Future Society. Machine Intelligence. Uplift Potential etc. Killer Robots: Autonomous Weapons Authorized for Lethal Force. Ecological Engineering. Space Age. Biopunk. 8 Craziest Mega-Engineering Projects We Could Use to Rework the Earth. Will the future judge us moral? – Stefan Klein and Stephen Cave. In 100 years it will not be acceptable to use genderised words such as ‘he’ or ‘she’, which are loaded with centuries of prejudice and reduce a spectrum of greys to black and white.
We will use the pronoun ‘heesh’ to refer to all persons equally, regardless of their chosen gender. This will of course apply not only to humans, but to all animals. It will be an offence to eat any life-form. Once the sophistication, not only of other animals, but also of plants has been recognised, we will be obliged to accept the validity of their striving for life.
Most of our food will be synthetic, although the consumption of fruit – ie, those parts of plants that they willingly offer up to be eaten – will be permitted on special occasions: a birthday banana, a Christmas pear. Popular now The intellectual character of conspiracy theorists Why God knows more about misbehaviour than anything else Can secular people benefit from prayer? Enjoying Aeon? Visit the Aeon Ideas beta Well, maybe. 1. 2. 3. 4. Ethics. Meet the Engineers Trying to Prevent the Destruction of Humanity. Meanwhile in the Future: We Have Changed the Climate with Wind Turbines. What to Expect From Aliens When We Make First Contact. 9 Overlooked Technologies That Could Transform The World. What I've noticed is that most people don't really pay attention to "science" news, unless it's something that they can see immediately. I think this is at least partially because of the amount of news that comes out daily - whatever we may think about the quality of news, there is just a flood of it, which makes picking out "interesting" items difficult.
When I talk about (just for example) the idea of gene therapy, most people think that it is still complete science fiction, as opposed to a very near-term product that will be available. Of course, CSP has been around for years, so it isn't really "new" to the average person. What they don't realize is the way that efficiencies have improved... And electronic currency is still in the "only oddballs use it" phase - people are aware of it, but mostly because of the issues bitcoin has had in the recent past. Finally, of course, for a majority of people, the only science fiction they think of it Star Wars/Trek, or (advanced!) 12 Technologies We Need To Stop Stalling On And Develop Now. The pace of technological change is governed by many factors — including public demand. Which is why we need to be demanding more. Here are 12 transformative technologies whose development should be expedited right now. Top image: Conceptual space elevator (Credit: Obayashi Corporation) To make this list meaningful, I only included those items that are within reasonable technological reach.
Sure, it would be nice to have molecular assemblers, warp drives, and the recipe for safe artificial intelligence, but it'll be decades before we can reasonably embark upon such projects. What's more, there are more pressing things to address in the near term. To that end, here's what we should be working on: 1. Image: Biosphere 2 Before we can venture out into space and build long-term space habitats, we have to figure out a whole bunch of stuff, including how to make viable and self-sustaining artificial biospheres. 2. 3D Bioprintable Vaccines Imaging having one of these in your home. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Science AMA Series: We are researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, ask us anything! : science. Thou Art Godshatter. Followup to: An Alien God, Adaptation-Executers not Fitness-Maximizers, Evolutionary Psychology Before the 20th century, not a single human being had an explicit concept of "inclusive genetic fitness", the sole and absolute obsession of the blind idiot god. We have no instinctive revulsion of condoms or oral sex. Our brains, those supreme reproductive organs, don't perform a check for reproductive efficacy before granting us sexual pleasure. Why not? Why aren't we consciously obsessed with inclusive genetic fitness?
Why did the Evolution-of-Humans Fairy create brains that would invent condoms? "It would have been so easy," thinks the human, who can design new complex systems in an afternoon. The Evolution Fairy, as we all know, is obsessed with inclusive genetic fitness. But since the maker of intelligence is thus obsessed, why not create intelligent agents - you can't call them humans - who would likewise care purely about inclusive genetic fitness? What about curiosity? Why? No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices. "The laws of physics and the rules of math don't cease to apply. That leads me to believe that evolution doesn't stop.
That further leads me to believe that nature —bloody in tooth and claw, as some have termed it —will simply be taken to the next level... "[Getting rid of Darwinian evolution is] like trying to get rid of gravitation. So long as there are limited resources and multiple competing actors capable of passing on characteristics, you have selection pressure. " —Perry Metzger, predicting that the reign of natural selection would continue into the indefinite future.
In evolutionary biology, as in many other fields, it is important to think quantitatively rather than qualitatively. "So long as there are limited resources and multiple competing actors capable of passing on characteristics, you have selection pressure. " While there are several candidates for the most important equation in evolutionary biology, I would pick Price's Equation, which in its simplest formulation reads:
Engineering Professor: Rocket Boots Are Possible Thanks To The Segway. Why the facepalm? It's not just steerable, without dynamic control over center of gravity, I don't think they'd be usable at all. Except maybe as novelty slam-you-into-a-wall-then-ground boot. I guess your saying without the Segway, some manner of rocket boot could still exist? Forgive me, I'm just trying to see if I need to clarify something. Could You Survive the End of the Universe? Where Is My Silicon-Based Life? The Most Significant Futurists of the Past 50 Years. The Times and Troubles of the Scientific Method. Inside story: Look, no hands.
Edge.org. Any first-hand experience of how scientific institutions actually operate drives home an excruciating realization: Science progresses more slowly by orders of magnitude than it could or should. Our species could have science at the speed of thought—science at the speed of inference. But too often we run into Planck's demographic limit on the speed of science—funeral by funeral, with each tock of advancement clocked to the half-century tick of gatekeepers' professional lifespans. In contrast, the natural clock rate of science at the speed of thought is the flash rate at which individual minds, voluntarily woven into mutually invigorating communities by intense curiosity, can draw and share sequences of strong inferences from data. Indeed, Planck was a giddy optimist, because scientists—like other humans—form coalitional group identities where adherence to group-celebrating beliefs (e.g., we have it basically right) are strongly moralized.