Why should Mitt Romney and the fabled “one-percent” pay only a 15% marginal tax on investment income ... half the rate charged to a dentist or auto mechanic on wages earned from work? This was not the case until recent Republican Congresses slashed taxes on passive, unearned dividends and capital gains.
Is the human brain a magnificent, near-miraculous organ? Or a flawed, forgetful, feeble-minded, under-achieving blob? My POV is the latter. Brain 1.0 is laughably dysfunctional, teeming with weaknesses even in our finest specimens. Memories are dust in a hurricane, logic is lunatic, empathy thinner than the neocortex on a sociopathic toddler. I want Brain 2.0. Are you with me? Eager for an upgrade?
To avoid confusion we need a new, more appropriate term for the study of life than biology – which is now more properly understood as the study of life built from organic cellular chemistry. A better term for the study of life is Vitology.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
The Enlightenment stands for the intellectual trends in 18th Century Europe that espoused the use of reason and science as a universal method for obtaining knowledge and solving human problems. The Enlightenment writers argued that the light of reason and science could free humanity from the darkness of ignorance, the burden of false beliefs, and the destructive influence of prejudices and superstition.
It’s come to my attention that the Superbowl is around the corner. I understand that that’s one bunch of men playing a game with another bunch of men in order to see who wins. The bunch that wins gets a bowl. This is, to me, both intriguing and, paradoxically, boring.
Foresight is not about making predictions. Rather, it’s a tool for identifying dynamics of change, in part by exploring the implications of those changes. This is a point I’ve made often enough that even I’m sick of it—but it remains an idea that not enough people understand. It’s next to useless to say “X will happen;” it’s much more valuable to say “here’s why X could happen.”
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