Ray Kurzweil has long been a cheerleader for the posthuman ideal, tirelessly championing what he sees as the almost limitless potential of human beings as we become increasingly merged with our technologies. Whether you believe he’s a delusional crank or a visionary prophet, there’s no denying that he talks
a good game – his latest essay for the Lifeboat Foundation examines the plausibility of transcending our biological limitations through technology, and it’s inspirational stuff.
All posts by Paul Raven
Yet more free fiction
Freshly arrived in the tubes of the intarwebs this week: Subterranean Online has just added a Mike Resnick story and a rare Charles Stross reprint to their latest edition (bringing the issue’s story count to eight), and Afterburn SF has seven new pieces of work online, including a story whose title alone is a work of genius:
Ben Burgis’s “Three Perspectives on the Role of the Anarchists in the Zombie Apocalypse“.
WIRED autopsies crowdsourcing experiment
Crowdsourcing is one of the slew of neologisms that the past year or so has thrown up – and like a lot of neologisms, everyone who uses it seems to have a different idea of what it means. WIRED attempted to put theory into practice in the field of ‘citizen journalism’ by crowdsourcing a series of articles on crowdsourcing – very meta. While they got some pretty interesting articles out of it, including an
interview with Douglas Rushkoff in which he writes off the term as a way for corporations to get work done for free, it didn’t work out to be the bed of roses they had hoped – the dissection of the project is well worth reading.
The end of science fiction?
David Louis Edelman asks a big question over at the author group-blog Deep Genre – when will science fiction end? In his own words: “I’m not asking this from a commercial standpoint so much as from an epistemological standpoint. Will there always be new science fiction? Or will the genre just wither up at some point and go away?” What do you think? Are we so immunised to the exponential curve of technological change that fiction based in extrapolated futures will cease to have any effect on us other than, perhaps, nostalgia?
Australian police boss fears clones and cyborgs
It sounds as if the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police is a science fiction fan – one who takes it a little too seriously. During a recent conference, he suggested that the police forces of the near future will have to deal with a variety of new threats to law and order, ranging from tech-savvy small-time crooks to rogue clones and human-robot hybrids. Personally, I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t just a viral marketing ploy for the forthcoming Blade Runner re-release.