Check out the new IEET donation premiums. And suggest your own.

When you think of the ideal creative environment, what comes to mind?  We may imagine a place where you have freedom of expression, a place that encourages breaking convention, somewhere that is abundant in resources that are readily accessible for innovative development of technology, and exposure to many different cultures for inspiration and collaboration. So as you imagine this ultimate creative playground, does Cuba come to mind?

I was recently interviewed by Sebastian Alvarez of Wanderlust. We covered such topics as video-gaming pets, the future of nonhuman animals, and cultural uplift. Check it out:

In this second selection of speculative fiction, and excerpt from a forthcoming novel, David Brin asks how we will keep our machine mind progeny loyal.

A series of activist events for radical life extension recently took place in Israel.

Humans want to believe that they’re the smartest creatures on the planet. But the more we understand octopuses, the more it seems that we may not be alone in our ability to solve problems, make complex connections between ideas, and survive by wits alone. A growing body of evidence — a lot of it still anecdotal — suggests that octopuses show elements of human-like intelligence.

To many modern readers, the issue between the Koreas is distant and a bit unreal. We see the now-deceased comical madman leader and his hapless current heir. This author’s father, on the other hand, lost a favorite younger brother to a Korean landmine in the 1950’s, making the ongoing conflict tangible. While conventional weapons are in use between these two halves of a nation, still technically at war with itself, the cyber background is still full of landmines as is the very real DMZ on the 38th parallel.

Could someone without a business degree become a marketing consultant?  No? Then how is it that people without philosophy degrees are becoming ethics consultants? [1]  Is it that people don’t know that Ethics is a branch of Philosophy just as Marketing is a branch of Business? Doubtful.

When the Soviet Union divided Berlin in two, US president John Kennedy went to Berlin and shouted “We are all Berliners.” Now that another evil empire has divided the World Wide Web into good and bad websites by shutting down Megaupload, the motto should be “We are all Megaupload users!” even the ones who never used it and don’t even know what exactly it is (was).

As anyone familiar with classical political economy knows, true property rights are rooted in self-ownership. You own yourself, and by extension you own what you make through labor or voluntary transactions thereof. Land, however, is not a fruit of labor.

Contrary to what we’ve been taught, and contrary to what we fervently believe to be true, there is not just one I. We are not individuals; we are hybriduals. Each of us is a compound, collective, hybrid being.

Of all the aspects differentiating lifelong learning from shorter-term, more specialized learning, perhaps none is more central than forgetting – or, to frame the issue more generally and technically, ”memory access speed deprioritization.” This extended abstract reviews some of the ideas involved in forgetting for lifelong learning systems, and briefly discusses the forgetting mechanisms used in the OpenCog integrative cognitive architecture.

Are you sniveling this morning, like I am?  After an insomniac night of feverish coughing?  Are you annoyed with the medical profession, wondering, “why can’t researchers defeat the common cold?”

As an atheist, sometimes, I wonder why it has taken human beings so long to realize that there is no god and that the so-called creator, almighty, all merciful, all knowing, and all-what-again god that humans have worshiped for ages is a fantasy, a figment of human mind and imagination, without any real instance, essence, existence or significance.