A Powerful Generation of ‘X-Men’ SUPERHUMANS Will Be Here in Less Than 200 Years, Claims Expert The Daily Mail | by Abigail …
Planet of the apps — have we paved the way for our own extinction? Financial Times | By John Thornhill | August …
The point of science fiction, the late Ray Bradbury once said, is not just to predict the future. It is to prevent it too. Some writers find this task straightforward. You take an issue in the modern world — automation, the creeping empire of social media, the depletion of the planet’s natural resources — and pursue it all the way to apocalypse. Wisdom dispensed. Job done….
They met for the first time in a hotel bar at Lake Tahoe in 1998, one evening after a technology conference. Bill Joy was an eminent computer-systems designer, chief scientist for Sun Microsystems. Ray Kurzweil was an award-winning inventor and technologist, whose many creations included a reading machine for the blind and an advanced music synthesizer. Their conversation focused on the future relationship between humans and machines….”
Vanderbilt University’s Michael Bess has written an extraordinarily thoughtful new book: Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life In The BioEngineered Society Of The Near Future. The first part of the book introduces the reader to the technologies that will enhance the physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities of our children and grandchildren: pharmaceuticals, bioelectronics, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and virtual reality.
As you may have noticed (or if not, now you know), I haven’t posted anything on the site for a while. I have all the typical excuses: busy at work, family stuff, the holidays, etc. But truth be told, not much grabbed me. That changed when I read Our Grandchildren Redesigned, the latest by my Vanderbilt colleague and friend, historian Michael Bess. As a dabbler in legal futurism, Bess’s book is a treasure chest to me. The subtitle says it all: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future.
21 January 2016 By Peter Kuryla [Link to Original] Michael Bess is a historian with a remarkably inventive turn of mind, a …
Michael Bess talks with Chapter 16 about Our Grandchildren Redesigned, a speculative look at the near future.
Over the coming decades – probably a lot sooner than most people realize –the next great wave of technological change will wash over our lives. Its impact will be similar in sweep and rapidity to the advent of computers, cell phones, and the web; but this time around, it is not our gadgets that will be transformed – it is we ourselves, our bodies, our minds. This will be a shift that cuts even more deeply than the great industrial revolutions of the past. It will not only alter how we make a living, communicate, and interact with each other, but will offer direct and precise control over our own physical and mental states.
Innovation Hub radio interviewed Michael Bess about how the emerging field of epigenetics may soon change the way people modify themselves and their children. Listen to the interview.