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“I think you can change human nature and it is possible to make this the best of all possible worlds” - Robert J. Sawyer is one of most prolific and talented science fiction novelists of our time.
Robert J. Sawyer - Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author - explains how the popularity of the Star Wars movies has “dulled the edge” that made science fiction such a pertinent film genre.
In the next decade, the United States will use increasingly capable artificial intelligence (AI) to greatly reduce the cost of health care, accelerate research and development into new medicines, improve cars and roads to reduce gridlock, and even regain much of the manufacturing base we lost to countries like China, say researchers in computer science, robotics, and management. They claim that AI will soon change the work of doctors, nurses and teachers across the country, create entirely new businesses, and radically remake industries already in existence.
In this piece David Eubanks asks how we might react to intelligence emerging from ubiquitous computing stuff in our environment. What if our imagination about where and how self-willed machine minds will arise is too narrow, and it might just pop up anywhere? What do we owe talking stuff?
Dr. NakaMats is the world record holder of patents (3,300+) and he wants to live to be 144 years old. The film follows this extraordinary Japanese celebrity on his mission to elongate life.
A documentary movie on IIT - the world’s toughest educational institute to get into (acceptance rate - 1.7%) Students pay only $700 to study the best-in-the-world education. There are 15 IIT’s in India, the best ones being Mumbai, Delhi, Kharagpur, Chennai, Kanpur and Roorkee.
In January, IEET Executive Director J. Hughes and IEET Fellow Wendell Wallach met with representatives of the Japanese Consortium on Applied Neuroscience (Japanese, English). They visited Trinity College as part of a national tour to meet with American neuroethicists.
After I recently moved to India, I was asked to write another blog-article for IEET, this time about the question of India’s role in accelerating change and the technological “Singularity.”
Concerned about your cognitive functions? Did you read “Brain Damage - 83 ways to stupefy intelligence” and realize that your mind’s been mercilessly mutilated? Fear not. There’s hope. Neurogenesis - the growth of brain cells - can be activated via several science-proven techniques. Many are recent discoveries, one is as ancient as bipedalism, one is futuristic, one is wet and weird. To pop open your head, read on:
Science fiction authors Richard Morgan and Greg Egan have described mind uploading and “backup copies” as a practical technology for immortality. Of course, “carbon chauvinists” often speak against mind uploading, and some have interesting things to say.
Preview for the feature film about Trans-humanism, mind uploading and the merging of human consciousness with artificial intelligence. The film was funded by Terasem, and it premiered at the 2009 Woodstock Festival. An additional IEET article on it can be found HERE.
Salman Khan speaks here at Web 2.0 about Khan Academy and its spectacular success in the education field. Bill Gates has called Khan “his favorite educator” and Khan was recently picked by Wired as one of the future’s 50 most influential people.
Whole Brain Emulation creates synthetic humans by implementing their thought processes in forthcoming hardware and software, which could arrive by mid-century. What are the rights of these uploads and how will they impact our economy, and society? Anders Sandberg of the Future Of Humanity Institute of the University of Oxford talks about these issues.
Dr. Koene is a Dutch neuroscientist. He’s director of analysis at Halcyon Molecular, co-founder of Carbon Copies, and co-founder/director at the Neural Engineering Corporation of Massachusetts. He first proposed “Whole Brain Emulation.”
Biology is said to be the study of life. But this is not really true. In fact, biology is only the study of some kinds of life. Biology, as practiced today, studies living things that are deemed similar to human life in one particular aspect – the possession of organic cellular chemistry characteristics. These characteristics are the use of six atoms (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur) to form molecules that build cellular membranes, metabolize nutrients and self-replicate in accordance with a chemical code. (part 2 of Hybriduality and Geoethics)
The Russian Revolution of 1917 that installed the communists in power and created the Soviet Union had a side effect that has been harder to undo than communism itself: it isolated Russia from the rest of Europe (at least from the part of Europe that was not occupied by the Soviet Union). Until then the Soviet Union had been a full member and protagonist of the big European mess, a continuing shift of alliances for the purpose of conquering small (and sometimes irrelevant) territories.
Some folks have heard me beat this drum. But it’s a fresh-enough thought - going to fundamentals that run deep beneath normal politics - so that I am moved to raise it yet again. In part because someone recently asked me, as author of The Transparent Society:“Can transparency and libertarianism complement each other?”
Identical twins they’re not. The two halves of Korea - a rabbit-shaped, mountainous peninsula jutting into the Yellow Sea - are wildly dissimilar. The North is an impoverished, tyrannized, height-and-economy stunted state, bizarrely cloistered with secret tunnels, rogue nuclear missiles and a recent “boy-king.” The South is a workaholic, studious, sleep-deprived builder of huge ships, skyscrapers, Samsung, Hyundai, globe-leading innovations, and direct democracy.
In this week’s episode George Dvorsky talks about the new mathematical study which reveals that our Galaxy should have been colonized by now, why Canadians are considering a ban on prenatal gender information, the growing gender imbalance, the latest on the lab-mutated avian flu, why whales are people, health tips to avoid cognitive decline, and why the sex-chip may not be such a good idea.
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The IEET is a 501(c)3 non-profit, tax-exempt organization registered in the State of Connecticut in the United States.
Contact: Executive Director, Dr. James J. Hughes,
Williams 119, Trinity College, 300 Summit St., Hartford CT
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Email: director @ ieet.org phone:
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