Can robots have rights? Should robots have rights? These deceptively big questions regarding "roborights" are shaping up to be among the Big Issues debated by law makers, scientists, engineers, and philosophers in 2019 - and far into the future. I read David J. Gunkel's Robot Rights to get a handle on where academia is "at" … Continue reading Robot Rights
"The pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate emphatic failure and ignore empire success." - The Life and Death of American Cities Scale by Geoffrey West may not be the easiest read (it has a highly academic style, complete with lots of highly academic jabs at different academic fields - … Continue reading Scale
"Those two, in paradise were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no alternative." - We I'm really enjoying retro-science fiction at the moment. The ideas imagined in science fiction of years past planted seeds in more practical minds who went on to shape the future that we live in … Continue reading We
Apparently Reason, Enlightenment, Science, and Human Progress are controversial again. (If the conversations I've been having on Twitter lately are anything to go by, ideas such as 1) absolute progress is a good thing, even if relative progress is slower than we might like, 2) that things are not all bad right now, in fact … Continue reading Enlightenment Now (Yes, please, and thank you)
“Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the … Continue reading New Gods for a New Age – Losing Our Religion and Finding it Again in (Unlikely) Places
"What could possibly go wrong?" The more I read and learn about science and technology, the more often I think that we don't give enough attention to that question: What. Could. Go. Wrong. Most technology is dangerous in the wrong hands, and as technology becomes more powerful, the what could go wrong is only escalating. … Continue reading Cat’s Cradle
There is a problem with automated governance and outsourcing decision making to artificial intelligence. And that problem is probability. And the probable problem at hand is that the innocent are flagged as guilty, the right candidates flagged as wrong, at an unacceptably high probability. As we use - even highly reliable - automated systems such … Continue reading I don’t like the look of your face
The following videos, representing a wide variety of views on the subject, are worth a few minutes of your time if you want to get to grips with the idea of electronic citizenship and the future of the digital nation state - beyond physical borders - for better or for worse. The state's perspective: The … Continue reading Citizenship as a Service – Rethinking the Nation State Beyond Physical Borders
Nudge is a book about "Libertarian Paternalism" - in other words about manipulating people into making better choices that are in their best interests (according to some centralised authority anyway). Tautology aside, the book is a decent take on the more practical (or evil, depending on your point of view) applications of behavioural economics. The … Continue reading Nudge
Banks, central banks, reserve banks - and Bitcoin. They all exist because human beings - individuals like you and me - cannot be trusted. (And because we are greedy, envious and have no self control or patience.) Money is not so much the root of all evil, as evil is the root of all money. … Continue reading Evil is the Root of all Money
