The popular view It’s common in contemporary sci-fi movies to see the future portrayed as a place of vast inequalities, where a tiny elite enjoys advanced technology and a life of leisure, while the masses slave away in poverty, in a polluted world stripped of resources. But sci-fi is very [...]
Steve Morris
It’s true that science and religion haven’t always rubbed along well together, and in fact Galileo Galilei was tried for heresy, but in this article I’m considering a broader issue, not just a religious one. I’m asking whether science is now an established part of mainstream cultural thinking or if [...]
The Ancient Greeks had a word for the largest number that they could conceive of. It was the myriad and it meant literally ten thousand. Coincidentally, that’s roughly the age of human civilization. So today, on Future Day I’m celebrating civilization’s first myriad. Ten thousand years ago was the beginning [...]
What do you think the future will be like? It might be a shiny utopia where human suffering no longer exists and we are free to live meaningful, creative lives limited only by the power of our imaginations: Why did the post-human superintelligence cross the road? I can’t say. You [...]
Like many of you here, I saw the recent interview on Singularityweblog with Dr Natasha Vita-More about her idea of the Whole Body Prosthetic. The article raises many interesting questions, not least what it would mean to have an uploaded mind and a physical body, whether natural or prosthetic. In [...]
Isaac Asimov in his novel I, Robot, famously proposed the three laws of robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such [...]
The author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has written about the technological singularity, a time when he predicts things will change so rapidly that he likens it to a mathematical singularity. In particular, he postulates the invention of an artificial intelligence capable of re-designing itself, which will inevitably lead to [...]
