# Edge 2009 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-will-change-everything) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-will-change-everything) - **Archive year:** 2009 - **Response rows represented:** 152 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 150 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 2 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 10 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 10 - **Not yet promoted:** 142 ## Editorial and provenance boundaries 1. Every extract below is copied from the downloaded Edge aggregate response archive and whitespace-normalized without changing its words. 2. The extract is representative, not a substitute for the full response; the linked response or aggregate page remains the provenance object. 3. Hypotheses, predictions, questions, provocations, and contested positions remain the contributor's claims rather than established facts. 4. Promotion into `reminders/` requires a separate standalone-passage, headline, category, source, routing, and reciprocal-link review. 5. This file records the entire archive cohort even when a response is outside the present consciousness-continuity and machine-succession trajectories. ## Complete response index ### EDGE2009-001 — A LIVELY GAMETE MARKET — Henry Harpending > B. But what if Sally values something like intelligence, which is almost completely unidimensional and of invariant polarity: nearly everyone values high intelligence. In this case Sally will evaluate Tom and Dick on simple scales that Sally shares with most other women, Tom will almost always be of higher value than Dick, and he will be able to obtain a higher price for his sperm. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Thomas Chair as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropolgy, University of Utah - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A LIVELY GAMETE MARKET](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11924) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-002 — A CHANGE IN WHO WE ARE — P Z Myers > The second big revelation is coming from neuroscience. Mind is clearly a product of the brain, and the old notions of souls and spirits are looking increasingly ludicrous…yet these are nearly universal ideas, all tangled up in people's rationalizations for an afterlife, for ultimate reward and punishment, and their concept of self. If many object to the lack of exceptionalism in our history, if they're resistant to the idea that human identity emerges gradually during development, they're most definitely going to find the idea of soullessness and mind as a byproduct of nervous activity horrifying. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist; Associate Professor, University of Minnesota, Morris - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [A CHANGE IN WHO WE ARE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11939) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-003 — OUR GENES ARE NOT OUR FATE — Dean Ornish > New studies show that these comprehensive lifestyle changes may change gene expression in hundreds of genes in only a few months—"turning on" (upregulating) disease-preventing genes and "turning on" (downregulating) genes that promote heart disease, oncogenes that promote breast cancer and prostate cancer, and genes that promote inflammation and oxidative stress. These lifestyle changes also increase telomerase, the enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and President of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [OUR GENES ARE NOT OUR FATE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11955) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-004 — A NEW THREAT — Joseph Traub > Due to the threat from increasing precision, range, and availability of weapons, will it be safe for our nation's leaders to gather in one public place? Such weapons are or will be available to a variety of nations, NGOs, and terrorist groups. It might well be in someone's interest to wipe out the nation's leadership in one blow. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University; coauthor, Complexity and Information - **Extract length:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [A NEW THREAT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11971) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-005 — THE EBB OF MEMORY — Kevin Slavin > In 1992, the artist Thomas Bayrle wrote that the great mistakes of the future would be that as everything became digital, we would confusememory with storage. What’s important about genuine memory and how it differs from digital storage is that human memory is imperfect, fallible, and malleable. It disappears over time in a rehearsal and echo of mortality; our abilities to remember, distort and forget are what make us who we are. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor and Founder, Playful Systems, MIT Media Lab - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE EBB OF MEMORY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11986) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-006 — BREAKING THE SPECIES BARRIER — Richard Dawkins > Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia. What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [BREAKING THE SPECIES BARRIER](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12080) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-007 — A DIFFERENT KIND OF MALE SUBJECTIVITY — Tino Sehgal > I really hope I will live to see this, as (although our epoch is of course a very challenging and thereby interesting one with the whole sustainability issue) the codes and modes of behaviour and expression available to men are extremely limited and simplistic, which make our times slightly dull. I am looking forward to seeing my own child grow up and what his generation's contribution will be, but even more so I sometimes have a sense of impatience to see how young men will be when I am very old. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** work has been exhibited at Tate Britain and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [A DIFFERENT KIND OF MALE SUBJECTIVITY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11577) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-008 — THE SUCCESSOR TO NATURAL SELECTION IN HUMANS — Bruce Parker > Technically, evolution of the human species as a result of natural selection stopped when we became a social animal — when the strong began protecting the weak and when our scientific and technological advances allowed us to extend the lives of those individuals unfortunate enough to have genetic weaknesses that would have killed them. With humans, artificial selection (selective breeding) was never a serious replacement for natural selection possibility, and as a result there have been no significant changes to the human species since its societies began. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visiting Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology; Author, The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [THE SUCCESSOR TO NATURAL SELECTION IN HUMANS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11741) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-009 — A LIVELY GAMETE MARKET — Henry Warwick > HENRY HARPENDING holds the Thomas Chair as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropolgy at the University of Utah, the strongest biological anthropology department in the United States. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a unique blend of field anthropologist (having spent years with the Bushmen and other peoples of the northern Kalahari) and population geneticist -one of international reputation, particularly active in the analysis of modern human origins. He played an important role in the development of the Out-of-Africa theory of human origins. He is coauthor, with Gregory Cochran, of The 10,000 Year Explosion. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** artist, composer, and scientist - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [A LIVELY GAMETE MARKET](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11909) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-010 — EXPECTATIONS — Corey S. Powell > Conscious machines. Intelligent machines are inevitable — by some measures they are already here. Synthetic consciousness would be a much greater breakthrough, in some ways a more profound one than finding life on other planets. One problem: We don't understand how consciousness works, so recreating it will require learning a lot more about what it means to be both smart and self-aware. Another problem: We don't understand what consciousness is, so it's not clear what "smart" and "self-aware" mean, exactly. Gerald Edelman's brain-based devices are a promising solution. Rather than trying to deconstruct the brain as a computer, they construct neural processing from the bottom up, mimicking the workings of actual neurons. Odds: 50-50. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Editor, Discover Magazine; Adjunct Professor, Science Journalism, NYU; Author: God in the Equation: How Einstein Transformed Religion - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [EXPECTATIONS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11593) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/Synthetic Consciousness Could Surpass Finding Alien Life by Corey S. Powell|Synthetic Consciousness Could Surpass Finding Alien Life by Corey S. Powell]] ### EDGE2009-011 — BRAIN-MACHINE INTERFACE (BMI) — James Geary > In humans, this type of brain-machine interface (BMI) could allow paralyzed individuals to control prosthetic body parts as well as open up new fields of entertainment and exploration. "The body's going to be very different 100 years from now," Miguel Nicolelis, Anne W. Deane Professor of Neuroscience at Duke University and one of the pioneers of the BMI, has said. "In a century's time you could be lying on a beach on the east coast of Brazil, controlling a robotic device roving on the surface of Mars, and be subjected to both experiences simultaneously, as if you were in both places at once. The feedback from that robot billions of miles away will be perceived by the brain as if it was you up there." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Deputy Curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; Author, Wit's End - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [BRAIN-MACHINE INTERFACE (BMI)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11756) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/A Brain on Earth Could Inhabit a Robot on Mars by Miguel Nicolelis|A Brain on Earth Could Inhabit a Robot on Mars by Miguel Nicolelis]] ### EDGE2009-012 — DECODING THE BRAIN — Gary Marcus > When we crack that nut, when we figure out how the brain manages to encode declarative knowledge , an awful lot is going to change. For one thing, our relationship to computers will be completely and irrevocably altered; clumsy input devices like mice, windows, keyboards, and even heads-up displays and speech recognizers will go the way of typewriters and fountain pens; our connection to computers will be far more direct. Education, too, will fundamentally change, as engineers and cognitive sciences begin to leverage an understanding of brain code into ways of directly uploading information into the brain. Knowledge will become far cheaper than it already has become in the Internet era; with luck and wisdom, we as species could advance immeasurably. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [DECODING THE BRAIN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11607) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-013 — MASSIVE TECHNOLOGICAL FAILURE — David Bodanis > Nuclear power is a mid 20th century technology (based on early 20th century science). Its overall power is greater still, and so is the amplitude of its destructive possibilities. Through good chance its negative use has, so far, been restricted to the destruction of two cities. Yet even that led to a great wave of generalized, anti-scientific feeling, not least from among the many people who'd always felt it's impious to interfere with the plans of God. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Futurist; Author, Einstein's Greatest Mistake - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [MASSIVE TECHNOLOGICAL FAILURE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11771) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-014 — NO MORE REALITY! — Philippe Parreno > Could we take the next step by breaking down the strict distinction between reality and fiction: NO MORE REALITY! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** French artist and filmmaker, of Algerian heritage. - **Extract length:** 19 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [NO MORE REALITY!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11622) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-015 — A NEW APPROACH TO ENERGY PRODUCTION — Andrian Kreye > Lab-based production of synthetic sources of energy will also end the geopolitical dependencies now tied to the consumption of power and thus change the course of recent history in the most dramatic fashion. This will eliminate the sources of many current and future conflicts, first and foremost in the Gulf region, but also in the Northern part of South America, in the Black Sea region and the increasingly exploitable Arctic. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A NEW APPROACH TO ENERGY PRODUCTION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11786) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-016 — CHEAP CRYONIC SUSPENSION OF BRAINS — Bart Kosko > Some future biocomputing technology may extract and thus back-up this defining neural information or wetware. But no such technology is in sight despite the steady advances of Moore's Law doubling of transistor density on computer chips every two years or so. Nor have we cracked the code of the random pulse train from a single neuron. Hence we are not even close to making sense of the interlocking pulse trains of the billions of chattering neurons in a functioning human brain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [CHEAP CRYONIC SUSPENSION OF BRAINS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11637) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-017 — THE SYNCHRONIZATION OF BRAINS — Jamshed Bharucha > Understanding how brains synchronize – or fail to do so — will not emerge from a single new idea, but rather from a complex puzzle of scientific advances woven together. What is game-changing is that only recently have researchers begun to frame questions about brain function in terms not of individual brains but rather in terms of how individual brains are embedded in larger social and environmental systems that drive their evolution and development. This new way of framing brain and cognitive science — together with unforeseen technological developments — promises transformational integrations of current and future knowledge about how brains interact. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; President Emeritus, Cooper Union - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE SYNCHRONIZATION OF BRAINS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11802) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-018 — POST-RATIONAL ECONOMIC MAN — David Berreby > Global 21st-century society depends on an 18th-century worldview. It's an Enlightenment-era model that says the essence of humanity — and our best guide in life — is cool, conscious reason. Though many have noted, here on Edge and elsewhere, that this is a poor account of the mind, the rationalist picture still sustains institutions that, in turn, shape our daily lives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Us and Them - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [POST-RATIONAL ECONOMIC MAN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11652) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-019 — WHY DON'T RUNNING SHOES BIODEGRADE? — Daniel Goleman > Despite the bells and whistles meant to make one brand of running shoe appeal more than another, at base they all reduce to three parts. The shoe's upper consists of nylon with decorative bits of plastics or synthetic leather. The "rubber" sole for most shoes is a petroleum-based synthetic, as is the spongy midsole, composed of ethylene vinyl acetate. Like any petrochemical widget, manufacturing the soles produces unfortunate byproducts, among them benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene. In environmental health circles these are known as the "Big Four" toxics, being variously carcinogens, central nervous system disrupters, and respiratory irritants, among other biological irritants. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [WHY DON'T RUNNING SHOES BIODEGRADE?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11817) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-020 — CHANGES IN THE CHANGERS — Antony Garrett Lisi > Human beings have an amazingly flexible sense of self. If we don a pair of high resolution goggles showing the point of view from another body, with feedback and control, we perceive ourselves to be that body. As we use rudimentary or complex tools, these quickly become familiar extensions of our bodies and minds. This flexibility, and our indefatigable drive to learn, invent, have fun, and seek new adventure, will lead us down future paths that will dramatically alter human experience and our very nature. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [CHANGES IN THE CHANGERS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11666) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-021 — HAPPINESS — Betsy Devine > Cash-strapped governments will love Layard's theory that high taxes on high earners make everyone happier. (They reduce envy in the less fortunate while saving those now super-taxed from their regrettable motivation to over-work.) It also makes political sense to turn people's attention from upside-down mortgages and looted pension funds to their more abstract happiness that you claim you can increase. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist, Author and Blogger - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [HAPPINESS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11833) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-022 — SILICON IMMORTALITY : DOWNLOADING CONSCIOUSNESS INTO COMPUTERS — David M. Eagleman > While medicine will advance in the next half century, we are not on a crash-course for achieving immortality by curing all disease. Bodies simply wear down with use. We are on a crash-course, however, with technologies that let us store unthinkable amounts of data and run gargantuan simulations. Therefore, well before we understand how brains work, we will find ourselves able to digitally copy the brain's structure and able to download the conscious mind into a computer. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Incognito, Sum, The Brain - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [SILICON IMMORTALITY : DOWNLOADING CONSCIOUSNESS INTO COMPUTERS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11682) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Mind Upload/Brain Copies May Arrive Before We Understand the Brain by David M. Eagleman|Brain Copies May Arrive Before We Understand the Brain by David M. Eagleman]] ### EDGE2009-023 — OUR BRAVE NEW MAP OF THE WORLD — Christine Finn > Our brave new map of the world is evolving as one created by us as individuals, as much as one which is geographically verifiable by a team of scientists. It will continue to be a mixture of landscapes mapped over centuries, and of unbounded digital terrains. One charted in well-thumbed atlases in libraries, and by global positioning systems prodded by fingers on the go. Armchair travellers gathering souvenirs through technology, knowing no bounds; a geography of personal space, extended by virtual reality; a sense of place plotted by chats over garden fences, as much as instant messaging exchanged between our digital selves across time zones drawn up in the steam age. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [OUR BRAVE NEW MAP OF THE WORLD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11848) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-024 — AVOIDING DOOMSDAY — Alexander Vilenkin > The long-term prospects of our civilization here on Earth are very uncertain. We can be destroyed by an asteroid impact or a nearby supernova explosion, or we can self-destruct in a nuclear or bacteriological war. It is a matter of not if but when the disaster will strike, and the only sure way for humans to survive in the long run is to spread beyond the Earth and colonize the Galaxy. The problem is that our chances of doing that before we are wiped out by some sort of catastrophe appear to be rather bleak. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [AVOIDING DOOMSDAY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11697) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-025 — THE AGE OF REPUTATION — Gloria Origgi > When asked about what will change our future, the most straightforward reply that comes to mind is, of course, the Internet. But how the Internet will change things that it has not already changed, what is the next revolution ahead on the net, this is a harder matter. The Internet is a complex geography of information technology, networking, multimedia content and telecommunication. This powerful alliance of different technologies has provided not only a brand new way of producing, storing and retrieving information, but a giant network of ranking and rating systems in which information is valued as long as it has been already filtered by other people. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher and Researcher, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Author, Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE AGE OF REPUTATION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11862) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-026 — HORIZONS BEYOND THE REACH OF BOOLEAN LOGIC, DIGITAL MANIPULATIONS AND NUMERICAL EVALUATIONS — Verena Huber-Dyson > Having figured out how to do something is not enough reason for actually doing it. That's one aspect of the paradigm shift I am expecting; coming from inside the ranks. Evaluation of scientific results and their potential effects on the world as we know it is of particular urgency these days when news are spreading so easily all over the population. Of course we do not want to regress to a system of classified information that generates elitism. Well this problem is creating the, not so new anymore, philosophical discipline of applied Ethics; if only it keeps scientifically well informed and focused down to earth on concrete issues. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** 1923-2016; Emeritus Professor, Formerly, Philosophy Department. University of Calgary, Alberta Canada - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [HORIZONS BEYOND THE REACH OF BOOLEAN LOGIC, DIGITAL MANIPULATIONS AND NUMERICAL EVALUATIONS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11711) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-027 — EVOLUTION CHANGES EVERYTHING — Scott Sampson > I recognize that this statement might seem improbable. If evolution is defined generally, simply as change over time, the above statement borders on meaningless. If regarded in the narrower, Darwinian sense, as descent with modification, any claim for evolution's starring role also appears questionable, particularly given that 2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Surely Darwin's "Dangerous Idea," however conceived, has made its mark by now. Nevertheless, I base my claim on evolution's probable impacts in two great spheres: human consciousness and science and technology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** President & CEO, Science World British Columbia; Dinosaur paleontologist and science communicator; Author, How To Raise A Wild Child - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [EVOLUTION CHANGES EVERYTHING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11878) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-028 — THE GROWING PERCEPTION OF A CLASH BETWEEN SAFETY AND LIBERTY — Dan Sperber > From the Neolithic revolution to the information age, the major changes in the human condition—none of them changing everything, needless to say—have been consequences of new technologies. There is now a glut of new technologies in the offing that will alter the way we live more rapidly and radically than anything before in ways we cannot properly foresee. I wish I could just wax lyrical about some of the developments we can at least sensibly speculate about, but others will do so more competently. So, let me focus on the painfully obvious that we would rather not think about. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE GROWING PERCEPTION OF A CLASH BETWEEN SAFETY AND LIBERTY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11562) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-029 — PEOPLE WHO CAN INTUIT IN SIX-DIMENSIONS — Robert Sapolsky > What the recent development has been is to be able to get staggeringly large amounts of that type of information. We have not just sequenced genes, but sequenced our entire human genome. And we can compare it to that of other species, or can look at genome-wide differences between human populations, or even individuals, or information about tens of thousands of different genes. And then we can look at expression of those genes — which ones are active at which time in which cell types in which individuals in which populations in which species. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [PEOPLE WHO CAN INTUIT IN SIX-DIMENSIONS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11725) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-030 — SCANNING FOR THE NONHUMAN IN HUMANS — Paul W. Ewald > Technological advances have been critical to resolving the ambiguities associated with infectious causation of such cryptic infectious causation. In the early 1990s Kaposi's Sarcoma Associated Herpes Virus was discovered using a molecular technique that stripped away the human genetic material from Kaposi's sarcoma cells and found what remained. A similar approach revealed Hepatitis C virus in blood transfusions. In these cases there were strong epidemiological signs that an infectious agent was present. When the cause was discovered, acceptance did not have to confront the barrier of entrenched opinions favoring other non-infectious causes. If such special interests are present the evidence has to be proportionately more compelling. Such is the case for schizophrenia, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, and many other chronic diseases, which are now the focus of vehement disagreements. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology, Amherst College; Author, Plague Time - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [SCANNING FOR THE NONHUMAN IN HUMANS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11893) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-031 — THE GREAT PIVOT: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES, NATIVE INTELLIGENCES, AND THE BRIDGE BETWEEN — John Tooby > Lessons from evolutionary psychology indicate that developing specialized intelligences — artificial idiot savants — and networking them would achieve a mosaic AI, just as evolution gradually built natural intelligences. The essential activity is discovering sets of principles that solve a particular family of problem. Indeed, successful scientific theories are examples of specialized intelligences, whether implemented culturally among communities of researchers or implemented computationally in computer models. Similarly, adding duplicates of the specialized programs we discover in the human mind to the emerging AI network would constitute a tremendous leap toward AI. Essentially, for this aggregating intelligence to communicate with humans — for it to understand what we mean by a question or want by a request, it will have to become equipped with accurate models of the native intelligences that inhabit human minds. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE GREAT PIVOT: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES, NATIVE INTELLIGENCES, AND THE BRIDGE BETWEEN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11265) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-032 — DISCOVERY (OR CREATION) OF NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CURES HUMANKIND’S EXISTENTIAL LONELINESS — Paul Saffo > The search so far has been met only by a great silence, but as astronomers continue their hunt for intelligent neighbors, computer scientists are determined to create them. Artificial intelligence research has been underway for decades and a few AIs have arguably already passed the Turing Test. Apply the exponential logic of Moore’s Law and the arrival of strong AI in the next few decades seems inevitable. We will have robots smart enough to talk to, and so emotionally appealing that people will demand the right to marry them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [DISCOVERY (OR CREATION) OF NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CURES HUMANKIND’S EXISTENTIAL LONELINESS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11421) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-033 — THIS VERY EXPLORATION IS CHANGING EVERYTHING — Daniel C. Dennett > Our species' stroll through Design Space is picking up speed. Recreational sex, recreational eating, and recreational perception (hallucinogens, alcohol), have been popular since Roman times, but we are now on the verge of recreational self-transformations that will dwarf the modifications the Romans indulged in. When you no longer need to eat to stay alive, or procreate to have offspring, or locomote to have an adventure — packed life, when the residual instincts for these activities might be simply turned off by genetic tweaking, there may be no constants of human nature left at all. Except, maybe, our incessant curiosity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [THIS VERY EXPLORATION IS CHANGING EVERYTHING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11280) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-034 — BIOLOGICAL MARKERS FOR MENTAL ILLNESS — Eric R. Kandel > With the passage of forty years we have made progress and the advent of a paradigm shift for the science of the mind. We no longer think that only certain diseases affect mental states through biological changes in the brain. Indeed, the underlying precept of the new science of mind is that all mental processes are biological — they all depend on organic molecules and cellular processes that occur literally "in our heads." Therefore, any disorder or alteration of those processes must also have a biological basis. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Recipient, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2002; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University; Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [BIOLOGICAL MARKERS FOR MENTAL ILLNESS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11436) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-035 — THE ROBOTIC MOMENT — Sherry Turkle > The robotic moment will bring us to the question we must ask of every technology: does it serve our human purposes, a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. When we connect with the robots of the future, we will tell and they will remember. But have they listened? Have we been "heard" in a way that matters? Will we no longer care? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, The Empathy Diaries - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE ROBOTIC MOMENT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11295) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-036 — DNA, WRITING THE SOFTWARE OF LIFE — J. Craig Venter > In science, as with most areas, seemingly simple ideas can and have changed everything. Just one hundred and fifty years ago Charles Darwin'sOn the Origin of Species was published and immediately impacted science and society by describing the process of evolution as natural selection but nobody understood why or how this process happened. It took until the 1940's to establish that the substance that carried the inheritable information was DNA. In 1953 an Englishman and an American, Crick and Watson, proposed that DNA is formed as a spiraling ladder — or double helix — with the bases A-T and C-G paired (base pairs) to form the rungs, however no one knew what the code of life actually was. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** A leading scientist of the 21st century for Genomic Sciences; Co-Founder, Chairman, Synthetic Genomics, Inc.; Founder, J. Craig Venter Institute; Author, A Life Decoded - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [DNA, WRITING THE SOFTWARE OF LIFE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11451) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Evolution/We Can Write New Software of Life by J. Craig Venter|We Can Write New Software of Life by J. Craig Venter]] ### EDGE2009-037 — RESIZING — Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster > Let's imagine that the fantastic Gulliver iconography with its cohabitation of tiny and giant people could also have some visionnary quality. Let's think that the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man can be more than science fiction and let's imagine a worldwide collective decision to genetically miniaturize the future generations in order to reduce the human needs and increase space and ressources on the blue planet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Film projections, photography and spatial installations, - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [RESIZING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11311) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-038 — HOMESTEADING IN HILBERT SPACE — Frank Wilczek > • New microelectronic information processors, informed by quantum principles—perhaps based on manipulating electron spins, or on supplementing today's silicon with graphene—will enable more cycles of Moore's law, on several fronts: smaller, faster, cooler, cheaper. Supercomputers will approach and then surpass the exaflop frontier, making their capacity comparable to that of human brains. Improved bandwidth will put the Internet on steroids, allowing instant access from anywhere to all the world's information, and blurring or obliterating the experienced distinction between virtual and physical reality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [HOMESTEADING IN HILBERT SPACE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11466) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-039 — A SEPARATE ORIGIN FOR LIFE — Robert Shapiro > When we discover separate origin life, we will hit the jackpot. It will truly be made of a different flesh. Biochemists will be fascinated to learn how life functions such as energy capture, information storage and catalysis can be carried out by materials different from the life we know. The field of biology will be greatly enriched, and a host of new technical innovations may arise from the new knowledge, but even this would not change everything. The largest impact would take place in the way that we view our existence and plan for our future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Senior Research Scientist, New York University; Author, Planetary Dreams - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [A SEPARATE ORIGIN FOR LIFE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11159) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-040 — CARNICULTURE — Austin Dacey > Imagine, though, that the illusion could come true. Imagine giving in to the human weakness for flesh, but without the growth hormones, the avian flu, the untold millions tortured and gone; imagine the voluptuous tenderness of muscle, finally freed from brutality. You are thinking of cultured meat or in vitro meat, and already it is becoming technologically feasible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Representative to the United Nations for the Center for Inquiry in New York City - **Extract length:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [CARNICULTURE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11328) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-041 — TRUE LIE DETECTION — Sam Harris > The development of mind-reading technology is in its infancy, of course. But reliable lie-detection will be much easier to achieve than accurate mind reading. Whether on not we ever crack the neural code, enabling us to download a person’s private thoughts, memories, and perceptions without distortion, we will almost surely be able to determine, to a moral certainty, whether a person is representing his thoughts, memories, and perceptions honestly in conversation. Compared to many of the other hypothetical breakthroughs put forward in response to this year’s Edge question, the development of a true lie-detector would represent a very modest advance over what is currently possible through neuroimaging. Once this technology arrives, it will change (almost) everything. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [TRUE LIE DETECTION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11481) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-042 — THE IDEA OF NEGATIVE AND IATROGENIC SCIENCE — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > The very term iatrogenic, i.e., harm caused by the healer, is not well spread -- I have never seen it used outside medicine. In spite of my lifelong obsession with what is called "type 2 error", or false positive, I was only introduced to the concept very recently thanks to a conversation with the essayist Bryan Appleyard. How can such a major idea remained hidden from our consciousness? Even in medicine, that is, modern medicine, the ancient concept "do no harm" sneaked-in very late. The philosopher of Science Georges Canguilhem wondered why it was not until the 1950s that the idea came to us. This, to me, is a mystery: how professionals can cause harm for such a long time in the name of knowledge and get away with it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE IDEA OF NEGATIVE AND IATROGENIC SCIENCE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11174) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-043 — Untitled Response — Stefano Boeri > DISCOVERING THAT SOMEONE FROM THE FUTURE HAS ALREADY COME TO VISIT US - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Architect; Professor, Politecnico of Milan; Visiting Professor at Harvard GSD; Editor-in-Chief, Abitare magazine - **Extract length:** 12 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Untitled Response](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-will-change-everything) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-044 — EXPLOITABILITY — David M. Buss > Because evolution by selection is a relatively slow process, the acquisition of scientific knowledge about adaptations for exploitation may enable staying one step ahead of exploiters, and effectively short-circuit their strategies. Some classes of crime will be curtailed. Cultural evolution, however, being fleeter than organic evolution, may enable the rapid circumvention of anti-exploitation defenses. Defenses, in turn, favor novel strategies of exploitation. Dissemination of discoveries about adaptations for exploitation and co-evolved defenses may change permanently the nature of social interaction. Or perhaps, like some co-evolutionary arms races, these discoveries ultimately may change nothing at all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [EXPLOITABILITY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11496) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-045 — NEURONALLY EXPRESSED MESSAGES — Peter Schwartz > Over the next several decades there are likely to be other significant new biological tools that I have not foreseen that will only strengthen my argument. But the combination of these three are already likely to give us sufficient insight into how the brain works that we will be able to construct the means to reliably read the state of the brain and use that information to control external devices. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Futurist; Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning, Salesforce.com; Author, Inevitable Surprises - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [NEURONALLY EXPRESSED MESSAGES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11189) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-046 — EVERYTHING...ALREADY CHANGED! — Kai Krause > Photonic solar paint that gathers free energy on any surface; transparent photovoltaic film to make every window in any house or vehicle into a steady energy source; general voltaics with 90% efficiency... Splitting water into hydrogen with ease ( and then hook that to power a desalination machine which can feed the water.. ; ) Transmit power wirelessly (as MIT finally did, following Teslas cue). Thin air "residual energy" batteries powering laptops and cellphones nearly infinitely.... all that is very close and will make an enormous difference - not just in Manhattan, London and Tokyo, but also in Ulaanbaatar, Irian Jaya or the Pantanal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [EVERYTHING...ALREADY CHANGED!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11345) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-047 — THE NEXT STEP IN HUMAN HEALTHCARE? — Ian Wilmut > Many laboratories are now using induced pluripotent stem cells to study inherited diseases, such as ALS. Pluripotent cells from ALS patients are turned into the different neural populations affected by the disease and contrasted with the same cell population from healthy donors. Discovery of the molecular cause of the diseases will involve analyses of gene function in the diseased cells in many ways. There is then the practical issue of devising a test to discover if potential drugs are able to prevent the development of the disease symptoms. This can be used as the basis of tests that can be carried out by robots able to screen thousands of compounds every week. Many further studies will then be required before any new medicine can be used to treat patients. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Reproductive Biology, Director Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh; Author, After Dolly - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [THE NEXT STEP IN HUMAN HEALTHCARE?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11511) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-048 — NEW STRUCTURES OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION — Hans Ulrich Obrist > The plan was for a university of about 20,000 students built on a network of rail and motorways, where different stations would become places of knowledge production and where permanent places could move. His was the idea of a "classroom on the move" where you would have all sorts of housing for professors, researchers and students: crates, sprawls, capsules…And when the existing infrastructure would not be enough there would also be inflatables designed by Price and which could be easily and swiftly added. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now; Co-author (with Rem Koolhas), Project Japan: Metabolism Talks - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [NEW STRUCTURES OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11204) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-049 — RECOGNIZING THAT THE BODY IS NOT A MACHINE — Randolph Nesse > Many people think that genetic engineering will change everything, even our very bodies and minds. It will, eventually. Right now, however, attempts to apply new genetic knowledge are having profound effects, not on our bodies, but on how we understand our bodies. They are revealing that our central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Professor of Life Sciences, Director (2014-2019), Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University; Author, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [RECOGNIZING THAT THE BODY IS NOT A MACHINE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11361) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-050 — ATTEMPTS AT GEOENGINEERING — Oliver Morton > "Geoengineering" technologies for counteracting some aspects of anthropogenic climate change — such as putting long-lived aerosols into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do, or changing the lifetimes and reflective properties of clouds — have to date been shunned by the majority of climate scientists, largely on the basis of the moral hazard involved: any sense that the risks of global warming can be taken care of by such technology weakens the case for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief News and Features Editor - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [ATTEMPTS AT GEOENGINEERING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11533) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-051 — THE FEELING THAT THINGS ARE INEVITABLY GOING TO GET WORSE — Brian Eno > The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don't cohere. There isn't time for them. Long term projects are abandoned—their payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned—not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits. Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [THE FEELING THAT THINGS ARE INEVITABLY GOING TO GET WORSE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11219) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-052 — A FOREBRAIN FOR THE WORLD MIND — W. Daniel Hillis > One might suppose that, with all its zillions of transistors and billions of human minds, the world brain would be thinking some pretty profound thoughts. There is little evidence that this is so. Today's Internet functions mostly as a giant communications and storage system, accessed by individual humans. Although much of human knowledge is represented in some form within the machine, it is not yet represented in a form that is particularly meaningful to the machine. For the most part, the Internet knows no more about the information it handles than the telephone system knows about the conversations that take place over its lines. Most of those zillions of transistors are either doing something very trivial or nothing at all, and most of those billions of human minds are doing their own thing. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [A FOREBRAIN FOR THE WORLD MIND](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11376) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Information/The World Mind Needs Knowledge Humans and Machines Can Share by W. Daniel Hillis|The World Mind Needs Knowledge Humans and Machines Can Share by W. Daniel Hillis]] ### EDGE2009-053 — TWO GRAND REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS — Maria Spiropulu > 2. the knowledge of how space and time emerge: the tectonics and characterization of our very Universe (with the Large Hadron Collider, relevant accelerator and non-accelerator fundamental research projects including a large number of astro-particle-gravity-cosmology observatories terrestrial and in space) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics, California Institute of Technology; Founder, AQT/INQNET - **Extract length:** 40 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [TWO GRAND REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11547) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-054 — UNDO THE PRESENT; RECALL THE PAST — Seth Lloyd > My job is to design and build quantum computers, computers that store and process information at the level of individual atoms. Even at the current rapid rates of progress of current computer technology, with the computer components halving in size every two years or less, and computers doubling in power over the same time, quantum computers should not be available for forty years. Yet we are building simple quantum computers today. I could tell you that quantum computers will drastically change the way the world works during our lifetime. But I'm not going to do that, for the simple reason that I have no idea whether it's true or not. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [UNDO THE PRESENT; RECALL THE PAST](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11234) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-055 — IMMORTAL COGNITION, BOUNDLESS HAPPINESS — Marco Iacoboni > The posterior association cortices (the ones in the back of the brain) are the first ones affected by Alzheimer's disease, a degenerative brain disorder affecting higher cognitive functions, for instance memory. The posterior association cortices also have reduced activity in the less dramatic cognitive decline that is often associated with aging. Brain stimulation will facilitate the activity of the posterior association cortices in the elderly by inducing synchronized firing of many neurons at specific frequencies. Synchronous neuronal firing at certain frequencies is thought to be critical for perceptual and cognitive processes. Our aging brain will get its synchronized neuronal firing going thanks to brain stimulation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; Author, Mirroring People - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [IMMORTAL COGNITION, BOUNDLESS HAPPINESS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11391) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-056 — UNDERSTANDING THE MIND — Mahzarin Banaji > From the little we do know, we can say that good people (we, us) are capable of incredible harm to others and even themselves. That daily moral decisions we make are not based on the principles of justice that we think they are, but are often a result of the familiarity and similarity of the other to oneself. These two simple types of bias happen because the mind and its workings remain invisible to us and until we unmask it meanderings, the disparity between what we do and what we think we do will remain murky. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Department Chair; Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Co-author (with Anthony Greenwald), Blind Spot - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [UNDERSTANDING THE MIND](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11250) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-057 — COORDINATED AND EXPANDED COMPUTATIONAL POWER WILL CHANGE SCIENCE — Lisa Randall > Very likely individual elements will work in conjunction with their environment or in collaboration with other system elements to produce emergent effects. Already we have learned that the genetic code is not sufficient to predict behavior, but gene's environments that determine which genes are triggered also play a big role. Very likely understanding the brain will require understanding coordinated dynamics as much as any individual element. Many diseases too are unlikely to be completely cured until the complicated dynamics among different elements is fully processed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [COORDINATED AND EXPANDED COMPUTATIONAL POWER WILL CHANGE SCIENCE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11406) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-058 — UNTITLED — Terence Koh > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 5 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [UNTITLED](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11100) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-059 — THE ANTHROPOSPHERE — Nicholas A. Christakis > Finally, it is not just the balance between males and females, or young and old, that is changing, but also the balance between rich and poor. Income inequality is reaching historic heights throughout the world. The top 1% of the people in the world receives 57% of the income. Income inequality in the US is presently at its highest recorded levels, exceeding even the Roaring Twenties. And while economic development in China has proceeded with astonishing rapidity, income is not evenly distributed; the prospects for conflict in that country as a result seem very high in the coming decades. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Yale University; Co-author, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [THE ANTHROPOSPHERE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10804) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-060 — THE DECLINE OF TEXT — Marti Hearst > How will this come about? As a first step, I think there will be a dramatic reduction in typing; input of textual information will move towards audio dictation. (There is a problem of how to avoid disturbing officemates or exposing seat-mates on public transportation to private information; perhaps some sound-canceling technology will be developed to solve this problem.) This will succeed in the future where it has failed in the past because of future improvements in speech recognition technology and ease-of-use improvements in editing, storage, and retrieval of spoken words. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE DECLINE OF TEXT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10959) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-061 — NEUROCOSMETICS — Marcel Kinsbourne > The example of cosmetic plastic surgery is instructive. Reconstructive in its origins, it is increasingly used for cosmetic purposes. I predict the same shift for deep brain stimulation. Cosmetic surgery is used to render people more appealing. In human affairs, appearance is critical. For our hypersocial species, personal appeal opens doors that remain shut to mere competence and intellect. Undoubtedly, cosmetic surgery enhances quality of life, so how can it be denied to anyone? And yet, it is by its very nature deceptive; the operated face is not really the person's face, the operated body not really their body. However, experience teaches that these reservations as to authenticity remain theoretical. The cosmetically adjusted nose, breast, thighs or skin tones become the person's new reality, without significant social backlash. Even face transplants are now feasible. We read so much into a face—but what if it is not the person's "real" face? Does anyone care, or even remember the previous appearance? So it will be with neurocosmetics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurologist and Cognitive Neuroscientist, The New School; Co-author, Children's Learning and Attention Problems - **Extract length:** 165 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [NEUROCOSMETICS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11115) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-062 — THE RE-IMPLEMENTATION OF LIFE IN ENGINEERED MATERIALS — Neil Gershenfeld > Biotechnology is booming (if not bubbling). But it is very clearly segregated from other kinds of technology, which contribute to the study of, but not the identity of, biology. If, however, life is understood as an algorithm rather than a set of amino acids, then the creation of such really-artificial or really-synthetic life can enlarge the available materials, length, and energy scales. In such a world, biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and manufacturing technology merge into a kind of universal technology of embodied information. Beyond the profound practical implications, forward- rather than reverse-engineering life may be the best way to understand it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE RE-IMPLEMENTATION OF LIFE IN ENGINEERED MATERIALS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10818) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Evolution/Life Can Be Reimplemented in Engineered Materials by Neil Gershenfeld|Life Can Be Reimplemented in Engineered Materials by Neil Gershenfeld]] ### EDGE2009-063 — ANIMAL FEELINGS — April Gornik > There is a growing scientific consensus that animals have emotions and feel pain. This awareness is going to effect change: better treatment of animals in agribusiness, research, and our general interaction with them. It will change the way we eat, live, and preserve the planet. We will eliminate the archaic tendency to base their treatment on an equation of their intelligence with ours. The measure of and self-congratulation for our own intelligence should have its basis in our moral behavior as well as our smarts. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visual Artists - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [ANIMAL FEELINGS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10973) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-064 — THE END OF ANALYTIC SCIENCE — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi > Unfortunately, it does not seem to be enough to protect the neutral objectivity of each separate science, in the hope that the knowledge generated by each will be integrated later at some higher level and used wisely. The synthetic principle will have to become a part of the fundamental axioms of each science. How shall this breakthrough occur? Current systems theories are necessary but not sufficient, as they tend not to take values into account. Perhaps after this realization sets in, we shall have to re-write science from the ground up. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [THE END OF ANALYTIC SCIENCE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11129) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-065 — THE BREAKDOWN OF ALL COMPUTERS — Anton Zeilinger > The implications of such an event will be enormous. If it happens to one of our technology based societies literally everything will break down. You will realize that none your phones does work. There is no way to find out via the internet what happened. Your car will not start anymore as it is also controlled by computer chips, unless you are lucky to own an antique car. Your local supermarket is unable to get new supplies.There will be no trucks operating anymore, no trains, no elctricity, no water supplies Society will completely break down. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel laureate (2022 - Physics); Physicist, University of Vienna; Scientific Director, Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information; President, Austrian Academy of Sciences; Author, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [THE BREAKDOWN OF ALL COMPUTERS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10832) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-066 — THE ERUPTION OF NEW RELIGIONS SHAPED BY UPHEAVAL — Joel Garreau > Then there is the new vision of transcendence coming out of neuroscience. It’s long been observed that intelligent organisms require love to develop or even just to survive. Not coincidentally, we can readily identify brain functions that allow and require us to be deeply relational with others. There are also aspects of the brain that can be shown to equip us to experience elevated moments when we transcend boundaries of self. What happens as the implications of all this research starts suggesting that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human physical traits? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal, The Garreau Group - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE ERUPTION OF NEW RELIGIONS SHAPED BY UPHEAVAL](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10988) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-067 — SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY WITH INTER-PLANETARY REACH — Dimitar D. Sasselov > I shall let others describe what it is and how they are going to do it. One thing is sure - it is going to be powerful - biologists will use synthesis the same way chemists today use synthesis routinely. But there is more! It is the inter-planetary reach of synthetic biology that makes it a new phenomenon in the cosmos we know. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University; Director, Harvard Origins of Life Initiative; Author, The Life of Super-Earths - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY WITH INTER-PLANETARY REACH](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11143) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-068 — RECOMBINATIONS OF THE NEAR POSSIBLE — Yochai Benkler > We are already have unmanned planes that can shoot live targets. We are seeing land robots, for both military and space applications. We are seeing networked robots performing functions in collaboration. I fear that we will see a massive increase in the deployment and quality of military robotics, and that this will lead to a perception that war is cheaper, in human terms. This, in turn, will lead democracies in general, and the United States in particular, to imagine that there are cheap wars, and to overcome the newly-learned reticence over war that we learned so dearly in Iraq. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard; Author, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [RECOMBINATIONS OF THE NEAR POSSIBLE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10845) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-069 — THE CREDIT CRUNCH FOR MATERIALISM — Rupert Sheldrake > The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. However, among researchers in neuroscience and consciousness studies there is no consensus. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. For example, Steven Lehar argues that inside our heads there must be a miniaturized virtual-reality full-colour three-dimensional replica of the world. When we look at the sky, the sky is in our heads. Our skulls are beyond the sky. Others, like the psychologist Max Velmans, argue that virtual reality displays are not confined to our brains; they are life-sized, not miniaturized. Our visual perceptions are outside our skulls, just where they seem to be. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** biologist and author - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [THE CREDIT CRUNCH FOR MATERIALISM](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11002) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-070 — SHADOW BIOSPHERE — Paul Davies > Why would it change everything? Apart from the sweeping technological applications that having a second form of life would bring, the discovery of a shadow biosphere would prove biological determinism, and confirm that life is indeed widespread in the universe. To expect that life would start twice on Earth, but never on another planet like Earth, is too improbable. And to know that the universe is teeming with life would make it far more likely that there is also intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We might then have greater confidence that the answer to the biggest of the big questions of existence — Are we alone in the universe? — is very probably, no. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; cosmologist; astro-biologist; co-Director of BEYOND, Arizona State University; principle investigator, Center for the Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology; Author, The Eerie Silence and The Cosmic Jackpot - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [SHADOW BIOSPHERE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10860) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-071 — STAR POWER — Roger Highfield > Now this idea really will change everything, ending the energy crisis and curbing climate change at a stroke. I am confident in what I say because a lot of clever people have said it again and again—and again—for more than half a century. Since the heady, optimistic days when scientists first dreamt of taming the power of the Sun, fusion energy has remained tantalisingly out of reach. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [STAR POWER](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11016) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-072 — CLIMATE — Stewart Brand > Our climate models, sophisticated and muscular as they are (employing more teraflops than any other calculation), still are just jumped-up weather prediction models. The real climate system has more levels and modes of hyper-connected nonlinearity than we can yet comprehend or ask computers to replicate, because so far we lack the math to represent climate dynamics with the requisite variety to control it. Acquiring that math will change everything. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [CLIMATE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10874) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-073 — GREEN OIL — Alun Anderson > Oil that we take out of the ground and burn is going to be replaced by oil that we grow. Bio-fuels based on corn are our first effort to grow green oil but they have clearly not succeeded. Current bio-fuels take too much land and too much energy to grow and too much of that energy goes into building parts of a plant that we can't easily convert into fuel. The answer will come from simple, engineered organisms that can soak up energy in a vat in any sunny spot and turn that sunlight straight into a precursor for fuel, preferably a precursor that can go straight into an existing oil refinery that can turn out gasoline. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [GREEN OIL](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11029) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-074 — INEXPENSIVE, CUSTOMIZABLE, INTERACTIVE E-TEXTS FOR WORLDWIDE USE — David G. Myers > Textbooks are sometimes faulted for being biased, dated, or outrageously expensive. But say this much for them, whether in traditional book or new web-based formats: By making the same information available to rich and poor students at rich and poor schools in rich and poor countries, they are egalitarian. They flatten the world. And as James Madison noted in 1825, “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [INEXPENSIVE, CUSTOMIZABLE, INTERACTIVE E-TEXTS FOR WORLDWIDE USE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10889) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-075 — ADOPTING RATIONALITY AND SUSTAINABILITY — Patrick Bateson* > "The power set free from the atom has changed everything, except our ways of thinking." So said Einstein. Whether or not he foresaw the total destruction of the world, the thought gave rise to a joke, albeit a sick one, that humans would never make contact with civilizations in other parts of the universe. Either those civilizations were not advanced enough to decode our signals or they were more advanced than us, had developed nuclear weapons and had destroyed themselves. The chances would be vanishingly small that their brief window of time between technological competence and oblivion would coincide with ours. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Ethology, Cambridge University; Co-author, Design for a Life (*Deceased) - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [ADOPTING RATIONALITY AND SUSTAINABILITY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11043) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-076 — MUCH SMARTER PEOPLE — Martin Seligman > Now consider an “eagle” lieutenant recognizing a likely ambush. Here, is what this eagle has stored in her brain. She has a list of the dimensions relevant to an ambush site versus a non-ambush site. She has values along each of these dimensions for each of the ambush and non-ambush sites that she has experienced or learned about. She has a mental model which assigns weights to each of these basic dimensions or features (and to higher order features, such as the interaction between two dimensions). Based on past experiences with similar sets of features and knowledge of the outcomes of those feature sets, she can predict the outcome of the present feature set and based on her predictive model, choose how to respond to the possibility of this being an ambush. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Director, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania; Author, Flourish - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [MUCH SMARTER PEOPLE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10903) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-077 — TRACKS & CLUSTERS — David Gelernter > None of today's software frameworks for online learning is adequate. New software must make it easy for parents & children to see & evaluate each track as a whole, give learners control over learning, integrate multimedia smoothly, include students in a net-wide discussion of each topic & put them in touch with (human) teachers as needed. Must also make it easy for parents & "guidance teachers" to evaluate each child's progress. It's all easily done with current technology—if software design is taken seriously. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled our Culture (and ushered in the Obamacrats) - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [TRACKS & CLUSTERS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11057) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-078 — SOCIAL MEDIA LITERACY — Howard Rheingold > Social media literacy is going to change many games in unforeseeable ways. Since the advent of the telegraph, the infrastructure for global, ubiquitous, broadband communication media have been laid down, and of course the great power of the Internet is the democracy of access—in a couple of decades, the number of users has grown from a thousand to a billion. But the next important breakthroughs won't be in hardware or software but in know-how, just the most important after-effects of the printing press were not in improved printing technologies but in widespread literacy. The Gutenberg press itself was not enough. Mechanical printing had been invented in Korea and China centuries before the European invention. For a number of reasons, a market for print and the knowledge of how to use the alphabetic code for transmitting knowledge across time and space broke out of the scribal elite that had controlled it for millennia. From around 20,000 books written by hand in Gutenberg's lifetime, the number of books grew to tens of millions within decades of the invention of moveable type. And the rapidly expanding literate population in Europe began to create science, democracy, and the foundations of the industrial revolution. Today, we´re seeing the beginnings of scientific, medical, political, and social revolutions, from the instant epidemiology that broke out online when SARS became known to the world, to the use of social media by political campaigns. But we´re only in the earliest years of social media literacy. Whether universal access to many-to-many media will lead to explosive scientific and social change depends more on know-how now than physical infrastructure. Would the early religious petitioners during the English Civil War, and the printers who eagerly fed their need to spread their ideas have been able to predict that within a few generations, monarchs would be replaced by constitutions? Would Bacon and Newton have dreamed that entire populations, and not just a few privileged geniuses, would aggregate knowledge and turn it into technology? Would those of us who used slow modems to transmit black and white text on the early Internet 15 years ago been able to foresee YouTube? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs - **Extract length:** 356 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [SOCIAL MEDIA LITERACY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10762) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-079 — ACCIDENTAL NUCLEAR WAR — Max Tegmark > During the half-century that we humans have been tooled up for nuclear Armageddon, there has been a steady stream of false alarms that could have triggered all-out war, with causes ranging from computer malfunction, power failure and faulty intelligence to to navigation error, bomber crash and satellite explosion. Gradual declassification of records has revealed that some of them carried greater risk than was appreciated at the time. For examples, it became clear only in 2002 that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USS Beale had depth-charged an unidentified submarine which was in fact Soviet and armed with nuclear weapons, and whose commanders argued over whether to retaliate with a nuclear torpedo. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute; President, Future of Life Institute; Author, Life 3.0 - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [ACCIDENTAL NUCLEAR WAR](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10917) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-080 — THE LENGTHENING LIFE-SPANS OF INDIVIDUALS SHADOWED BY THE SHORTENING LIFE-SPANS OF SPECIES — Monica Narula > THE LENGTHENING LIFE-SPANS OF INDIVIDUALS SHADOWED BY THE SHORTENING LIFE-SPANS OF SPECIES - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist, New Dehli; Member, Raqs Media Collective; Co-Initiator, Sarai.net - **Extract length:** 12 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE LENGTHENING LIFE-SPANS OF INDIVIDUALS SHADOWED BY THE SHORTENING LIFE-SPANS OF SPECIES](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-will-change-everything) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-081 — NEUROPHENOMICS + TARGETED STIMULATION = PSYCHOLOGICAL OPTIMIZATION? — Brian Knutson > Clinical implications of this type of control are straightforward, yet startling. Both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy look like blunt instruments by comparison. Imagine giving doctors or even patients the ability to precisely and dynamically control the firing of acetylcholine neurons in the case of dementia, dopamine neurons in the case of Parkinson's disease, or serotonin neurons in the case of unipolar depression (and so on...). These technological developments will not only improve clinical treatment, but will also advance scientific theory. Along with applications designed to cure will come demands for applications that aim to enhance. What if we could precisely but noninvasively modulate mood, alertness, memory, control, willpower, and more? Of course, everyone wants to win the brain game. But are we ready for the rules to change? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [NEUROPHENOMICS + TARGETED STIMULATION = PSYCHOLOGICAL OPTIMIZATION?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10776) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-082 — LEVERAGING DIFFERENCES — Stephen M. Kosslyn > We humans are more alike than different, but our differences are nonetheless pervasive and substantial. Think of differences in height and weight, of shoe size and thumb diameter. In this context, it's not surprising that our brains also differ. And in fact, ample research has documented individual differences not only in the sizes of specific brain regions, but also in how strongly activated the same parts of the brain are when people perform a given task. And more than this, both sorts of neural differences – structural and functional – have been shown to predict specific types of behavior. For example, my collaborators and I have shown that the strength of activation in one part of visual cortex predicts the ease of visualizing shapes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [LEVERAGING DIFFERENCES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10931) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-083 — EMPATHY — Eric Fischl > Leave it to the Scientists, so caught up in their research, to miss the big picture. Either they take for granted that the reasons that motivate the questioning and the technologies they develop will not only contain its original impetus but will make it explicit. Or they believe that technological development will transcend its own impetus and render those expressed needs insignificant. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visual Artists - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [EMPATHY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11086) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-084 — KNOWLEDGE SPREADING — K. Eric Drexler > The basic science to support this undertaking flourishing, but the engineering has has gotten a slow start, and for a peculiar reason: The idea of using tiny machines to make things has been burdened by an overgrowth of mythology. According to fiction and pop culture, it seems that all tiny machines are robots made of diamond, and they're dangerous magic— smart and able to do almost anything for us, but apt to swarm and multiply and maybe eat everything, probably including your socks. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Researcher; Policy Advocate; Author, Engines of Creation - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [KNOWLEDGE SPREADING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10790) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-085 — THE LIBERATION OF TIME — Lee Smolin > Many philosophies and religions offer answers to these questions, and most give the same answer: reality and truth transcend time. If something is real, it has a reality which continues forever, and if something is true, it is not just true now, it was always true, and will always be. The experience we have of the world existing within a flow of time is, according to some religions and many contemporary physicists and philosophers, an illusion. Behind that illusion is a timeless reality, in modern parlance, the block universe. Another manifestation of this ancient view is the currently popular idea that time is an emergent quality not present in the fundamental formulation of physics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE LIBERATION OF TIME](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10945) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-086 — THE MOBILE PHONE — Keith Devlin > What other object do you habitually carry around with you and use all the time, and take for granted? Yet when did you acquire your first mobile phone? Can you think of a reason why anyone else in the world will not react the same way when the technology reaches them? Now imagine the impact on someone in apart of the world that has not had telephones, computers, the Internet, or even easy access to libraries. I'll let your own answers to these questions support my case that this is game changing on a hitherto unknown global scale. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [THE MOBILE PHONE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10646) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-087 — THINKING SMALL: UNDERSTANDING THE BRAIN — Irene Pepperberg > Knowledge of exactly how the brain works will change everything. Despite all our technical advances in brain-mapping, we still do not fully understand how the human or nonhuman brain works as a complete organ—e.g., the interconnectedness of the separate areas we are currently mapping. Just as we are beginning to learn that it is not "the" gene that controls what happens in our bodies, but rather the interplay of many genes, proteins, and environmental influences that turn genes on and off, we will learn how the interplay of various neural tissues, the chemicals in our body, environmental influences, and possibly some current unknowns, come together to affect how the brain works…and that will change everything. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THINKING SMALL: UNDERSTANDING THE BRAIN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10328) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-088 — A VERY VERY GOOD BATTERY — John D. Barrow > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Cosmologist; Physicist; Professor of Mathematical Science, Director, Millennium Mathematics Project, University of Cambridge; Author, The Book of Universes - **Extract length:** 11 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [A VERY VERY GOOD BATTERY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10420) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-089 — FUTURE AS PRESENT. A FINAL EXPERIMENT — Ernst Pöppel > When time came to an end, the gods decided to run a final experiment. They wanted to be prepared after the big crunch for potential trajectories of life after the next big bang. For their experiment they choose two planets in the universe where evolution had resulted in similar developments of life. For planet ONEthey decided to interfer with evolution by allowing only ONE species to develop their brain to a high level of complexity. This species referred to itself as being „intelligent“; members of this species were very proud about their achievements in science, technology, the arts or philosophy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Research Group Systems, Neuroscience and Cognitive Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany; Guest Professor, Peking University, China - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [FUTURE AS PRESENT. A FINAL EXPERIMENT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10535) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-090 — BUT WE SHALL ALL BE CHANGED — Frank Tipler > I'm 62, so I'll have to limit my projections to what I expect to happen in the next two to three decades. I believe these will be the most interesting times in human history (Remember the old Chinese curse about "interesting times?") Humanity will see, before I die, the "Singularity," the day when we finally create a human level artificial intelligence. This involves considering the physics advances that will be required to create the computer that is capable of running a strong AI program. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [BUT WE SHALL ALL BE CHANGED](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10661) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-091 — AT LAST: TECHNOLOGY WILL CHANGE EDUCATION — Haim Harari > Third, for the first time, the generation that grew up with a computer at home is reaching the teacher ranks. The main obstacle of most education reforms has always been the training of the teachers. This should be much easier now. Just remember the first generation of Americans who grew up in a car-owning family. It makes a significant difference. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [AT LAST: TECHNOLOGY WILL CHANGE EDUCATION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10335) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-092 — THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AGAINST A CIVILIAN POPULATION — Lawrence M. Krauss > Ultimately, what so concerned Einstein, and is of equal concern today, is the fact that first use of nuclear weapons cannot be justified on moral or strategic grounds. Nevertheless, it may surprise some people to learn that the United States has no strict anti-first-use policy. In fact, in its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. declared that nuclear weapons "provide credible military options to deter a wide range of threats" including "surprising military developments." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, ASU; Author, The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AGAINST A CIVILIAN POPULATION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10429) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-093 — MALTHUSIAN INFORMATION FAMINE — Charles Seife > Much more important, though, is that vast amounts of digital memory will change the relationship that humans have with information. For most of our existence, our ability to store and relay knowledge has been very limited. Every time we figured out a better way to preserve and transmit data to our peers and to our descendents—as we moved from oral history to written language to the printing press to the computer age—our civilization took a great leap. Now we are reaching the point where we have the ability to archive every message, every telephone conversation, every communication between human beings anywhere on the planet. For the first time, we as a species have the ability to remember everything that ever happens to us. For millennia, we were starving for information to act as raw material for ideas. Now, we are about to have a surfeit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 145 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [MALTHUSIAN INFORMATION FAMINE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10546) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-094 — ENERGY AND ECONOMICS: THE ROAD TO CIVILIZATION 1.0 — Michael Shermer > Based on our energy efficiency at the time, in 1973 the astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that Earth represented a Type 0.7 civilization on a Type 0 to Type 1 scale. (More current assessments put us at 0.72.) As the Kardashevian scale is logarithmic — where any increase in power consumption requires a huge leap in power production — fossil fuels won’t get us there. Renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal are a good start, and coupled to nuclear power — perhaps even nuclear fusion (instead of the fission reactors we have now) could eventually get us to Civilization 1.0. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [ENERGY AND ECONOMICS: THE ROAD TO CIVILIZATION 1.0](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10262) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-095 — COMPUTERS ARE THE NEW MICROSCOPES — Terrence J. Sejnowski > By 2015 computer power will begin to approach the neural computation that occurs in brains. This does not mean we will be able to understand it, only that we can begin to approach the complexity of a brain on its own terms. Coupled with advances in large-scale recordings from neurons we should by then be in a position to crack many of the brain's mysteries, such as how we learn and where memories reside. However, I would not expect a computer model of human level intelligence to emerge from these studies without other breakthroughs that cannot be predicted. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [COMPUTERS ARE THE NEW MICROSCOPES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10675) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-096 — BLACK HOLES: THE ULTIMATE GAME-CHANGER? — Paul J. Steinhardt > There is a real chance of breakthrough in the foreseeable future as theorists converge on one of the greatest threats to information preservation: black holes. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, a black hole forms when matter is so concentrated that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational field. Any information that passes through the event horizon surrounding the black hole—the "point of no return"—is lost forever to the outside world. Suppose, for example, that Bob pilots a spaceship into the black hole carrying along three books of his choice. It appears that the titles and contents of the three books vanish. Either that or Einstein's general theory of relativity is wrong. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [BLACK HOLES: THE ULTIMATE GAME-CHANGER?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10342) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-097 — CONSERVING THE CLIMATE: WILL GREENLAND'S MELTING ICE THE DEAL? — Stephen Schneider > Unfortunately, the longer we wait for more confident "proof" of game changing melt rates in Greenland (or West Antarctica as well, where another 5 meters potential sea level rise lurks), the higher the risk of passing a tipping point in which the melting becomes an unstoppable self-driven process. That game change occurrence would force unprecedented retreat from the sea, and a major abandonment or rebuilding of coastal civilization and loss of coastal wetlands. This is a gamble with "Laboratory Earth", that we can't afford to lose. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** climatologist, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [CONSERVING THE CLIMATE: WILL GREENLAND'S MELTING ICE THE DEAL?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10438) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-098 — THE EXISTENCE OF ADDITIONAL SPACE-TIME DIMENSIONS — Gino Segre > There are striking differences from the 1915 situation, most particularly the lack of a clear test for the detection of extra dimensions. The novel theories now in fashion do predict that additional particles must be present in nature because of these extensions of space and time, but since the mass of these particles is related to the unknown scale of the extra dimensions, it also remains unknown. Roughly speaking, the smaller the one, the larger the other. Nevertheless the hunt has begun; we are beginning to see in the literature publications from major laboratories with titles such as “ Search for Gamma Rays from the Lightest Kaluza-Klein Particle”, that being the name frequently given to the as of yet undiscovered particles associated with extra dimensions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE EXISTENCE OF ADDITIONAL SPACE-TIME DIMENSIONS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10557) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-099 — UNDOING BABYLON — Daniel L. Everett > Still, mechanical procedures able to translate most contents from any source language into accurate, idiomatically natural constructions of any target language seem less utopian to us now because of major breakthroughs that have led to several programs in machine translation (e.g. the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University). I believe that we will see within our lifetime the convergence of developments in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, statistical grammar theories, and an emerging field — computational anthropology (informatic-based analysis and modeling of cultural values) — that will facilitate powerful new forms of machine translation to match the dreams of early pioneers of computation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [UNDOING BABYLON](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10269) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-100 — HIDDEN PERSUADERS '09 — Helen Fisher > "Mind is primarily a verb," wrote philosopher John Dewey. Every time we do or think or feel anything the brain is doing something. But what? And can we use what scientists are learning about these neural gymnastics to get what we want? I think we can and we will, in my life time, due to some mind—bending developments in contemporary neuroscience. Brain scanning; genetic studies; antidepressant drug use; estrogen replacement therapy; testosterone patches; L-dopa and newer drugs to prevent or retard brain diseases; recreational drugs; sex change patients; gene doping by athletes: all these and other developments are giving us data on how the mind works—and opening new avenues to use brain chemistry to change who we are and what we want. As the field of epigenetics takes on speed, we are also beginning to understand how the environment affects brain systems, even turns genes on and off—further enabling us (and others) to adjust brain chemistry, affecting who we are, how we feel and what we think we need. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 169 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [HIDDEN PERSUADERS '09](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10690) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-101 — WE ARE LEARNING TO MAKE PHENOTYPES — Mark Pagel > We all develop from a single cell known as a zygote. This zygote divides and becomes two cells, then four, eight and so on. At first, most of the cells are alike, but as this division goes on something wondrous occurs: the cells begin to commit themselves to adopting different fates as eyes or ears, or livers or kidneys, or brains and blood cells. Eventually they produce a body of immense and unimaginable complexity, making things like supercomputers and space shuttles look like Lego toys. No one knows how they do it. No one is there to tell the cells how to behave, there is no homunculus directing cellular traffic, and no template to work to. It just happens. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Reading University, UK; Fellow, Royal Society; Author, Wired for Culture - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [WE ARE LEARNING TO MAKE PHENOTYPES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10350) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-102 — THE UNMASKING OF TRUE HUMAN NATURE — Aubrey de Grey > Which technologies will dominate this march? Surveying the torrent of literature on this topic, we can with reasonable confidence identify three major areas: software, hardware and wetware. Artificial intelligence researchers will, numerous experts attest, probably build systems that are "recursively self-improving"—that understand their own workings well enough to design improvements to themselves, thereby bootstrapping to a state of ever more unimaginable intellectual performance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation; Author, Ending Aging - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [THE UNMASKING OF TRUE HUMAN NATURE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10447) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-103 — IF YOU INSIST: PERSONAL GENOMICS? — Steven Pinker > I have little faith in anyone’s ability to predict what will change everything. A look at the futurology of the past turns up many chastening examples of confident predictions of technological revolutions that never happened, such as domed cities, nuclear-powered cars, and meat grown in dishes. By the year 2001, according to the eponymous movie, we were supposed to have suspended animation, missions to Jupiter, and humanlike mainframe computers (though not laptop computers or word processing – the characters used typewriters.) And remember interactive television, the internet refrigerator, and the paperless office? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [IF YOU INSIST: PERSONAL GENOMICS?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10568) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-104 — SOUL-TRAVEL FOR SELFLESS BEINGS — Thomas Metzinger > In 2008, in another experiment, we saw that a monkey on a treadmill could control the real-time walking patterns a humanoid robot via a brain-machine interface directly implanted into its brain. The synchronized robot was in Japan, while the poor monkey was located thousands of miles away, in the US. Even after it stopped walking, the monkey was able to sustain locomotion of the synchronized robot for a few minutes—just by using the visual feedback transmitted from Japan plus his own "thoughts" (whatever that may turn out to be). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Adjunct Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study; Author, The Ego Tunnel - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [SOUL-TRAVEL FOR SELFLESS BEINGS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10276) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-105 — KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HOW WE KNOW WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING — Lera Boroditsky > With this in mind, it may seem foolhardy to claim that epistemology will change the world. And yet, that is precisely what I intend to do here. I think that knowledge about how we know will change everything. By understanding the mechanisms of how humans create knowledge, we will be able to break through normal human cognitive limitations and think the previously unthinkable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, UCSD - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HOW WE KNOW WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10704) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-106 — THE ORGANISM ITSELF AS THE EMERGENT MEANING — Brian Goodwin > A major consequence that I see of this revelation in biology is the realisation that the separation we have made between human creativity as expressed in culture, and natural creativity as expressed in evolution, is mistaken. The two are much more deeply related than we have previously recognised. That humans are embedded in and dependent on nature is something that no-one can deny. This has become dramatically evident recently as our economic system has collapsed, along with the collapse of many crucial ecosystems, due to our failure to integrate human economic activity as a sustainable part of Gaian regulatory networks. We now face dramatic changes in the climate that require equally dramatic changes in our technologies connected with energy generation, farming, travel, and human life-style in general. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology at Schumacher College - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE ORGANISM ITSELF AS THE EMERGENT MEANING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10358) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-107 — THE LAPTOP QUANTUM COMPUTER — Donald D. Hoffman > Laptop QCs will make us rethink neuroscience. A few decades ago we peered inside brains and saw complex telephone switch boards. Now we peer inside brains and see complex classical computations, both serial and parallel. What will see once we have thoroughly absorbed the mind set of quantum computation? Some say we will still find only classical computations, because the brain and its neurons are too massive for quantum effects to survive. But evolution by natural selection leads to surprising adaptations, and there might in fact be selective pressures toward quantum computations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [THE LAPTOP QUANTUM COMPUTER](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10457) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-108 — COMPUTING THE EMBRYO — Lewis Wolpert > We know much about the mechanisms involved in the development of embryos. But given the genome of the egg we cannot predict the way the embryo will develop. This will require a enormous computation in which all the many thousands of components , particularly proteins, are involved and so the behavior of every cell will be known. We would, given a fertilized human egg be able to have a picture of all the details of the newborn baby, including any abnormalities. We would also be able to programme the egg to develop into any shape we desire. The time will come when this is possible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [COMPUTING THE EMBRYO](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10580) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-109 — GOD NEEDN'T ACTUALLY EXIST TO HAVE EVOLVED — Jesse Bering > In other words, from both a well-being and a biological perspective, whether our beliefs about the world 'out there' are true and accurate matters little. Rather, psychologically speaking, it's whether they work for us—or for our genes—that counts. As you read this, cognitive scientists are inching their way towards a more complete understanding of the human mind as a reality-bending prism. What will change everything? The looming consensus among those who take Occam's Razor seriously that the existence of God is a question for psychologists and not physicists. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Associate Professor, Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand; Author, Perv - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [GOD NEEDN'T ACTUALLY EXIST TO HAVE EVOLVED](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10283) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-110 — INSIDE OUT: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF EVERYTHING — Tor Nørretranders > Soon we will be building not only Artificial Intelligence. We will be building Artificial Will. Systems with an ability to convert internal decisions and values into external change. They will be able to decide that they want to change the world. A plan inside becomes an action on the outside. So they will have to know what is inside and outside. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [INSIDE OUT: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF EVERYTHING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10718) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-111 — AND IF THE BIG CHANGE DIDN'T ARRIVE? — Carlo Rovelli > I grew up expecting that, when adult, I'd travel to Mars. I expected cancer and the flu—and all illnesses—to be cured, robots taking care of labor, the biochemistry of life fully unraveled, the possibility of recreating damaged organs in every hospital, the nations of the Earth living prosperously in peace thanks to new technology, and physics having understood the center of a black hole. I expected great changes, that did not came. Let's be open minded: it is still possible for them to come. It is possible for unexpected advances to change everything—it has happened in the past. But—let's indeed be open minded—it is also possible that big changes would not come. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [AND IF THE BIG CHANGE DIDN'T ARRIVE?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10367) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-112 — AFRICA — James J. O'Donnell > When will we know? That's a scary question. One future timeline has us peaking now and subsiding, as we wrestle with the challenges we have made for ourselves, into some long period of not-quite-success, while Africa and the failed states of other continents linger in waiting for—what? Decades? Centuries? There are no guarantees about the future. But as we think about the financial crises of the present, we have to remember that what is at risk is not merely the comfort and prosperity of the rich nations but the very lives and opportunity for the poorest. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [AFRICA](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10469) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-113 — ON BASKETBALL AND SCIENCE CAMPS — Stephon H. Alexander > When I returned to the Bronx, I couldn’t really talk much about my experience. After all, a discussion on the Heisenberg principle is far less interesting than ball-park trash talk. I began playing less basketball and eventually went on to college and became a physicist. I could not help feeling a little guilty. In the back of my mind, I knew the real mathematical genius in my neighborhood was a guy named Eric Deabreu. But he never finished high school. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics at Brown University; Author, The Jazz of Physics - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [ON BASKETBALL AND SCIENCE CAMPS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10592) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-114 — NOTHING WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING — Richard Foreman > The belief that there is anything that will change things, in and of itself stymies, I believe, real change. To believe that anything "will change things" focuses one on the superficial surface of things, which indeed change all the time. Such changes—which have been and will continue to be—create always an orientation of consciousness that focuses always on "the future". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Playwright & Director; Founder, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [NOTHING WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10290) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-115 — NO MORE TIME DECAY — Emanuel Derman > No one dies. No one gets older. No one gets sick. You can't tell how old someone is by looking at them or touching them. No May-September romances. No room for new people. Everyone's an American car in Havana, endlessly repaired and maintained long after its original manufacturer is defunct. No breeding. No one born. No more evolution. No sex. No need to hurry. No need to console anyone. If you want something done, give it to a busy man, but no one need be busy when you have forever. Life without death changes absolutely everything. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Financial Engineering, Columbia University; Author, Models.Behaving.Badly - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [NO MORE TIME DECAY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10732) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-116 — FASTER EVOLUTION MEANS MORE ETHNIC DIFFERENCES — Jonathan Haidt > The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we're going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism.. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social Psychologist; Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [FASTER EVOLUTION MEANS MORE ETHNIC DIFFERENCES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10376) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-117 — LIVE TO 150 — Gregory Benford > We need fear no senioropolis of caution and withdrawal. Once society realizes that people who get educated in 20 years can use that education for another century or so, working well beyond 100, all the 20th Century social agenda vanishes. Nobody will retire at 65. People will switch careers, try out their dreams, perhaps find new mates and passions. We will see that experience can damp the ardent passions of glib youth, if it has a healthy body to work through. That future will be more mature, and richer for it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [LIVE TO 150](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10480) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-118 — WHAT CHANGES ANYTHING? — Robert Provine > Our nervous system is biased for the detection of change. Do you feel the watch on your wrist or the ring on your finger? Probably not, unless you have just put them on. You don't see the blind spot of each retina because they are unchanging and filled-in by your brain with information from the visual surround. If the image on your retina is experimentally stabilized, the entire visual field fades in a few seconds and you can see only visual stimuli that move through the field of view. You notice the sound of your home's air control system when it turns-on or turns-off, but not when it's running. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [WHAT CHANGES ANYTHING?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10604) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-119 — PROOF OF THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS — Clifford Pickover > Many mathematical surveys indicate that the "Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis" is the most important open question in mathematics. The rapid pace of mathematics, along with computer-assisted mathematical proofs and visualizations, leads me to believe that this question will be resolved in my lifetime. Math aficionado John Fry once said that he thought we would have a better chance of finding life on Mars than finding a counterexample for the Riemann Hypothesis. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [PROOF OF THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10297) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-120 — BETTER MEASUREMENTS — Gregory Cochran > Our most reliable engine of change has been increased understanding of the physical world. First it was Galilean dynamics and Newtonian gravity, then electromagnetism, later quantum mechanics and relativity. In each case, new observations revealed new physics, physics that went beyond the standard models—physics that led to new technologies and to new ways of looking at the universe. Often those advances were the result of new measurement techniques. The Greeks never found artificial ways of extending their senses, which hobbled their protoscience. But ever since Tycho Brahe, a man with a nose for instrumentation, better measurements have played a key role in Western science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Consultant; Adaptive Optics and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah; Coauthor (with Henry Harpending), The 10,000 Year Explosion - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [BETTER MEASUREMENTS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10749) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-121 — CELEBRATORY SELF RE-ENGINEERING — Andy Clark > But what really matters is the way we are, as a result of this tidal wave of self- re-engineering opportunity, just starting to know ourselves: not as firmly bounded biological organisms but as delightfully reconfigurable nodes in a flux of information, communcation, and action. As we learn to celebrate our own potential, we will embrace ever-more-dramatic variations in bodily form and in our effective cognitive profiles. The humans of the next century will be vastly more heterogeneous, more varied along physical and cognitive dimensions, than those of the past as we deliberately engineer a new Cambrian explosion of body and mind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [CELEBRATORY SELF RE-ENGINEERING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10385) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-122 — DISCOVERING ANOTHER UNIVERSE IN OUR UNIVERSE — Steve Nadis > The next question to consider is whether we could ever see traces of such a collision? There’s no definitive answer to that yet, and until we detect the imprint of another bubble we won’t know for sure. But theorists have some pretty specific ideas of what we might see—namely, disk-shaped features lurking somewhere amidst the fading glow of Big Bang radiation known as the cosmic microwave background. And if we were to look at such a disk in gravitational waves, rather than in electromagnetic waves (which we should be able to do in the near future), we might even see it glow. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor to Astronomy Magazine and a freelance writer - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [DISCOVERING ANOTHER UNIVERSE IN OUR UNIVERSE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10491) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-123 — ROUNDING AN ENDLESS VICIOUS CIRCLE — Alan Alda > Evidence from the past seems to point to our becoming increasingly dangerous pretty much every time we come up with a new idea or technology. These new things are usually wholesome and benign at first (movable type, pharmacology, rule of law) but before long we find ways to use these inventions to do what we do best—exercise power over one another. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Actor; Writer; Director; Host, PBS program Brains on Trial; Author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [ROUNDING AN ENDLESS VICIOUS CIRCLE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10605) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-124 — WHY HUMAN NATURE WILL REBEL — Nicholas Humphrey > Imagine if this Edge question had been posed to the citizens of Rome two thousand years ago. Would they have been able to predict the coming of the internet, DNA finger-printing, mind-control, space travel? Of course not. Would that mean they would have failed to spot the technological developments that were destined to change everything? I don't think so. For the fact is nothing has changed everything. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [WHY HUMAN NATURE WILL REBEL](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10305) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-125 — CONTROLLING BRAIN PLASTICITY — Leo M. Chalupa > In recent years, developmental neurobiologists have made considerable progress in unraveling the myriad factors underlying the plasticity of neurons in the developing brain. For instance, a number of studies have now demonstrated that it is the formation of inhibitory circuits in the cortex that causes decreased plasticity in the maturing visual system. While no single event can entirely explain brain plasticity, progress is being attained at a rapid pace, and I am convinced that in my lifetime we will be able to control the level of plasticity exhibited by mature neurons. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [CONTROLLING BRAIN PLASTICITY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10393) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Restored Brain Plasticity Could Make Learning Effortless by Leo M. Chalupa|Restored Brain Plasticity Could Make Learning Effortless by Leo M. Chalupa]] ### EDGE2009-126 — LITTLE CHANGES MAKE THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE — Barry C. Smith > Will a similar transformation of the human mind come about in our time? Could there come a time when we intend to communicate and do so without talking out loud? If the answer is ‘yes’ a quiet public space would be restored where all could engage in their private conversations without disturbing others. Could it really happen? Recently, we have been amazed by how a chimpanzee running on a treadmill could control—for a short time—the movements of a synchronized robot running on a treadmill thousands of miles away. Here, we would need something subtly different but no less astounding: a way of controlling in thought, and committing to send, the signals in the motor cortex that would normally travel to our articulators and ultimately issue in speech sounds. A device, perhaps implanted or appended, would send the signals and another device in receivers would read them and stimulate similar movements or commands in their motor cortex, giving them the ability, through neural mimicry, to reproduce silently the speech sounds they would make if they were saying them. Could accent be retained? Maybe not, unless some way was found of coding separately, but usably, the information voice conveys about the size, age and sex of the speaker. However, knowing who was calling and knowing how they sounded may lead us to ‘hear’ their voice with the words understood. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor & Director, Institute of Philosophy School of Advanced Study University of London - **Extract length:** 227 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [LITTLE CHANGES MAKE THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10502) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-127 — DEPLOYMENT OF A SIGNIFICANT ROGUE NUCLEAR DEVICE — Gerald Holton > An answer can be given once more in one sentence: the intentional, hostile deployment‚—whether by a state, a terrorist group, or other individuals‚—of a significant nuclear device. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University; Author, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture - **Extract length:** 27 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [DEPLOYMENT OF A SIGNIFICANT ROGUE NUCLEAR DEVICE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10618) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-128 — Untitled Response — Freeman Dyson > Another set of opportunities and responsibilities will arise when radiotelepathy is extended from humans to other animal species. We will then experience directly the joy of a bird flying or a wolf-pack hunting, the pain of a deer hunted or an elephant starved. We will feel in our own flesh the community of life to which we belong. I cannot help hoping that the sharing of our brains with our fellow-creatures will make us better stewards of our planet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Untitled Response](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-will-change-everything) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-129 — WEST ANTARCTICA AND SEVEN OTHER SLEEPING GIANTS — Laurence C. Smith > Unfortunately, we are discovering more giants that are probably lighter sleepers than the THC. Seven others — all of them potential game-changers — are now under scrutiny: (1) the disappearance of summer sea-ice over the Arctic Ocean, (2) increased melting and glacier flow of the Greenland ice sheet, (3) "unsticking" of the frozen West Antarctic Ice Sheet from its bed, (4) rapid die-back of Amazon forests, (5) disruption of the Indian Monsoon, (6) release of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, from thawing frozen soils, and (7) a shift to a permanent El Niño-like state. Like the THC, should any of these occur there would be profound ramifications — like our food production, the extinction and expansion of species, and the inundation of coastal cities. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [WEST ANTARCTICA AND SEVEN OTHER SLEEPING GIANTS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10402) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-130 — ARTIFICIAL, SELF-REPLICATING MEME MACHINES — Susan Blackmore > All around us the techno-memes are proliferating, and gearing up to take control; not that they realise it; they are just selfish replicators doing what selfish replicators do—getting copied whenever and wherever they can, regardless of the consequences. In this case they are using us human meme machines as their first stage copying machinery, until something better comes along. Artificial meme machines are improving all the time, and the step that will change everything is when these machines become self-replicating. Then they will no longer need us. Whether we live or die, or whether the planet is habitable for us or not, will be of no consequence for their further evolution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [ARTIFICIAL, SELF-REPLICATING MEME MACHINES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10513) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-131 — ESCAPING THE GRAVITY WELL — David Dalrymple > I'm not as optimistic about interstellar travel as some (I certainly don't expect it to become practical in this century), but I'm also much more optimistic about the ability of human civilization to adapt and survive without the precise conditions that were necessary for its evolution. There are so many possible solutions for the survival of humans (or posthumans) in solar orbit or on "inhospitable" planets that I expect we will find some way to make it work long before generational or faster-than-light voyages to faraway star systems; in fact, I expect it in my lifetime. But someday, "escaping the gravity well" will mean not that of Earth, but that of our star, and then humankind's ship will at last have...gone out. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research affiliate, MIT Media Lab - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [ESCAPING THE GRAVITY WELL](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10631) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-132 — THE FULL FLOURISHING OF SOLAR TECHNOLOGY — Ian McEwan > By nearly all insider and expert accounts, we are or will be at peak oil somewhere between now and the next five years. Even if we did not have profound concerns about climate change, we would need to be looking for different ways to power our civilization. How fortunate we are to have a safe nuclear facility a mere 93 million miles away, and fortunate too that the dispensation of physical laws is such that when a photon strikes a semi-conductor, an electron is released. I hope I live to see the full flourishing of solar technology—photovoltaics or concentrated solar power to superheat steam, or a combination of the two in concentrated photovoltaics. The technologies are unrolling at an exhilarating pace, with input from nanotechnology and artificial photosynthesis. Electric mobility and electricity storage are also part of this new quest. My hope is that architects will be drawn to designing gorgeous arrays and solar towers in the desert—as expressive of our aspirations as Medieval cathedrals once were. We will need new distribution systems too, smart grids—perfect Rooseveltian projects for our hard-pressed times. Could it be possible that in two or three decades we will look back and wonder why we ever thought we had a problem when we are bathed in such beneficent radiant energy? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Novelist; Recipient, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction; Author, Sweet Tooth; Solar; On Chesil Beach; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; The Cockroach - **Extract length:** 215 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [THE FULL FLOURISHING OF SOLAR TECHNOLOGY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10321) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-133 — NEVER-ENDING CHILDHOOD — Alison Gopnik > The world is transforming from an agricultural and manufacturing economy to an information economy. This means that people will have to learn more and more. The best way to make it happen is to extend the period when we learn the most — childhood. Our new scientific understanding of neural plasticity and gene regulation, along with the global spread of schooling, will make that increasingly possible. We may remain children forever — or at least for much longer. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [NEVER-ENDING CHILDHOOD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10411) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-134 — READING MINDS — Kenneth W. Ford > As what is technically feasible proliferates in its complexity, cost, and impact on humankind, we should more often ask the question, "Should we do it?" Take mind reading. We can probably safely assume that the needed device would have to be located close to the brain being read. That would mean that choice is possible. We could let Mind Reader™, Inc. make and market it. Or we could outlaw it. Or we could hold it as an option for special circumstances (much as we now try to do with wiretapping). What we will not have to do is throw up our hands and say, "Since it can be done, it will be done." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Retired Director of the American Institute of Physics - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [READING MINDS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10524) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-135 — HOMO EVOLUTIS — Juan Enriquez > Unless we believe that we have now stabilized all planetary and galactic variables, these cycles of growth and extinction will continue time and again. 99% of species, including all other hominids, have gone extinct. Often this has happened over long periods of time. What is interesting today, 200 years after Darwin's birth, is that we are taking direct and deliberate control over the evolution of many, many species, including ourselves. So the single biggest game changer will likely be the beginning of human speciation. We will begin to get glimpses of it in our lifetime. Our grandchildren will likely live it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [HOMO EVOLUTIS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10179) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-136 — INTERSTELLAR VIRUSES — George Dyson > "That seems reasonable," I agreed. "My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already... and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as there's a digital world — a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine — for it to colonize when it gets there. And that's why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [INTERSTELLAR VIRUSES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10255) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Digital Life/Digital Life May Travel Between the Stars by George Dyson|Digital Life May Travel Between the Stars by George Dyson]] ### EDGE2009-137 — WISDOM REBORN — Roger Schank > An archive needs to be created that has all the wisdom of the world in it. People have sought to do this for years, in the form of encyclopedias and such, but they have failed to do what was necessary to make those encyclopedias useful. There is too much in a typical encyclopedia entry, not to mention the absurd amount of information in a book. People are set up to hear stories and stories don't last all that long before we lose our ability to concentrate on their main point, their inherent wisdom, if you will. People tell each other stores all the time, but when they write or lecture they are permitted (or encouraged) to go on way too long (as I am doing now.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun! - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [WISDOM REBORN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10186) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-138 — THE OPEN UNIVERSE — Stuart A. Kauffman > Many physicists now doubt the adequacy of reductionism, including Philip Anderson, and Robert Laughlin. Laughlin argues for laws of organization that need not derive from the fundamental laws of physics. I give one example. Consider a sufficiently diverse collection of molecular species, such as peptides, RNA, or small molecules, that can undergo reactions and are also candidates to catalyze those very reactions. It can be shown analytically that at a sufficient diversity of molecular species and reactions, so many of these reactions are expected to be catalyzed by members of the system that a giant catalyzed reaction network arises that is collectively autocatalytic. It reproduces itself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE OPEN UNIVERSE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10193) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-139 — A FAREWELL TO HARM — Karl Sabbagh > Would the total elimination of murderous impulses from the human race have a down side? Well, of course, one single person who escaped the elimination process could then rule the world. He — probably a man — could oppress and kill with impunity since no one else would have the will to kill him. Measures would have to be devised to deal with such a situation. Such a person would be so harmful to the human race that, perhaps, plans would have to be laid to control him if he should arise. Tricky, this one, since he couldn't be killed, as there would no one able to kill him or even to design a machine that would kill him, as that also would involve an ability to contemplate the death of another human being. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A FAREWELL TO HARM](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10200) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-140 — THE ACTUAL, THE POSSIBLE, AND THE UNIMAGINABLE — Unattributed Edge contributor > The answer is simple, and reveals a deep fact about our biology, and the biology of all other organisms. The brain, as a physical device, evolved to process information and make predictions about the future. Though the generative capacity of the brain, especially the human brain, is spectacular — providing us with a system for massive creativity, it is also highly constrained. The constraints arise from both the physics of brain operation, as well as the requirements of learnability. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE ACTUAL, THE POSSIBLE, AND THE UNIMAGINABLE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10207) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-141 — A NEW KIND OF MIND — Kevin Kelly > Ideally this additional intelligence should not be just cheap, but free. A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that supercomputers would first host this artificial mind, and then perhaps we'd get mini-ones at home, or add them to the heads of our personal robots. They would be bounded entities. We would know where our thoughts ended and theirs began. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [A NEW KIND OF MIND](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10137) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-142 — LIFE (OR NOT) ON MARS — Rodney A. Brooks > Another set of possibilities for what we might discover would be one of these same forms with a different or incompatible encoding for amino acids. That would be a far more radical outcome. It would tell us two things. Life arose twice, spontaneously and separately, on two adjacent planets in one particular little solar system. The Universe must in that case be absolutely teeming with life. But more than that it would say that the space of possible life biochemistries is probably rather narrow, so we will immediately know a lot about all those other life forms out there. And it will inform us about the probable spaces that we should be searching in our synthetic biology efforts to build new life forms. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [LIFE (OR NOT) ON MARS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10214) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-143 — CRACKING OPEN THE LOCKBOX OF TALENT — Howard Gardner > For the first time, it should be possible to delineate the nature of talent. This breakthrough will come about through a combination of findings from genetics (do highly talented individuals have a distinctive, recognizable genetic profile?); neuroscience (are there structural or functional neural signatures, and, importantly, can these be recognized early in life?); cognitive psychology (are the mental representations of talented individuals distinctive when contrasted to those of hard workers); and the psychology of motivation (why are talented individuals often characterized as having 'a rage to learn, a passion to master?) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [CRACKING OPEN THE LOCKBOX OF TALENT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10144) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-144 — MASTERING DEATH — Marcelo Gleiser > What to do? We spread our genes, write books and essays, prove theorems, invent family recipes, compose poems and symphonies, paint and sculpt, anything to create some sort of permanence, something to defy oblivion. Can modern science do better? Can we contemplate a future when we control mortality? I know I am being way too optimistic considering this a possibility, but the temptation to speculate is far too great for me to pass on it. Maybe I'll live for 101 years like Irving Berlin, having still half of my life ahead of me. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth College; Author, The Island of Knowledge - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [MASTERING DEATH](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10221) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-145 — CULTURE — Timothy Taylor > Material culture is the thing that makes us human, driving human evolution from the outset with its continually modifying power. Our species' particular dilemma is that in order to safeguard what we have, we have continually to change. The culture of things—invention and technology—is ever changing under the tide of words and routines whose role is to image fixity and agreement when, in reality, none exists. This form of change is no trivial thing because it is essential to our longer term survival. At least, the longer term survival of anything we may be proud to call universally human - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [CULTURE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10150) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-146 — SUPERINTELLIGENCE — Nick Bostrom > Machines will have several advantages: most obviously, faster processing speed — an artificial neuron can operate a million times faster than its biological counterpart. Machine intelligences may also have superior computational architectures and learning algorithms. These "qualitative" advantages, while harder to predict, may be even more important than the advantages in processing power and memory capacity. Furthermore, artificial intellects can be easily copied, and each new copy can — unlike humans — start life fully-fledged and endowed with all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors. Given these considerations, it is possible that one day we may be able to create "superintelligence": a general intelligence that vastly outperforms the best human brains in every significant cognitive domain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Oxford University; Director, Future of Humanity Institute; Author, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [SUPERINTELLIGENCE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10228) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Machine Succession/Machines Can Inherit Everything Their Predecessors Knew by Nick Bostrom|Machines Can Inherit Everything Their Predecessors Knew by Nick Bostrom]] ### EDGE2009-147 — LABORATORY EARTH COLONIES — John Gottman > Within the next two centuries the seemingly impossible technical problems of space travel began to be solved. Problems of foil sails were solved. Designs emerged for ships that could get up to 85% of the speed of light within 2 years, using acceleration from starts and from harnessing the creative energy of empty space itself. The Moon, Europa and Mars were colonized. Terra-forming technologies developed. Many designs emerged for the spinning complete 2-mile Earth-habitat ship that produced a 1-g environment. Thousands of people wanted to make the trips. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Co-founder, The Gottman Relationship Institute; Author, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [LABORATORY EARTH COLONIES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10158) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-148 — CLIMATE WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING — William H. Calvin > The big working models of fluid dynamics used to simulate ocean and atmospheric circulation will themselves be game-changing for other fields of dynamics, such as brain processing and decision making. They should be especially important as they are incorporated into economic research. Climate problems will cause economies to stagger and we have just seen how fragile they are. Unlike 1997 when currency troubles were forced by a big El Niño and its associated fires in southeast Asia, the events of 2008 show that, even without the boat being rocked by external events, our economy can partially crash just from internal instabilities, equivalent to trying to dance in a canoe. Many people will first notice climate change elsewhere via the economic collapse that announces it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [CLIMATE WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10235) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-149 — MOLECULAR MANUFACTURING — Ed Regis > The idea sounds fatuous in the extreme…until you remember that objects as big and complex as whales, dinosaurs, and sumo wrestlers got built in a moderately analogous fashion: they began as minute, nanoscale structures that duplicated themselves, and whose successors then differentiated off into specialized organs and other components. Those growing ranks of biological marvels did all this repeatedly until, eventually, they had automatically assembled themselves into complex and functional macroscale entities. And the initial seed structures, the gametes, were not even designed, built, or programmed by scientists: they were just out there in the world, products of natural selection. But if nature can do that all by itself, then why can't machines be intelligently engineered to accomplish relevantly similar feats? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Monsters - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [MOLECULAR MANUFACTURING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10165) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-150 — A WEB-EMPOWERED REVOLUTION IN TEACHING — Christopher J. Anderson > Now think about this from the pupils' perspective. In the past, everyone's success has depended on whether they were lucky enough to have a great mentor or teacher in their neighborhood. The vast majority have not been fortunate. But a young girl born in Africa today will probably have access in 10 years' time to a cell phone with a high-resolution screen, a web connection, and more power than the computer you own today. We can imagine her obtaining face-to-face insight and encouragement from her choice of the world's great teachers. She will get a chance to be what she can be. And she might just end up being the person who saves the planet for our grandchildren. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, TED conferences, TED Talks; author, TED Talks - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A WEB-EMPOWERED REVOLUTION IN TEACHING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10242) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-151 — THE DISCOVERY OF INTELLIGENT LIFE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE — Douglas Rushkoff > No, I have the feeling that the only way to change everything is for something be done to us, instead. Just imagining the encounter of humanity with an "other" implies a shift beyond the solipsism that has characterized our civilization since our civilization was born. It augurs a reversal as big as the encounter of an individual with its offspring, or a creature with its creator. Even if it's the result of something we've done, it's now independent of us and our efforts. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE DISCOVERY OF INTELLIGENT LIFE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10172) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2009-152 — THE FIRST MAJOR UPGRADE OF THE HUMAN BRAIN AND THE MIND IT GENERATES SINCE THE PLEISTOCENE — Gregory Paul > Evolution whether biological or technological has been speeding up over time as the ability to acquire, process and exploit information builds upon itself. Human minds adapted to comprehend arithmetic growth tend to underestimate exponential future progress. Born two years before the Wright's first flight, my young grandmother never imagined she would cross continents and oceans in near sonic flying machines. Even out of the box thinkers did not predict the hyperexpansion of computing power over the last half century. It looks like medicine is about to undergo a similar explosion. Extracellular matrix powder derived from pig bladders can regrow a chopped off finger with a brand new tip complete with nail. Why not regenerate entire human arms and legs, and organs? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Researcher; Author, The Princeton Field Guide of Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [THE FIRST MAJOR UPGRADE OF THE HUMAN BRAIN AND THE MIND IT GENERATES SINCE THE PLEISTOCENE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10249) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Mind Upload/Formerly Human Minds May Become Entirely Artificial by Gregory Paul|Formerly Human Minds May Become Entirely Artificial by Gregory Paul]]