Futurology is the study of the future.
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Interview with Blay Whitby |
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Wednesday, 07 February 2007 |
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(This is the longer version of an interview originally published in Rocks Magazine, February 2007 issue.) What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what is its purpose?
AI is the study of intelligence in humans, animals, and machines and the attempt to engineer intelligence into any type of artifact.
One purpose of AI is to understand what intelligence is and how it works. The second is to build useful technology. As a matter of history, AI has been very successful at both. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 14 February 2007 )
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The End of Suffering |
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Tuesday, 26 September 2006 |
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Katherine Power explores David Pearce's idea that all suffering should be abolished, an ambitious project Pearce believes to be technically feasible, thanks to genetic engineering and nanotechnology. Before anaesthesia, surgery used to be agony. It's hard to imagine that anyone could have been anything but pleased when painless surgery was introduced in the mid-19th century. And yet, although many welcomed anaesthesia, some did object. In Zurich, anaesthesia was even outlawed. “Pain is a natural and intended curse of the primal sin. Any attempt to do away with it must be wrong,” claimed the Zurich City Fathers. Painless delivery in childbirth was a particularly contentious issue. Some insisted that “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). Others, like Doctor Charles Delucena Meigs (1792-1869), Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women at Jefferson Medical College, believed that labour pains were “a most desirable, salutary and conservative manifestation of the life force”. There was even a belief, expressed in 1847 in The New York Journal of Medicine, that pain was vital to surgical procedure. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 08 October 2008 )
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