William Sims Bainbridge

William Sims Bainbridge Ph.D. is a prolific and influential sociologist of religion, science and popular culture. Dr. Bainbridge serves as co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the NSF and has recently taught sociology and computational social science at George Mason University. In 1976 he published his first book The Spaceflight Revolution, which examined the push for space exploration in the 1960s. He then went on to publish Satan’s Power, which described several years of infiltration of the Process Church, a religious cult related to Scientology. In the last thirty years, Bainbridge has published more than a dozen more books dealing with space, religion, and psychology. Dr. Bainbridge’s long-standing interest in “personality capture,” using extensive personality surveys to record individual personalities in software, is reflected in works such as Experiments in Psychology (1986) which included cutting-edge psychology experimentation software written by Bainbridge.

Dr. Bainbridge was instrumental in creating the NBIC Converging Technologies program, and in producing its widely read reports:

• Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (2001)
• Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science (2003)
• Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies In Society (2006)

Dr. Bainbridge’s two most recent books are God from the Machine (2006) and The Secular Abyss (2007).  Dr. Bainbridge has published over 200 articles and essays for various journals and encyclopedias.

Dr. Bainbridge’s CV.

Home Page |

---

Books

The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World by William Sims Bainbridge (2010)

Online Multiplayer Games by William Sims Bainbridge (2010)

Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual by William Sims Bainbridge (2009)

God from the Machine: Artifical Intelligence Models of Religious Cognition by William Sims Bainbridge (2006)

Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies In Society by Mihail Roco and William Sims Bainbridge (2006)

Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance by Mihail Roco and William Sims Bainbridge (2003)

---

Articles

"Religion for a Galactic Civilization 2.0"   Ethical Technology  Aug 20, 2009

"Challenge and Response"   Ethical Technology  Jun 25, 2003