It’s always an honour to be asked to feature on a blog, so I was pleased to be on Richard Dee’s showcase recently.
The great and unusual thing about Richard’s request is that he didn’t specify a particular topic or have a set of questions. It was entirely up to me, and for some reason I chose to write about mailing lists and living forever. Check it out here and leave a comment if you feel inspired to do so.
In June this year I was invited to Oxford University by the International Neuroethics Society for a symposium on human brain organoids and other novel entities. As you can imagine it was a fascinating afternoon and another one of those moments when I felt as if science fiction could never be as strange as the real science itself.
There was talk of gastruloids, novel entities and chimeras. We discussed how to measure consciousness, the ethical valuation of moral status, developing a human brain inside an animal and that the closer we get to human brain surrogates the more pressing the ethical issues become.
You can read all about the symposium and watch some videos on the neuroethics society website.
Here’s a taster from the summary: Continue reading
In the words of Frederik Pohl, my job as a science fiction author is, “to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
I’m sure we all have mixed feelings about the future of robotics and artificial intelligence. I certainly do and it’s such a broad subject that it’s no surprise emerging technologies and science generates big questions. What human activity we value and what it means to be human might not be new questions, but this could be the moment to assess them again.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending even more time than usual thinking and reading about robots and artificial intelligence. I’ve outlined some brief thoughts below, but there’s way too much to put into a short blog post like this and others have written whole books about it, not least Max Tegmark in his book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Continue reading