This paper examines policy, legal, ethical, and strategy implications for national security of the accelerating science, technology, and engineering (ST&E) revolutions underway in five broad areas: biology, robotics, information, nanotechnology, and energy (BRINE), with a particular emphasis on how they are interacting. The paper considers the timeframe between now and 2030 but emphasizes policy and related choices that need to be made in the next few years to shape the future competitive space favorably, and focuses on those decisions that are within U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) purview. The pace and complexity of technological change mean that linear predictions of current needs cannot be the basis for effective guidance or management for the future. These are issues for policymakers and commanders, not just technical specialists.
Imagination, reality flow in opposite directions in the brain
As real as that daydream may seem, its path through your brain runs opposite reality. Aiming to discern discrete neural circuits, researchers have tracked electrical activity in the brains of people who alternately imagined scenes or watched videos.
William Gibson: “Google is not ours” @GreatDismal
Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.
William Gibson : “Science fiction never imagined Google” @GreatDismal
Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction.We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it.
Evitable Conflicts, Inevitable Technologies? The Science and Fiction of Robotic Warfare and IHL
his article contributes to a special symposium on science fiction and international law, examining the blurry lines between science and fiction in the policy discussions concerning the military use of lethal autonomous robots
Battlestar Galactica and International Relations
The genre of science fiction offers the analyst an opportunity that cannot be matched by more mimetic genres, namely the chance to look at how sets of widely-circulating expectations of the social serve to constrain authors as they work to introduce as yet unexplored problematiques, the fantasy aspect in much of science fiction storytelling is premised simply on a material difference.
RT @BanKillerRobots: Everyone wants to prevent the scifi scenario says We need to consider challenging Q of “meaningful” huma…
RT @BanKillerRobots: Everyone wants to prevent the scifi scenario says We need to consider challenging Q of "meaningful" huma…
@paleofuture : This Is What I See Every Time You Tell Me How Cool Oculus Rift Is
@paleofuture : This Is What I See Every Time You Tell Me How Cool Oculus Rift Is