A different time comes
When I was younger I read many of Frank Herbert’s Dune series of books. Though there was a notable decline after the first installment (or at least diminishing returns), I read the whole original series (and follow-ups), so I must have enjoyed it to some extent. I’m not really a completist, as such. But an […]
The spread of ‘white people problems’
Life Expectancy Rises Around the World, Study Finds: A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases […]
I, for one, welcome robot servitors!
This is an incredible story, Meet ROBOT-Rx, The Robot Pharmacist Doling Out 350 Million Doses Per Year:
If medical errors are one of the leading causes of death, and medication dispensing errors account for 21 percent of all medical errors, then higher…
Panem ~ Bharat
Could any real country have an economy like Panem’s? Actually, yes. Not exactly analogous, but: More mobile phones than lavatories for a booming India. I would currently bet that a future like India writ-large is somewhat more likely than China or US…
Not just genomics: the creeping future
In 2007 Reihan Salam asked me when the $1,000 genome was going arrive. On paper, probably around this year, or early next. But as I’ve been suggesting it really isn’t that big of a deal (the sticker price isn’t real in any case, someone will want the publicity). Over at The Crux I try and […]
The future is here
Believe it or not I am probably mildly skeptical about the possibilities for the 21st century as a canvas for human flourishing. That is one reason I like to emphasize the positive, because it is important for me to not get caught up in my own bias. Over the last two human generations (50 years) […]
Singularity Summit 2011
That time of the year for a certain type of nerd, the Singularity Summit. Here’s a a preview: This Singularity Summit line-up this year features a mix of 25 speakers from numerous fields, with a central focus on robotics and artificial intelligence, in particular the victory of the IBM computer Watson in Jeopardy! this February. Inventor and award-winning author Ray Kurzweil will give […]
Eugenics as a luxury of the affluent
In the comments below Jason says in regards to the connection between eugenics and genocide and the “slippery slope”:
In your current comfortable first world circumstances, you are right the slope is perhaps not that slippery. I hope you ar…
Genetics existed before -omics
In the post below, Moderate marginal value to genomics, I left some things implicit. It turns out that this was an ill-considered decision. In reality my comments were simply more cryptic and opaque than implicit. This is pretty obvious because even th…
Nuclear power as the “shark attacks” of energy
Image Credit: Stefan Kuhn
I was at a coffee shop recently and a SWPL couple (woman had dreads to boot!) a number of tables away were reading a newspaper, and the husband expressed worry about the Fukushima disaster. The wife responded that “n…
Humanity+ conference in Pasadena
I was going to try and make it to the Humanity+ conference this year, but life intruded and the scheduling didn’t work out. Here’s the program. If you live in the LA area and this is your cup of tea, registration still looks open. Also check out H+ magazine. I noticed that my friend […]
The future is now, but more so
If you have some time to kill, the Paleo-Future weblog is really awesome. It shows what people thought the future was going to be like (often around the year 2000) from the 1870s through every decade of the 20th century. As usual with this sort of thing it tells you more about the salient aspects […]