The 11th Hour Time Capsule

Source: 11th Hour Action.

Artificial Life Likely In 3 To 10 Years

Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer. Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

Source: AP via CBS News.

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

Source: New York Times.

William Gibson on the Past and Future

Oddly, Gibson, a former English major, knows little about computers or technology of any kind. And he has always insisted that his fiction was a way to comment on the present day and not to suggest the future. Indeed, his latest work, Spook Country—a high-style political techno-thriller out this month—actually takes place in the (very recent) past, February 2006. The affable and thought-provoking writer talked with DISCOVER from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Source: Discover.

Would you give up your immortality to ensure the success of a posthuman world?

July 25-26, Chicago—On Wednesday at Transvision 2007, Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence guru who heads up MIT’s Media Lab, puckishly suggested we could solve any population problem by uploading the minds of 10 billion people and running them on a computer that occupies a few cubic meters and costs only a few hundred dollars to run. Minsky was one of the scientific stars speaking at the World Transhumanist Association’s annual meeting. Other celebrities included Star Trek’s Captain Kirk (perhaps now better known as Denny Crane on ABC TV’s bizarre Boston Legal), William Shatner. I am never starstruck by Hollywood personalities, but I have to admit that Shatner gave a hell of talk at the conference. More on that later. Another Hollywood luminary St. Elsewhere’s Ed Begley, Jr. (now the protagonist in HGTV’s reality series Living with Ed) also dropped by. Techno-celebrities included the X Prize’s Peter Diamandis, the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil, and Second Life’s Philip Rosedale.

Source: Reason Magazine.

ABC: The Last Days on Earth

Via Betterhumans.com

The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering

Three years ago in The Atlantic, the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel wrote a critique of genetic engineering titled “The Case Against Perfection.” Now he has turned it into a book. The title is the same, but the text has changed, and sections have been added. That’s what human beings do. We try to improve things.
…
Sandel thinks this vision of freedom is flawed. Part of freedom, he argues, “consists in a persisting negotiation with the given.” To abolish the given by re-engineering not only our world but also ourselves would “leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.” This is a profound insight. But it’s not fatal to freedom. It’s fatal to perfection.

Source: NY Times.

What happens if all human experience can be stored on crystals?

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is record on devices the size of a grain of sand.

Source: BBC.

Visions of the future

Check out some new scenarios from the recent scenario process at the Economic & Social Research Council. See the Guardian blog.

David Brin Predicts the Future

David Brin works out of his home office in San Diego County, but he spends much of his day in invisible worlds—ones hidden from us because we can’t perceive them or because they don’t even exist yet. For the past three decades, the Hugo Award–winning author has been mapping out his vision of the future in dozens of works, both nonfiction and sci-fi. His 1998 book, The Transparent Society, explores how technological innovations force us to choose between privacy and security, foreshadowing the era of YouTube and ubiquitous surveillance cameras. His 1990 novel, Earth, anticipates so many of today’s trends—from the World Wide Web to global warming—that there is a Web site devoted entirely to its prognostications.

Via Discover.