Yesterday in Shanghai, a woman miscarried. The child that wasn’t born would have led a unified China to attack and defeat India, Russia, and finally Europe, resulting in a Chinese empire that ruled the world from 2050 to 2100. Instead, China wilted under internal political strife caused by economic and environmental pressures, and became a second-rate power in the 21st century.
You can make an argument that the quality of health care in the United States is as good as anywhere in the world (if you can afford it)—but the system we use to allocate and pay for that care is obviously broken and needs to be fixed.
I have proposed that a scenario of slower-than-disruptive tech development over the next 15-20 years combined with weak or reduced opposition to human enhancement could result in “increasing irrelevance” for transhumanists. But what exactly does that mean?
The nation-state as a primary locus of power in the world is a paradigm that dates back only a few hundred years. Could that model be replaced in our lifetimes by something different?
In the next 24 hours, more than 150,000 individual humans will become extinct. Over the past three decades, upwards of 1.6 billion people have disappeared from the Earth forever.
In a recently concluded poll, IEET readers showed a mix of attitudes toward the “scientific discoveries and technological accomplishments” of the last ten years. Now we want to know what you think about the social and political developments of that same period.
Got a working time machine you can use? Planning a quick trip into the near future to check things out? Might be a good idea to take along this handy map to make sense of where you find yourself.
Yesterday, December 4, 2009, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies convened an intimate but ambitious seminar to explore the “Biopolitics of Popular Culture.” We heard from a remarkable collection of speakers, including movie directors, screenwriters, science fiction authors, game designers, culture critics, and entrepreneurs.
In a recently concluded poll, we asked, “If you had a personal robot that could do only one thing, which ability would you prefer it to have?” Is the question itself unethical?
We have learned to accept differences in appearance caused by nature or by accident. And we are getting better about appreciating the diversity of bodily expression that modern society has brought. But all this is only the beginning.
An upgraded version of You might incorporate—literally incorporate—access to augmented reality overlays, a direct brain to Internet connection, and LED (light-emitting diode) tattoos.
How many times have you relied on a weather forecast only to find yourself woefully unprepared for what really happened? The same risk holds for predictions about future trends.
Wielded by an expert, the sharp sword of rationality cuts deep, exposing underlying layers of confusion, intellectual laziness, or willful misunderstanding in what might on the surface appear to be logical arguments.
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