CapitalistImperialistPig

Science fiction was a big part of my youth, from age ten until at least the end of my teens. Much of what I loved was already classical, from Jules Verne to Edgar Rice Burroughs to the golden age of SF in the 1930s-1950s. Lately, I've turned back to SF in a small way, but mostly been disappointed. Currently I'm reading New York 2140 , a fairly highly praised book by Kim Stanley Robinson. The hard SF of my youth was filled with astonishing predictions: nuclear power, space travel, robots, communication satellites, smartphones. There were some others that didn't work out: time travel, psychokinesis, and that staple of Popular Science, flying cars, but overall, guys like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were amazingly prescient as well as entertaining. The central conceit of New York, 2140 is that sea levels have risen 50 feet due to global warming, but that Manhattan underwater is still thriving, and many major buildings of today, suitably reinforced ...

Captain Futuro Predicts A lot of debates about artificial intelligence come down to "what about consciousness? We don't understand consciousness." I will stipulate to that. Consciousness is the last refuge of the doubters - the last hiding place for some kind of magical hocus-pocus - unless you count quantum gravity, or like Roger Penrose, conflate them. Well maybe, but I doubt it. The fundamental building block of consciousness is self-awareness. Our consciousness is our awareness of self, and our awareness of other's consciousness. Old style machines had no self-awareness. A truck was just a truck, not knowing or caring about other trucks or even itself. It's pretty clear that other animals, even rather primitive ones, have some level of self-awareness. It's an essential tool for competitive success in the struggle for existence. Our trucks and other machines are developing some self-awareness too. They have computers which keep track of when they a...