A blog focusing on some of the most prominent “-isms” surrounding humanity’s technological future: extropianism, transhumanism, posthumanism, the mouth-filling Singularitarianism, and others in that constellation.
January 23, 2012
Back in August, I wrote a post entitled “Appearance as a Guide to Moral Character: Does Real Beauty Come from the Inside?,” responding to a talk by Prof. Irfan Khawaja of Felician College. Now Prof. Khawaja has written a thoughtful response to my post, which is available here.I probably won’t have time to response again to Prof....
December 22, 2011
I think the first news report I saw about the possibility of genetically engineering avian influenza to be more virulent was this one by the redoubtable Brandon Keim of Wired in 2010. Keim’s post did not really make clear why Yoshihiro Kawaoka, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison had sought to develop a more virulent strain of the...
December 8, 2011
Readers of this blog may be familiar with the concept of “Friendly AI” — the project of making sure that artificial intelligences will do what we say without harming us (or, at the least, that they will not rise up and kill us all). In a recent issue of The New Atlantis, the authors of this blog have explored this idea at some...
December 8, 2011
A recent issue of The New Atlantis features several essays on transhumanism which may be of interest to readers of this blog. I’ll describe them briefly in this post and the next.The first essay is “The Case for Enhancing People,” by Ronald Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason magazine. Ron is well known for supporting...
November 9, 2011
A charming YouTube video is making the rounds, showing a very small child playing with an iPad, and then trying to get a magazine to respond to her finger gestures in the same way. My favorite part is when, with transcendent infant logic, she tests her finger on her leg, to make sure her finger is working properly. Reasonable parents...
September 30, 2011
Scientists claim they have discovered the brain mechanism responsible for susceptibility to group pressure — and a way to control it. Dr. Vasily Klucharev, the lead researcher, says, “People can try to reduce conformity in certain situations, especially when they know about negative consequences of group pressure such as criminal...
September 29, 2011
The New York Times reports on an exhibition at The National Art Museum of China called “Translife,” a collection of works about the supposedly imminent post-human future.“Brain Station,” WU JuehuiThe exhibition’s organizers (and the article’s author) speak in breathless tones of the various boundaries they’re crossing, and...
September 28, 2011
IBM recently unveiled a new “cognitive computing” chip that is said to function like the human brain. These sorts of claims are made all the time, and are, as a rule, grossly exaggerated or outright false. But from everything I’ve read, this breakthrough sounds legitimate: if the researchers have done what they claim, this may be a...
September 27, 2011
Hello out there, all you hard-workin’ cowboys and cowgirls and species-liberated cow-human persons! Here are some links you might find interesting if you read this here blog: On the Singularity• Hank Campbell argues, in so many words, that Singularitarianism is a fraud conceived to line the pockets of several prominent figures with...
September 26, 2011
Tim Carmody wrote a fascinating article recently on the future of computerized translation, noting that Google recently shut down its Translate interface for programmers (and later reopened it, but now as a paid service). Apparently more and more of the data Google were using to refine its translation technology were drawn from pages...