One day when I was a young teenager, living out in the countryside in the south of England, a dear old guy I knew drove past me when I was on a long solitary walk. He recognized me and pulled over to ask if I wanted a ride down to the village.
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.
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.
Those who see the possibility of a revolutionary future of abundance and freedom are right, as are those who fear the possibility of catastrophe and extinction. But where they are both wrong is in believing that the future is out of our hands, and should be kept out of our hands. We need an open singularity, one that we can all be a part of.
2011 promises to be a year chock full of complex legislative debate over the policies of emerging technologies like synthetic biology and geoengineering, to name only two. Fortunately, three elements are brewing to create what might just be a perfect storm in terms of getting all the right folks to huddle together so the best policies are set forth.
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. has moved rapidly from activating only a handful of unarmed unmanned flying systems to currently deploying over 7,000 unmanned systems in the air and over 12,000 on the ground, many of these heavily armed. There is every reason to suspect this rapid incorporation of military robotics will only accelerate.
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.
Could it be that there is no intelligence without a body? That there’s only computation? That cognition is the byproduct of biological processes, and never the driver of them?
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!
British biologist Robert Edwards, who developed the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), has won a Nobel Prize. But the Vatican says the choice of Professor Edwards was “completely out of order.”
There’s something rather liberating about being asked to give a no-holds talk on your perspective on life, the universe, and everything. So when the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center asked if I would speak as part of their “Where do we go from here?” series, I jumped at it.
Maxwell Mehlman is a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, and author of Wondergenes: Genetic Enhancement and the Future of Society and The Price of Perfection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement. Max is final speaker of the Transforming Humanity conference held this weekend at the University of Pennsylvania by the Center for Inquiry. He is speaking here on Can Humanity Survive Evolutionary Engineering?.
We are in for a time of major decision-making as the Moore’s Law of Cameras (sometimes called “Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law”) takes hold and elites of all kinds are tempted to utilize surveillance in Orwellian/controlling ways, often with rationalized good intentions.
I’m sometimes asked my view on the singularity. As the author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, and a recipient of the H.G. Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism, people assume that I believe in this thing called The Singularity and can’t wait for it to occur.
The immediate lessons from the Deepwater Horizon disaster are pretty obvious - we (or at least somebody) messed up! But what about the less obvious lessons, especially those concerning technology innovation and how it’s handled?
New technologies depend on uncommon materials, and society depends on new technologies. Which means that economies that develop the former and control the latter have something of an upper hand in today’s interconnected and technology-dependent world.
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