Explore the evolution of humanity as we move away from supernatural beliefs, drawing on concepts like Evolutionary Humanism and the ideas of Transhumans and Posthumans. I invite you to read these insights on how evolutionary and ideological shifts together shape our identity as a species.
How do we grow up as a species and jettison supernatural beliefs, with reference to Evolutionary Humanism, Transhumans, Posthumans et al?
The Universe may not have begun with a Big Bang, but instead with a Big Bounce, according to a new theory about how the Universe expands
2013, Chris Hables Gray sat down with me and described, in uncomfortably specific terms, the kind of global pandemic the world would be living through seven years later. Almost nobody paid attention. It’s still one of the most undervalued conversations in my entire archive.
So in October 2020, with the virus raging and the US election weeks away, I brought him back.
Two hours. Pandemics and cyborgs. Surveillance capitalism, including where he lands in the Cory Doctorow vs. Shoshana Zuboff debate. Existential risk, the singularity, and the gap between #ArtificialIntelligence and what he calls artificial stupidity.
Then we got to populism, democracy, and Trump. Listening back six years later, with Trump back in the White House, some of it lands very differently than it did then. I’ll let you judge which parts.
Chris is hard to put in a box: anarchist-feminist activist, union organizer, UC Santa Cruz and NYU lecturer, editor of The Cyborg Handbook and Modified: Living as a Cyborg (a book I was glad to contribute to). He calls himself a pessimist of the intellect and an optimist of the will. That combination is rare in #futurism, and it’s exactly why both the #transhumanism crowd and the #BigTech skeptics should hear him out.
His parting line has stayed with me ever since: make the news you want to see.
Artificial intelligence is transforming agriculture and the livestock industry through precision farming, predictive analytics, and automated systems. Ultimately, successful agricultural strategies rely on combining technological efficiency with essential human oversight and accountability.
Bill Gates paid for the rights to seven #physics lectures recorded in 1964 so that anyone, anywhere in the world, could watch them for free. More than half a century later, they remain remarkably underappreciated.
The lecturer was Richard Feynman.
In November 1964, #richardfeynman delivered Cornell University’s Messenger Lectures, originally planned as a six-part series for a general audience. He eventually added a seventh lecture. The series was titled * The Character of Physical Law*, and the BBC filmed it.
A year later, Feynman would receive the #NobelPrize in Physics.
For years, the films circulated among universities before gradually disappearing from public circulation in the 1980s.
Bill Gates had watched the lectures while studying at Harvard. He later said he had fallen in love with them, even suggesting that if he had encountered Feynman’s teaching earlier, he might have pursued physics instead of building a software company.
Researchers have covered robotic fingers with a new artificial skin that allows the hand to grasp fragile pencil lead and pull away from a needle before it punctures the covering. Both actions depend on more than sensitive sensors. The robot must also receive and interpret their signals quickly enough to respond.
Adding thousands of sensing points makes that harder, because more detailed touch information also means more data to read, transmit and process.
Researchers at Southern University of Science and Technology in China and collaborating institutions tackled that bottleneck with a system inspired by the human sensory nervous system. Described in Nature Machine Intelligence, it reads more than 10,000 sensing elements 100 times a second and processes the information in stages.
When a patient arrives in the emergency department with severe abdominal pain, every minute counts. Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine are investigating ways to streamline the work of radiologists and make it more efficient. They also aim to quickly identify patients who may need urgent surgery and speed up the path to treatment.
The scientists have uncovered a new way to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret right upper quadrant (RUQ) ultrasounds, which visualize organs in the right upper side of the abdomen such as the liver, the gallbladder, the right kidney and part of the pancreas.
In a recent study in Nature Communications, researchers created a vision-language AI agent, which blends visual ultrasound data with written clinical data from the lab, that can accurately read RUQ ultrasounds, diagnose common health conditions affecting these organs and suggest logical next steps.
A research team led by Dr. Sun-Mi Hwang from the Clean Air Research Laboratory at the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) has developed catalysts as an all-in-one solution to address exhaust emissions from ammonia-fueled ships. This technology can simultaneously and cost-effectively remove various greenhouse gases from ammonia combustion and is expected to contribute to achieving carbon neutrality in the maritime industry.
The key findings were published in Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy.
The AI craze is now coming for our PCBs.
Have you ever imagined that your mind could be connected to the whole universe? Well, our brains are one of the most complex systems, arguably more complicated than any other known system in every galaxy, and that includes different economies and the internet.
The human brain is made up of interconnected neurons that have the ability to process information in a very unique and dynamic way, suggesting the highest degree of complexity. Up to this day, it is the only organ that can not be transplanted from one person to the other.
All of these are reasons why scientists have formed a lot of theories about where our consciousness comes from, or if there’s a possibility that it could be connected to something bigger than one living organism, namely, to this entire universe.
