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.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
In this second selection of speculative fiction, and excerpt from a forthcoming novel, David Brin asks how we will keep our machine mind progeny loyal.
Contrary to what we’ve been taught, and contrary to what we fervently believe to be true, there is not just one I. We are not individuals; we are hybriduals. Each of us is a compound, collective, hybrid being.
Of all the aspects differentiating lifelong learning from shorter-term, more specialized learning, perhaps none is more central than forgetting – or, to frame the issue more generally and technically, ”memory access speed deprioritization.” This extended abstract reviews some of the ideas involved in forgetting for lifelong learning systems, and briefly discusses the forgetting mechanisms used in the OpenCog integrative cognitive architecture.
By now, everybody knows that there’s a big crowd of folks who think something really big is going to happen this year because the Mayan Calendar allegedly ended in 2012 — specifically December 21, 2012. Less well known amongst the masses that are vaguely familiar with the meme is the fact that psychedelic/cyberdelic philosopher Terence McKenna was the original primary source for this notion and for this particular date.
On Sunday, December 11, we explored the convergence of religion with highly imaginative future science and technologies in the Turing Church online workshop 2 in teleXLR8, a 3D interactive video conferencing space.
Five alternative futures for Muslims are explored in this essay. In the first, the Islamic world attempts to return to its historical memory of grandeur. As this return is not a contextual return but a reiteration of the conditions of the 7th century, a medieval feudal Islam gains supremacy. For most Muslims, this is decline. In the second possible future, divisions within the Islamic world heighten. War with the West, among Islamic nations, and among sects in Islam is primary. This is a slow, but potentially dramatic decline. In the third, Islam follows a linear trajectory, becoming part of the modern secular world. In the fourth, Islam and the West undergo pendulum shifts, as one declines and the other rises. The final future is a “virtuous spiral” that imagines not only an alternative modernity for the Islamic world, but an alternative global future.
At first glance religion and transhumanism are at opposite poles of human endeavour. Religion with its superstitions and reliance on supernatural intervention is the very kind of thing that transhumanism is trying to free the human species from. Yet there are a lot of things that transhumanism can learn from religion. There are even things that could make transhumanism and religion partners in improving the human species.
A Japanese company is pitching an alternative energy plan that’s out of this world—and potentially the largest public infrastructure project in human history.
The IEET will begin publishing short science fiction pieces that reflect on the social, moral, political, economic or philosophical consequences of future technologies, in particular pieces that touch on the IEET’s core issues - the ethics and policy dimensions of life extension, human enhancement, moral enhancement, non-human personhood, structural unemployment and catastrophic risks.
This is the first piece of fiction that we are publishing, submitted in response to our call for short science fiction reflecting “on the social, moral, political, economic or philosophical consequences of future technologies, in particular pieces that touch on the IEET’s core issues - the ethics and policy dimensions of life extension, human enhancement, moral enhancement, non-human personhood, structural unemployment and catastrophic risks.” We will be publishing at least four of the twenty submissions we have received so far, one a week, and will continue reviewing submissions for consideration. - J. Hughes
Do you despise Congress? You’re not alone. The current Congress’s 11% approval rating is the lowest since polling began. Yet, because of gerrymandering and the resulting hyper-partisanship, people tend to support their own particular Representative, and to heap the blame on the other party.
I first encountered the meticulous, gorgeous nanotechnology and molecular computer art of Murray Robertson in 2009, while perusing jpegs at the Foresight Institute’s online Nanomedicine Gallery. My favorite image was vibrant and visionary; it depicted a glorious techno-future where minuscule robots navigate our bloodstreams, to silently combat viruses, toxins, free radicals, fungi and other malevolencies.
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