Category Archives: Humanity
Humanity Rocks — FastForward Radio
Are human beings better or more important than other living things? Should we be just as concerned about the lives of animals as we are our fellow humans? Woud the world be better off without humans? Phil and Stephen discuss the case for human exceptionalism and explain why humanity has a unique role to play […]
Persistence
One of the greatest achievements in human history, perhaps the greatest, is the development of tools to make information persistent. Imagine the world before the invention of writing: knowledge could only be stored in living human brains. It took years and years to build up a viable collection of information in any one mind, and […]
Hey I Know That Guy!
You hear a lot about how the “average person” does this or thinks that, of things that will or won’t appeal to the average person — but does such an entity really exist? Is there really an average person? National Geographic says yes. They have crunched the numbers and come up with an answer. Check out the […]
Where We’re Coming From
It’s not exactly how we got to where we are; it’s more like how we got to where we started from.
Where We're Coming From
It’s not exactly how we got to where we are; it’s more like how we got to where we started from.
The Smart Ones
The Boskops. They were here on the planet contemporaneously with us. They had great big heads and cute little faces. They were smarter than us. How much smarter? Well, it says here that we are Homo Erectus to their Homo Sapiens. Put your head around that one. We spend a lot of time here at […]
Safeguarding Humanity
I was born into a world in which no individual or group claimed to own the mission embodied in the Lifeboat Foundation’s two-word motto. Government agencies, charitable organizations, universities, hospitals, religious institutions — all might have laid claim to some peace of the puzzle. But safeguarding humanity? That was out of everyone’s scope. It would […]
Disruption and Transformation
Preparing for the Foresight Vision Weekend in Sunnyvale, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my map of the development space for nanotechnology which we revisited in a recent edition of FasftForward Radio. I’ve never been completely satisfied with the axes of that diagram. I wanted to show how some developments have this immediate […]
The Three Goals, Game Theory, and Western Civilization
A while back, I wrote about the possibility of updating the Three Laws of Robotics as goals in order to make them a more practical means of getting at a friendly artificial general intelligence. This kicked off some interesting discussion, including some debate as to whether my “goals” really aren’t just rules rephrased. In which […]