Daniel Rourke /stream

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Creativity is one of humanity’s uniquely defining qualities. Numerous thinkers have explored the qualities that creativity must have, and most pick out two important factors: whatever the process of creativity produces,…

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All technologies rely on specific materials that support communication, materials that leave their mark on the environment in a way that exceeds human imagination.

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Telofossils II, 2015. Images courtesy XPO Gallery and the artist We don't have a time machine (that we know of—yet), but we can still get a theoretical idea about what our…

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Humanity inscribes itself into the rock record of Earth’s history. People now move more sediment than all the world’s rivers combined. Fossil fuel burning has changed the composition of the atmosphere.

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There’s a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The…

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas…

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A collection of essays on the work of Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter attempts to move toward a future beyond white supremacist narratives of human universality.  The past year’s high profile murders…

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Even though it’s looking increasingly likely that humanity will find a way to wipe itself off the face of the Earth, there’s a chance that our creative output may live on.

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The MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Layer III standard, more commonly referred to as MP3, has become a nearly ubiquitous digital audio file format. First published in 1993, this codec implements a lossy…

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How many researchers does it take to change a test of artificial intelligence? Sixty-five years ago, famed mathematician and WWII code-breaker Alan Turing unveiled the “Imitation Game,” a playful scenario designed to…

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One day artificial intelligence might well identify any object that passes in front of its sensors, and with far greater depth and accuracy than humans. For now, we have smartphone apps…

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In a welcome sign of the coming singularity, Buzzfeed just announced that it has built a sentence generator that mimics the turgid writing style of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

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I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in…

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Creativity is one of humanity’s uniquely defining qualities. Numerous thinkers have explored the qualities that creativity must have, and most pick out two important factors: whatever the process of creativity produces,…

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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) presents a dystopian vision of a near-future world in which most organic vegetation has died and human life is becoming increasingly rare.

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Telofossils II, 2015. Images courtesy XPO Gallery and the artist We don't have a time machine (that we know of—yet), but we can still get a theoretical idea about what our…

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In a nondescript alleyway on Pittsburgh’s North Side, Nathan Kukulski arrives at a house party carrying two half-empty cases of beer. The place is called Cyberpunk Apocalypse, an experiment in communal…

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There’s a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The…

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas…

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Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism. As a universal wave that erases the self-portrait of…

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The MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Layer III standard, more commonly referred to as MP3, has become a nearly ubiquitous digital audio file format. First published in 1993, this codec implements a lossy…

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How many researchers does it take to change a test of artificial intelligence? Sixty-five years ago, famed mathematician and WWII code-breaker Alan Turing unveiled the “Imitation Game,” a playful scenario designed to…

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One day artificial intelligence might well identify any object that passes in front of its sensors, and with far greater depth and accuracy than humans. For now, we have smartphone apps…

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Finally, the robot revolution is arriving. There’s a Cambrian explosion in robotics, with species of all sizes, shapes and modes of mobility crawling out of the muck of the lab and…

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I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in…