Social/Ethical/Legal

Italy elects first transhumanist MP

A transhumanist congressman? In Italy? Seriously? Yes. In July, Italy — ironically, a stronghold of the Catholic Church —  became the first major Western nation to elect an active transhumanist. Giuseppe Vatinno, a member of the Italian Parliament, ran on a platform of “politics that strive to improve the human condition, making use of appropriate [...]

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Accelerated returns in food production

Ray Kurzweil’s “law of accelerating returns” is a very viable economic theory that can be used to address many of the issues that economists are facing in our times, but unfortunately most university departments of economics pay very little attention to it, whereas the old economic theories are not able to answer issues that global [...]

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First attack on a cyborg

UPDATE: McDonald’s provided this statement to KurzweilAI on July 18, 2012: “We share the concern regarding Dr. Mann’s account of his July 1 visit to a McDonald’s in Paris.  McDonald’s France was made aware of Dr. Mann’s complaints on July 16, and immediately launched a thorough investigation. The McDonald’s France team has contacted Dr. Mann [...]

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V2V: Department of Transportation’s new communication system helps cars avoid crashes by talking to each other

The University of Michigan is conducting a pilot program to test a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications device that could help drivers avoid accidents, CNET reports. This technology could prevent up to 81 percent of all vehicle crashes, according to the Department of Transportation (DOT). The school’s Transportation and Research Institute is seeking 3,000 drivers in the [...]

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‘Avatars’ to replace some humans at NYC area airports

As if TSA groping in airports wasn’t enough, now we’re going to be subjected to some kind of creepy composite of Princess Leia from Star Wars and the advertising scene in Minority Report. “I can be just about anything you want me to be,” over-enthuses the simulated “customer service representative,” five of which are intended for installation [...]

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Black boxes to be required in all new cars from 2015

A new bill (Senate Bill 1813, known as MAP-21) passed by the U.S. Senate in March calls for “mandatory event data recorders” to be installed in all new passenger motor vehicles sold in the U.S. for recording data before, during, or after a crash. As stated in Section 31406 of the bill, the government would have [...]

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A universe of self-replicating code

What we’re missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see [...]

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Will corporations prevent the Singularity?

It occurred to me recently that the world possesses some very powerful intelligent organisms that are directly and clearly opposed to the Singularity — corporations. Human beings are confused and confusing creatures. We don’t have very clear goal systems, and are quite willing and able to adapt our top-level goals to the circumstances. I have [...]

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Crowdfunded science projects

Got a cool idea for a research project, but need funding? Check out Petridish.org, which has just launched crowdfunded science and research projects. I think this is a really great idea that could open up funding for some amazing research ideas. On Petridish.org, researchers post materials about themselves and their research, and the public can discover projects [...]

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How to jam annoying talkers

Attention, telephone babblers, library whisperers, and hecklers: Japanese researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology want you to shut the bleep up. They’ve developed the “Speech-jammer” gun, which will reduce you to incoherent stuttering from up to 90 feet away. It works by recording your words and then sending them back [...]

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