Daniel Rourke /stream

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‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in…

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Digital fabrication is praised as the future of manufacturing. Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machine tools can convert a digital design into an object with the click of a mouse, which means…

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We have a strange, sad way of leaving things behind. Not just regular old things—spent notebooks, obsolete consumer electronics, whatever—but big things that happen to be old.

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There are places you never expect to be in life.

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The promise of virtual reality has always been enormous. Put on these goggles, go nowhere, and be transported anywhere. It’s the same escapism peddled by drugs, alcohol, sex, and art —…

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Craig Venter reclines in his chair, puts his feet up on his desk and - gently stroking his milk chocolate-coloured miniature poodle, Darwin, asleep in his arms - shares his vision…

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Since the dawn of cinema, the cut has been one of the most powerful tools in a director’s kit. If we see a man walk through a door and turn his…

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Astronauts on a routine repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves coping with more than they bargained for in the pulse-pounding opening sequence of Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning film, Gravity.…

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Evolution’s retirement plan has been 3.6 billion years in the making. With the appearance of the modern human being, we now have an organism that can take over from natural processes…

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Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork,…

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During writing a paper for the 100 Year Starship Symposium, I wished to convince the starship designers that they should  acknowledge the dynamics of high-technology economy, which may be crucial for…

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In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan uses the metaphor of the mythological Prometheus to frame his discussion on posthumanism and positions him as a trickster with a…

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Who Owns the Future?by Jaron Lanier Simon & Schuster, 2013, 396 pp. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov Public Affairs, 2013, 415 pp.

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In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material of…

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This is what a New Yorker article has to say on the subject of “Moral Machines”: “An all-powerful computer that was programmed to maximize human pleasure, for example, might consign us…

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For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new…

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Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable" "All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised of…

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The first step on this trip is mental. We need to begin by no longer treating the Internet like a ghost. It's made of more metal, plastic, and fiber than you…

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Last Wednesday, with relatively little fanfare, Google introduced a new technology called Google Knowledge Graph. Type in “François Hollande,” and you are offered a capsule history (with links) to his children,…

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Systems that can identify emotions in images of faces might soon collate millions of peoples' reactions to events and could even replace opinion polls IF THE computers we stare at all…

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‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in…

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Digital fabrication is praised as the future of manufacturing. Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machine tools can convert a digital design into an object with the click of a mouse, which means…

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There are places you never expect to be in life.

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Craig Venter reclines in his chair, puts his feet up on his desk and - gently stroking his milk chocolate-coloured miniature poodle, Darwin, asleep in his arms - shares his vision…

Bookmark

Since the beginning of cinema, filmmakers have relied on cutting from one image to another in order to tell a visual story. The human brain naturally fills in the gaps between…

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Astronauts on a routine repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves coping with more than they bargained for in the pulse-pounding opening sequence of Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning film, Gravity.…

Bookmark

Evolution’s retirement plan has been 3.6 billion years in the making. With the appearance of the modern human being, we now have an organism that can take over from natural processes…

Bookmark

Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork,…

Bookmark

During writing a paper for the 100 Year Starship Symposium, I wished to convince the starship designers that they should  acknowledge the dynamics of high-technology economy, which may be crucial for…

Bookmark

Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change,…

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Who Owns the Future?by Jaron Lanier Simon & Schuster, 2013, 396 pp. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov Public Affairs, 2013, 415 pp.

Bookmark

In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material of…

Bookmark

Computers are getting invisible. They shrink and hide. They lurk under the skin and dissolve in the cloud. We observe the process like an eclipse of the sun, partly scared, partly…

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For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new…

Bookmark

Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable" "All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised of…

Bookmark

The first step on this trip is mental. We need to begin by no longer treating the Internet like a ghost. It's made of more metal, plastic, and fiber than you…

Bookmark

Systems that can identify emotions in images of faces might soon collate millions of peoples' reactions to events and could even replace opinion polls IF THE computers we stare at all…