A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
When Mario Costeja González googled himself in 2009, two prominent results appeared: home-foreclosure notices from 1998, when he was in temporary financial trouble. It took the next five years to have 18 words delisted from Google search results on his name. Continue reading… “Google and our right to be forgotten”
How do you code something as abstract as moral logic into a bunch of transistors?
Are robots capable of moral or ethical reasoning, knowing right from wrong? Not yet. But the U.S. government is spending millions on developing machines that understand moral consequence.
Continue reading… “U.S. military wants to teach robots how to make moral and ethical decisions”
Science fiction can be used to help scientists think about the uses and ethics of their inventions.
The Smithsonian Magazine May issue has an essay on the relationship between science, science fiction, and the future by Boing Boing buddy Eileen Gunn. She writes, “What’s science fiction good for? Major writers — Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow and others — talk about why science fiction likes to think about the future and how science fiction can be used to help scientists think about the uses and ethics of their inventions. The rest of the issue covers science and ethical issues of the near future.”
Continue reading… “Science fiction influences our thinking about the future”
Futurist Thomas Frey: The year is 2032. You have just celebrated your 80th birthday and you have some tough decisions ahead. You can either keep repairing your current body or move into a new one.
Continue reading… “When Death Becomes Optional”
dexamethasone
A New York doctor named Maria New has been advising pregnant women to take a steroid called dexamethasone to prevent homosexuality and “masculine behavior” in their daughters. How did she get away with this form of anti-gay genetic engineering?
“Our life is frittered away by detail …. Simplify, simplify.” — Henry David Thoreau
Ever have one of those days?
Run a day late on a credit card payment, and you’re dinged a $39 late fee.
Miss a traffic sign on our way across town – right in front of a cop – and get dinged another $150.
Continue reading… “The simplification mandate – Surpassing the complexity threshold”
Some will find it shocking, macabre, echoing the worst allegations of Nazi atrocities. An American artist has spent the past 20 years making sculptures out of human skin.
Continue reading… “Gruesome Human Skin Art By Andrew Krasnow”
