Blogging, then, seems to be an industry on the cusp of maturity. Nick Carr compares its evolution to that of ham radio in the early twentieth century. Out of the amateur hubbub emerged self-made stars, who were then hired by fledgling networks that eventually grew into CBS, NBC and ABC. In much the same way, blogging celebrities have been snatched up by old and new conglomerates, while a sudden heart attack in the old-media world has put commercial blogging enterprises into a startlingly advantageous position. To wit, in the midst of a major downturn in advertising profits across most media, revenue to Gawker’s network of eight blogs jumped 45% in the first half of this year.

In theory, many Japanese could easily make the leap into a cashless world. The country has six main competing cashless payment systems, many of them embedded into mobile phones. Including Oyster-type cards issued by public transport companies, industry sources estimate that there are about 120 million cashless payment chips sitting in Japan’s wallets and handbags, waiting to be swiped.

To be Transhuman is to be something other than human. Just as we might expect a machine intelligence to seem alien to us and to consider us alien, we might also consider such humans who transcend their humanity to be as different.

The usual answer to this from would-be Transhumanists is that, if Transhumans are going to have all the talents and abilities, they are going to have the advantage in any war. Join up or find yourself on the losing side.

But Harris shows us a view of Transhumanism so revolting that one might expect the entire human race to rise up en masse and divert every effort to stamping it out if it should ever become more than an occasional curiosity. While most would-be Transhumanists probably do not plan on becoming cannibals, the whole point is that you really can’t plan at all on what a transhuman being would think is an appropriate way to treat traditional humans. Even if that potential transhuman being is the one that was once you. Just ask Clarice Starling.

..as this article ingeniously argues, the Westphalian system never existed in the first place. It was mostly American theorists making up “the Westphalian system” because the idea of international law made Americans feel better. The real world was always about bandits, terrorists, anarchists, mercenaries, and naked exercises of cynical power, and if we could get our heads around that, we wouldn’t have to sweat a New Dark Age because we wouldn’t be able to tell it from common reality.

Imagine a place – perhaps a shrinking city, or a badly savaged brownfield neighborhood – where laws were set up to strip rules and regulations down to a do-no-harm minimum (maintaining criminal laws and protecting health, safety, workers’ rights and civil liberties, but perhaps limiting liability and certainly slashing red tape and delays) allowing for wild deviations from existing patterns for buildings, systems and operations. Imagine a free-fire zone for sustainable innovations, where new approaches could be iterated and tested rapidly, and, when they work, sent to proliferate outside the Zone. Conversely, some of the freedom might paradoxically come from imposing boundary limitations that can’t yet be made practical or survive politically outside the Zone, such as bans on broad classes of chemicals or strict greenhouse gas emissions limits.

It’s July 2009, and in Johnson City, America’s permanent colony on the moon – named after Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who authorised it – they are celebrating the third generation of lunar Americans: the first child born to parents themselves born on the moon. With just 5000 inhabitants, “city” is perhaps too grandiose a term.

Robonomics: If robots and digital systems can do everything, let them–but let human society skim value from the result. This becomes a technologically-driven version of the Basic Income Guarantee model, where citizens are given a basic above-poverty income guarantee and are free to explore education, entrepreneurship, or even a life of indolence. Or they can get one of the remaining human jobs, jobs that may pay much more than they do now in order to attract people who otherwise wouldn’t want the work.

Could urban planners “seed” depressed areas with gourmet delis and boutique coffeeshops, in order to lure in a gentrifying vanguard of artists and hipsters? Forget former NYPD chief Bill Bratton’s “Fixing Broken Windows” theory; in this view, what would really turn around certain neighbourhoods is a state-funded injection of artisan bakeries.

If the inventors of Twitter never win a Nobel Prize, they wuz robbed. Because as far as I’m concerned, they have enabled us all to take a major evolutionary step at a crucial moment. At a time when the human race faces not one but several extinction threats, we suddenly get the ability to talk to one another.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are having The Conversation