On the horizon is the expanding field of brain-digital interface. Devices have already been built that use brain activity to control basic machinery, such as a prosthetic limb.This can be achieved either through implantable devices that directly interface with the brain, or external neuro-modulation, perhaps integrated into a helmet.
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As innovation in this field proceeds, Moreno also wondered whether we risk entering a human arms race, with militaries competing to have the most highly enhanced super soldiers. Such an arms race would have profound ethical implications, both for test subjects of the research and for how we view the balance between soldier as citizen and soldier as tool.I feel like I've seen this movie. I think it starred Jean-Claude Van Damme. Get over yourself. Re-imagining tired scifi tropes and calling it journalism?
The mind is best understood, not as software, but rather as an emergent property of the physical brain. So building an artificial intelligence with the same level of complexity as that of a human intelligence isn’t a matter of just finding the right algorithms and putting it together. The brain is much more complicated than that, and is very likely simply not amenable to that kind of mathematical reductionism, any more than economic systems are. Getting back to the question of artificial intelligence, then, you can see why it becomes a much taller order to produce a human-level intelligence. It’s possible to build computers that can learn and solve complex problems. But it’s much less clear that there’s an easy road to a computer that’s geared towards the type of emergent properties that distinguish the human brain. Even if such properties did emerge, I’m willing to bet that the end result of a non-human, sapient intelligence would be very alien to our understanding, possibly to the point of non-comprehension. Electric circuits simply function differently then electrochemical ones, and so its likely that any sapient properties would emerge quite differently.The article isn't long and is worth a scan, but you do sort of have to be entrenched in this stuff to really be interested. The way I see it, Knapps has two points: building the brain is hard because its circuitry is plastic (as in changeable) and self-adapting, and its hard because it cannot easily be done purely with software or hardware, but rather a much-more-difficult mesh of the two. So imagine if you will, a helicopter. It flies into the deep Amazon rainforest and picks up a few people from an isolated indigenous tribe. They are then transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida and are witness to a shuttle launch. One minute they are hunting for food and the next moment they are witness to one of the greatest engineering feats in history. It is then explained to them that inside that colossal structure (that is now flinging itself upwards at approximately a hundred times the speed of their fastest arrow) are six human beings who will soon be among the stars. "Can you build this?" the translator then asks the Amazonians.
Mr King's ultimate objection seems to me to blur together two separate thoughts. First, he seems to think there is a class of problems that belong to the nation as a whole. Then there's the thought that problem-solving efforts financed by gifts from the rich people will prove ineffective, while efforts financed by taxes can work.
To Mr King's claim that "charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny", I'd point out that tax revenue won't help much either. Asia's growing economies, greenhouse-gas emissions, and demand for oil aren't the sorts of thing American policy can do much about.
Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own.That last bit has to be especially distateful to a libertarian, doesn't it.
I know, I know. I’m profaning sacred ground here. Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, the teenage boys (and occasional girls) who grew into adults and kept on reading superhero comics were viewed as oddballs or outcasts. When Hollywood began to rediscover the pioneering DC and Marvel superheroes of the 20th century, it was refreshing and delightful at first, and for a while: the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, Tim Burton’s “Batman,” Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, the X-Men series. All were lots of fun, all descended into fatal decadence — as exemplified by Joel Schumacher’s “Batman & Robin,” quite possibly the worst film ever made in any language or tradition — all have since been zombified and ripped from the grave for another go-round, with emphatically mixed results. There’s nothing new about any of that, arguably. One of the defining characteristics of Batman and Superman and all their kind is their malleability, their immortality, their apparently endless recyclability.
But for the love of Christ, at what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient? Those one-time comic-book pariahs are now the dominant force in pop-culture entertainment, and their works are deemed to be not just big but also relevant and important, much the way that Cecil B. DeMille’s crap-history spectacles were in another day.And this from Freddie DeBoer:
I look forward with interest to the Avengers, but Andrew O'Hehir is perfectly right about the continued pretense that comic book fans are somehow an oppressed minority. You can't have the biggest movie of all times made for you and continue to complain that you're marginalized.Years ago (literally 20 years ago) when I read comic books daily, I was obsessed with the X-Men. Like so many of my peers, I role-played (usually I was Wolverine, occasionally Gambit). Here's some fun tidbits for you: Wolverine actually had bone claws all along, and they were coated with adamantium when he got his adamantium skeleton. He had a wife, but when she died, his healing factor was so powerful that it "healed" the nerves in his brain and made him forget he was ever married. At one point Magneto literally ripped the adamanium out of Wolverine. It then turned out that Wolvie's healing factor was way stronger, but the constant biocompatibility battle his body had been in against the adamantium had weakened it. After the adamantium was gone, he was essentially indestructible. For a time he becomes one of Apocalypse' Four Horseman, mutates into a feral monster, and eventually rejoins the X-Men.
