Project Hieroglyph

Category: Responses

  • Science and Science Fiction

    A lot of us who do science non-fiction work are inspired by science fiction. I grew up watching the original Star Trek, in the 1960s, and that vision of people working together towards a common goal and achieving something bigger than themselves resonates with me. The science fiction stories that inspire me focus on the…

  • Excerpt from The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul

    I compare language to telepathy to point out how powerful language is. In the intimate conversations that you have with a lover, spouse or close friend, language feels as effortless as singing or dancing. The ideas flow and the minds merge.

  • Work-In-Progress Update: April 2013

    Last week I had a really great phone call with Darren Petrucci, Suncor Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Arizona State University, and we talked about previous work that each of us had done on border design. Previously, when I worked on the Border Town project, my goal was to create design interventions for…

  • “The Day It All Ended”: Thoughts of a Technologist

    Brad Allenby, President’s Professor of Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering; Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics; Professor of Law, Arizona State University  The most immediate response to the nice little piece by Charlie Jane Anders, “The Day It All Ended,” is pleasure at reading an optimistic story. This is more rare than you would think,…

  • Response to “Covenant”

    What I love about Hieroglyph and about the Center for Science and the Imagination is that I totally believe that you can’t have better futures without better dreams. With Hieroglyph, the idea is not that we’re utopians; it’s that we’re thoughtful about how things might go right. And that’s incredibly important.

  • Response to “Degrees of Freedom”

    As a scholar, the questions that this story raises, if this were a real technology, would be: “What exactly is going on in the software, in the intelligence that sits behind the system? How is it programmed such that we can read the Dorians with such subtlety and guide ourselves to a decision?”

  • Response to “Entanglement”

    To understand these new complexities, we need a new human consciousness. To understand that our actions have consequences, even though they are disconnected in time and space. This is also what we try to address in our work whenever we have the opportunity.

  • Response to “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA”

    When I first encountered the story, I was expecting it to be very futuristic – to happen maybe a hundred years in the future. But it struck very close to home. These are things that I think will happen in the next decade.

  • Response to “Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl”

    I am working on a project to assess learning using brain data, and this story does prompt me to further consider a natural extension of that line of research – can the brain be manipulated to accelerate learning?

  • Response to “Periapsis”

    I think the story is a really interesting analysis of how economic activity might evolve in the solar system. […] You have the emergence of diverse cultures that predominate in different environments. You have a distinct Mars culture and a very different Deimos culture. You also have a very interesting treatment of a different economic…