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"Laboratories Fiction."
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Death sentence
After his failed attempt to escape from Furnace Penitentiary, Alex struggles to survive the bloodstained laboratories beneath where monsters are manufactured, with a death sentence, or worse, hanging over his head.
Book
Partners of Humans: A Realistic Assessment of the Role of Robots in the Foreseeable Future
As robots are generally thought to perform human-like tasks, they depend on the successes of information technology in the area of artificial intelligence to succeed in such pursuits. But robots, through their anthropomorphic character and their weighty presence in science fiction, attract the attention of the press and the media in a way that, at times, blurs the distinction between the actual state of the art and exaggerated claims. This makes it hard to assess the true functional positioning of robots, how this is likely to move forward and whether the outcome of progress could be detrimental to human society. The aim of this paper is to review the actual level of competence that is being achieved in robotics research laboratories and a plausible impact that this is likely to have on human control over life and jobs. The key thesis here is that cognition in machines and even an artificial form of consciousness lead to operations in a set of tasks (the ‘algorithmic’ category) which is different from that available to truly cognitive and conscious human beings (the ‘life-need’ category): that is, in the paper it is argued that a major category error (Ryle in The concept of mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949) looms in predictions of serious threats to humanity. As far as a threat to jobs goes, it is argued that early attention to education and re-skilling of humans in the workplace can lead to an effective symbiosis between people and robots.
Journal Article
Suspicious minds
A mysterious lab. A sinister scientist. A secret history. If you think you know the truth behind Eleven's mother, prepare to have your mind turned Upside Down in this thrilling prequel to the hit show Stranger Things. It's the summer of 1969, and the shock of conflict reverberates through the youth of America, both at home and abroad. As a student at a quiet college campus in the heartland of Indiana, Terry Ives couldn't be farther from the front lines of Vietnam or the incendiary protests in Washington. But the world is changing, and Terry isn't content to watch from the sidelines. When word gets around about an important government experiment in the small town of Hawkins, she signs on as a test subject for the project, code named MKULTRA. Unmarked vans, a remote lab deep in the woods, mind-altering substances administered by tight lipped researchers . . . and a mystery the young and restless Terry is determined to uncover. But behind the walls of Hawkins National Laboratory--and the piercing gaze of its director, Dr. Martin Brenner--lurks a conspiracy greater than Terry could have ever imagined. To face it, she'll need the help of her fellow test subjects, including one so mysterious the world doesn't know she exists--a young girl with unexplainable, superhuman powers and a number instead of a name: 008. Amid the rising tensions of the new decade, Terry Ives and Martin Brenner have begun a different kind of war--one where the human mind is the battlefield.
Imagining technologies for disability futures
[...]the potential of future technologies in this area are found equally in engineering and product development laboratories or in care settings pioneering the use of assistive robotics, for example. The Perinatal Life Support project, coordinated by the Eindhoven University of Technology, is developing a perinatal life support system with the aim of potentially providing premature infants with a supply of oxygen and nutrients through the umbilical cord and an artificial placenta. [...]research aims to address premature infant death or the neurological or developmental complications that can be an outcome of extreme prematurity. In her view, “science fiction is the dress rehearsal for social change”.
Journal Article
Nearly found
High school senior and science whiz Nearly Boswell, called Leigh, is thrilled when she gets an internship in a forensic science lab, since it is a step toward college and a way out of the trailer park--but soon she finds herself the target of a serial killer, one who seems to know a lot about the residents of Sunny View Trailer Park as well as her absent father's secrets.
Book
Step Into the Free and Infinite Laboratory of the Mind
Aliens! Killer robots! Spaceships! For a long time, Finn saw science fiction stories in a fairly conventional way--as a touchstone or a starting point for a conversation about a topic such as artificial intelligence (Terminator or I, Robot) or genetic engineering (Gattaca or Frankenstein). These stories act as a kind of collective shorthand, one that gets a crowd on the same page before conversation turns to the \"real\" challenges facing society. That was before the future became his job. When he founded the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University in 2012, he began to understand science fiction as part of an important feedback loop with real scientific and technological innovation. Science fiction and science are both engaged in exploring the adjacent possible: the worlds many might be able to reach from their present configuration of science and society. Writers and researchers scour the literature, looking for ideas that might be combined or extended in novel ways, and both groups are in the business of creating new stories or new concepts that might change the world.
Journal Article
The place between breaths
Grace, sixteen, fears that she'll succumb to the schizophrenia that took her mother away, while she and her father work for a genetics lab rushing to find a cure.
Book
Visions of human futures in space and SETI
We discuss how visions for the futures of humanity in space and SETI are intertwined, and are shaped by prior work in the fields and by science fiction. This appears in the language used in the fields, and in the sometimes implicit assumptions made in discussions of them. We give examples from articulations of the so-called Fermi Paradox, discussions of the settlement of the Solar System (in the near future) and the Galaxy (in the far future), and METI. We argue that science fiction, especially the campy variety, is a significant contributor to the ‘giggle factor’ that hinders serious discussion and funding for SETI and Solar System settlement projects. We argue that humanity's long-term future in space will be shaped by our short-term visions for who goes there and how. Because of the way they entered the fields, we recommend avoiding the term ‘colony’ and its cognates when discussing the settlement of space, as well as other terms with similar pedigrees. We offer examples of science fiction and other writing that broaden and challenge our visions of human futures in space and SETI. In an appendix, we use an analogy with the well-funded and relatively uncontroversial searches for the dark matter particle to argue that SETI's lack of funding in the national science portfolio is primarily a problem of perception, not inherent merit.
Journal Article
Following Baxter
\"Eleven-year-old Jordie Marie Wallace has been waiting forever for someone to move in next door, so she is thrilled when Professor Reece arrives: she has a laboratory in her basement and an extraordinary dog named Baxter, who seems to understand everything Jordie says. Jordie and her younger brother TJ begin walking Baxter and helping Professor Reese in the lab. But being lab assistants ends up being more than Jordie and TJ bargained for and leads them to a secret neither of them expected. When Professor Reece goes missing, it is up to Jordie and TJ to use their smarts and Baxter's magical powers to find her. Will they be able to save Professor Reece before it's too late?\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
From Parasite to Symbiont: Cyborg Identity, Ecological Agency and Posthuman Freedom in Suarez’s Daemon and Freedom
This article examines Daniel Suarez’s techno-thrillers Daemon (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) as works of speculative fiction that critically engage with themes of posthuman identity, algorithmic governance, and ecological agency. Rather than portraying artificial intelligence as a dystopian threat, the novels imagine the Daemon, which is a self-replicating system launched upon its creator’s death, as an infrastructural force that reorganizes global systems of power, labor, and survival. Through a posthumanist reading, drawing on thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, this article interprets the Daemon not as malevolent code, but as an ecological actor embedded in material networks, capable of fostering adaptive forms of life and governance. By reading Suarez’s fiction through the lens of posthuman ecocriticism and infrastructural media theory, the article offers a model for understanding freedom, not as a static right, but as a relational capacity earned through participation in sympoietic systems. It argues that speculative fiction can function as a cartographic tool, mapping not only future technologies but future ontologies.
Journal Article