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I just finished reading Jaron Lanier‘s “Who Owns the Future” so I will share some of my impressions of this book.

An interesting series of discussions have appeared throughout the blogosphere over the last few days focused on the question of economics in a future dominated by Artificially Intelligence. An article by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones magazine ignited the debate claiming the human race would soon be out of work.

Money, capital, capitalism, governments, and scarcity are all the same phenomena.

One worry about the possibility of radical germ line enhancement of the human species is that it may, at some point, produce a being so genetically superior to the regular human that the race would split in two. 

The Jetson’s already was telling a tale of the monotony of the type of work that was performed by white collar workers in the mid 60′s. George Jetson worked for “Spacely’s Sprockets” a generic name combining the founder of the company with a “sprocket” a generic device that is never fully explained in the series.

Will auto insurance disappear?

That’s a “provocative but plausible” scenario according to a recent Celent report.

Take a look at these farm houses which I saw under construction in remote areas of Yunnan province China. They were not unusual; farmsteads this size were everywhere in rural China. Note the scale of these massive buildings.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately in the science blogosphere about a recent experiment where physicists created a gas of quantum particles with a negative temperature – negative as in, below absolute zero. This is pretty strange, because absolute zero is supposed to be that temperature at which all atomic motion ceases, where atoms that normally jiggle about freeze in their places, and come to a complete standstill.

While these technologies have been utilized for decades on a stand-alone basis, we will be the first to integrate them together so that the byproducts of each process become key inputs for the next. The total system is able to provide entire communities with ultra-clean burning ethanol cooking fuel, renewable electricity for area clinics, schools, shops/businesses and homes, high-protein animal feed, organic fertilizer, algae-derived biodiesel, clean drinking water, and managerial, skilled & unskilled employment opportunities.

Science funding and especially basic science funding directly impacts what will happen in our future. This report outlines the challenges that face the United States in an era of declining and already diminished basic research resources, and also outlines a growing role for universities in providing hubs of innovation and centers for research.

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.