has been up-ended, requiring us to rapidly innovate new ways of living, working, and being in community with each other. The COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread protests demanding racial justice in response to the tragic death of George Floyd have awakened deeper questions, and a longing among like-minded explorers of consciousness to connect more deeply.

Many of you have likely heard that psychic abilities run in families. While this may be true, there hasn’t been any research studies that look at this concept using modern tools of genetic analysis. One study in Scotland looked at family trees of people with the Second Sight and found that psychic abilities appear to run in families.

Scientists from IONS recently published a book chapter on “Self-health Monitoring and Wearable Neurotechnologies” in the Handbook of Clinical Neurology. This blog includes excerpts from that chapter.