“Mind uploading could actually offer something tantalisingly close to true immortality. Just as we currently back up files on external drives and cloud storage, your uploaded mind could be copied innumerable times and backed up in secure locations, making it extremely unlikely that any natural or man-made disaster could destroy all of your copies. Despite this advantage, mind uploading presents some difficult ethical issues.”
Category: ideas
How America Lost Its Mind: Our Current ‘Post-Truth’ Moment Has Roots As Deep And Old As The U.S. Itself
Kurt Andersen: “The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. … Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”
Truth Or Opinion? Just Because We’re “Entitled” To Our Opinions Doesn’t Make Them Right
The notion that the metaphorical “court of public opinion” should be a truth-seeking body was chucked overboard long ago. Today, a peculiar, pluralistic ideology dominates the “free market(place) of ideas”—an ideology cast in the same mold as liberal multiculturalism. The noblest virtue of this ideology, we’re taught, is not the bare-knuckle struggle for truth, but the equal protection and representation of variegated perspectives and identities, especially those that have been historically excluded from the mainstream (or feel like they have been).
How The Smartphone May Have Killed A Generation
“The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.”
Britons Will Get The Right To Be Forgotten Online Just In Time For Brexit
In addition to the right to having any site, including Facebook, delete all trace of personal data, people will find that “companies will also have to ask people for permission to collect personal data rather than rely on pre-selected tick boxes.”
Where To Find The Stylish Kids? In Soho, Of Course
Except this time, they’re there for “product drops,” of course. “They have fully embraced ‘normcore’ fashion, but with branded limited releases and collaborations. It is not price but exclusivity, the scarcity model, that drives the new geeks. And those limited editions go to those who know about the releases first and get there first.”
If Amazon Is Going To Have A Drone Delivery Army, It’ll Need A Drone Repair Platoon As Well
Drone infrastructure update, ahoy: “In this new filing, the company provides a thumbnail sketch of how its system works right now: products are manufactured, brought to a fulfillment facility, from which they’re dispatched to a customer.” Yes, drones are going to buzz back and forth from moving vehicles … or at least that’s one plan.
Tech Companies Are Rotten At The Core
The problem is way larger than any high-level Googler’s anonymous anti-equity rant. “The kind of computing systems that get made and used by people outside the industry, and with serious consequences, are a direct byproduct of the gross machismo of computing writ large. More women and minorities are needed in computing because the world would be better for their contributions—and because it might be much worse without them.”
Criticism Isn’t Dead; It’s Just Migrated To YouTube
Oh, and that “criticism” is created by fans instead of critics. For instance, there are the guys who run New Rockstars. “They are superfans — sophisticated ones — using visual aids to break down shows and movies for superfans. And their handiwork makes the audience for these pop-culture spectacles even bigger and more engaged.”
That’s Right, BBC, We Need More Cultural Critics, Not Fewer
As the Beeb U-turns and decides not to cut Radio 4’s Saturday Review, we still need reviews – though things have changed drastically. “In the 19th century lengthy reviews flourished to such a degree that Thomas Carlyle predicted ‘by and by it will be found that all literature has become one boundless self-devouring review.’ It didn’t quite happen but many of the modernists – Pound, Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence – are as celebrated for their critical essays as for their poems or novels.”