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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The 21st century has been referred to as “the urban century”. By 2050, over 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities. The rate of urbanisation is staggering: more than 400 million people in China and 215 million people in India will migrate to cities by 2015. Today’s cities can barely handle the burden of their current populations: core services like energy, water, communications, transportation and public safety are inefficient and increasingly decrepit. The burden on the environment is also profound: cities only occupy 2 per cent of the earth’s landmass, but account for over 75 per cent of our resource consumption. Indian cities like Delhi and Mumbai will be stretched to breaking point.
While there is a great deal of bad, indeed, horrendous, news in the world - global warming, terrorism, the global financial crisis, water shortages, worsening inequity - there are also signs of positive change.
The world of science fiction is known for its absence of cultural diversity. While history texts are still recovering from the conspicuous absence of the contributions of non-European cultures across the world and in America, there’s an equal need to claim the future as well.
Imagine an artificial being, granted the rights of humans but without a limited lifespan, that would have the ability to gather resources to itself indefinitely.
For many reasons, the tiny country of Singapore should be considered as a leading candidate to be the eventual epicenter of the Technological Singularity.
Eggs were first. Millions of years before mammals, eggs existed, their hard shells protecting the incubating embryo inside. Egg Mom wanders mobile, light in her anatomy—unlike her mammalian sister that waddles around, heavily crippled with the burden of her womb. Eggs were an evolutionary smart idea.
IEET Fellow Patrick Lin has co-edited a new volume, Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics with thirty essays on different aspects on robot ethics, including contributions by IEET Executive Director James Hughes and IEET Fellow Wendell Wallach.
Fire all the janitors and make poor kids clean their schools? Zap Korea with an airborne superlaser that’s never worked during testing? Ignore global warming and plan to re-engineer the entire planet with untested technology instead?
After much hard work, the editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Russell Blackford, and IEET Fellow Linda MacDonald Glenn are pleased to announce that the special issue that they have been editing if coming online.
(by Robert Bradbury, IEET Fellow Milan Cirkovic, and IEET Board Chair George Dvorsky) We critically assess the prevailing currents in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), embodied in the notion of radio-searches for intentional artificial signals as envisioned by pioneers such as Frank Drake, Philip Morrison, Michael
Papagiannis and others. In particular, we emphasize (1) the necessity of integrating SETI into a wider astrobiological and future studies context, (2) the relevance of and lessons to be learnt from the anti-SETI arguments, in particular Fermi’s paradox, and (3) a need for complementary approach which we dub the Dysonian SETI. It is meaningfully derived from the inventive and visionary ideas of Freeman J. Dyson and his imaginative precursors, like Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Olaf Stapledon, Nikola Tesla or John B. S. Haldane, who suggested macro-engineering projects as the focal points in the context of extrapolations about the future of humanity and, by analogy, other intelligent species. We consider practical ramifications of the Dysonian SETI and indicate some of the promising directions for future work.
“As an artist, I can appreciate precedent representation and objecthood crises at the cite and sight of artistic collage and assemblage. As a transhumanist, however, I’m cognizant that artistic collage and assemblage will look like mere speed bumps when compared to the transubstrationality to be encountered near a singularity spike.”
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