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 22, 2014
Her is an enjoyable, thoughtful and rather sad movie anticipating a possible future for relations between us and our artificially intelligent creations. Director Spike Jonze seems to see that the nature of these relationships depends in part on the qualities of the AIs, but even more on how we understand the shape and meaning of our own...
December 6, 2013
Zoltan Istvan is a self-described visionary and philosopher, and the author of a 2013 novel called The Transhumanist Wager that he claims is a “bestseller” because it briefly went to the top of a couple of Amazon’s sales subcategories. Yesterday, Istvan wrote a piece for the Huffington Post arguing that atheism...
December 4, 2013
Tonight, HBO is premiering a new episode of its State of Play series on sports. This new installment is called “Trophy Kids” and its focus is the tendency among some parents — in this case, the parents of student-athletes — to live vicariously through their children. Here’s a teaser-trailer: Of course, the...
December 2, 2013
Just before Thanksgiving, acclaimed physicist, science popularizer, and futurist Michio Kaku had an article in the “Crystal Ball” section of the New York Times Opinion pages on his predictions — as a scientist — for the future. Kaku lists ten putatively great technological developments that we will achieve if only we can just...
November 25, 2013
In response to my previous post about dolphin babies and synthetic biology, Professor Rubin offered a thoughtful comment — here’s an excerpt: A wonderful, thought-provoking post! I suppose that “taking these speculative and transgressive fantasies about science too seriously” would mean at least failing to look critically...
November 22, 2013
According to an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, “Chess-playing computers, far from revealing the limits of human ability, have actually pushed it to new heights.” Reporting on the story of Magnus Carlsen, the newly minted world chess champion, Christopher Chabris and David Goodman write that the best human chess...
November 21, 2013
On November 19, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. hosted a short event on the myths and realities surrounding the growing “DIYbio” movement — a community of amateur hobbyists who are using some of the tools of synthetic biology to perform a variety of experiments either in their homes or together with their peers in...
September 26, 2013
In response to our post “U.S. Policy on Robots in Warfare,” Mark Gubrud has passed along to us a comment: It was odd that on the Monday morning after the Friday afternoon when my Bulletin article appeared, John Markoff of the New York Times posted an article whose message many took as contradictory to mine. Where I had characterized...
September 21, 2013
“Atlas,” a humanoid robot built by Boston Dynamics and unveiled in 2013 as part of the “Robotics Challenge” sponsored by the U.S. military-research agency DARPA. [Source: DARPA on YouTube] Our friend Mark Gubrud has a new article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists examining the U.S. Department of...
May 1, 2013
Thanks for the shoutout and the kind words, Adam, about my review of Kurzweil’s latest book. I’ll take a stab at answering the question you posed: I wonder how far Ari and [Edward] Feser would be willing to concede that the AI project might get someday, notwithstanding the faulty theoretical arguments sometimes made on its...