From the neon saturated wrecks of post-industrial cities, to isolated colony ships on the edge of human space, Japanese Anime has never shied away from imagining worlds radically altered and eras of rapid cultural change. While it is hard to pigeonhole and generalise Anime, which is less a genre than it is an artistic medium, it is in the realm of science fiction that it truly stands out as a unique platform for exploration.
In this article, I give a real-life case study (in which I was an attorney of record) where human machine mergers bring up several legal and ethical issues, including disability rights. I review some of the literature on this and discuss different practical ways practicing attorneys may approach the issues. The names have been changed to protect the privacy of the parties.
There’s no question that we need to seriously consider harvesting the sun’s energy in space with massive solar panels. The big question, however, is how to get all that energy back to Earth.NASA believes they have found the answer: Power-beaming solar-power satellites.
Increasingly, scientific consensus is failing to influence public policy. Facts, statistics and data appear insufficient to change highly politicized minds… and science has started scrutinizing why.
From the Transparency front: Taser Inc—best known for its generally non-lethal but controversial “stun-gun” devices—has released a mini-camera (about the size of a cigar stub) that clips on to a police officer’s sunglasses or collar. The camera can record two hours of video during an officer’s shift. “Testimony is interesting; Video is compelling,” says the Taser site. The information is then transferred and eventually stored in a cloud-computing system that uses Taser’s online evidence management system.
One of the predictable consequences of science’s rapidly growing knowledge of genetics is that the knowledge can be put to use to kill, harm or terrorize.
The EMP-vulnerability of our electric grid, our machines, transportation systems, tools, and homes is probably the most glaring “acute-impact” threat on our horizon.
Once in a long while the price of the truth is simply too high to let scientists disclose their findings publicly. That is so when it comes to publishing detailed information about dangerous viruses and microbes.
“As an artist, I can appreciate precedent representation and objecthood crises at the cite and sight of artistic collage and assemblage. As a transhumanist, however, I’m cognizant that artistic collage and assemblage will look like mere speed bumps when compared to the transubstrationality to be encountered near a singularity spike.”
DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced concepts think-tank, is looking to take propaganda to the next level, and they’re hoping to do so by controlling the very way their targets perceive and interpret the flow of incoming information.
In the U.S., bipartisan group of scientists and national security experts has recommended further research and testing of extreme geoengineering projects, or climate remediation, to assertively lessen the effects of global warming before it “reaches a tipping point.”
Q: What do you get if you place some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the fields of technology innovation, risk, and sustainability in the same room for two days? A: One whopping headache!
It has been suggested that the whole Earth is a giant organism rapidly progressing toward sentience, and that humankind is the principal agent of this evolution. Such a belief requires that we go beyond the role of being stewards and take a more proactive stance as it relates to the Earth’s future.
Some have been discussing a grouchy missive by the brilliant linguistic philosopher George Lakoff—specifically Lakoff’s latest dismissal of reason as a tool of enlightenment decision making. It provokes me to respond.
For more than a decade, I have worked in the field of scenario development, consulting with businesses, governments, and NGOs about possible futures. There’s sort of a rule of thumb among professional futurist-types: scenario elements that sound plausible are almost certainly wrong, while scenario elements that sound utterly implausible are very likely on-target.
Recently I had a chat with Mary DeMarle, the lead writer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, about how the ethics of enhancement and augmentation were considered when crafting the game’s story and characters.
Asked this question in a recently concluded poll, IEET readers could not agree on an answer. Close to 30% said Less, close to 30% said More, and about the same amount said Neither.
Transhumanism is not simply something that will happen in the future; it is a general byproduct of modernity. Thinking of transhumanism narrowly, only as a future state, jeopardizes the development of desirable ethics and societal changes.
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