The Quantified Life of the Fluid Self
We never stop revising the picture we have of ourselves. We sense that our identities are fixed in place – rock-solid and immovable – but we’re wrong about that.
Category: Opinion
Immortality 101
Fairy tale immortality, whereby you drink an elixir and there, you’re indestructible, is a fool’s errand.
Review: Mainframe Experimentalism Revisits the Earliest Days of Computer Art
The 1960s and 1970s were the era prior to the rise of home and micro computing, when small computers weighed as much as a fridge (before you added any peripherals to them) and large computers took up entire air conditioned offices. Mainframes cost millions of dollars, minicomputers tens of thousands at a time when the average weekly wage was closer to a hundred dollars. To access a computer you had to engage with the institutions that could afford to maintain them – large businesses and universities, and with their guardians – the programmers and system administrators who knew how to encode ideas as marks on punched cards for the computer to run.
The Curse of Frankenstein: how archetypal myths shape the way people think about science
Invoking Mary Shelley’s myth of Frankenstein is standard fare in arguments over controversial science.
The Quantified Home of the Future
I’ve been thinking about the idea of home a lot recently. I’ve been traveling over three continents for the last 6 months, living out of hostels, surfing friend’s couches, and even staying in local homes through Couchsurfing or personal connections.
Are Artificial Intelligence Doomsayers like Skeptical Theists?
Some of you may have noticed my recently-published paper on existential risk and artificial intelligence. The paper offers a somewhat critical perspective on the recent trend for AI-doomsaying among people like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates. Of course, it doesn’t focus on their opinions; rather, it focuses on the work of the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who has written the most impressive analysis to date of the potential risks posed by superintelligent machines.
Steve Aoki Neon Future II
Steve Aoki once again confirms his place as the leading proponent of optimistic futurism in the EDM scene and beyond. And wait, is this a return of the concept album?
Vital Questions — A Book Review
Life has been on earth about 4 billion years. If we think of each billion as a term at college, then for its Freshman, Sophomore and Junior years, life majored in chemistry.
The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time
“Today, natural philosophy has not disappeared completely. It lives under disguise. Scientists write popular books, for the general educated public, professing to make their ideas about the science that they practice accessible to non-scientists. They use these books to speculate about the larger meaning of their discoveries for our understanding of the universe and of our place within it. They also have another audience, however: their colleagues in science, addressed under the disguise of popularization.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Universal Progressive Evolution
Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.