Overview: Science&Technology

Fantastic essay by Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, reframing AI into deep historical and evolutionary contexts.Starts by pointing out that "we are embedded in a living world, yet we do not even recognize all the life on our own Earth. For most of human history, we were unaware of the legions of bacteria living and dy…

critical theory... reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s... changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy...Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning... postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture...…

trillions of dollars are spent on making the world technologically ‘smarter’ ... but very little is spent on getting humans ready for that future... We will need to decide, very soon, where humans end and machines start, and vice-versa- and this is an ethical question NOT a technological challenge.

the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction... Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes ... "The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its w…

When cars come with an 'ethics module', will it be optional? Will there be choices? Will you have to get an upgrade if you change your religious beliefs? Fun cans of worms: "a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly is exploring the ethical dilemmas that may arise when vehicle self-driving is deployed in the real world." - Self-Driving Cars Get …