“We will begin to use science and technology not just to manage the world around us but to manage our own human biology as well,” Bostrom said. “The changes will be faster and more profound than the very, very slow changes that would occur over tens of thousands of years as a result of natural selection and biological evolution.”

Bostrom declined to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. “Maybe it will take eight years or 200 years,” he said. “It is very hard to predict.”

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Once serious environmental deterioration sets in, the curve of technological change will flatten, even if we develop ‘godlike AIs,’ for the simple reason that intelligence itself is not enough to sustain growth. You also need resources, externally-derived social stability, etc. Climate change threatens technological growth by threatening its fundamental drivers.

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Banksy once told Swindle magazine: ‘I have no interest in ever coming out. I figure there are enough self-opinionated a**holes trying to get their ugly little faces in front of you as it is.’

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Laura McKensie, 21, was arrested and thrown in a holding cell due to a mix-up with her travellers visa. Laura was held in legal limbo for weeks without access to her parents or a chance to explain herself.

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Coders were told that their applications would have constant access to the Net, not the usual mobile hurry-up-and-wait feel. Working with the cloud — enabling programs to push or pull info to or from the Web — was a must. All Android phones would know where they were at all times, either by tapping into onboard GPS or by cross-referencing cell towers using a proprietary database owned by Google. And applications would be allowed to share information, which at the simplest level meant the kind of copy-and-paste functionality across all programs that cell phones currently lack.

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Google says it has learned the rules of the game — sometimes the hard way. Not long ago, the company enhanced its mobile version of Picasa, a photo-editing, storage, and slide-show service, so users could instantly upload images from their camera phone. Google took it to a phone company for placement but couldn’t get the necessary sign-off. The service, which was free, would have competed with a similar proprietary offering the carrier was rolling out — and charging $10 a month for. The idea of instant mobile uploading to Picasa was quietly shelved.

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So we have intelligence augmentation through both biochemistry and human-computer interface well underway and increasingly powerful, with artificial intelligence on some possible horizon. Let’s cast aside the loaded term “Singularity” and just talk about getting smarter. This is happening now, and will under nearly any plausible scenario keep happening for at least the next decade and a half. Enhanced intelligence alone won’t solve global warming and other environmental threats, but it will almost certainly make the solutions we come up with more effective. We could deal with these crises without getting any smarter, to be sure, and we shouldn’t depend on getting smarter later as a way of avoiding hard work today. But we should certainly take advantage of whatever new capacities or advantages may emerge.

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Wearing special legs he made for himself during his recovery and rehabilitation, Herr was soon out climbing again. With work, he was able to scale rock surfaces more difficult than those he’d tackled before the accident – not, he will tell you, because of the prostheses, but because he’d devoted himself to the sport. When he tired of the extreme-athlete life, Herr returned to school, enrolling at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. There, he discovered a passion for math and science and secured his first patent for prosthetic-limb design before graduating.

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this piece of art is one of the best things that’s gonna happen to the cyberpunk movement this year (apart from the first Doktor Sleepless trade paperback and the hopefully promising re-make of Ghost in the Shell and Pearry, trust me, you don’t release The Gene Generation in 2008, we’re so releasing doom in your pants.

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It’s 2019. The web of 6 trillion computing cores – 6 billion processing chips containing 1000 cores each – networked as if local to each other have simulated a path out of destruction for humanity. We have 23 years to go if we follow the human leadership – 2300 years or more if we blindly follow the computing intelligence – what do we choose?
7/11/08 11:24am
by Jane McGonigal

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