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.
I’m beginning a short series at Psychology Today about the ongoing advances being made in machine intelligence. I’d originally thought about using “The Ascent of Machine” for the series title — after Jacob Bronowski’s wonderful work, “The Ascent of Man”, which I found so inspiring when it first came out. […]
The closing plenary for the WorldFuture conference, held earlier this month in Vancouver, BC, was given by Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute. In his presentation, Frey offered up Eight Grand Challenges for humanity. It was a thought provoking presentation, though not without its critics. To recap, Frey stated that […]
Information. There is probably nothing so important to our lives, to our culture, to our world. Information, and the ability to communicate it, has been at the foundation of humanity’s rise since before we used fire or stone tools. It has allowed us to grow from nomadic clans to villages […]
Earlier this week, Charles Stross posted his thoughts on why he doesn’t think the Technological Singularity will happen. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the Technological Singularity is defined as that point in the future when a self-improving artificial general intelligence (AGI) achieves superintelligence. As Stross recommends, if you’re […]
Nine months ago, I wrote a post called “The Supercomputer Race” about China’s then top-ranked supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A and what it meant for the U.S. The Tianhe-1A achieved 2.57 petafolps (1015 floating point operations per second) on LINPACK, a benchmark based on a series of complex linear equations. In comparison, […]
Often when people think about intelligence and the future, they have visions of monolithic supercomputers, Terminator scenarios and Skynet. But there’s an entirely different path to future intelligence. Intelligence augmentation (IA, not to be confused with AI) involves supplementing our own brain’s abilities using a range of different technologies. While […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, I began blogging for Psychology Today earlier this month. My latest post there is “Vaccinations: The Intelligent Choice?”, which addresses some of the misconceptions and disinformation surrounding vaccine safety. I decided to write about this because the Washington State legislature is currently attempting […]