Preventing Skynet is Online May 23, 2009
Posted by Matt Brown in Transhumanism.add a comment
Preventing Skynet is the new blog created by Michael Anissimov, founder of the Immortality Institute and owner of Accelerating Future. The purpose of the site is to showcase some of the dangers that synthetic intelligence could pose if we are not careful (for those of you living in a cave, Skynet is a reference to the fictional SI in the Terminator movies.)
So far there are only three essays up but content will grow as people submit writings. More importantly though, one of the articles up there is mine! Yes, that was a bit of shameless self-promotion. Anyways, the essays up are quite good and the themes they touch on are ones we need to be thinking about and discussing. Give it a look.
Letter From Utopia May 20, 2009
Posted by Matt Brown in Transhumanism.Tags: Nick Bostrom, philosophy, Transhumanism
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I absolutely love this essay. It’s by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, the director of the Future Humanity Institute at Oxford University and one of the most well known transhumanist thinkers in the world. As the title implies it is a letter from utopia, the twist being that utopia in the article is one of our possible futures. Bostrom lays out a wonderful case for striving for a utopia is desirable (an easy task) and attainable (a much harder task) and he does it with some truly beautiful prose. If you have any interest in the future, transhumanism… you know what, scratch that. Even if you don’t have an interest in those things you owe it to your self to read this essay.
