Clément Vidal‘s essay, “Cosmological Immortality: How to Eliminate Aging on a Universal Scale” discusses various scenarios of cosmic immortality.1 Vidal says that we might worry about the far future because, for example, we may come to live extremely long lifespans or we simply care about future beings who will live there. Continue reading Cosmological Immortality
Category Archives: Futurism
Futurism Remembering the 1950-60’s USA ‘Futurists’ – What Went Wrong?
Moore’s law is an example of futures studies; it is a statistical collection of past and present trends with the goal of accurately extrapolating future trends. Continue reading Futurism Remembering the 1950-60’s USA ‘Futurists’ – What Went Wrong?
Summary of Ray Kurzweil’s: “The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence”
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
(I first read this book almost 20 years ago and it profoundly affected my thinking. Here is my summary of the book that I used in my classes in the CS department at UT-Austin.) Continue reading Summary of Ray Kurzweil’s: “The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence”
A Vision of the Future
A colleague elucidated a thoughtful reply to those who believe that culture needs a vision of an ideal future. In my case this vision is of a future where our post-human descendents attain higher levels of being and consciousness. Our role in the drama is as protagonists in that evolutionary epic, and this provides (roughly) the meaning of our lives. Continue reading A Vision of the Future
Summary of Marshall Brain’s “Robotic Nation”
Recent discussion about the effect of technology on employment reminded me of Marshall Brain‘s prescient essays of almost 20 years ago. (“Robotic Nation,” “Robots in 2015,” and “Robotic Freedom“) Here is a summary of the main theses in each essay Continue reading Summary of Marshall Brain’s “Robotic Nation”