Tag: Society

Apes, AIs and Us

On first contact with our Great Ape cousins, we dressed them in clothes, gave them beds to sleep in and even took them for tea with the King.
They were people.

We are so close that a rat and a mouse are ten times as different from one-another as a Human and a Chimp. We will seem closer still when Super Intelligent AIs raise the cognitive bar and humans join the other animals as uncanny innocents.
Read how it plays out in @SingularitysChildren my new Novel
#SuperIntelligence #BugNet
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32966907

#top100 #scifi Num:92 Holy Fire

http://amzn.to/1jr8FZG
@bruces Plausible near future SciFi. Like all great SciFi the book uses technology and visions of futuristic society as a means of exploring the deeper questions of what it is to be human. Here the tensions between the philosophies of the young and the old; Disruption and status quo.

Bruce Sterling – Holy Fire

Odious Debt

“The rising tide of debt cannot be explained by a rising tide of laziness or irresponsibility. The debt is systemic and inescapable. It isn’t fair, and people know it.”

“Radical proposals such as these bear in common a recognition that money, like property and debt, is a sociopolitical construct. It is a social agreement mediated by symbols: numbers on slips of paper, bits in computers. It is not an immutable feature of reality to which we can but adapt. The agreements that we call money and debt can be changed. To do so, however, will require a movement that contests the immutability of the current system and explores alternatives to it.”