Stone Age minds in internet time
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I mak...
All posts tagged with future
Link: Robots in retail
MIT Technology Review has an interview with an exec from a company making robots for Walmart: “Walmart’s new robots are loved by staff—and ignored by custome...
Artificial intelligence with the biases of its designers
Nice piece from Kate Crawford in the New York Times about how predictive technologies used by Google and others go wrong when applied outside the context the...
Link: Will humans extinct themselves into cyborghood?
Alex Tabarrok writes at Marginal Revolution: “Should we care if the human race goes extinct?”
Bill Nye looks at the future of human evolution
The noted television popular science educator Bill Nye has a new book in which he looks at the evidence for evolution: Undeniable: Evolution and the Science ...
Link: Does ‘singularity’ have the right meaning for technology?
Many futurists and not a few science fiction writers hold the idea that computer technology is developing toward a point where artificial intelligence will b...
Link: Kim Stanley Robinson looks at our future in the Anthropocene
In Nautilus David Grinspoon interviews science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson about his recent work, 2312 and the disconnect between technological optim...
Launching genetic diversity to the stars
Popular Mechanics asks, “How Many People Does It Take to Colonize Another Star System?”. The basic problem is that a multigenerational star voyage requires t...
Billions of Earths
The Bad Astronomer explains this week’s new Kepler-assisted astronomy findings: “The Sky May Be Filled with Earth-like Planets”.
Pointing to entomophagy
Julie Lesnik is a biological anthropologist who has done a lot of research on insect consumption, by ancient hominins, living humans and living non-human pri...
Humans are still evolving, and soon we'll know a lot more about it
Lots of readers have asked me to react to this Telegraph article: “Sir David Attenborough: Humans have stopped evolving”:
Turning eyes toward the future
The Guardian covers a story on risks to humanity: “How are humans going to become extinct?” The occasion for the story seems to be Cambridge University’s des...
A future beneath the yellow sky
Why am I linking this story in the NY Times about the extreme levels of pollution in Beijing? (“Pollution Is Radically Changing Childhood in Chinas Cities”)
Our future shrinking population
Jeff Wise in Slate has an essay about “World population may actually start declining, not exploding”.
Martian will
Adam Mann in Wired covers Elon Musk’s ideas about putting people on Mars: “Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony”.
Interstellar design
Popular Mechanics has an article that goes through some of the basics of space flight design principles: “What would a starship actually look like?”
Mailbag: Beyond the solar system
My name is Corey Hayes. I am in my final year of Anthropology at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. My Minor's English, and I've been told I have a bent...
Thinking about the dark days
When it comes to the long term future of humanity, I’m fundamentally an optimist. But The Atlantic has an interview with Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford Uni...
Genomes too cheap to meter
Matthew Herper is a science and medicine contributing writer at Forbes.com. He has just written a series of posts themed as “Gene Week”, focusing on advances...
Quote: Boyle on progress
Alan Boyle:
Clearing the stack
Here are some links that have been piling up in my browser tabs this week:
Some future evolution scenarios
Because of my work on recent human evolution, people ask me a lot – I mean, an awful lot – what our evolution will be like in the future.
Vooks
The coming trend in e-books: video.
Cryonics tales
And now for something completely different:
The sixth sense
Quinn Norton started wearing a vibrating compass to her leg to experiment with sense augmentation: “My New Sense Organ”
Quote: Nick Bostrum on mucking around with genes
Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is headed by Nick Bostrum, who gave an interview to Time writer Eben Harrell:
Robots with bones
Robots with bones:
Mailbag: Statistics and future evolution
I was trying to find out more about recent research predicting a relative convergence of racial features in future generations (but I don't know anything abo...
Machine memory
John Zogby polled Americans on whether they’d like to become cyborgs. Some of the questions are about brain implants for health, others for information or “e...
Hawks in U.S. News
I’m featured in an article in U.S. News and World Report, by Nancy Shute. It was a great interview, and she’s put together our work on recent acceleration wi...
Becoming bionic
A couple of months ago, the Washington Post ran an article by Michael Chorost, who has written a book about his experience with a cochlear implant. I meant t...
Don't ask the experts if they can't agree on the question
John Timmer was at the World Science Fest’s panel on What It Means To Be Human, and gives a partial blow-by-blow. Usually these kinds of panels don’t bother ...
The future of robot love affairs
I've been telling people this week that there is some sense to which the evolutionary future will be determined by the cultural impact of technological chan...
802,701 A.D.? A little short of that
UPDATE (2007/10/28): I wrote this post last year (the original datestamp is October 18, 2006), to critique some reports about what sounded like crazy future...
Scientific publication changing with the times
Alan Boyle covers a talk by Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science that augurs changes to come in the publication of pop science:
The past is before us, or behind, whatever
A recent paper in Cognitive Science by Nuñez and Sweetster has evoked several interesting strains of blog commentary. The paper is about the cognitio...
Recent evolution and future evolution
Wired has a short article by Annalee Newitz about recent evolutionary changes and their implications for futurists:
Kurzweil interview: The Singularity Is Near
Regular readers know my interest in future evolution. Of course in some senses the future is unknowable, especially over the evolutionary time scale.
Getting under your skin
I just couldn't see these two items on Slashdot without connecting them together.
Carnival of the Future
The current "Carnival of the Future" is featuring this post from a few days ago, as a lead-off to the topic of future evolution in humans. Check it out for ...
The future evolution of humans
I've written about some future predictions for human evolution before. A couple of readers sent me this article from Science (subscription required) by Mich...
Human evolution "at the crossroads"
MSNBC has posted a new entry in its series on "future evolution," this one covering possible scenarios for the evolution of our species in the future. This ...
Ummm…about that "evolutionary impact statement"…
MSNBC is running a series on the "future of evolution," featuring Peter Ward's book Future Evolution and others. Today (5/4/05) was my last lecture day in m...
Taming the domestic frontier
An opinion column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Vincent G. Barnes (Friday, Feb. 11, 2005) makes an interesting argument about the uses of genetic en...