IEET Rights News

Russell Blackford Morality, With Limits

2010-03-21T15:25:30+00:00

We can’t expect people to be either as self-denying as conservatives or as altruistic as liberals seem to want.

Time Machine

2010-03-20T19:05:20+00:00

Kristi Scott The Baroque Body: The Role of Body Modification in Scott Westerfeld´s Uglies

2010-03-20T15:34:42+00:00

(with co-author M. Heather Dragoo) Abstract: As a genre, science fiction provides a uniquely fertile medium from which we can extrapolate the defining characteristics of personhood, explore our future potentials, and project our current selves onto tomorrow. One such example is the Uglies trilogy by Scott Westerfeld.

Andrea Kuszewski Autism And Vaccines: Why People Still Believe The Hype

2010-03-19T14:41:37+00:00

Early last month, the now-famous paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield that supposedly linked vaccines to the onset of autism, was formally retracted by the Lancet, the journal that published it back in 1998. This was a monumental decision, considering it was the conclusions drawn from this paper that launched the firestorm of debate around the safety of vaccines, and likely the cause of the current vaccine crisis.

Mining Space

2010-03-19T14:17:18+00:00

IEET Fellow David Brin proposes economic incentives for exploring space. Can space exploration pay for itself?

Design Outside the Box

2010-03-19T02:02:47+00:00

Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell offers a funny, fast-paced, enlightening presentation on the strange new world of online interactive gaming.

DS Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

John Robb Online Games, Super Empowerment, and a Better World

2010-03-18T20:11:09+00:00

For active online gamers, real life is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. Effort isn’t connected to reward. The path forward is confused, convoluted, and contradictory. Worse, there’s a growing sense that the entire game is being corrupted to ensure failure. So why play it?

Kyle Munkittrick Are You There, Dog? It’s Me, Gordon.

2010-03-18T15:12:25+00:00

One of the biggest letdowns for me about the film Wall-E was that all of the robots, save the evil navigator, were in some way visually anthropomorphic. They had hands, eyes, voices, that were unmistakably humanish. Pixar’s great mascot, Luxo Jr., managed to be lovable without these traits. There is a certain extra level of magic involved in making a great character that is utterly unrecognizable as human.

Ben Goertzel Compassion

2010-03-17T12:06:40+00:00

We tend think about compassion on the level of individual selves and minds: Bob feels compassionate toward Jim because Jim lost his wife, or his wallet, etc. Bob sympathizes with Jim because he can internally, to a certain extent, “feel what Jim feels.”

George Grant and Transhumanism

2010-03-15T02:31:45+00:00

Dr. J. chats with Janna Rosales about her 2009 doctoral dissertation for the University of Toronto, When the “Twilight of Justice” Meets the “Dawn of Nanotechnology”: A Critique of Transhumanism and the Technological Imperative in the Light of George Grant’s Moral Philosophy.