Technology versus Humanity

““The key thing that I would point out is computer scientists have not been good at interacting with the social scientists and the philosophers,” said Joichi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab and a member of the board of directors of The New York Times. “What we want to do is support and reinforce the social scientists who are doing research which will play a role in setting policies.””

How Tech Giants Are Devising Real Ethics for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/technology/artificial-intelligence-ethics.html
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I'd be happy to contribute :)

“Kevin Kelly, the writer and futurist, whose most recent book is “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future,” said, “What we can do now would be A.I. fifty years ago. What we can do in fifty years will not be called A.I.””

The Hype—and Hope—of Artificial Intelligence - The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-hype-and-hope-of-artificial-intelligence
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The greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions – greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater even than Scientology – is the religion of technology. John Adolphus Etzler, a Pittsburgher, sounded the trumpet in his testament The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men (1833). By fulfilling its ‘mechanical purposes’, he wrote, the US would turn itself into a new Eden, a ‘state of superabundance’ where ‘there will be a continual feast, parties of pleasures, novelties, delights and instructive occupations’, not to mention ‘vegetables of infinite variety and appearance’.”

The internet as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud – Nicholas Carr | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/the-internet-as-an-engine-of-liberation-is-an-innocent-fraud
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“a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.”

Big data, Google and the end of free will
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c.html
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Brilliant stuff!

“Advances in 3D printing are also entering the world of prosthetics and organ transplants. We will soon be able to create custom replacement parts for both limbs and organs. Imagine a future where you will be able to replace different limbs to suit different tasks, with bionic body parts specifically engineered to perform specialized tasks much better than our own arms and legs that are generally good at most things.”

The ethics of transhumanism
http://social.techcrunch.com/2016/08/26/the-ethics-of-transhumanism/
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