The person depicted is Isaac Newton. Now, an algorithm named “Sir Isaac” in his honor is, according to its creators, a small but decisive step toward the “robot scientist.” The …
Mechanization of knowledge: common sense
Common sense as a mechanism for representing and directly justifying the natural world, forms, people, things and social relations is an old issue, primarily in philosophy. Such a sense/perception of …
About paradigm shift
The words paradigm change are used sparingly but steadily in recent decades in international commentary (or babble) when it comes to commenting on some of the changes (sometimes real and …
Courier – Internet: 1-0!
It is neither sophistry nor a joke, but an actual condition: the internet has overwhelmingly less bandwidth compared to traditional postal services. So much less that Google itself, when it …
Do machines live?
The same year that Norbert Wiener published his treatise on the “human use of human beings,” in 1950, another exceptional figure in the history of computer science, Alan Turing, posed …
The pregnancy of the cyborg
…Here I want to interject an important element: words like Life, Purpose, and Soul are completely unsuitable in pure scientific thinking. These terms acquired their meaning because we recognize the …
“prevention of abnormalities”
Last February, the British parliament passed a law approving corrective genetic interventions in egg DNA, using DNA segments from another woman’s eggs. The birth of children from “three parents” (the …
robotic self-organization
From a technological and construction perspective, it is something remarkable. The robotic ants are the work of one of the leading companies in research and application of cutting-edge technologies: the …
Are consciousness and memory technoscientific “objects”?
The question in the title now seems foolish or pointless. Of course what has historically been called “consciousness” is a techno-scientific object of analysis and research! For decades now. Even …
The pearly gates of cyberspace
This essay by Margaret Wertheim was published in Greek in the magazine futura no. 5, Winter 1998 – 1999, from which we republish it. It was included in the collective …
mj-plus
If you remember Michael Jackson – and who truly can forget him? – you might have wondered: what exactly was this amazing comet that once crossed the sky of spectacle? …
Live work
The desolate rocky landscape belongs to the planet Mars. The vehicle visible in the lower right is the Curiosity rover, NASA’s spacecraft that landed on Mars in August 2012 and …