It is a position that we have publicly supported (i.e., in writing) on various occasions, despite it being particularly unpopular: every process of extensive mechanization of human capabilities quickly leads …
Science; Of whom;
When in 1942, during the Second World War, a good portion of the Western physicists’ elite gathered in the US to transform their until-then theoretical knowledge and ideas into something …
Not everything is for sale!
This “beggar” (or perhaps homeless?) in the photographs (in the Moscow metro) is called Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman. He is probably the greatest living mathematician and geometer – certainly for half, …
Statistics… as we say “state”
The phrase of Mark Twain (which he himself attributed to British Prime Minister Disraeli) is now widely known: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Despite …
Strategic mistake!
John Ioannidis was endlessly vilified around here when he dared to criticize the hygiene-terrorist hysteria. In the USA he was even threatened—he lives very close to the corporate (and not …
In front of the door of (natural) law
Galileo’s and Descartes’ laws of motion, Newton’s law of gravity, Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, Mendel’s laws of genetics, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of reflection and refraction of light …
Big Bang: the farewell of a theory; (how sacred is science?)
The Big Bang theory will soon close a century of life – perhaps its obituary will coincide with the moment it retires into the history of human scientific conceptions. Its …
the great leap: immunity as capital, morbidity as investment
The term “natural capital” was first used in 1973 by E.F. Schumacher in his book “Small Is Beautiful” and was further developed by Herman Daly, Robert Costanza and other founders …
do machines feel remorse?
In the 1990s, shortly after the successful cloning of the famous (or infamous) Dolly, one of the dominant themes of the discussions of the time regarding new technologies was that …
a discussion about artificial intelligence (somewhere far away…)
The following text is a transcript of a discussion that took place between certain academics in a distant country, prompted by the emergence of ChatGPT a few months ago. First …
Technological metaphysics (a note on “artificial intelligence”)
The ChatGPT app gained 100,000,000 (100 million) active users in just two months from its release: it is a world record for the speed at which a technological application has …
GATTACA remains relevant 25 years later
Twenty-five years have passed since the release of the film GATTACA, a film that tells the story of a possible near future in which social inequalities, which were previously associated …