Crispr in the court of public opinion

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A philosophical poser in today’s Financial Times appears in an article entitled “Geneticists quest for crisper prose in the book of life”. At issue is the emerging gene editing technology known as CRISPR – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, (not the most illuminating acronym in the world of science). In essence, the technology has […]

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Situation vacant: mind uploaders wanting

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If we are “nothing more than the signals flitting through our brain” it might just about make sense that this little mashy blob of signal-facilitating could be cryonically preserved – frozen for the dubious benefit of some posterity that might thaw it out – and then the zippity-zap of signalling could again begin. Assuming that […]

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Cognitive demography: a question in the numbers

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In the week of this year’s Bilderberg meeting, it might be useful to reflect on a few numbers in assessing the issue of equality – not equality in terms of the customary metrics of wealth, or GDP, or access to resources, or educational attainment, but rather in terms of the brute number of human neurons […]

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Thought experiment 1 – Humour and AI

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In the Guardian article referenced below in Lively Stuff, scientist Richard Dawkins in self-deprecatory mode references a cartoon showing a chap hard at work late at night on his computer, while his wife’s voice from off begs him to come to bed. He cannot be disturbed, he cries, as “Someone is wrong on the Internet”. […]

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Technology and solving the big problems

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Imagine being out on the street on the morning of 21 July 1969, and asking 100 people about humanity’s potential following the moon landing of the previous day. So, what next? Most people would have talked about cities on Mars, flying cars on Earth, and eradicating disease. You would have got nothing but blank looks […]

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