Men are weak now, and yet they transform the Earth’s surface. In millions of years their might will increase to the extent that they will change the surface of the Earth, its oceans, the atmosphere, and themselves. They will control the climate and the Solar System just as they control the Earth. They will travel [...]
Archive | Technoculture
RSS feed for this sectionThe Artilect War
I was recently contacted by one of my former students and a regular commenter on this blog, Sebastian Wolfe, about Hugo de Garis’ work on technoculture, along the lines of Kurzweil and Joy. In his The Artilect War, De Garis’ postulates the the production of “artilects,” or autonomous artificial intelligences whose intellects far exceed their [...]
Kurzweil’s Consciousness
In rereading Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines again, aspects of his argument have become more obvious to me. I’m interested, this time, in the implications that his definitions have on how we define “human.” Indeed, he states in the prologue that “the primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be [...]
Living Forever, Again
Via Kurzweilai.org: In an interview, Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes. Since the publication of his new book, Fantastic Voyage, I’ve been hearing more and more about prolonging the human life, reversing the aging process, and becoming one with our technology. He posits that if we are lucky [...]
Janet Murray Visits MSC
Last night, Janet H. Murray gave her lecture “Why Study Games?” as a part of the MSC Annual Arts Festival (See the poster (4.5 MB PDF) designed by Giles Hoover). Her answer to the titular question is because “games make us human.” Citing anthropological studies, specifically the work The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by [...]
Socialist sf/f
Via BoingBoing: China Miéville offers fifty works of fantasy and science fictions that socialists should read. Among them are two of my favorites: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Interestingly enough, also included are Moorcock’s Hawkmoon novels and Morrison’s Beloved. I would also add Herbert’s Dune and Heinlein’s A Stranger in [...]
New Media Architecture
Bruce Sterling, with his typical enthusiasm for green and quirky construction, reports on the french architect François Roche and his firm R&Sie, pronounced “heresy.” Sterling writes: Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the “viab,” a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes. A viab would produce structures that [...]
