Chip implanted in brain interfaces quadriplegic man to a computer.While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable skills, and therefore no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see: singularity]. ( Read more... )

Man unable to form new memories after brain surgery. For him, it is always 1953.

This is like a real-world version of the movie Memento. Except he isn't looking to kill anyone or is tattooing notes all over his body. But, other than that...

Anyway, scientists at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri are working on a brain prosthesis that ( Read more... )

Over the last year I've been using a new party discussion gambit which consists of positing that "Google makes me smarter." The resulting discussion quickly separates the digiterati from the illinternet sheep ( Read more... )

Researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili have performed brain imaging studies of Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns, and can show the religious experience is triggered by a chain of distinct neurological events. This review of their book 'Why God Won’t Go Away' makes it sound like good reading:These questions and more resonate at the heart of ( Read more... )

The First Annual Colloquium on the Law of Transhuman Persons was last weekend.

I guess it is time to start thinking about Transhumanism and the law. After all, superintelligent AI's are people too!

The short review? Basically I called it right a couple of days ago, before I ever saw it:Yet, what reviews are out there today do leave a little room for hope; those who actually know something about Science Fiction are comparing the movie to Gattica, Lathe of Heaven, and Solaris. That, combined with the power of diminished expectations, might mean ( Read more... )

I've already mentioned that I plan on seeing 'Aeon Flux' this weekend. What I haven't mentioned is that I am doing so counter to the popular wisdom that the movie is going to suck like hard vacuum ( Read more... )

I am planning on going to see the Aeon Flux movie this weekend, even though there is no way in hell it can come anywhere close to the non-linear, posthuman, singularity-teetering, subversive future of Peter Chung's original vision.

Given all that, you can probably understand why I found this cartoon by Mike Russell explaining Aeon Flux to the ( Read more... )

Eye-implantable miniature telescope. In clinical trials now.That was her ambition, to be in simstim. Bobby just laughed it off. she talked to me about it, though. "How'd I look with a pair of these?" she'd ask, holding a full-page headshot, Tally Isham's blue Zeiss Ikons lined up with her own amber-brown. She'd had her corneas done twice, but she ( Read more... )

That is, he needs your help if you can describe the 'supermind' experience to him. Which, let's face it, none of us have any experience with. That is, other than using Google.

Sorry Rudy, I really wish I could help you. Really...