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Novacene : the coming age of hyperintelligence
\"The originator of the Gaia theory offers the vision of a future epoch in which humans and artificial intelligence together will help the Earth survive. James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the Anthropocene;the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age the Novacene has already begun. In the Novacene, new beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think 10,000 times faster than we do and they will regard us as we now regard plants. But this will not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by science fiction. These hyperintelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project. It is crucial, Lovelock argues, that the intelligence of Earth survives and prospers. He does not think there are intelligent aliens, so we are the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos. Perhaps, he speculates, the Novacene could even be the beginning of a process that will finally lead to intelligence suffusing the entire cosmos. At the age of 100, James Lovelock has produced the most important and compelling work of his life.\"--Publisher's website.
Book
The singularity : could artificial intelligence really out-think us (and would we want it to)?
This volume represents the combination of two special issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on the topic of the technological singularity. Could artificial intelligence really out-think us, and what would be the likely repercussions if it could? Leading authors contribute to the debate, which takes the form of a target chapter by philosopher David Chalmers, plus commentaries from the likes of Daniel Dennett, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, Ben Goertzel, Frank Tipler, among many others. Chalmers then responds to the commentators to round off the discussion.
eBook
THE DIGITAL GENERATION
From the cyber utopians to the internet sceptics, everyone seems to have an opinion about the role new technologies should play in our lives. This article suggests that the gadgets we now make and use are far from innocent: their ultimate commercial and potentially, political purpose is the creation of a surveillance society on a scale that would have shocked George Orwell. We must decide that it is in our best interests to live with machines as servants and not masters, and to retain our sense of self and society despite the tidal wave of connectivity and information theft. (Quotes from original text)
Journal Article
Popular Culture and Public Affairs
Recently I saw a corporate TV advertisement for the American television network ABC. It showed brief shots of people in other countries—France, Japan, Russia and so on. These people were doing all kinds of things, but they weren't watching television. Americans, the commentary told us, watch more TV than any of these people. Yet America is the richest, most innovative, most productive nation on the planet. ‘A coincidence’, concluded the wry, confident voice, ‘we don't think so’.
Journal Article
'The Spiritual Brain': A response to atheists, materialists
There are plenty of examples. People were terribly excited when a computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. The machines, it was claimed, were thinking like -- or, rather, better than -- humans. But, of course, they weren't. They were simply aggregating the skills of their programmers. Kasparov was playing a team. Claims about \"God genes\" have proved absurd, attempts to induce religious experiences with magnetic helmets are dubious in the extreme, and temporal-lobe epilepsy explains almost nothing about either religious or high artistic talent. The inflation of scientific claims based on such patently feeble evidence is an embarrassment to the materialists. That said, the claims of the soulists, once we step back from the simple experience of being an aware self, are equally problematic. [Mario Beauregard] uses evidence like near-death experiences (NDEs) and psi - - or paranormal -- effects and his own work on religious experience to show that the self or soul is not simply locked inside the skull. In the case of NDEs, for example, people often report seeing themselves from the outside, typically, reporting a bird's-eye view of an operating theater. One cannot doubt these experiences, but the interpretation that they involve a separation of the self from the body is speculation. In the case of psi effects -- telepathy, psychokinesis -- the evidence is patchy. Finally, it is unquestionable that religious experiences are not the simple pathologies claimed by some materialists, but that is not to say they are demonstrably different in kind from anything encountered in material science.
Newsletter
Author Frank Tipler thinks physics proves Christianity
[Frank Tipler] rejects all this. We have a theory of everything, all the problems were resolved 30 years ago. Subsequent stringy speculations are just that, speculations without any experimental proof. To deny the multiverse is to deny quantum theory; a complete theory of quantum gravity was stumbled upon long ago by Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg, and the Standard Model is founded on rock-solid foundations of experimental evidence. Why, then, do the physicists deny all this? Because, says Tipler, they don't like the universe that emerges, a universe that begins and ends with God. The experimentally based physics to which Tipler refers predicts a singularity -- a point at which all known laws of physics break down and to which, therefore, our science has no access -- from which the universe sprang. There is a further singularity at the end of the universe and a third joining the two. This is the Holy Trinity. The first singularity, says Tipler, is God the Father, the second God the Holy Ghost, and the third God the Son. The latter, because of his role as the singularity that runs alongside the present, is able to appear in human history.
Newsletter