We Will End Disability by Becoming Cyborgs Hugh Herr is a living exemplar of the maxim that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. At the age of 17, Herr was already an accomplished mountaineer, but during an ice-climbing expedition he lost his way in a blizzard and was stranded on a mountainside for three days. By the time rescuers found him, both of his legs were doomed by frostbite and had to be amputated below the knee. Once his scars healed, Herr spent months in rehab rooms trying out prosthetic legs, but he found them unacceptable: How could he climb with such clunky things? Today, three decades after his accident, Herr walks on bionic limbs of his own creation. Herr believes the solutions lie not in biological or pharmacological cures but in novel electromechanical additions to our bodies. The MIT scientists are part of a movement aimed at ushering medicine into a cyborg age. The body is electric. This article originally appeared in print as “The End of Disability.”
Technological singularity The technological singularity is the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization in an event called the singularity.[1] Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is an occurrence beyond which events may become unpredictable, unfavorable, or even unfathomable.[2] The first use of the term "singularity" in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann. Proponents of the singularity typically postulate an "intelligence explosion",[5][6] where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, that might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human. Basic concepts Superintelligence Non-AI singularity Intelligence explosion Exponential growth Plausibility
Could artificial intelligence kill us off? Are you conscious? Of course you are. You're awake, you're sentient, you might even be upright. OK then, since you're conscious and I'm conscious and everyone else is conscious, go ahead. The search for a definition of consciousness must lay claim to be the world's longest-running detective story. Try Newsweek: subscription offers Lately though, the hunt seems to have changed gear. The tipping point Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an improbable prophet, partly because he's dead, and partly because he's still associated with a famous palaeontological fraud. In 1912, he became part of the team working on Piltdown Man, the "discovery" of bones in East Sussex which were claimed to belong to an early hominid and thus to provide the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans. When he resumed in 1918, he moved the focus of his studies sideways into geology and began teaching in China. But it was neither his science nor his love-life that brought him into conflict with the church. So.