In the first Matrix movie, the character Cypher announces that he wants to be plugged back into the network. A few scenes later, we see him dining at a fine restaurant, fully aware that everything he is experiencing is a simulation, and he doesn’t care. The question presented by this sequence is an ontological crossroads at which we now seem ...
Maybe not 2012, but how about 2030? I think it’s a safe bet the world will not end this Friday, never mind the fact that an anthropologist will tell you the Maya never actually said it would. But some not so ancient prognosticators will tell you that the end of world as we know it will happen sometime before the ...
Rick Kelly, in this article on TechCrunch, takes techno-centric paranoia to the next level when he fires away at legislation nobody has yet proposed to regulate future possible applications of 3D printers. Strangely, Kelly cites some of the very serious potential hazards — like the ability to make a functioning firearm! — with this technology but proceeds to dismiss any ...
The defenders of online piracy (the polite ones anyway) often paint a vision of a future that, on paper, sounds very attractive indeed. This, from one commenter on my blog, is a good representation of a sensibility we encounter all the time: “Imagine a world where you have access to all the world’s books, movies, music, the entirety of the ...
