It would be nice if SF was more mainstream and popular in airport & big box book racks. We don’t need prescient mystics like Nostradamus, but rather humanist, rational, scientific writers like Isaac Asimov.

Along the human evolution and non-hard SF themes, I’d include Kurt Vonnegut’s “Galapagos” (1985). It really turns the ‘humans as the ultimate species’ idea (which is wrong-headed and not very Darwinian anyway) upside down. Not many stories are written from the perspective of the far future, and the ‘inspiring’ is not what you would expect.

There are two communities: one is working on strong AI, and the other is working on the control problem (safety). At present, they are close to being two solitudes. Therein lies the danger.

The question may be moot, the Americas were once ‘owned’ by the king & queen of Spain 🙂

Stephen Johnson makes a compelling argument for a burst of creativity actually being less due to a ‘Eureka’ moment and more the result of a ‘slow hunch’. Darwin is the classic example. It was almost 25 years between the Galapagos visit and “Origin of Species” (although in fairness, most of the ideas were worked out long before 1859). Einstein…[Read more]

Yes, it does come down to whether intelligence drives ‘good’ forward and ignorance drives ‘bad’ (both in a sawtooth fashion of course). This is perhaps not a question that computer scientists are best able to answer, although their contribution would be very helpful. For my part, I hope the future is Asimovian.

The only thing more crazy-making for me than talking to evolutionary psychologists is talking to cyberneticians about 2nd order, 3rd order, …

I’ll just relate one thought from one of our more colourful prime ministers, Jean Chretien. He said that Canadians know how to get out of a snow bank. You just go a little forward, then a little backward,…[Read more]

In regards to the earlier “3-pound hominid brain” question, I’d say two things.

First, given what we have worked out (learned) about the natural world, it’s obvious that our understanding has and will continue to range far and wide. I would advise those evolutionary psychology types who restrictively link everything back to the savannah where we…[Read more]

Actually I was thinking of two Lawrence Krauss lectures that I saw on YouTube. He was deriving the GR equation from first principles in one and estimating the number of piano tuners in a city in the other, both for a class of humanities students. They needed to follow his line of thought and they also needed to answer some hard questions…[Read more]

a sphere…

Lawrence Krauss sometimes jokes, “consider a sphere” in the lectures of his I’ve seen online (poking fun at physics professors). So imagination can also be used as a mental whiteboard, not so much to create anew, but rather to follow another’s argument. Too much creativity-within-imagination could therefore interfere with learning.

I would say that creativity is a bit more pervasive than applied imagination. A computer running a program might show creativity (eg an advanced search algorithm).

To paraphrase JBS Haldane, the world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. A 3-lb hominid brain has its limits. However, it could be said that the Burgess Shale is evidence of creativity on a vast scale, and took place long, long before anything like humans were around. So, the two appear to be quite different things.

Of course virtual and augmented reality are two of the underlying stories of the whole information age. Captain Pike was made to be unfettered by his badly damaged physical body way back at the start of Star Trek, so the idea has been around for a while. We are basically brains connected to sensor/motor networks.

Making almost everything virtual…[Read more]

There is significant opportunity in extra-terrestrial habitation regarding medicine. Antibiotic resistance is a growing concern because new and effective antibiotics now come on-stream only in years where it used to be months (during the mid twentieth century). We are now searching ever more extreme environments, like high arid deserts, arctic…[Read more]

By the third movie, I was cheering for the Empire (I almost walked out of the theatre when the Ewoks showed up)

Here is a much more compelling story:

“The fall of Empire…a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity” – Isaac Asimov, Foundation

I think people are giving up on microbes too quickly. Dismissing Malthus, Darwin, Venter, etc in favour of von Neumann machines seems a bit dogmatic.

Even sticking to really, really, really hard established science, which seems to be the doctrine of these ‘Big Ideas’, let’s look at electronics.

When I was a lad, my dad bought a portable radio…[Read more]

Yes, of course (I do know what neutronium is). I was taking an extreme example to make the point. I was originally going to use ‘cast rodinium’ 🙂