Philippe van Nedervelde is a futurist and transhumanist Belgian reserve officer, virtual reality expert, public speaker, and media specialist with various futurist organizations, and an international vocal public advocate of technology and science.
Van Nedervelde is a futurist and transhumanist writer, activist, and speaker. He advocates for space settlements to avoid human extinction. He claims that his motivation is due to a desire to answer the big questions of life and to continue life as long as possible. Van Nedervelde is a member of the peer2peer Foundation; on the Board of World Technology Award Judges, Materials category for the World Technology Network; appointed advisor to the board of the now defunct Extropy Institute; on the Board of Advisors to Adaptive A.I. Inc., the parent company of SmartAction; one of the signators to the 2014 Technoprogressive Declaration; a regular speaker at Humanity+'s annual Transvisions Conference; a speaker on Coast to Coast AM, speaking on weaponized nanotechnology and smartdust; and cited by the Human Enhancement Study sponsored by the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment. Van Nedervelde is one of the co-founders of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, along with William Sims Bainbridge, Howard Bloom, artificial intelligence theorist Ben Goertzel, Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Martine Rothblatt, Giulio Prisco and others.
Van Nedervelde was an early developer in virtual reality. He is the founder of E-spaces, a virtual reality and 3D graphics studio; the patent-filing inventor of C-Thru, applying VR to security systems; and co-CEO of X3D Technologies, Inc., a virtual worlds production company co-founded and co-owned by Hollywood movie-director Michael Bay. Van Nedervelde directed E-spaces' production of twelve online 3D training simulators for British Petroleum and the broader oil and gas industry to certify well lease operators in the maintenance and troubleshooting of oil and gas well surface equipment. He also developed virtual reality projects for the Munich Airport Center, Simsala Grimm, Virtual Europe, and the transhumanist-themed sculpture in Martine Rothblatt's Teresem Island. Van Nedervelde co-founded the security-surveillance technology company Panoptic Systems, Inc., by applying his user-interface and virtual reality design knowledge to optimize the ergonomics and performance of security-surveillance systems. Van Nedervelde coined the phrase "Multi-laterally Assured Pervasive Permanent Sur-/Sous-veillance" to describe an alternative to the Cold War-era doctrine of mutually assured destruction. MAPPS describes a situation total surveillance and sousveillance, and thus nobody has the opportunity to plan and deploy a large-scale organized armed aggression.
Nanotechnology expert
Van Nedervelde was the Executive Director for Europe of the Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology think-tank, from 1997 to 2014. He also holds the position of Global Task Force member for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. As Executive Director for Europe, Van Nedervelde interfaced with the media and represents the institute at European Union events, including EU parliamentary hearings. He has spoken at various conferences, including a working group on unconventional security threats, organized in Washington D.C. by the Strategic Assessments Group of the US Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence. Van Nedervelde co-authored the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology and was cited in Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near.
Van Nedervelde serves on the board of directors of the Lifeboat Foundation, an organization dedicated to reducing existential threats in the world. He also serves as the International Spokesperson for the foundation, representing it by fundraising, giving multimedia presentations, and addressing the media. Van Nedervelde stated that the foundation's programs fill a gap left by governments and corporations, which "only think short term, so we felt that it was critical for an organization to focus on the long term and worry about existential risks to humanity."
Van Nedervelde is the Director of International Development for the 2045 Initiative, a non-profit that seeks cybernetic immortality by the year 2045. He served as the keynote speaker and engaged the audience with science and technology goals during the 2013 Global Future 2045 conference at the Lincoln Center in New York.
