“Connecting with Our Connected World” is my latest article and explores the coming era of the Internet of Things. It’s also the lead article for The Futurist magazine – my third cover story for them, which obviously I’m pleased about. While much has been written about IoT – or the […]
I love technology. Good. Now that that’s out of the way, allow me to clarify. I love good technology. Jetpacks. Flying cars. Meal-in-a-pill. Not good. These won’t fly (some of them literally) because they don’t meet all of the criteria of good technology. Consider that in order to move all […]
Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the patenting of natural genes is a major milestone in patent law and has significant implications for the future of technology. For many years now, the U.S. Patent Office has allowed the patenting of natural genes, perhaps most famously the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes […]
My latest article, “Are You Smarter Than a Sixth-Generation Computer?” leads off this month’s issue of The Futurist magazine. (Sept/Oct 2012) The article explores the need for a standard metric for AIs and is based on my paper, “Toward a Standard Metric of Machine Intelligence”, which I recently published in […]
With the arrival of the 2012 Olympic Games, we find ourselves focused on the extremes of human performance. For seventeen days, the world’s finest athletes will compete at the limits of strength, speed and endurance. Many observers have speculated that for a number of these competitions, we may well be […]
In futures thinking, often it’s important to look back in order to look ahead. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, offering the perfect opportunity to do both.
If you could improve your body, would you do it? It seems a simple enough question with a simple enough answer. But what if that improvement meant incorporating a mechanical device into your body? Suddenly the question isn’t so simple, is it? And if that integration required the prior removal […]
BBC News is running a series on human enhancement this month. For it, I was asked my thoughts regarding the feasibility of augmentation in the context of a famous 1970s television show. “Is the Six-Million-Dollar Man Possible?” asks whether the bionic capabilities of the Steve Austin character could be achieved […]
It seems a day doesn’t pass that we don’t hear of yet another advancement that will change and improve our lives. Unfortunately, such advances can also have a very negative impact on the welfare of the people and society they should be improving.
It’s interesting what inspires or motivates an article. It might be a conversation, a good book, a song from days gone by. Sometimes there’s just a deadline waiting to be met. In the case of “Playing the Long Game“, my latest article at H+ Magazine, it was a recent tweet by its editor, Michael Anissimov.