William Sims Bainbridge

William Sims Bainbridge Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow of the IEET. Dr. Bainbridge is a prolific and influential sociologist of religion, science and popular culture, and serves as co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the NSF. 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 has published over 200 articles and essays for various journals and encyclopedias.

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Books

eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming by William Sims Bainbridge (2013)

The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays by eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More (2013)

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)

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Articles

"The Meaning of Outer Space"   Ethical Technology  Dec 31, 2012

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

"Challenge and Response"   Ethical Technology  Jun 25, 2003