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Rick Falkvinge, Founder of Pirate Party movement, honored as Top Global Thinker / IT entrepreneur, is interviewed about the Swedish Pirate Party and its influence in other European countries and the SOPA legislation.
What do I see on the horizon, for women? I am not a prophetess - a “Cassandra” - but as a lifelong member of the XX gender, I’m deeply curious, invested, and opinionated about this topic. When Hank Pellissier (IEET managing director) sent me questions that he and James Hughes (executive director) compiled asking for predictions on the future of females, I couldn’t resist. Here are their questions and my responses:
Current TV’s Jason Silva, the director of the documentary - “Turning into Gods” - interviewed by Reason’s Zach Weissmueller. Silva looks at how technological progress allows humans to direct their own evolution.
We’ve looked into the future, and it’s dark. Increasingly, we’ve lost a progressive view of our future. Instead of seeing promise and lives made better by technology, we’re seeing lives filled with cyborgs and an uninhabitable society. Should we be afraid? Or are we being unnecessarily pessimistic? TVO’s The Agenda invited science fiction authors Robert Sawyer and Madeline Ashby, internet critic Jesse Hirsh, and the IEET’s James Hughes to address these topics.
Africa is a deeply patriarchal society; this is the part of the “Traditional African Value System.” Men dominate the socio-economic and political machinery and organizations. Men are regarded as natural leaders, who are superior and born to rule over women. Women are considered weaker vessels-extensions of men and secondary human beings. The pride and dignity of women are derived from and dependent on men.
For centuries, world politics has been organized around nations and their official functionaries—with artificial borders drawn up, separating French from German, Australian from New Zealander. But this could all be blown away as technology and political movements reshape our understanding of world governance.
Thousands of women have had to get their breast implants removed after a French company, Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), admitted that they had used industrial grade silicone in the implants. Not only was this class of silicone not approved for medical use, but some of it also contained fuel additives. Basically, PIP pumped some plastic bags full of silicone intended for use with fuels and food products - and then sold them as implants. Not surprisingly, the implants had a high breakage rate and many women had to get them removed even before news of the company’s misdeeds was made public in 2010.
“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.”
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