Toggle light / dark theme

Here’s a very in depth, approximately 6,000 word story (broken into 5 articles) with many pictures on transhumanism–from one of the world’s leading tech sites: The Verge.


Zoltan Istvan is very worried about the superintelligent machines.

He says the war over artificial intelligence will be worse than the Cold War nuclear arms race — much worse. It will be far more deadly, and whoever wins will control the world, eternally. This artificial intelligence might be being developed right now, he says, for all we know. At a government facility in the middle of the Arizona desert, perhaps.

But this is not what Zoltan Istvan is most afraid of, and neither is it the weirdest thing he will tell me in our week together driving 400 miles across the Southwest in his 40-year-old “Immortality Bus,” crudely fashioned into the shape of a coffin. As the presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party, Zoltan Istvan is dedicated to spreading transhumanism’s gospel, like some modern day Ken Kesey who doesn’t even need acid for his trip.

An emerging class of atomically thin materials known as monolayer semiconductors has generated a great deal of buzz in the world of materials science. Monolayers hold promise in the development of transparent LED displays, ultra-high efficiency solar cells, photo detectors and nanoscale transistors. Their downside? The films are notoriously riddled with defects, killing their performance.

Read more

Samsung Mobile is building a virtual reality browser.


Maybe it’s my game industry roots talking, but when I think of virtual reality, the last thing I imagine is checking updates on Facebook or poking through a Reddit thread.

Yet come tomorrow, December 2, Samsung is going to provide proof of this concept with a virtual reality web browser called the Samsung Internet for Gear VR. Users of the Samsung S6 family of mobile phones and the Samsung Note 4 or 5 — coupled with the Samsung Gear VR unit — will be able to shake their head in disgust watching Black Friday fight videos and scan for offensive tweets on Twitter from the glorious world of virtual reality. The app will support HTML5 based videos, as well as 3D streaming and 360-degree content.

If the urge to add a comment to the Internet void hits you, Samsung Internet takes advantage of both voice input and a Gaze Mode keyboard to facilitate hands-free typing. Simply stare at the key you want to press for a few moments. Activating links, traversing menus, and adding bookmarks will also use the Gaze Mode feature.