A blog focusing on some of the most prominent “-isms” surrounding humanity’s technological future: extropianism, transhumanism, posthumanism, the mouth-filling Singularitarianism, and others in that constellation.
October 20, 2015
The new book Science, Virtue, and the Future of Humanity, just published by Rowman & Littlefield, brings together essays examining the future — particularly scientific and technological visions of the future, and the role that virtue ought to play in that future. Several of the essays appeared in The New Atlantis, including essays...
October 1, 2015
Last month, Vice published a short article by Jason Koebler about how genetic engineering, including the genetic engineering of human beings, is probably protected by the First Amendment. The basic argument behind this seemingly ridiculous notion is that the First Amendment protects not only speech but also “expressive conduct,”...
September 25, 2015
“How is having a cochlear implant that helps the deaf hear any different than having a chip in your brain that could help control your thoughts?” —Michael Goldblatt, former director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, quoted in the Atlantic What’s the difference between reading books all day and playing video games? Come...
September 22, 2015
I was very happy to learn from George Dvorsky at io9 that Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World is not the terrifying dystopia it used to be.” It’s not that the things in the novel couldn’t happen (more or less), but rather that they are happening and “we” have become much more enlightened and simply don’t need to...
September 4, 2015
We have occasionally written about human cloning here on Futurisms — for example, five years ago we had a back–and–forth with Kyle Munkittrick about cloning — and we return to the subject today, with an excerpt from the latest issue of The New Atlantis. The entirety of that new issue is dedicated to a report called The...
August 18, 2015
Like Her before it, the film Ex Machina presents us with an artificial intelligence — in this case, embodied as a robot — that is compellingly human enough to cause an admittedly susceptible young man to fall for it, a scenario made plausible in no small degree by the wonderful acting of the gamine Alicia Vikander. But Ex Machina...
August 11, 2015
Image via Shutterstock I found myself thinking about progress at 8:30 yesterday morning, when someone in the neighborhood was already using a leaf blower to clean up his yard. Here is a real time- and effort-saving product, and in my part of the world anyway it has near universal adoption by householders and lawn-care services. This...
June 25, 2015
Robots and artificial intelligence have been staples of pop culture for decades. But I can’t recall any time when there have been quite so many prominent robot- and AI-related projects released in such a short span. A period of just under nine months has seen the release of five movies and a new TV show with high production values,...
May 7, 2015
In a recent New Atlantis essay, “In Defense of Prejudice, Sort of,” I criticized what I call the new rationalism: Today there is an intellectual project on the rise that puts a novel spin on the old rationalist ideal. This project takes reason not as a goal but as a subject for study: It aims to examine human rationality empirically...
May 4, 2015
Our Futurisms colleague Charlie Rubin had a smart, short piece over on the Huffington Post a couple weeks ago called “We Need To Do More Than Just Point to Ethical Questions About Artificial Intelligence.” Responding to the recent (and much ballyhooed) “open letter” about artificial intelligence published by the...