So I’ve just returned from Providence, RI, where an IHS conference on social change was held at Brown University. Stars of the show included the ever-lucid Will Wilkinson (recently in the news himself) and Claremont Professor Paul Zak, who received during the conference a Drudge Report link heralding a “childbirth wonder drug that can ‘cure’ [...]

Sorry, George Will. Nudging irritates me. When I think of nudging, I do not think of unobtrusively maximizing aggregate efficiency in a way consonant with free public choice. I think of this:

I think, I’m a man, not a number data point clustered within a statistically significant group! Nudging is only possible when you look at [...]

What happens to us when we can outsource and archive our memories? What’s the difference between technological recall and human remembrance? What do Jorge Luis Borges and Maude Flanders have in common? My attempt to answer all these questions and more is up now at The New Atlantis. Teaser quote:
Through technology, the alienation and systematization [...]

Ross, talking about those crazy Singularitarians, channels a little Tocqueville:
the mere fact that the Singularity is inherently “escapist,” and bears a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Christianity, isn’t a problem with the concept. It’s the whole point.
As John Gray has also pointed out, we seem always innately to grope toward the concept of God. But that concept [...]

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration [...]

Mixed news for fans of radical life extension: Charles Lindbergh is sort of your posterboy.
Forget aviation hero. On the side, Lindbergh was a Dr Frankenstein figure, who used his mechanical genius to explore the possibility of conquering death - but only for the select few who were considered “worthy” of living forever.
“Beating death was [...]

Star intellectual Steven Pinker, who should be careful whom he calls stupid, has penned (for The New Republic) an attack on the President’s Council on Bioethics that makes my ridicule of Martha Nussbaum sound like a call-in to Delilah. It is so easy to think up a list of insults for this piece that I [...]

Michael Brendan Dougherty makes an enjoyable @TAC upon the metric system, Hegelianism, and their latest champion, Fareed Zakaria.
The enthusiasts for the metric system (which is based on incorrect calculations anyway) remind me of the enthusiasts for Esperanto. George Soros speaks Esperanto.
But Zakaria’s conclusion is even worse:
Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they [...]

Ann Hornaday doesn’t really like Iron Man:
Toggling between Stark’s impish goatee and Iron Man’s full-metal body condom, and amid so many generic fireballs, kill shots and earsplitting thumps, bumps and crunches, the film finally collapses under its own weight. It’s possible to see a decent franchise in “Iron Man” with Downey at its troubled center; [...]

In comments [scroll down], Jesse Mazer has pressed me on how my conception of ethics and suffering applies to “intelligent aliens.”
if we met a species of intelligent aliens, you would say that torturing them is not bad because of the harm it causes to them, but only because of the harm it causes to the [...]

Stands for, y’know, We Await Radical-life Extension’s Zarathustra. I see Sonny’s on board, praying for the Great Noontide. Then there’s this guy:
As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor [...]

Ronald Bailey has an amusing enough post on Those Crazy Scots — specifically, Scots toying with the idea of crossbreeding people and monkeys. Problem area:

Professor Hugh McLachlan, professor of applied philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian University’s School of Law and Applied Sciences, said although the idea was “troublesome”, he could see no ethical objections to the [...]

I almost forgot about this. There’s now a book that teaches kids how not to fear their new Plastic Post-Op moms. Rod Dreher no likey:
What kind of message is this sending to little girls? That if they don’t like their bodies, that if their physical appearance doesn’t conform to current physical ideals, that they should [...]

At Reason’s Hit & Run, Ronald Bailey praises the latest prophet of beating this thing called death:
In his column, “It’s not immoral to want to be immortal,” brilliant University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan refutes those who say that we should all just “go gentle into that good night.” From his column:
What is particularly interesting [...]