keithly + futurism   3

John Gray on humanity's quest for immortality | Books | The Guardian
Oh Mr Gray, your belief in original sin without salvation is sooo depressing. But enlightening.
science  immortality  technology  futurism 
january 2011 by keithly
What's Wrong With "X Is Dead" - Science and Tech - The Atlantic
Edgerton has the same flair for the flashy stat that Anderson does. For example, to illustrate the point that newer and older technologies happily coexist, he notes that the Germans used more horses in World War II than the British did in World War I. More prosaically, some of the electricity for your latest gadget was probably made in a power plant that's decades old. Many ways to bind pieces of paper -- staplers, binders, paper clips, etc -- remain in common usage ("The Paperclip Is Dead!"). World War I pilots used to keep homing pigeons tucked inside their cockpits as communication tools (see above). People piloting drones and helicopters fight wars against people who use machetes and forty-year old Soviet machine guns; all these tools can kill effectively, and they all exist right now together.
technology  economics  futurism  history 
august 2010 by keithly
The First Church of Robotics - NYTimes.com
Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way
Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.
...
Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.
technology  culture  religion  futurism  philosophy 
august 2010 by keithly

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