# Edge 2013 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?*. 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 *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-should-we-be-worried-about) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-should-we-be-worried-about) - **Archive year:** 2013 - **Response rows represented:** 154 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 154 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 0 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 0 - **Not yet promoted:** 154 ## 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 ### EDGE2013-001 — Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Words? — Benjamin K. Bergen > Many of us are afraid of exposing children to taboo language, based on this same notion—that somehow certain words can damage young minds. And the well-being of children—were it indeed on the line—would most certainly be a justifiable reason to limit freedom of speech. But the problem is that the Supreme Court's premise, that children can be harmed by selected taboo words, does not survive the test of careful empirical scrutiny. In fact, there are no words so terrible, so gruesomely obscene, that merely hearing them or speaking them poses any danger to young ears. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor, Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego; Author, What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Words?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25253) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-002 — A World Of Cascading Crises — Peter Schwartz > The public's view of violence is a good example of the second new dynamic of heightened awareness. Steven Pinker has elegantly shown us that the real threat of violence in most of our lives has diminished dramatically. Yet most of believe because of the constant drumbeat of reporting on violence that the threat is far greater than it actually is. The absence of children playing on suburban streets is a sign of how scared parents are of the threat of kidnapping, which actually remains very small. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Futurist; Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning, Salesforce.com; Author, Inevitable Surprises - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [A World Of Cascading Crises](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23881) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-003 — Excellence — Eric R. Weinstein > The problem with all this is that we cannot excel our way out of modern problems. Within the same century, we have unlocked the twin nuclei of both cell and atom and created the conditions for synthetic biological and even digital life with computer programs that can spawn with both descent and variation on which selection can now act. We are in genuinely novel territory which we have little reason to think we can control; only the excellent would compare these recent achievements to harmless variations on the invention of the compass or steam engine. So surviving our newfound god-like powers will require modes that lie well outside expertise, excellence, and mastery. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician and Economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Excellence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23879) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-004 — Authoritarian Submission — Michael Vassar > Dacher Keltner and other psychologists recently showed that higher socioeconomic class—essentially higher satisfaction of esteem needs—leads to increased unethical behavior, while other research suggests that external efforts to boost self-esteem tend to produce anti-social narcissism. Research of this type fits in well with Jonathan Haidt's theories on the authoritarian dimension of moral cognition. It may not be a coincidence that one of the world's most popular religions is literally named "submission". In general, authoritarian impulses have always advised rulers to keep their subjects' bellies full… and pressed firmly against the ground. Steven Pinker has compellingly established the success of modern society in bringing us unprecedented peace. People, who don't fear for their safety, but who despair of ever achieving love or belonging, are the most submissive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, MetaMed Research - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Authoritarian Submission](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-005 — The Loss Of Death — Kate Jeffery > Now, all this may be coming to an end, for one of the things we humans, with our evolved intelligence, are working hard at is trying to eradicate death. This is an understandable enterprise, for nobody wants to die—genes for wanting to die rarely last long in a species. For millennia, human thinkers have dreamed of conquering old age and death: the fight against it permeates our art and culture, and much of our science. We personify death as a spectre and loathe it, fear it and associate it with all that is bad in the world. If we could conquer it, how much better life would become. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience, Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University College London - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Loss Of Death](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23875) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-006 — Who Gets to Play in the Science Ballpark — Stephon H. Alexander > Unfortunately, with exception to a few enlightened individuals, professional inclusion has not been the collective experience of underrepresented groups (this goes beyond ethnicity and includes individuals who also "think" differently) in certain scientific disciplines. Given the population trends, some argue that for the U.S. to be competitive in STEM related fields, we'll need to extend the scientific enterprise to the increasing Latino and Black populations. I worry that while funding structures tend to address this issue at the K-12 and collegiate levels, there has been little serious discussion about diversifying, recruiting and indulging in inclusive practices to persons of color in the academy. Time and time again, research has shown that a lack of role models, especially to underrepresented groups, negatively impacts excellence and retention. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics at Brown University; Author, The Jazz of Physics - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Who Gets to Play in the Science Ballpark](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23874) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-007 — I've Given Up Asking Questions — Terry Gilliam > I've given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me... and marvel stupidly. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Screenwriter; Film Director; Animator; Actor; Member, Monty Python Comedy Troupe; Director, Brazil, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas; Author, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir - **Extract length:** 22 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [I've Given Up Asking Questions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23873) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-008 — Working with Others? — Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg > As the 21st Century proceeds, tasks facing our species will become increasingly complex. Many problems that in an earlier era might have been easily addressed by a single person will now require a sophisticated set of abilities contributed by different people. The individual contributions must be deeply complementary; the whole must be more than the sum of its parts. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute | Clinical Psychologist; Author, What's the Matter with Batman - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Working with Others?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23871) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-009 — Applying Classic Science To Understand "Modern States" Shaped By Crime — Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran > Civil and penal laws are at the base of the everyday life; what we think and how we behave result of interactions between our brain and the codes, rules and institutions around us. When those codes and institutions are based on criminal interests, the social and cultural references of right and wrong change. Then we obtain societies in which illegality is the norm, which is usually defined as a failed State. The result is a vicious circle that strengthens criminal networks that operate across different countries; networks involved in massive corruption, mass murder, human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion and cruel violence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Director, Scientific Vortex, Inc. - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Applying Classic Science To Understand "Modern States" Shaped By Crime](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23870) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-010 — Unfriendly Physics, Monsters From The Id, And Self-Organizing Collective Delusions — John Tooby > Sciences can move at the speed of inference when individuals only need to consider logic and evidence. Yet sciences move glacially (Planck's "funeral by funeral") when the typical scientist, dependent for employment on a dense ingroup network, has to get the majority of her guild to acknowledge fundamental, embarrassing disciplinary errors. To get science systematically moving at the speed of inference—the key precondition to solving our other problems—we need to design our next generation scientific institutions to be more resistant to self-organizing collective delusions, by basing them on a fuller understanding of our evolved psychology. - **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:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Unfriendly Physics, Monsters From The Id, And Self-Organizing Collective Delusions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23867) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-011 — Worry About Internet Drivel — David Gelernter > The internet's insatiable demand for words creates global deflation in the value of words. The internet's capacity to distribute words near-instantly means that, with no lag-time between writing and publication, publication and worldwide availability, pressure builds on the writer to produce more. Global deflation in the value of words creates pressure, in turn, to downplay or eliminate editing and self-editing. When I tell my students not to turn in first-drafts, I sometimes have to explain, nowadays, what a first draft is. - **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:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Worry About Internet Drivel](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23866) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-012 — Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Words? — Unattributed Edge contributor > Many of us are afraid of exposing children to taboo language, based on this same notion—that somehow certain words can damage young minds. And the well-being of children—were it indeed on the line—would most certainly be a justifiable reason to limit freedom of speech. But the problem is that the Supreme Court's premise, that children can be harmed by selected taboo words, does not survive the test of careful empirical scrutiny. In fact, there are no words so terrible, so gruesomely obscene, that merely hearing them or speaking them poses any danger to young ears. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Words?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23865) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-013 — We Are In Denial About Catastrophic Risks — Martin Rees > We will always have to worry about thermonuclear weapons. But a new trigger for societal breakdown will be the environmental stresses consequent on climate change. Many still hope that our civilisation can segue towards a low-carbon future without trauma and disaster. My pessimistic guess, however, is that global annual CO2 emissions won't be turned around in the next 20 years. But by then we'll know—perhaps from advanced computer modelling, but also from how much global temperatures have actually risen by then—whether or not the feedback from water vapour and clouds strongly amplifies the effect of CO2 itself in creating a 'greenhouse effect'. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College; Author, From Here to Infinity - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [We Are In Denial About Catastrophic Risks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23864) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-014 — Computer-Generated Fascism — David Bodanis > Gene therapy is likely to take that further, quite plausibly slowing aging by decades—but what if that costs several hundred thousand dollars? Many people in our cities' wealthiest neighborhoods would start using that. It's not hard to imagine popular leaders with no memory of World War II inspiring those outside the select high-income domains, those who are mocked beyond endurance by the existence of these near immortals in their midst, to pursue this all too human response to injustice. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Futurist; Author, Einstein's Greatest Mistake - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Computer-Generated Fascism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23863) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-015 — The Mating Wars — David M. Buss > Despite the fact that many equate evolution with survival selection, survival is only important inasmuch as it contributes to successful mating. Differential reproductive success, not differential survival success, is the engine of evolution by selection. You can survive to old age. But if you fail to mate, you fail to reproduce, and your genes bite the evolutionary dust. We are all descendants of a ruthless selective process of competition for the most valuable mates—those who can give our children good genes and an array of resources ranging from food and shelter to the social skills needed to scramble up the status hierarchy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Mating Wars](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23862) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-016 — History And Contingency — Paul Kedrosky > Why, then, are they called fire departments? Because of history. Cities used to be built out of pre-combustion materials—wood straight from the forest, for example—but they are now mostly built of post-combustion materials—steel, concrete, and other materials that have passed through flame. Fire departments were created when fighting fires was an urgent urban need, and now their name lives on, a reminder of their host cities' combustible past. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor, Infectious Greed; General Partner, SK Ventures - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [History And Contingency](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23860) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-017 — Data Disenfranchisement — David Rowan > The data disenfranchised suffer in two main ways. First, they face systemic disadvantages in markets which are nominally open to all. Take stockmarkets. Any human traders today bold enough to compete against the algorithms of high-frequency and low-latency traders should be made aware how far the odds are stacked against them. As Andrei Kirilenko, the chief economist at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, along with researchers from Princeton and the University of Washington, found recently, the most aggressive high-frequency traders tend to make the greatest profits—suggesting that it would be wise for the small investor simply to leave the machines to it. It's no coincidence that power in a swathe of other sectors is accruing to those who control the algorithms—whether the Obama campaign's electoral "microtargeters" or the yield-raising strategists of data-fuelled precision agriculture. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor, WIRED UK - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Data Disenfranchisement](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23859) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-018 — The Coming Fight Between Engineers And Druids — Paul Saffo > The gulf between Druid and Engineer makes C. P. Snow's Two Cultures seem like a mere crack in the sidewalk. The two camps do not merely hold different worldviews; they barely speak the same language. A recent attempt to sequester oceanic carbon by dumping iron dust in the Pacific off of British Columbia intrigued Engineers, but alarmed Druids who considered it an act of intentional pollution. Faced with uncertainty or crisis, engineers instinctively hit the gas; Druids prefer the brake. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Coming Fight Between Engineers And Druids](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23858) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-019 — Crisis At The Foundations Of Physics — Steve Giddings > I will say I am deeply concerned about how we will arrive at a complete and consistent theory of gravity, and that we must, in order to describe not only black holes—which have been found to be ubiquitous in the universe—but also both the early inflationary and pre-inflationary evolution of our universe, as well as our seemingly dark-energy dominated future. The current problems at the foundations link to multiple big questions—and I fear it will be no small feat to resolve them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Crisis At The Foundations Of Physics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23857) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-020 — Lamplight Probabilities — Bart Kosko > The fifth and final lamplight probability is the binomial probability model. It describes the canonical random metaphor of flipping a coin. The binomial model requires binary outcomes such as heads or tails and further requires independent trials or flips. The probability of getting heads must also stay the same from flip to flip. This seems simple enough. But it can be hard to accept that the next flip of a fair coin is just as likely to be heads as it is to be tails when the preceding three independent coin-flip outcomes have all been heads. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Lamplight Probabilities](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23856) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-021 — Are We Homogenizing The Global View Of A Normal Mind? — P. Murali Doraiswamy > DSM-II in 1968 had 182 conditions, DSM-III in 1980 had 265 conditions, and DSM-IV in 1994 had 297. DSM V is expected to be released later this year and will have many changes including an unknown number of new conditions. Today, somewhere around 40 million Americans are thought to be suffering from a mental illness. In 1975, only about 25% of psychiatric patients received a prescription but today almost 100% do and many receive multiple drugs. The use of these drugs has spread so rapidly that levels of common antidepressants, like Prozac, have been detected in the US public water supply. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychiatry, Translational Neuroscience Division, Duke University Health System - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Are We Homogenizing The Global View Of A Normal Mind?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23855) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-022 — What Is Conscious? — Timo Hannay > Towards the end of 2012 doctors picked up the first message (via a brain scan) from a patient in a persistent vegetative state. But if input-output characteristics can't be trusted—and they probably can't—then we really have no way of confirming whether this represented a conscious act or an insensible physical response. Similarly, what of patients under anaesthetic? For all we know they may be suffering in agony during their operations even if they have no memory of it afterwards. And so on and on, from human embryos to birds, insects and, yes, even plants. Not to mention all those computers we're bringing into existence: might they have an inner life too? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Managing Director, SchoolDash; Co-organizer, Sci Foo Camp - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [What Is Conscious?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23853) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-023 — That We Won't Make Use Of The Error Catastrophe Threshold — William McEwan > For now we can delight in the recent knowledge that nature has already got there. The APOBEC3 family of genes systematically introduces errors into virus genomes, tipping them over the precipice. Viruses take this threat seriously. HIV has a gene whose function is to counteract APOBEC3. Without this gene, HIV cannot replicate. Other viruses seem to have lost the battle: The human genome is littered with the remnants of extinct viruses that bear the scars of APOBEC3 activity. Perhaps accelerated mutation was a contributing factor to these viruses' demise. I fear evolution's ingenuity—accumulated at that geologically slow rate of 10-10 base pairs per generation—may surpass our own unless we can grasp this beautiful idea and devise some gentle, non-toxic tipping of our own. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investigator Scientist, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, U.K. - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [That We Won't Make Use Of The Error Catastrophe Threshold](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23852) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-024 — A Fearful Asymmetry: The Worrying World Of A Would-Be 'Science' — Helena Cronin > One is the world of the objective content of ideas, in particular of science as a body of knowledge, of actual and possible scientific theories, their truth or falsity, their refutability, tests passed or failed, valid and invalid arguments, objections met or unanswered, crucial evidence deployed, progress achieved. Darwinian science has high status in this world of objective knowledge as perhaps "the single best idea anyone has ever had". And, probably uniquely in the history of science, it is unlikely to be superseded; biology will be forever Darwinian—for natural selection, it seems, is the only mechanism that can achieve design without a designer. And the Darwinian understanding of human nature is a straightforward implication of that core insight. The first serious attempt at a science of ourselves … and, what's more, it's most likely right. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-director of LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science; Author, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [A Fearful Asymmetry: The Worrying World Of A Would-Be 'Science'](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23851) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-025 — Unmitigated Arrogance — Jessica L. Tracy > I worry about the recent epidemic of lying and cheating that has infected public discourse in a diversity of domains. Think of science writer Jonah Lehrer's fabrication of fairly trivial details in his non-fiction book, Imagine: How Creativity Works—which was subsequently pulled from shelves by its publisher. Or social psychologist Dietrich Stapel's fabrication of empirical data reported in over 50 published articles—most of which were eventually retracted by the journals. Or Lance Armstrong's many years of competitive cycling powered by illegal doping—resulting in the removal of his seven Tour de France victories and a lifetime banishment from the sport. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia; Author, Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Unmitigated Arrogance](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23850) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-026 — Science By (Social) Media — Michael I. Norton > Would your opinion of the soundness of the underlying science be influenced by the publication outlet? My guess is that more people would be more likely to believe a "guns good" piece that appeared in the Times and a "guns bad" piece that appeared on Fox News—precisely because these pieces are at such odds with the general tenor of these publications. And considering the reverse shows the larger problem: readers may discount "guns good" research that appears on Fox News and "guns bad" research in the New York Times regardless of the actual quality of the underlying science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Director of Research, Harvard Business School; Co-author (with Elizabeth Dunn), Happy Money - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Science By (Social) Media](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23849) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-027 — Misplaced Worries — Dan Sperber > New arms of destruction— atomic, chemical, biological— are becoming more and more powerful and more and more accessible. Terrorist acts and local wars of new magnitude are likely to occur. When they do, the argument will be made even more forcefully than it was in the US after 9/11 that powerful states should be given the means to try and prevent them including in ways that curtail democratic rights. What should we worry most about, terrorism and wars or further limitations to rights? - **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:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Misplaced Worries](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23847) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-028 — The Human-Nature Divide — Scott Sampson > We should all be worried about the gaping psychological chasm separating humanity from nature. Indeed a strong argument can be made that bridging this divide deserves to be ranked amongst the most urgent 21st Century priorities. Yet so far the human-nature divide hasn't even made it to our cultural to-do list. - **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:** 51 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Human-Nature Divide](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23845) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-029 — The Complex, Consequential, Not-So-Easy Decisions About Our Water Resources — Giulio Boccaletti > Reams have been devoted to rousing alarms about the global water crisis, but the barrier to effective action is not one of conviction, but of complexity. It is frightening that—outside of a restricted circle of practitioners—we have been unable to develop a fact based, practical way of debating water issues in public. We do not need great public debates on the likelihood of "water wars" or the popular yet mistaken idea that water is an exhaustible resource. But we do need debates on the practical, consequential choices we have. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Strategy Officer of The Nature Conservancy; Author, Water: A Biography - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Complex, Consequential, Not-So-Easy Decisions About Our Water Resources](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23844) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-030 — Big Experiments Won't Happen — Lisa Randall > In fact, the Superconducting Supercollider that was cancelled in the US would have had about three times the energy. It was designed with the ultimate physics goals in mind, which argued for a more powerful machine. The LHC—though designed to answer similar questions—was built in a pre-existing tunnel that constrained the maximum energy that could be achieved. If we had three times the energy, I'd be a lot less worried. But we don't. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Big Experiments Won't Happen](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23840) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-031 — What We Learn From Firefighters — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > I thought that the story had ended there and that people would pay attention to the evidence; after all I played by the exact rules of scientific revelation, communication and transmission of evidence. Nothing happened. To make things worse, I sold millions of copies of The Black Swan and nothing happened so it cannot be that the results were not properly disseminated. I even testified in front of a Congressional Committee (twice). There was even a model-caused financial crisis, for Baal's sake, and nothing happened. The only counters I received was that I was "repetitive", "egocentric", "arrogant", "angry" or something even more insubstantial, meant to demonize the messenger. Nobody has managed to explain why it is not charlatanism, downright scientifically fraudulent to use these techniques. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What We Learn From Firefighters](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23839) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-032 — Chinese Eugenics — Geoffrey Miller > Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of "yousheng" ("good birth"—which has the same literal meaning as "eugenics"). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current "gaokao" exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a "social fostering fee" (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China's traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Chinese Eugenics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-033 — Men — Helen Fisher > In fact, women who seek more independence when in a committed relationship. Women want more personal space (women 77% vs men 56%); women are less eager to share their bank account (women 35% vs men 25%); women are more eager to have girl's night out (women 66% vs men 47%); and women are more likely to want to vacation with their female buddies (women 12% vs men 8%). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Men](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23837) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-034 — World As We Know It — Richard Foreman > Time by itself, of course, will alter the parameters within which these problems are currently situated, and all of them will be absorbed or transcended by the new, evolving parameters which will eventually dissolve these threatening problems. Even if "The end of the world itself" is threatened, that too will lead to some "other" state—inconceivable perhaps—but even as a vague allusion we humans will dismiss it as beyond thought and "Not to be wished for". But that very understandable rejection arises from the same psychological base implied and evoked in the word— "worried!"—which is the lynch-pin, as I see it, of this year's Edge Question. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Playwright & Director; Founder, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [World As We Know It](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23836) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-035 — Technology May Endanger Democracy — Haim Harari > Science is the source of numerous cures for medical, social and economic issues. It is also an incredibly exciting and beautiful intellectual adventure. It leads to new technologies, which change our lives, often for the better. Could these technologies endanger the foundations of liberal democracy? This may sound crazy. Yet, we should all worry about it. It is a real threat, which should concern every thinking person, if he or she believes that science can advance humanity and that democracy is the least bad system of governance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Technology May Endanger Democracy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23835) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-036 — Science Publishing — Marco Iacoboni > In the current publishing system, it is complicated to achieve these conclusions. One way of doing it, is to pool together experiments that share a number of features. For instance, our group and others have investigated mirror neurons in autism and concluded that mirror neuron activity is reduced in autism. Some other groups failed to demonstrate it. The studies that show mirror neuron impairment in autism largely outnumber the studies that fail to show it. In this case, it is reasonable to draw solid conclusions from the scientific literature. In many other cases, however, as in the example of neuromodulation of the frontal lobe and social prejudice, there is much uncertainty due to the selectivity regarding what gets published and what is left out. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; Author, Mirroring People - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science Publishing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23834) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-037 — Is The New Public Sphere... Public? — Andrew Lih > Without passing judgment on the extent or reach of these types of license agreements, the logistics of accessing one's own data are worrisome. Typically, these services (Twitter, Facebook, Weibo, Instagram, et al) are the sole digital possesser of your words, links, images or video that were created within their system. You may own the copyright, but do you actually possess a copy of what you've put into their system? Do you actually control access to your content? Do you have the ability to search and recall the information you created? Is public access to your data (eg. through application programming interfaces) possible now, or guaranteed in the long term? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Journalism, American University; Author, The Wikipedia Revolution - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Is The New Public Sphere... Public?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23833) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-038 — Stress — Arianna Huffington > Plus, new high-tech tools are making it possible for individuals to take more and more control of their own health. The first wave of connecting technology hyper-connected us to the entire world—but, in the process, often disconnected us from ourselves. That's why I'm so excited about the new wave of technology that reconnects us to ourselves. For example, a robust market of wearable devices has emerged, monitoring everything from activity and food intake to weight and sleep. Thirty million wearable devices were shipped in 2012, and 80 million are on track to ship in 2016—by which time consumer wearables will be a $6 billion market. These many innovations are signals of a significant change in attitude about the role technology can, and should, be playing in our lives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair, President, Editor-In-Chief, The Huffington Post Media Group; Nationally Syndicated Columnist; Author - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Stress](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23830) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-039 — "Smart" — Evgeny Morozov > I find myself preoccupied with the invisible costs of "smart" solutions in part because Silicon Valley mavericks are not lying to us: technologies are not only become more powerful—they are also becoming more ubiquitous. We used to think that, somehow, digital technologies lived in a national reserve of some kind—first, we called this imaginary place "cyberspace" and then we switched to the more neutral label of "the Internet"—and it's only in the last few years, with the proliferation of geolocational services, self-driving cars, smart glasses, that we grasped that, perhaps, such national reserves were a myth and digital technologies would literally be everywhere: in our fridges, in our belts, in our books, in our trash bins. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy; Syndicated Columnist; Author, The Net Delusion - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** ["Smart"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23829) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-040 — Losing Touch — Christine Finn > That widely-reported reminder of our evolved capabilities helped assuage my own real worry—call it, perhaps, a haptical terror—about losing touch with the physical world. What was the future for fingers, as tools, in the digital age? Where the latest interface is a touch which is smooth and feather-light, where the human to machine commands are advancing to be spoken, or breathed, or blinked, even transmitted by brain waves, would finger-work be the preserve of artists and childs-play? Fingers could still form churches and steeples, and all the peoples, be in the play of poets, peel an orange. But in the digital age would there be pages still to turn, tendrils to be untangled, a place for hard key-strokes, not simply passing swipes? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Losing Touch](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23828) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-041 — Are We Becoming Too Connected? — Gino Segre > I am by no means advocating isolation, but it is overwhelming to see on my computer every morning the list with synopses of all the high-energy physics preprints submitted the day before. They appear complete with routing for access in PDF and alternative formats. Does this run the risk of producing a herd mentality? Submit now before you are scooped and it becomes too late! Can we imagine incidents when such pressure is unproductive? Does it encourage groupthink? - **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:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Are We Becoming Too Connected?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23827) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-042 — We Don't Do Politics — Brian Eno > Most of the smart people I know want nothing to do with politics. We avoid it like the plague—like Edge avoids it, in fact. Is this because we feel that politics isn't where anything significant happens? Or because we're too taken up with what we're doing, be it Quantum Physics or Statistical Genomics or Generative Music? Or because we're too polite to get into arguments with people? Or because we just think that things will work out fine if we let them be—that The Invisible Hand or The Technosphere will mysteriously sort them out? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [We Don't Do Politics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23826) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-043 — The Black Hole Of Finance — Seth Lloyd > The mathematical model that I constructed is a simple generalization of Ehrenfest's model. In my model there are white balls (positive energy/assets) and black balls (negative energy/debt), which can be created or destroyed in pairs. As a result, the number of white balls is always equal to the number of black balls, but the total number of balls is not conserved. In this model, there are two types of processes: balls are moved at random from urn to urn, as before, and balls can be created or destroyed in pairs within an urn. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Black Hole Of Finance](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23825) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-044 — Putting Our Anxieties To Work — Joseph LeDoux > Ever since the phrase "the age of anxiety" entered the lexicon, each generation has claimed they have more to worry about than the previous one. But the fact is, anxiety is part of the human condition. It's the price we pay for having brain that makes predictions about things that haven't happened, the ability to see a future that is not necessarily foretold by the past. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU; Director Emotional Brain Institute; Author, Anxious - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Putting Our Anxieties To Work](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23824) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-045 — What—Me Worry? — J. Craig Venter > Avoidance of vaccination creates a public health hazard. It is not a civil liberty issue. The un-vaccinated coupled with antibiotic resistance and decreased animal habitats promoting zoonotic transfer of disease causing agents is a potential disaster that could take humanity back to the pre-antibiotic era. I thought we learned these lessons after global pandemics such as the Plague and the outbreak of 1918 flu that killed 3% of the population, but clearly without modern science and medicine we will be destined to relive history. - **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:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [What—Me Worry?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23823) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-046 — Science Has Not Brought Us Closer To Understanding Cancer — Xeni Jardin > Maybe to get at the bottom of our worries, we should just "follow the money." Because the profit to be made in cancer is in producing cancer treatment drugs, machines, surgery techniques; not in finding a cure, or new ways to look at causation. There is likely no profit in figuring out the links to environmental causes; how what we eat or breathe as a child may cause our cells to mutate, how exposure to radiation or man-made chemicals may affect our risk factors. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Tech Culture Journalist; Partner, Contributor, Co-editor, Boing Boing; Executive Producer, host, Boing Boing Video - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Science Has Not Brought Us Closer To Understanding Cancer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23819) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-047 — Power And The Internet — Bruce Schneier > All disruptive technologies upset traditional power balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it empowers the powerless, but that's only half the story. The Internet empowers everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power, but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Fellow and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School; Author, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Power And The Internet](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23818) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-048 — One Universe — Lawrence M. Krauss > There may be, however, new limits looming on our ultimate ability to probe nature—made manifest because of the truly remarkable successes of physical theory and experiment in the past 50 years—due to the accident of the circumstances in which we find ourselves living, which could, at least in principle, change the way fundamental science may progress in the future. - **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:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [One Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23816) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-049 — Blown Opportunities — Frank Wilczek > The enabler was new basic knowledge. Insight into electromagnetism allowed us to transmit both power and information; first steps in understanding the quantum world have supported microelectronics, lasers, and a host of other technologies. Understanding the true origin of diseases allowed their prevention or cure; molecular understanding of plant and animal metabolism supported vast improvements in agriculture, yielding richer harvests with far less human labor. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Blown Opportunities](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23815) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-050 — MADness — Vernor Vinge > Breakers (vandals, griefers) have more leverage than Makers (builders, creators), even though the Makers far outnumber the Breakers. This is the source of some of our greatest fears about technology—that if weapons of mass destruction are cheap enough, then the relatively small percentage of Breakers will be sufficient to destroy civilization. If that possibility is scary, then the MAD threat should be terrifying. For with MAD planning, it is hundreds of thousands of creative and ingenious people in the most powerful societies—many of the best of the Makers, powered by the riches of the planet—who work to create a mutually unsurvivable outcome! In the most extreme case, the resulting weapon systems must function on the shortest of time scales, thus moving the threat into the realm of thermodynamic inevitability. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Hugo Award-winning Novelist, A Fire Upon The Deep, Rainbow's End - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [MADness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23814) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-051 — The End Of Fundamental Science? — Mario Livio > The hope has been, that we can find a theory that would explain not only all the forces that we observe in nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear forces), but also all the values of all the "constants of nature" (such as, the relative strength of the forces, the ratio of the masses of the elementary sub-atomic particles, and so on). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Astrophysicist; Author, Why?: What Makes Us Curious - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The End Of Fundamental Science?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23813) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-052 — Rats In A Spherical Trap — Gregory Benford > A similar synergy may operate to open the coming interplanetary economy, this time wedding nuclear rockets and robotics. These could operate together, robot teams carried by nuclear rockets to far places, and usually without humans, who would compromise efficiency. Mining and transport have enormously expanded the raw materials available to humanity, and the rocket/robot synergy could do so again. As such fundamentals develop in space, other businesses can arise on this base, including robotic satellite repair/maintenance in high orbits, mining of helium 3 on the moon, and metal mining of asteroids. Finally, perhaps snagging comets for volatiles in the outer solar system will enable human habitats to emerge within hollowed-out asteroids, and on Mars and beyond. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Rats In A Spherical Trap](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23812) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-053 — The Fragility Of Complex Systems — Randolph Nesse > On the morning of August 31, 1859, the sun ejected a giant burst of charged particles. They hit the earth 18 hours later, creating auroras so bright that at 1 AM birds sang and people thought morning had dawned. Currents induced in telegraph wires prevented transmission, and sparks from the wires set papers aflame. According to data from ice cores, solar ejections this intense occur about every 500 years. A 2008 National Academy report concluded that a similar event now would cause "extensive social and economic disruptions." Power outages would last for months, and there would be no GPS navigation, cell phone communication, or air travel. - **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:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Fragility Of Complex Systems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23811) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-054 — The Promise Of Catharsis — Andrian Kreye > The problem with catharsis though is that it will always remain an empty promise. There is no paradise, no salvation, no ultimate victory. Progress is a tedious process of trial and error, no matter if it is biological, scientific or social. If one or all work towards an unobtainable goal, much effort is wasted and the appearance of false prophets almost a given. Catharsis thus becomes the ultimate antagonist of rational thinking. If there is paradise in the beyond, why bother with the here and now. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Promise Of Catharsis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23808) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-055 — The Paradox Of Material Progress — Rolf Dobelli > Material progress has and will continue to spread. Knowledge is cumulative. At times in our past, knowledge has diminished. The classic case is Tasmania or—on a grander scheme—the Middle Ages. But since Gutenberg, it is difficult to imagine that humanity will ever again shed information. Through the accumulation of knowledge and global trade, the goods and services that my lawyer-friend enjoys today soon will be available to the poorest farmer in Zimbabwe. But no matter how much knowledge we accumulate, no matter how cheap computation, communication and information storage become, no matter how seamless trade flows, that farmer will never get any closer to a date with the Pope. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, Zurich Minds; Journalist; Author, The Art of Thinking Clearly - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Paradox Of Material Progress](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23807) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-056 — Close Observation And Description — Ursula Martin > Darwin's books and letters are full of careful descriptions. The amateur struggling with a field guide may take comfort reading how he frets over the difference between a stem with two leaves and a leaf with two leaflets. Darwin seems to have had a soft spot for fumitories, giving wonderfully detailed descriptions of the different varieties, whether and under what conditions they attracted insects, and how the geometry and flexibility of the different parts of the flower affected how pollen was carried off by visiting bees. He was looking for mechanisms that ensured evolutionary variability by making it likely that bees would occasionally transfer pollen from one flower to another, giving rise to occasional crosses—analysis later reflected in the Origin of Species. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Close Observation And Description](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23806) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-057 — Global Greying — David Berreby > Perhaps, though, I should be more positive, and less like a typical fifty-four-year-old, extolling the way things were in my youth. No doubt the greyer world will have its advantages. (Older people, for example, consume less power and fewer products per capita. In 2010 Brian C. O'Neill and his colleagues analyzed that effect and concluded that global greying might supply as much as 29 percent of the reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions needed to avert a climate catastrophe this century.) Whatever one's attitude toward greying, though, it is indisputably happening. It deserves much more attention. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Us and Them - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Global Greying](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23805) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-058 — The Fourth Culture — Bruce Parker > We should be worrying about a growing dominance of the Fourth Culture and how it may directly or indirectly affect us all. Because of its great communication capabilities, and its appeal to people's egos, their sexuality, their prejudices, their faith, their dreams, and their fears, the Fourth Culture can easily shape the thoughts of millions. It promotes emotion over logic, self-centeredness over open-mindedness, and entertainment value and money-making ability over truth and understanding. And for the most part it ignores science. - **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:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Fourth Culture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23804) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-059 — Close To The Edge — Kai Krause > The sheer number of the target audience would allow third parties to create brilliant courseware. It would equalize the playing field and raise the awareness at all levels. New kinds of classes could be offered, such as how to find answers and solutions, how to search, how to deal with security, the pleasures and pitfalls of the social networks—all those issues which are of much higher importance to kids now than the literally "old-school" curriculum—and which they are left to deal with on their own right now. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Close To The Edge](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23803) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-060 — Impact — Bruce Hood > As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end. Also, before reaching that conclusion, natural selection eventually corrects for perturbations that threaten the stability of environments. Nature will find a way and ultimately all things will cease to be. So I could be glib and simply recommend, "Don't worry, be happy." Of course, we are not wired that way and being happy requires not worrying. My concern then, rather than worry, is how we go about science and in particular the obsession with impact. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol; Author, The Self-Illusion, Founder of Speakezee - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Impact](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23802) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-061 — Children Of Newton And Modernity — Stuart A. Kauffman > Because these evolutionary processes typically cannot be pre-stated, the very phase space of biological, economic, cultural, legal evolution keeps changing in unpre-statable ways. In physics we can always pre-state the phase space, hence can write laws of motion, hence can integrate them to obtain the entailed becoming of the physical system. Because in the evolution of life, and human life, the very phase space changes in unpre-statable ways, we can write no laws of motion. Nor can we noncircularly pre-state the boundary conditions on this evolution, so we neither have laws of motion, nor their boundary conditions so cannot integrate the entailed trajectories of the laws of motion we do not have anyway. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Children Of Newton And Modernity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23801) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-062 — Social Media: The More Together, The More Alone — Marcel Kinsbourne > Humans can do better than that. The entrainment of body rhythms has consolidated the loyalty of and the shared mindset of groups perhaps since times prehistoric; the rhythm of synchronous marching feet, the ritual chant, the dance around the cauldron complete with boiled missionary. Between individuals, the salute, and adding touch to the multimodality interpersonal mix, the handshake, high five, couples dancing. Whether the objective is to promote military discipline, adherence to a sect or religious persuasion, faith healing, rhythmically entrained behavior is the catalyst and the glue. When the goal is to inculcate irrational and counterintuitive beliefs, this is more successfully done by rhythm and group ritual than by strenuous verbal persuasion. Of such is the Collective, otherwise known as the in-group, for better or for worse. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurologist and Cognitive Neuroscientist, The New School; Co-author, Children's Learning and Attention Problems - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Social Media: The More Together, The More Alone](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23800) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-063 — The Danger Of Inadvertently Praising Zygomatic Arches — Robert Sapolsky > The free will concept requires one to subscribe to the idea that despite there being a swirl of biological yuck and squishy brain parts filled with genes and hormones and neurotransmitters, nonetheless, there's an underground bunker in a secluded corner of the brain, a command center containing a little homunculus who chooses your behavior. In that view, the homunculus might be made of nanochips or ancient, dusty vacuum tubes, of old crinkly parchment, stalactites of your mother's admonishing voice, of streaks of brimstone, or rivets made out of gumption. And, in this view of behavior, whatever the homunculus is made of, it ain't made of something biological. But there is no homunculus and no free will. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Danger Of Inadvertently Praising Zygomatic Arches](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23799) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-064 — The Teenage Brain — Sarah-Jayne Blakemore > Decades of research on early neurodevelopment demonstrated that the environment influences brain development. During the first few months or years of life, an animal must be exposed to particular visual or auditory stimuli for the associated brain cells and connections to develop. In this way, neuronal circuitry is sculpted according to the environment during 'sensitive periods' of brain development. This research has focused mostly on early development of sensory brain regions. What about later development of higher-level brain regions, such as prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex, which are involved in decision-making, inhibitory control and planning, as well as social understanding and self-awareness? We know these brain regions continue to develop throughout adolescence. However, we have very little knowledge about how environmental factors influence the developing teenage brain. This is something that should concern us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychology Professor, University of Cambridge; Author, Inventing Ourselves - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Teenage Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23798) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-065 — Augmented Reality — William Poundstone > I worry about augmented reality. It's an appealing technology that seems completely inevitable in the next twenty years. You'll wear eyeglasses that are no bulkier than the regular kind, or maybe even contact lenses, and they'll overlay all sorts of useful information on your field of view. You could have an interactive map, a live news ticker, or notifications of messages—anything you can get on a screen now. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, How Do You Fight a Horse-Sized Duck?: Secrets to Succeeding at Interview Mind Games and Getting the Job You Want; Nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Augmented Reality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23797) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-066 — The Disconnect Between News And Understanding — Gavin Schmidt > Any efforts that can be made to make it easier to access depth and context must therefore be applauded and extended. New online tools can be developed to scaffold information by providing entry points that are appropriate for any level of knowledge. 'Context' buttons alongside online searches could direct the interested to the background information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Climatologist; Director, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Disconnect Between News And Understanding](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23796) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-067 — Objects Of Desire — Sherry Turkle > Why is solitude so important and why do we want to cultivate it in the young? Solitude is a precondition for creativity but it is also where we find ourselves so that we can reach out and have relationships with other people where we really appreciate them as other people. So, solitude is a precondition for conversation. If we aren't able to be alone with ourselves we are at risk of using other people as "spare parts" to support our fragile selves. One of the great tasks of childhood is to develop the capacity for this kind of healthy solitude. It is what will enable children to develop friendships of mutuality and respect. - **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:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Objects Of Desire](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23795) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-068 — Where Did You Get That Fact? — Victoria Stodden > Here's an example. When news articles started appearing on the world wide web in the 90's I remember eagerly anticipating hot-linked stats—being able to click on any number in the text to see where it came from. More than a decade later this still isn't routine, and facts are asserted without the possibility of verification. For any conclusions that enter the public sphere, it should be expected that all the steps that generated the knowledge are disclosed, including making the data they are based on available for inspection whenever possible, and making available the computer programs that carried out the data analysis—open data, open source, scientific reproducibility. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Where Did You Get That Fact?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23794) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-069 — Being Told That Our Destiny Is Among The Stars — Ed Regis > In 2012 NASA and DARPA jointly funded a "100-Year Starship" program, the goal of which was to achieve human interstellar flight within the next one hundred years. On September 13, 2012, the 100-Year Starship (100YSS) project held the first of its planned annual public symposiums, in Houston, Texas. Here, about a hundred scientists, social scientists, educators, journalists, and miscellaneous others gathered to witness a series of scientific presentations outlining schemes by which human beings could, just possibly, leave planet Earth behind, travel to the stars, and establish a new "Earth 2.0" in another solar system, all within a century. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Monsters - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Being Told That Our Destiny Is Among The Stars](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23793) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-070 — Say It Ain't So — Stuart Firestein > You can't lump these predictions in the same bin with more serious promises like the eradication of cancer. One sort of prediction is just imaginative musing, the other is a kind of promissory note. Artificial intelligence, space travel, alternative energies, and cheaper more plentiful food are all in this second category. They cost money, time and resources and they are serious activities; the speculations of science fiction writers don't have any cost associated with them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chair, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University; Fellow, AAAS - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Say It Ain't So](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23790) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-071 — Incompetent Systems — John Naughton > We now live in a digital world in which copying is not only effortless, non-degenerative and effectively free but is actually intrinsic to digital technology. What is a computer, after all, but a copying machine? Copying is to digital technology as breathing is to animal life; you can't have one without the other. So trying to apply an IP regime designed for analog circumstances to a world in which all media and cultural artefacts are digital offends against common sense. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge; Director, Wolfson College Press Fellowship Programme; Columnist, the Observer; Author, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Incompetent Systems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23789) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-072 — Is Idiocracy Looming? — Douglas T. Kenrick > There are several causes for concern. To begin with, it is a correct assumption that natural selection is largely agnostic with regard to intelligence. We large-brained hominids like to think that all the information-crunching power in our hypertrophied cortexes will eventually allow us to solve the big problems of modern times, allowing our descendants to persist into the distant future. But it ain't necessarily so. Dinosaurs were a lot smarter than cockroaches, and Australopithecines were Einsteinian by comparison, yet the roaches have had a much longer run, and are widely expected to outlast Homo sapiens. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University; Author, Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life; Editor, Evolution and Social Psychology - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Is Idiocracy Looming?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23788) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-073 — The Rise Of Anti-Intellectualism And The End Of Progress — Tim O'Reilly > Consider how in 375 AD, after a dream in which he was whipped for being "a Ciceronian" rather than a Christian, Saint Jerome resolved no more to read the classical authors and to restrict himself only to Christian texts, how the Christians of Alexandria murdered the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in 415, and realize that, at least in part, the so-called dark ages were not something imposed from without, a breakdown of civilization due to barbarian invasions, but a choice, a turning away from knowledge and discovery into a kind of religious fundamentalism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.; Author, WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Rise Of Anti-Intellectualism And The End Of Progress](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23786) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-074 — Worrying About Children — Alison Gopnik > The picture is even more profoundly misguided from an evolutionary perspective. Childhood itself is one of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings—we have a much longer childhood than any other primate. This extended childhood seems, at least in part, to be an adaptation to the radically increased variability and unpredictability of human environments. The period of protected immaturity we call childhood gives humans a chance to learn, explore, and innovate without having to plan, act and take care of themselves at the same time. And empirically, we've discovered that even the youngest children have truly extraordinary abilities to learn and imagine, quite independent of any conscious parental shaping. Our long protected childhood, arguably, allows our distinctive human cognitive achievements. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Worrying About Children](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23785) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-075 — "The Singularity": There's No There There — Bruce Sterling > It's just not happening. All the symptoms are absent. Computer hardware is not accelerating on any exponential runway beyond all hope of control. We're no closer to "self-aware" machines than we were in the remote 1960s. Modern wireless devices in a modern Cloud are an entirely different cyber-paradigm than imaginary 1990s "minds on nonbiological substrates" that might allegedly have the "computational power of a human brain." A Singularity has no business model, no major power group in our society is interested in provoking one, nobody who matters sees any reason to create one, there's no there there. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Fiction Author, Mirrorshades - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** ["The Singularity": There's No There There](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23784) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-076 — The Death Of Mathematics — Keith Devlin > Since the course was on university-level mathematical thinking, not computation, there was no possibility of machine-graded assignments. The focus was on solving novel problems for which you don't have a standard procedure available, in some cases constructing rigorous proofs of results. This kind of work is highly creative and intrinsically symbolic, and can really be done only by covering sheets of paper (sometimes several sheets of paper) with symbols and little diagrams—sometimes using notations you devise specially in order to solve the problem at hand. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Death Of Mathematics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23783) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-077 — A Synthetic World — Seirian Sumner > Synthetic biology is currently tightly regulated, along the same lines as GMOs. But when biosynthetic products overflow into the natural world, it will be harder to keep control. Let's look at this from the molecular level, which arguably we have more control over than the organism or ecosystem level. We can shuffle the genes and whole genomes to create something that nature did not get round to creating. But a biological unit does not exist in isolation: Genes, protein complexes, cells, all function in modules—a composite of units, finely tuned by evolution in a changeable environment to work together. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Reader, Behavioral Ecology, University College London - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A Synthetic World](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23782) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-078 — The Power Of Bad Incentives — Sam Harris > Unfortunately, prisons are places of perverse incentives—in which the very norms one must follow to avoid becoming a victim lead inescapably toward violence. In most U.S. prisons, for instance, whites, blacks, and Hispanics exist in a state of perpetual war. This young man is not a racist, and would prefer to interact peacefully with everyone he meets, but if he does not join a gang he is likely to be targeted for rape and other abuse by prisoners of all races. To not choose a side is to become the most attractive victim of all. Being white, he likely will have no rational option but to join a white-supremacist gang for protection. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Power Of Bad Incentives](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23781) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-079 — Morbid Anxiety — Joel Gold > The very word worry connotes passivity and helplessness. We worry about some event in the future and hope that it works out. And the very nature of the question we are posed this year implies that much of how we worry is irrational. I'm confident that many of the responses addressing what we shouldn't be worrying about will reassure readers because they will be specific and supported by the evidence. Columbus ultimately revealed that people need not fear falling off of a flat earth. General and weak 'don't worry, be happy' bromides are of no use. Notice that people who are told to 'relax' rarely do. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychiatrist; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine; Coauthor (with Ian Gold), Suspicious Minds - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Morbid Anxiety](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23779) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-080 — Quantum Mechanics — Lee Smolin > I worry that we don't really understand quantum phenomena. We have a successful theory—quantum mechanics, which has passed every experimental test since it was formulated in 1926 and which is the foundation for our understanding of all of physics—except gravity. It is the basis of new technologies of quantum information and computation which are presently under intensive development. Still, I don't believe quantum mechanics gives a complete description of nature. I strongly believe there is another, truer description, waiting to be discovered. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Quantum Mechanics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23778) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-081 — Internet Silos — Larry Sanger > Information silos in general are nothing new and not limited to the Internet; talk radio works this way, churches and academia are often silos, and businesses and organizations study how to avoid a silo culture. But Internet communities are particularly subject to a silo mentality because they are virtually instant, meaning have no history of competing, diverse traditions, and are also self-selecting and thus self-reinforcing. The differences between online communities tend to be quite stark. That's why there are so many silos online. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder of Wikipedia and Citizendium - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Internet Silos](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23777) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-082 — The Relative Obscurity Of The Writings Of Édouard Glissant — Hans Ulrich Obrist > Although he is not widely known, Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) is one of the most important twentieth-century writers, whose thinking remains fundamental for the twenty-first century. I believe we should be worried about his relative obscurity, since he discusses with great insight what seem to me to be the most important issues surrounding globalisation: homogenisation and extinction. His theory of the 'creolization of the world' pertains to questions of national identity in view of the colonial past that characterises his Antillean identity. He broaches the urgent question of how best to escape the threat of cultural homogenisation, and how we can work to sustain the positive force of creolisation— a plurality of cultures— within the terms of an ongoing global exchange. - **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:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Relative Obscurity Of The Writings Of Édouard Glissant](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23776) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-083 — Neural Data Privacy Rights: An Invitation For Progress In The Guise Of An Approaching Worry — Melanie Swan > Personal biometric data streams are growing as individuals engage in quantified self-tracking with smartphone applications, biomonitoring gadgets, and other Internet-connected tools. The adoption of wearable electronics (e.g.; smartwatches, disposable patches, augmented eyewear) could further hasten this, and might have even faster adoption than tablets (to date, the most-quickly adopted electronics platform). This could allow the unobtrusive collection of vast amounts of previously-unavailable objective metric data. Not only could this include biometrics like cortisol (e.g.; stress) levels, galvanic skin response, heart rate variability, and neurotransmitter levels (e.g.; dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin), but also robust neurometrics such as brain signals and eye-tracking data that were formerly obtainable only through lab-based equipment. These data might then be mapped to predict an individual's mental state and behavior. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosophy and Economic Theory, the New School for Social Research - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Neural Data Privacy Rights: An Invitation For Progress In The Guise Of An Approaching Worry](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23774) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-084 — Global Cooperation Is Failing And We Don't Know Why — Daniel Haun > More than ever we depend on the successful cooperation of nations on planetary scale decisions. Many of today’s most dire problems cannot be solved by actions taken within single countries, but will only find solutions if the global community joins forces in a collective action. More often than not, however, global cooperation is failing, even if the problem is well defined, and the options for action fairly well understood. Why? One answer that comes to mind very easily is that humans’ narrow pursuit of their own interests will trump any possibility for collective action. This explanation is as insufficient as it is pessimistic. If this was the heart of the problem, failure would be inevitable. We are not going to change human nature in time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Early Child Development and Culture, Director, Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig University - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Global Cooperation Is Failing And We Don't Know Why](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23773) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-085 — All The T In China — Robert Kurzban > Anthropologists have documented a consistent historical pattern: when the sex ratio skews in the direction of a smaller proportion of females, men become increasingly competitive, becoming more likely to engage in risky, short-term oriented behavior including gambling, drug abuse, and crime. This sort of pattern fits well with the rest of the biological world. Decades of work in behavioral ecology has shown that in species in which there is substantial variation in mating success among males, males compete especially fiercely. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UPenn; Director, Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP); Author, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [All The T In China](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23772) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-086 — Does The Human Species Have The Will To Survive? — Dave Winer > Until a few generations ago, the human species was dealing with the following question: Do we have what it takes to survive? We answered that question with the invention of heat, plumbing, medicine and agriculture. Now we have the means to survive, but do we have the will? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Blogging and RSS Software Pioneer; Editor, Scripting News Weblog - **Extract length:** 48 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Does The Human Species Have The Will To Survive?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23771) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-087 — Losing Our Hands — Susan Blackmore > Here is a possible analogy. About two billion years ago mitochondria evolved from primitive bacteria by entering into a symbiotic relationship with early eukaryotic cells. Each benefitted the other; so this was not a hostile takeover but a gradual coming together until neither the living cells nor the mitochondria within them could survive without the other. The cells feed and protect the mitochondria; they provide the power. Could our future be heading this way? The analogy implies a world in which humans manage the power supplies to feed an ever-increasing number of inventions in return for more fun, games, information and communications; a world in which we so value the fruits of our machines that we willingly merge both physically and mentally with them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Losing Our Hands](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23770) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-088 — The New Age Of Anxiety — Gary Klein > I hesitate to raise the issue because I'm just adding to the problem but I do think it is something worth worrying about and I don't see any easy way to counter this new age of anxiety. The Science/Media complex keeps ramping up, continually finding novel dangers. It keeps finding more threats to keep us up at night—and then we have to worry about the consequences of sleep deprivation. It never stops. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Scientist, MacroCognition LLC; Author, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The New Age Of Anxiety](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23769) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-089 — No Surprises From The LHC: No Worries For Theoretical Physics — Amanda Gefter > Einstein thought deeply about the role anomalies play in physics. He distinguished between two types of theory: constructive and principled. Constructive theories, he said, are models cobbled together to account for anomalous observations, like the double slit experiment that shaped the theory of quantum mechanics. Principled theories, on the other hand, start with logical principles from which particular facts about the world—including anomalies—can be derived. Relativity was a principled theory. "The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction," Einstein said. How? By seeking out paradox: that place where established principles collide in contradiction, where logic self-destructs. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [No Surprises From The LHC: No Worries For Theoretical Physics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23766) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-090 — Armageddon — Timothy Taylor > Obviously, moral distinctions should be made between religionists who blow people up and stone apostates to death, and those who do not. There is also a distinction between faiths that reject science wholesale, and those that do not. The Catholic Church has long eschewed burning heretics in the auto-da-fé, and it never rejected Darwin's view of human evolution: already in 1868, John Henry—later Cardinal—Newman found it potentially compatible; positive acceptance has emerged gradually since 1950. But Catholicism retains a firm belief in a precisely delimited future leading to the Last Judgement. The Pope's opposition to contraception connects to this: the globe does not need to be sustainable in perpetuity if all will be renewed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Armageddon](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23765) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-091 — Losing Completeness — Anton Zeilinger > In today’s world, all these activities—scientific, artistic, whatever—have been compartmentalized to an unprecedented degree. There are fewer and fewer people able to bridge the many gaps. Fields of expertise and activity become narrower and narrower; new gaps open all the time. Part of the cause is certainly the growth of the Internet, which typically provides immediate answers to small questions; the narrower the question, the better the answer. Deep analysis is an endeavor that by its very essence is entirely different from browsing the Web. - **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:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Losing Completeness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23762) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-092 — Worries On The Mystery Of Worry — Donald D. Hoffman > This answer can be fleshed out with details of the biological correlates of worry. Briefly, when we worry and experience psychological stress there is activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and orbito-frontal cortex of the brain, which interact with each other and with the amygdala. The amygdala interacts with the hippocampus and other subcortical structures, which in turn control the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus controls the autonomic nervous system, which governs the release of epinephrine and acetylcholine, and the HPA axis, which governs the release of cortisol into the bloodstream. In short, when we worry there is an impressively complex array of interacting neural and endocrine activities that engages the whole person, brain and body. The correlation between worry and this complex biological activity is systematic and predictable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Worries On The Mystery Of Worry](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23760) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-093 — The Growing Gap Between The Scientific Elite And The Vast "Scientifically Challenged" Majority — Leo M. Chalupa > Now consider the vast factual ignorance that has repeatedly been documented in recent years. A majority of people do not believe in evolution, a substantial proportion believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old, many think that vaccines do more harm than good, and a particularly troubling one for those of us in the brain sciences, is that it is commonly thought that the brain is a muscle. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Growing Gap Between The Scientific Elite And The Vast "Scientifically Challenged" Majority](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23759) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-094 — Metaworry — Brian Knutson > Another option for closing the worry gap involves policy change. Governments undoubtedly collect valuable data on the relative potency of various threats, so as to direct their limited resources towards reducing the most pressing dangers. But information alone is not enough—it must motivate behavioral change. Thus, laws (with enforceable sanctions) are sometimes necessary to transform this information into action. Unfortunately, in the case of global threats, governments must coordinate their laws. This is not impossible. It has happened in the past, when governments came together to ban chlorofluorocarbons in order to stop atmospheric ozone depletion. It may happen in the future with respect to carbon sequestration and global climate change. But it requires a massively coordinated and continued effort. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Metaworry](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23757) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-095 — Do We Understand The Dynamics Of Our Emerging Global Culture? — Kirsten Bomblies > Luckily, there are informative parallels between biological and cultural evolution. Cultural systems—like biological systems—change over time. Heritable units of culture (counterparts of genes in biology) are difficult to define, but we can observe information propagating and mutating e.g. as the packets Dawkins popularized as memes. Unlike genes, ideas or memes can be transmitted worldwide in an instant and potentially reach massive audiences, so the evolution of cultures can hurtle forth at a rate far exceeding our biological evolution. The mutation and differential survival of ideas, however, is analogous to the mutation and differential survival of genetic variants, and thus our understanding of cultural evolution can be informed by biological concepts. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Do We Understand The Dynamics Of Our Emerging Global Culture?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23755) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-096 — Presentism — Noga Arikha > Certainly, worries emerge whenever technology changes the mode of cultural transmission. Though there might be a correlation between the acceleration of technological transformations and the speed at which the past recedes, one should not forget that the fear of forgetting—indeed—was strong when printing became common. If forgetfulness has increased, it is not because of new technology per se but despite it: it is because curricular fashions are mimicking Internet entropy rather than providing the centripetal force needed to turn the young into its informed users. As it is, ours is an age of information glut, not deep knowledge. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Fellow, Warburg Insitute (London); Research Associate, Institut Jean Nicod of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris); Author, The Ceiling Outside - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Presentism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23752) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-097 — The Opinions Of Search Engines — W. Daniel Hillis > A problem becomes apparent if we change the example from "Museums of New York" to "Provinces of China." Is Taiwan such a province? This is a controversial question. With semantic search either the computer or the curator of the knowledge will have to make a decision. Editors of published content have long made such judgments; now, the search engine makes these judgments in selecting its results. With sematic search these decisions are not based on statistics, but on a model of the world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Opinions Of Search Engines](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23750) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-098 — C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures': The Nature-Nurture Debate — Simon Baron-Cohen > No one denies the important role that experience and learning play in language development. What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary. If he were still alive today, CP Snow might despair as I do that, despite efforts to communicate the science to a wider public, the field of sex differences remains an example of a domain where the two cultures remain separated by a deep chasm. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge; Director, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge; Author, The Pattern Seekers - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures': The Nature-Nurture Debate](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23749) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-099 — The Loss Of Lust — Tor Nørretranders > Also, the desire to reproduce leads to the advertising of good genes and general fertility through a cultural and societal display of skills and sexiness. These are major, if not dominant sources of the unconscious drive for creating great results in science, art and social life. Attempts to shortcut mating preferences and the matching process through clinical control could lead not only to a loss of quality in the offspring but also to a loss of cultural fertility. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Loss Of Lust](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23747) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-100 — The Consequences Of Our Increasing Knowledge Of What Causes Disease, And Its Consequences For Human Freedom — Esther Dyson > In this case, the trigger is our increasing knowledge of how we make ourselves sick—or how we can keep ourselves healthy: proper diet, regular exercise, no smoking, limited drinking, sufficient sleep.... In other words, it's becoming pretty clear that a squeaky-clean lifestyle (and just for good measure, add in avoidance of stress) is the key to good health for most people, and to reducing medical costs dramatically for society as a whole. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investor; Chairman, EDventure Holdings; Executive Founder, Wellville; Author: Release 2.0 - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Consequences Of Our Increasing Knowledge Of What Causes Disease, And Its Consequences For Human Freedom](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23746) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-101 — We Worry Too Much About Fictional Violence — Jonathan Gottschall > In the wake of a mass shooting we feel a desperate need to know "why?" so we can get to "how"—how can we keep this from happening again? When someone shoots up a school, a mall, or an office, people on the left usually blame lax gun laws, and recommend a fix of stricter gun laws. On the right, people are apt to blame it on cultural factors—violent video games and films have sickened the culture, glorifying wanton violence and desensitizing young people to its effects. Loose gun regulation is not a cause of the massacres, but our best defense against them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Research Fellow, English Department, Washington & Jefferson College; Author, The Storytelling Animal - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [We Worry Too Much About Fictional Violence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23745) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-102 — Natural Death — Antony Garrett Lisi > Within a hundred years, unless we make some major research breakthroughs, you are going to die. Before then, you'll get to watch many of the friends and family you love go through the process of decay, infirmity, and death—their personalities and all their memories gone forever. Witnessing this process over and over, we know it is nature's way, but it is horrible, tragic, and heartbreaking. The prospect of our own personal death is so terrifying that most people aren't willing to confront it honestly. To stare into the void, and know—truly know—that our existence will shortly end… as natural as it is, we are not emotionally or intellectually equipped to accept it. Instead, most people lie about it to themselves and others. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Natural Death](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23743) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-103 — The Demise Of The Scholar — Daniel L. Everett > The teacher-scholar is a moderately paid individual who models problem-solving and a cultivation of thirst for knowledge. The home in which this modeling takes place, the modern college or university, is the descendant of the academy of Plato. The greatest accomplishments of western civilization have come from university and college students, past and present, the disciples of professionals who have taken them under their wings, taught them in classes, worked with them in research labs, and talked about the glories of learning over a beer (or a coffee) in campus pubs and student unions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Demise Of The Scholar](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23742) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-104 — The Unavoidable Intrusion Of Sociopolitical Forces Into Science — Nicholas A. Christakis > I am not suggesting that scientists should be cut off from society, free from moral scruples or collective oversight. But I am saying that seeing science as arbitrary or threatening and seeing scientists as (merely) self-interested—and using these excuses to restrict scientific inquiry or to distort scientific findings—is dangerous. It's like seeing those who advocate for more, better-paid judges as being like any other venal lobbying group. The administration of justice and the conduct of science generate benefits for us all. - **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:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Unavoidable Intrusion Of Sociopolitical Forces Into Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23741) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-105 — Posthuman Geography — David Dalrymple > Individual humans will eventually fade even from the social world. When you can literally wire your brain to others, who's to say where you stop and they begin? When you can transfer your mind to artificial embodiments, and copy it as a digital file, which one is you? We'll need a new language, a new conceptual vocabulary of everything from democracy to property to consciousness, to make sense of such a world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research affiliate, MIT Media Lab - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Posthuman Geography](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23740) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-106 — Communities Of Fate — Margaret Levi > Jaron Lanier, in Edge, argues that the "new moral question" is whether our decisions are self-interested or take others into account. Who an individual includes in her community of fate or what Lanier labels "circle of empathy" is a moral question, yes, but it is also an empirical question. Organizational and institutional factors can explain variation and transformation in the community of fate. They can enable individuals to revise their beliefs and understandings of the consequences of their actions and, in some instances, to change the boundaries of their communities of fate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sara Miller McCune Director, Center For Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, professor, Stanford University; Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies, University of Washington - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Communities Of Fate](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23739) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-107 — The Danger From Aliens — Seth Shostak > In addition, our near-term future will surely include many technological developments that will unavoidably be visible to other societies. Consider powersats—large arrays of solar cells in orbit around the Earth that could provide us with nearly unlimited energy, sans the noxious emissions or environmental damage. Even in the best cases, such devices would back-scatter hundreds or thousands of watts of radio noise into space. Do we want to forbid such beneficial technologies until the end of time? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute; Author, Confessions of an Alien Hunter - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Danger From Aliens](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23738) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-108 — Super-A.I.s Won't Rule The World (Unless They Get Culture First) — Andy Clark > "Deep Learning" algorithms are now showing us how to use artificial neural networks in ways that come closer than ever before to delivering learning on a grand scale. But we probably need "deep culture", as well as deep learning, if we are ever to press genuine hyper-intelligence from the large databases that drive our best probabilistic learning machines. - **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:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Super-A.I.s Won't Rule The World (Unless They Get Culture First)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23737) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-109 — Current Sequencing Strategies Ignore the Role of Microorganisms in Cancer — Azra Raza, M.D. > Studies have already demonstrated that 20 to 30 percent of cancers worldwide are associated with chronic infection: The Epstein–Barr virus can cause lymphomas and nasopharyngeal cancers; the human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer and head and neck tumors; long-term bacterial infection with Helicobacter pylori can cause stomach cancer; and hepatitis B virus (HBV) causes liver cancer. There is a good possibility that many more cancers will be associated with pathogens, and some cancer-causing pathogens may turn out to be part of our collective microbiome, the community of microorganisms that live in our bodies. The microbiome makes up about 1 to 3 percent of our biomass and outnumbers human cells in the body by 10 to 1. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center; Author, The First Cell - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Current Sequencing Strategies Ignore the Role of Microorganisms in Cancer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23735) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-110 — Human Intuitions Will Stifle Technological Progress — David Pizarro > Here's an example: For quite some time it has been possible for my email provider to generate targeted advertisements based on the content of my email. But it can now also suggest a calendar entry for an upcoming appointment mentioned in an email, track my current location as the time of the appointment approaches, alert me about when I should leave, and initiate driving directions that will get me there in time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Human Intuitions Will Stifle Technological Progress](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23734) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-111 — The End Of Hardship Inoculation — Adam Alter > Unfortunately, these critical experiences are declining with the rise of lifestyle technologies. iPhones and iPads are miraculously intuitive, but their user-friendliness means that children as young as three or four years of age can learn to use them. Smartphones and tablets singlehandedly eradicate the need to remember phone numbers, to perform mental calculations, and to seek new forms of entertainment, so children of the 21st century and beyond never experience the minor hardships that attend those tasks. They certainly derive other benefits from technology, but convenience and stimulation are double-edged swords, also heralding the decline of hardship inoculation. Consequently, today's children might be poorly prepared for the more difficult tasks that meet them as time passes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business, NYU; Author, Irresistible - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The End Of Hardship Inoculation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23732) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-112 — Illusions Of Understanding And The Loss Of Intellectual Humility — Tania Lombrozo > Fortunately not. If a change in font or a delay in access can attenuate fluency, then a host of other minor tweaks to the way information is accessed and presented can surely do the same. In educational contexts, deceptive clarity can partially be overcome by introducing what psychologist Robert Bjork calls "desirable difficulties," such as varying the conditions under which information is presented, delaying feedback, or engaging learners in generation and critique, which help disrupt a false sense of comprehension. And some of the social mechanisms that help calibrate understanding, such as explanation, can be facilitated by the marriage of information technologies and social media. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Illusions Of Understanding And The Loss Of Intellectual Humility](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23731) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-113 — Superstition — Matt Ridley > I worry about superstition. Rational Optimists spend much of their energy debunking the charlatans who peddle false reasons to worry. So what worries me most are the people who make others worry about the wrong things, the people who harness the human capacity for superstition and panic to scare us into doing stupid things: banning genetically modified foods, teaching children that the earth is 6,000 years old, preventing the education of girls, erecting barriers against immigrants or free trade, preventing fossil fuels taking the pressure off rain forest—that sort of thing. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Writer; Fellow, Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Medical Sciences; Author,The Evolution of Everything - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Superstition](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23728) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-114 — An Exploding Number Of New Illegal Drugs — Thomas Metzinger > We might perhaps have had a chance to deal with the challenge then, rationally, based on ethical arguments. The really difficult, and most important, task would have been to honestly weigh the psychological and social risks against a general principle of liberty and the intrinsic value of the experiences resulting from one or another altered brain state. But we decided to push it underground and look the other way. Half a century later, a globalized and scientifically well-informed underground chemistry strikes back. More kids are going to die. It would be starry-eyed optimism to think that we can still control the situation. - **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:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [An Exploding Number Of New Illegal Drugs](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23727) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-115 — The Triumph Of The Virtual, And Its Consequences — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi > A few decades ago I started doing research and write about the impact of indiscriminate television watching, especially on children. Then, as the interactive video games began to appear on the market, it seemed that finally the electronic technology was becoming more child-friendly: instead of watching passively inane content, children would now have a chance to become engaged actively in stimulating activities. What I did not have the sense to imagine was that the engagement offered by the new technology would become a Pandora's box containing bait for the reptilian brain to feast on. What scares me now is that children experiencing such reality are going to create a really real world like the one Hieronymus Bosch envisioned—full of spidery creatures, melting objects, and bestial humans. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Triumph Of The Virtual, And Its Consequences](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23726) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-116 — There Is Nothing To Worry About, And There Never Was — Virginia Heffernan > Marshall McLuhan said that "electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West." Let's hope that the Internet finishes that job any day now. Its next move is clearly to abolish the ghastly Western idée fixe that even a pixel of freedom or insight is gained in the miserable practice of worrying, in the chronic braincell-bruising overexercise of our lizard impulses to fight or flee. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Columnist, The New York Times Magazine; Editorial Director, West Studios; Author, Magic and Loss - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [There Is Nothing To Worry About, And There Never Was](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23724) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-117 — The Cultural And Cognitive Consequences Of Electronics — Luca De Biase > In 1953, exactly sixty years ago, the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote about the cultural future of electronics. As a young poet, before World War I, Ungaretti had been briefly fascinated by the Futurist movement and he had strong feelings about the "poetic" rhythm of mechanics and about the aesthetics in the technical discoveries. But after World War II, at the age of 65, he was worried. In the past, he wrote, technology followed human imagination but, in the future, the enormous set of engineering achievements, lead by electronics, was going to go faster than human imagination; thus humanity could end up thinking as machines, losing the ability to feel, love, fear... - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Editor, Nova 24, of Il Sole 24 Ore - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Cultural And Cognitive Consequences Of Electronics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23723) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-118 — The Underpopulation Bomb — Kevin Kelly > A lower global population is something that many folks would celebrate. The reason it's scary is that the low will keep getting lower. All around the world, the fertility rate is dropping below replacement level, country by country, so that globally there will soon be an unsustaining population. With negative population growth, each generation produces fewer offspring, who produce fewer still, until there are none. Right now, Japan's population is way below replacement level, as is most of Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Former Soviet Republics, and some Asian countries. It goes further: Japan, Germany and Ukraine have absolute population decline; they are already experiencing the underpopulation bomb. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Underpopulation Bomb](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23722) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-119 — The Patience Deficit — Nicholas G. Carr > I know that my own perception of time has been changed by technology. If I go from using a fast computer or web connection to using even a slightly slower one, processes that take just a second or two longer—waking the machine from sleep, launching an application, opening a web page—seem almost intolerably slow. Never before have I been so aware of, and annoyed by, the passage of mere seconds. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Utopia is Creepy - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Patience Deficit](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23721) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-120 — Magic — Neil Gershenfeld > 2001 has come and long since gone. Once upon a time we were going to live in a science fiction future, with visions of flying cars, wrist communicators, and quantum teleporters. Oh, wait, all of that stuff is here. You can today buy cars with wings, smartphone watches, and, for those so inclined, single-photon sources to make entangled pairs. But the future brought the past with it. We can now create life from scratch, and model the global climate, yet battles rage over the teaching of evolution or human impact on the environment that Darwin or Galileo would recognize as challenges to the validity of the scientific method. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Magic](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23720) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-121 — Human Population, Prosperity Growth: One I Fear, One I Don't — Laurence C. Smith > If population growth is a measure of a species' success, then the 20th century was astonishingly successful for Homo sapiens. In just one long human lifetime we grew our living population from 1.6 to 6.1 billion, a net addition of 4 ½ billion people. Now in the 21st, we exceed 7 billion and demographic computer models, fed with national birth and death statistics from countries around the globe, reflect our slowing but still-climbing growth, advancing towards 9-10 billion by 2050 despite falling total fertility rates in much of the world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Human Population, Prosperity Growth: One I Fear, One I Don't](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23714) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-122 — The Disconnect — Barbara Strauch > Today, sadly, that is most often not the case. Coverage of health and science in general-interest newspapers has declined dramatically. Reporters whose work I have long admired have moved on to other things or retired or been fired, as science staffs have been slashed. True, there are many, many more good websites and some excellent blogs that cover a wide range of science topics, but most are aimed at smaller segments of readers, who search out information focused in specific areas. Some general interest papers in other countries continue to value science coverage, but unless you're a reader with access to those publications that doesn't help much. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Editor, The New York Times; Author, The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain; The Primal Teen - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Disconnect](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23711) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-123 — Democracy — Dylan Evans > Democracy is like the appendix. The very thing that makes majority dissatisfaction inevitable in a democracy—the voting mechanism—also makes it hard for a better political system to develop. The reforms that would be necessary to pave the way for alternative systems of governance lie well outside the safe middle ground of the median voter. Politicians advocating such reforms are unlikely, therefore, to be voted into office. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and CEO of Projection Point; Author, The Utopia Experiment - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Democracy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23710) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-124 — The Behavior Of Normal People — Karl Sabbagh > The most worrying aspect of our society is the low index of suspicion that we have about the behavior of normal people. In spite of the doctrine of original sin that permeates Christianity, the assumption most of us hold about most people in everyday life is that they are not, on the whole, criminals, cheats, mean-spirited, selfish, or on the lookout for a fast buck. Bad behavior is seen as something to be noticed, reported on, and analyzed, whereas people who do not lie and cheat are taken for granted. Good behaviour is seen as the default mode for humans, and bad behaviour is seen as 'aberrant', even though from self-knowledge as well as experiments like Stanley Milgram's, we know that 'normal' people are not always saints. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Behavior Of Normal People](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23709) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-125 — Failure Of Genomics For Mental Disorders — Terrence J. Sejnowski > There is a wide spectrum of symptoms and severity amongst those diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia. We now know that this in part depends on the particular combination of genes that are affected. Environmental factors also have a major influence. To paraphrase Tolstoy: Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way. - **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:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Failure Of Genomics For Mental Disorders](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23705) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-126 — Can They Read My Brain? — Stanislas Dehaene > Similarly, in 2006, with Bertrand Thirion, we tested the theory that the visual areas of the cortex act as an internal visual blackboard where mental images get projected. Indeed, by measuring their activity, we managed to decode the rough shape of what a person had seen, and even of what she had imagined in her mind's eye, in full darkness. Jack Gallant, at Berkeley, later improved this technique to the point of decoding entire movies from the traces they evoke in the cortex. His reconstruction of the coarse contents of a film, as deduced by monitoring the spectator's brain, was an instant YouTube hit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Can They Read My Brain?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23704) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-127 — The Rise In Genomic Instability — Eric Topol > Although we now have an appreciation for the frequency of de novo mutations due to the spectacular advances in sequencing technology and analytics, we do not have even a rudimentary understanding of what induces them in the first place—and what are the more subtle impacts that may track with a sort of devolution of man. Especially disconcerting is that the signals of increased genomic instability are occurring in a relatively short span of time, in the context of human evolution over millions of years. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Translational Science Institute; Author, The Patient Will See You Now - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Rise In Genomic Instability](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23703) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-128 — The Anthropocebo Effect — Jennifer Jacquet > Science helps shape how we see ourselves. Words also matter to perception, and perception matters to behavior. Consider what the theory of natural selection did to our view of humans in the biological world. We should be worried about the new era of Anthropocene—not only as a geological phenomenon, but also as a cultural frame. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, NYU; Author, Is Shame Necessary? - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Anthropocebo Effect](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23701) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-129 — The Gift Of Worry — Robert Provine > Worry is a kind of thought and memory evolved to give life direction and protect us from danger. Without its nagging whispers, we would be prone to a reckless, Panglossian lifestyle marked by drug abuse, unemployment and bankruptcy. Why not smoke, have that last drink for the road, pollute the water supply, or evade taxes? All will be fine! In our feel-good, smiley-face era, generally free of plague, famine and war, it is easy to adopt a smug optimism and demean a behavior that has served us well throughout our evolutionary history. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Gift Of Worry](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23697) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-130 — Worrying — James J. O'Donnell > There will be a lot of other essays on this typically intriguing Edge question that invoke worry and use the word easily—so should we be worried about that? Here's the test I would use to decide: If what my colleagues in these pages are talking about is evidence-based, especially quantitative, peer-reviewed or peer-reviewable, and has the effect of increasing our understanding and moving people towards appreciation of intelligent actions we can take as individuals or society, I'm not going to call that worry. And there will be a lot of it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Worrying](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23696) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-131 — The Dangerous Fascination Of Imagination — Carlo Rovelli > The task of separating the good thoughts from the silly ones is extremely hard, of course, but this is precisely where intelligence matters, what should be nurtured. Isn't it? But many say today that, after all, there are no "good ideas" and "bad ideas". All ideas can be good. I hear this in philosophy departments, from very smart colleagues: "every idea is right in its own context"; or, "we do not have to suppress ideas that might turn out to be better tomorrow"; or "everything is better than lack of creativity". We often have to choose between truth or consolation, between realizing that we do not know, or making up pretty stories. - **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`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Dangerous Fascination Of Imagination](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23695) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-132 — A World Without Growth? — Satyajit Das > All brands of politics and economics are deeply rooted in the idea of robust economic growth, combined with the belief that governments and central bankers can exert substantial control over the economy to bring this about. In his 1929 novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald identified this fatal attraction: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former Financier; Author, Age of Stagnation - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A World Without Growth?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23694) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-133 — Not Enough Robots — Rodney A. Brooks > Many recent press stories have worried that smarter robots will take away too many jobs from people. What worries me most right now is that we will not find a way to make our robots smart enough quickly enough to take up the slack in all the jobs we will need them to do over the next few decades. If we fail to build better robots soon then our standard of living and our life spans are at risk. - **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:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Not Enough Robots](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23693) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-134 — Our Blindspots — Daniel Goleman > The brain's perceptual mis-alignment in recognizing dangers has reached an historic danger point. The human gene pool was robust enough to survive the failure of people in the Middle Ages to see the dangers in rats and fleas as vectors for the Black Plague. But today our collective blindspot has set in motion long-term dynamics in geophysical systems like the carbon cycle that will have devastating impacts not just on humans, but on the survival of countless other species—and will take hundreds of years to reverse. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Our Blindspots](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23692) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-135 — Unknown Unknowns — Gary Marcus > The truth is that we simply don't know enough about the potential biotechnology, nanotechonology, or future iterations of artificial intelligence to calculate what their risks are, compelling arguments have been made that in principle any of the three could lead to human extinction. These risks may prove manageable, but I don't think we can manage them if we don't take them seriously. In the long run, biotech, nanotech and AI are probably significantly more likely to help the species, by increasing productivity and limiting disease, than they are to destroy it. But we need to invest more in figuring out exactly what the risks are, and to better prepare for then. Right now, the US spends more than $2.5 billion dollars a year studying climate change, but (by my informal reckoning) less than 1% of that total studying the risk of biotech, nanotech, and AI. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 145 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Unknown Unknowns](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23691) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-136 — Life As We Know It — Max Tegmark > For example, they would probably lack our strong human fear of death: as long as they've backed themselves up, all they stand to lose are the memories they've accumulated since their most recent backup. The ability to readily copy information and software between AIs would probably reduce the strong sense of individuality that's so characteristic of our human consciousness: there would be less of a distinction between you and me if we could trivially share and copy all our memories and abilities, so a group of nearby AIs may feel more like a single organism with a hive mind. - **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:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Life As We Know It](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23690) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-137 — Safe Mode For The Internet? — George Dyson > We need a low-bandwidth, high-latency store-and-forward message system that can run in emergency mode on an ad-hoc network assembled from mobile phones and laptop computers even if the main networks fail. We should keep this system on standby, and periodically exercise it, along with a network of volunteers trained in network first aid the way we train lifeguards and babysitters in CPR. These first responders, like the amateur radio operators who restore communications after natural disasters, would prioritize essential communications, begin the process of recovery, and relay instructions as to what to do next. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Safe Mode For The Internet?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23689) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-138 — The Decline Of The Scientific Hero — Roger Highfield > Recently, brain scans by Chris and Uta Frith of University College London, and Francesca Happe of King's College, revealed activation in temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex during these scenarios. What is remarkable is that the same brain network is engaged whether considering moving shapes or the mental states of others. There is a human predilection to make narratives out of whatever we see around us, to see agency in a dark shadows and messages in the stars. In these patterns we can find heroes too. The stories that create heroes are important because they cement reputations, crucial for the evolution of cooperation, through a mechanism called indirect reciprocity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Decline Of The Scientific Hero](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23686) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-139 — The Loss Of Our Collective Cognition And Awareness — Douglas Rushkoff > We should be worried about the decline of the human nervous system. We should be worried that something—likely environmental, but possibly more subtle than that—is hampering our ability to parent new human beings with coherently functioning perceptual apparatuses. We should be worried about what this means for the economic future of our society, but we should also be worried about what this means for the future of our collective cognition and awareness as a species. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Loss Of Our Collective Cognition And Awareness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23685) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-140 — The Is-Ought Fallacy Of Science And Morality — Michael Shermer > We begin with the individual organism as the primary unit of biology and society because the organism is the principal target of natural selection and social evolution. Thus, the survival and flourishing of the individual organism—people in this context—is the basis of establishing values and morals, and so determining the conditions by which humans best flourish ought to be the goal of a science of morality. The constitutions of human societies ought to be built on the constitution of human nature, and science is the best tool we have for understanding our nature. For example: - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Is-Ought Fallacy Of Science And Morality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23683) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-141 — What Is A Good Life? — David Christian > Even worse, the story of growth is steering us towards ecological chaos. The biosphere is rich in resources and extraordinarily resilient. But there are limits. And what 'growth' really means is ever increasing consumption of the energy and resources of the biosphere by one species, our own. Today, we are learning that 'growth' is pushing the biosphere to its limits. There is a real danger that biospheric systems will start breaking down, perhaps violently and fast, because we are messing with ancient, complex, unpredictable and global metabolic pathways, such as the Carbon and Nitrogen cycles. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Big History Institute and Distinguished Professor in History, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, Origin Story - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [What Is A Good Life?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23682) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-142 — Digital Tat ... — Juan Enriquez > Trivially easy to apply, seemingly innocuous, initially painless, these frequent electronic tattoos are long lasting and someday will portray you as an almost saint or a serious sinner or both. Electronic tattoos are trivially easy to copy, reproduce, spread, store. They will long outlive your body. So in a sense, they begin to fulfill Borges' greatest fear, they begin to make one immortal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Digital Tat ...](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23681) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-143 — The "Nightmare Scenario" For Fundamental Physics — Peter Woit > Results from the LHC have now started to come in, and these are carrying disturbing implications. Unsurprisingly, none of the promised "Beyond Standard Model" particles have put in an appearance. More worrisome though is the big LHC success: the discovery of the Higgs. Within the still large experimental uncertainties, now that we've finally seen Higgs particles they look all too much as if they're behaving just the way the Standard Model predicted they would. What physicists are facing now is a possibility that they always knew was there, but couldn't believe would really come to pass: the "Nightmare Scenario" of the LHC finding a Standard Model Higgs and nothing more. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematical Physicist, Columbia University; Author, Not Even Wrong - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The "Nightmare Scenario" For Fundamental Physics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23680) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-144 — Fast Knowledge — Nicholas Humphrey > One-touch knowledge can be an enormous boon. Yet I worry that in raising us all to a plane of unprecedented genius, it is creating a drearily level playing field. When each of us can learn so much, so easily, in the same way as everybody else, we are in danger of becoming mere knowledge tourists, hopping from attraction to attraction at 30,000 feet without respecting the ground that lies between. One-step travel is a boon as well. But when everyone finds themselves going to the same places, when it's the arrival and not the journey that matters, when nothing whatever memorable happens along on the way, I worry that we end up, despite our extraordinary range of experience, with less to say. - **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:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Fast Knowledge](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23676) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-145 — Society's Parlous Inability To Reason About Uncertainty — Aubrey de Grey > The situation is the worst in the more mathematically extreme cases. These are the situations that can be summarised as "high risk, high gain"—low perceived probability of success, but huge benefits in the event of success. As any academic will aver, the mainstream mechanisms for supplying public funding to research have gravitated to a disastrous level of antipathy towards high-risk high-gain work, to the point where it is genuinely normal for senior scientists to stay one step ahead of the system by essentially applying for money to do work that is already largely complete, and thus bears no risk of failing to be delivered on time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation; Author, Ending Aging - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Society's Parlous Inability To Reason About Uncertainty](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23675) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-146 — Capture — Charles Seife > Capture is a bigger threat than even Stigler first realized. Any profession that depends to some degree on objectivity, and whose work affects the fortunes of a group of people with power and money, is subject to capture. Science, a field in which objectivity is paramount, is far from immune. There's evidence that medical researchers who take money from industry tend see the natural world in a more positive light: in their experiments, drugs seem to work better, patients seem to survive longer, and side effects seem to be less dangerous. Yet few scientists, even those taking tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug companies or medical device manufactures, think that they serve any master but Truth with a capital T. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Capture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23674) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-147 — Homogenization Of The Human Experience — Scott Atran > How did it all happen? No real evidence has emerged from science for dramatic change in general anatomy of the human body and brain, or in basic capacities for physical endurance and perception. The key to this astounding and bewildering development may have been a mutation in the computational efficiency of the brain to combine and process concepts—a recursive language of thought and theory of mind—that led to linguistic communication about possible worlds, and to a mushrooming cultural cooperation and creativity within and between groups to better compete against other groups. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist; Emeritus Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris; Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford; Author, Talking to the Enemy - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Homogenization Of The Human Experience](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23673) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-148 — We Won't Be Able To Understand Everything — Clifford Pickover > At the risk of a further digression into the edges of understanding, consider the work of Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. Some of his key proofs are based on "inter-universal Teichmüller theory." As he develops future proofs based on this mathematical machinery, which was developed over decades in many hundreds of pages, how many humans could possibly understand this work? What does it even mean to "understand" in contexts such as these? As mathematics and subatomic physics progresses in the 21st century, the meaning of "understanding" obviously must morph, like a caterpillar into a butterfly. The limited, wet human brain is the caterpillar. The butterflies are our brains aided by computer prosthetics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [We Won't Be Able To Understand Everything](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23670) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-149 — Systematic Thinking About How We *Package* Our Worries — Mary Catherine Bateson > A sense of what the proximate danger is, which is often a by-product or side effect of what is talked about. Global warming was a bad description of a danger because it sounded comfy, and even climate change sounds fairly neutral. Extreme weather conditions causing humanitarian disasters can get more attention. Regional warfare for access to resources (oil) or arable land may be more salient than a few degrees of temperature change or rising ocean surfaces. It is entirely possible that global warming will lead to nuclear war as a side effect, but that is not where our concern needs to be. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emerita, George Mason University; Visiting Scholar, Sloan Center on Aging & Work, Boston College; Author, Composing a Further Life - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Systematic Thinking About How We *Package* Our Worries](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23669) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-150 — Science Is In Danger Of Becoming The Enemy Of Humankind — Colin Tudge > Worst of all perhaps is that those in high places—both in science and in politics—don't seem to realize that this is happening. They do not listen to criticism. "Public debate" means a one-way flow of information de haut en bas. The status quo for all its obvious flaws and indeed its horrors is seen as "progress". But those who are doing well out of it, including those intellectuals who have chosen to go along with the act, cannot even begin to consider that they could be wrong. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist; Author, Six Steps Back to the Land - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science Is In Danger Of Becoming The Enemy Of Humankind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23666) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-151 — The Real Risk Factors For War — Steven Pinker > Groupism. The ideal of human rights—that the ultimate moral good is the flourishing of individual people, while groups are social constructions designed to further that good—is surprisingly recent and unnatural. People, at least in public, are apt to argue that the ultimate moral good is the glory of the group—the tribe, religion, nation, class, or race—and that individuals are expendable, like the cells of a body. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Real Risk Factors For War](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23665) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-152 — Living Without The Internet For A Couple Of Weeks — Daniel C. Dennett > In the meantime, it would be prudent to start brainstorming about how to keep panic at bay if a longterm disruption of large parts of the Internet were to occur. Will hospitals and fire stations (and supermarkets and gas stations and pharmacies) keep functioning, and how will people be able to get information they trust? Cruise ships oblige their paying customers to walk through a lifeboat drill the first day at sea, and while it isn't a popular part of the cruise, people are wise to comply. Panic can be contagious, and when that happens people make crazy and regrettable decisions. As long as we insist on living in the fast lane, we should learn how to get on and off without creating mayhem. - **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:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Living Without The Internet For A Couple Of Weeks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23664) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-153 — Worrying About Stupid — Roger Schank > We glorify stupid on TV shows, showing what dumb things people do so we can all laugh at them. We glorify people who can sing well but not those who can think well. We create TV show after TV show that make clear that acting badly will make you rich and famous. The fact that most exchanges on these shows are done without thought and without the need to back up one's opinions with evidence seems to bother no one. - **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:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Worrying About Stupid](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23662) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2013-154 — The Belief Or Lack Of Belief In Free Will Is Not A Scientific Matter — Howard Gardner > Of course there are various compromises possible: Daniel Dennett-type views that we should act "as if" there were free will and treat others the same way; William James; 'My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will:" Or Daniel Kahneman's implication that System 1 is automatic, while System 2 involves conscious reflecting. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Belief Or Lack Of Belief In Free Will Is Not A Scientific Matter](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23660) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted