topic: society
The Evolution Will Be Mechanized
Wednesday, September 1, 2004 9:01 PM
topics:
artificial intelligence
anti-singularity
society
related posts
The Evolution Will Be Mechanized. Bruce Sterling rant in Wired about/against the Singularity.
The singularity's biggest flaw isn't that it's hard to imagine, but that it flatters its human inventors. We may be on the verge of an astounding breakthrough! Or, with equal likelihood, we may be at the edge of a new dark age of plagues, mass hunger, and climate destabilization. More likely yet, we live in a dull, self-satisfied, squalid eddy in history, blundering around with no concept of progress and no sense of direction. We have no idea what we really want from our own lives or from society. And no Moore's law rising majestically on any 2-D graph is ever going make us magnificent or spiritual when we lack the will, vision, and appetite for spiritual magnificence.
While I can understand Sterling's cynicism about humanity, I believe the mistake he makes is in defining the Singularity as something transcendent, something "magnificent or spiritual." While any number of over-zealous proponents of transhuman technologies certainly envision the Singularity this way, this definition is rather far-afield of the original vision of the Singularity Vinge paints in his paper "The Coming Technological Singularity."
I prefer to define the Singularity in far more basic terms: a technology-mediated intelligence "runaway," after which the human life will be drastically changed. This could easily (perhaps more easily) mean human extinction as it does something "magnificent or spiritual."
Don't regulate RFID--yet
Monday, August 30, 2004 10:27 PM
topics:
society
ethics
related posts
Don't regulate RFID--yet. A counterpoint to yesterday's post on RFID. Declan McCullagh argues that industry should have the opportunity to implement RFID responsibly before protesters urge the Feds to pile on with legislation designed to regulate their use.
Even if the behavior of industry is somewhat suspect after the debacles of the late '90's, this makes some sense. If nothing else, regulating too early may not only retard any positive outcomes from the implementation of RFID technology, it may completely miss some egregious means of violating citizen's privacy that wasn't anticipated when the technology was in its infancy.
It strikes me that seeking to heavily regulated RFID technology at this stage is largely analogous to legislation aimed at regulating P2P nets - just because a technology has the potential for abuse doesn't mean that all uses are bad.
Back to "The Matrix"
Sunday, August 29, 2004 9:33 PM
topics:
augmented reality
society
Back to "The Matrix". Richard Posner posting on Lawrence Lessig's blog discusses emergent social implications of virtual worlds.
Nanotech will tap nature's potential, investor says
Sunday, August 29, 2004 9:28 PM
topics:
nanotech
society
Nanotech will tap nature's potential, investor says. Venture capitalism interest in nanotechnology appears to still be strong despite recent setbacks.
Speaking at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, Jurvetson asserted that nanotechnology--the ability to make products on the molecular level--will usher in the next great wave of innovation despite the recent cancellation of Nanosys' high-profile initial public offering. That revolution will occur, in part, because scientists will be able to harness or imitate the power of nature.
Pope Condemns Unethical Science, Cloning (AP)
Sunday, August 29, 2004 9:10 PM
topics:
ethics
society
anti-singularity
Pope Condemns Unethical Science, Cloning (AP). The Church cautions against too rapid progress in science and technology.
George W. Bush Is Getting Brain-jacked
Sunday, August 29, 2004 8:49 PM
topics:
society
transhuman
George W. Bush Is Getting Brain-jacked. An extended discussion of the science policy of the Bush administration, the legacy of Vannevar Bush, and the internal cat-fight between politically appointed neo-luddites and scientists within the government.
In the past three years, the NBIC program has convened hundreds of researchers, entrepreneurs and policy wonks from academia, business, federal agencies and the military to brainstorm what will happen when petaflop chips running expert systems, back-engineered from the hippocampus, can be stuck into the brain as an internal modem using nanowires that are spit out by gene-tweaked extremophile bacteria. The NBIC's initial report stunned even the most optimistic techno-utopians with its predictions of rapid human enhancement, life extension and nano-neural interfaces in the coming decades. Turns out that when people on the cutting edge of the molecular, information and cognitive sciences begin to talk about merging their fields and applying them to extending the human body and brain, things get very transhumanist very fast—nanobots or no nanobots.
Transhumanism Evolves in Silence
Sunday, August 29, 2004 8:44 PM
topics:
transhuman
society
Transhumanism Evolves in Silence. Wrap-up report from TransVision 2004, a Transhumanist conference.
But looking at an audience of about only 150, I became deeply discouraged. I had been hoping for so many more. Here was an international conference in the heart of Toronto with some of the most important transhumanist thinkers on the planet talking about the future of our species—including Stelarc, cyborg Steve Mann, biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, Extropian Max More, philosopher Nick Bostrom, computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg, democratic transhumanism promoter and Betterhumans columnist James Hughes and many, many more—yet the event was unable to attract more than a handful of enthusiasts.
