In Khannea SunTzu remarkable new novel she’ll never write - The NeoProgressive’s New Deal - the leader character, Cassandra Assange (Daughter of Julian Assange, born in 2003), is the target of literal micro drone assassination attempts, a vicious media campaign and endless incapacitating litigation. She became a political activist like her father in the mid 2020s, and exemplified the new counter-cultural ideal. Militantly lesbian and technoprogressive she gave birth of a clone of her wife, and her wife gave birth to a clone of Cassandra in the late 2020s.
Growing old, and having lost hope of finding love again, I read about the Lifemates Co-op and was intrigued. “Mr or Ms Right doesn’t exist in nature. If you want someone that was made for you, come to us.” I made an appointment to visit their office and talk with a salesperson…
Pages 9-18 of chapter 1 of the riveting science fiction book Nexus by Ramez Naam brought to you by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. This is the last installment of Chapter 1 to be published on the IEET. You can order Nexus via Amazon by clicking Here
First nine pages of chapter 1 of the riveting science fiction book Nexus by Ramez Naam brought to you by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Check back here tomorrow for another nine pages of this fascinating book!
If it isn’t the cinematic handling of some very futuristic images or the curious immersion of cybernetic pondering into the narrative flow; Ramez Naam’s Nexus will impress a reader with one very unusual device: it is the unadulterated humanity with its entire heritage that is the most alien and unfamiliar of this world.
David Brin here, coming back for one of my infrequent guest blogs. Amid the election, I’ll alternate political posts (also to be found at http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/) with others about science, fiction and the future. And so, for relief, let’s have a miscellany of cool techie stuff!
IEET Contributor Travis James Leland offers the first chapter of his current work-in-progress, about the world’s first posthuman being and how he impacts the world. In this selection, we meet Alpha and his online girlfriend, ‘Loo. They are attracted to each other online. Should they risk a meat-meeting?
Disturbingly beautiful science fiction by a new IEET contributor. What’s it about? “Catastrophic implications of a literal technological virus that finds its host in human brain tissue.”
“The apocalypse came, but not in the way we expected. There was no violent overthrow of governments, no alien invasion, no deadly Armageddon between nations or even of “good” and “evil”. Rather a genius, some say a madman threw, literally threw, his Gift into the waters of the world and it was forever changed.
When we become immortal, visiting “old friends” for nostalgic reminiscing will require an enormous amount of time. But - we’ll have eternity at our disposal… Here’s a short Science Fiction gem from a new contributor.
IEET wants short science fiction pieces that reflect on the social, moral, political, economic or philosophical consequences of future technologies, in particular pieces that touch on the IEET’s core issues - the ethics and policy dimensions of life extension, human enhancement, moral enhancement, non-human personhood, structural unemployment and catastrophic risks.
IEET wants short science fiction pieces that reflect on the social, moral, political, economic or philosophical consequences of future technologies, in particular pieces that touch on the IEET’s core issues - the ethics and policy dimensions of life extension, human enhancement, moral enhancement, non-human personhood, structural unemployment and catastrophic risks.
One of the most vexing questions for technoprogressives and transhumanists is how to maintain the hard-won gains toward political equality among citizens as we become more diverse in our bodies and abilities. Francis Fukuyama pointed to the challenge in Our Posthuman Future, and Nicholas Agar addressed the issue in Humanity’s End. Technoprogressives believe that an expanded transhuman solidarity is possible if enhancement is made widely and equitably available, and if we we fight for a society committed to the rights of all persons. But it won’t be easy. In this story David Brin reflects on political and even theological challenges of the advent of a society with radical enhancement.
Global fertility is declining so fast that, at current linear trends, global population would stabilize in this century at 9 or 10 billion. Progress in agriculture, energy and manufacturing technologies will hopefully make it possible to support these numbers in an increasingly ecologically sustainable way. But accelerating progress in the treatment of disease and slowing of aging will also be pressing down mortality rates, keeping unsustainable population growth a threat. Some have suggested that draconian controls on fertility would be an acceptable trade-off for the benefits of longer lives. This short story by Daniel Hero suggests another possible adaptation to the longevity-population dilemma. - J.
Intelligent life is a fragile accident in an indifferent universe, and the first duty of intelligent life is to figure out how to transform itself and its environment in order to survive. Unfortunately intelligent creatures sometimes evolve suicidally conservative memetic straitjackets - condoms are a sin, the climate isn’t changing, doing this ghost dance will stop bullets, unregulated markets are always right. In this short story Ms. Donoho imagines a far future descendant of ours forced to witness the unnecessary deaths of the descendants of today’s Luddites and bioconservatives.
One of the catastrophic risks that technoprogressives take more seriously than most policy analysts is the emergence of self-willed artificial intelligence and robotics. We are skeptical of the focus on “hard take-off” scenarios, which tend to lead to fatalistic or magical thinking approaches to risk mitigation, and we emphasize instead the importance of incremental steps such as regulation of computing to avoid the creation of self-willed machine minds until we have a better handle on how to safely integrate them. In this short story Alex imagines one way that the tension between human control and the self-awareness of machine minds might play out.
I should mention that the IEET staff read the fiction submissions without the authors’ names on them. So the fact that a submission from our former Managing Director was selected was not the nepotism that it might otherwise appear to be. Mike reflects here thoughtfully on the generation gap we already see playing out between those accustomed to more-or-less attentive face-to-face communication, and the younger generation who are growing used to a fragmented attention that makes little distinction between face-to-face and virtual presence. - J. Hughes
In this piece David Eubanks asks how we might react to intelligence emerging from ubiquitous computing stuff in our environment. What if our imagination about where and how self-willed machine minds will arise is too narrow, and it might just pop up anywhere? What do we owe talking stuff?
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.
This is the first piece of fiction that we are publishing, submitted in response to our call for short science fiction reflecting “on the social, moral, political, economic or philosophical consequences of future technologies, in particular pieces that touch on the IEET’s core issues - the ethics and policy dimensions of life extension, human enhancement, moral enhancement, non-human personhood, structural unemployment and catastrophic risks.” We will be publishing at least four of the twenty submissions we have received so far, one a week, and will continue reviewing submissions for consideration. - J. Hughes
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