Are men expendable? After millennia of vigorously hoisting their species to the top of the food chain, is XY now a barrier to additional progress? Has the ball game for “dudes” expired? Will the future be self-reproducing super-women? With males”¦ extinct?
How does a democratic society both nurtureandregulate fast-evolving technologies poised to radically alter life? How can we find a balance between those two imperatives?
Genetic architecture is an exciting, promising, and highly conceptual field that suggests we can bridge the gap between biology, artificial intelligence, and architecture.
Sascha Vongehr is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University. This is his first article for the IEET.
Virtually all talk of cognitive enhancement focuses exclusively on the enhancement of individual intelligence. But what about enhancing group intelligence?
In responding to a recently concluded poll, IEET readers selected bioengineering as the emerging technology most likely to make a big impact during this decade.
While thoughtful folks point to recent, tragic events in Arizona, appealing for Americans to tone down the horrifically polarized rhetoric of recent years, we all can see the opposite going on. It seems that we have entered what Robert Heinlein forecast as “The Crazy Years.”
Not long ago nanotechnology was a fringe topic; now it’s a flourishing engineering field, and fairly mainstream. But nano is not as small as the world goes.
Watch out! The “death panels” are back. They are going to be used by Obama and his horde of federal health reformers to make sure that if you are old, very sick and go into a hospital, you will never return.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that all during December 2010, we counted down the 31 most popular articles posted on our blog during the previous eleven months. Now, here’s a handy guide for your re-reading pleasure.
Stephen Hawking is arguing that humanity may be putting itself in mortal peril by actively trying to contact aliens (an approach that is referred to as Active SETI). I’ve got five reasons why he is wrong.
It is natural to feel that software development will never get things right. We all feel frustrated by software that doesn’t work as it should. People in industry are constantly bemoaning the lateness and incompleteness of software projects. But the facts are better than they seem, and are improving rapidly.
With some people, you just can’t win. Do you engage them in a debate, or do you hold your tongue and save yourself the frustration from beating your head against a brick wall? That is the dilemma I face.
There is good reason for thinking that posthumans will, on the whole, be atheists. And there is good reason for thinking that widespread apostasy would, on the whole, be desirable.
What are the current unresolved issues in transhumanist thought? Which of these issues are peculiar to transhumanist philosophy and the transhumanist movement, and which are more actually general problems of Enlightenment thought? Which of these are simply inevitable differences of opinion among the more or less like-minded, and which need decisive resolution to avoid tragic errors of the past?
In a world where everyone is beautiful, we will simultaneously be able to enjoy it and move past it so that we can get on with some of the more important and meaningful aspects of life and existence.
If sex makes you smarter via changes in synaptic strength following the act, can you get the same benefit from virtual sex, as long as your brain is convinced it is real at the time?
While we tend to believe that more smarts would help us solve the formidable mass of problems we have created, the empirical data seems to disagree with us.
Here we have a roundup of the roundups - a collection of various collections of top stories from 2010 in science, technology, astronomy, engineering, and even cheerleading!
Humanity is devoting some of its best minds, from a wide diversity of fields, to helping software achieve consciousness. The quest is not especially difficult as it is a capability that can be intelligently designed; there is no need to wait for it to naturally evolve.
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