My friend and colleague Stuart Armstrong gave a talk titled von Neumann probes, Dyson spheres, exploratory engineering and the Fermi paradox to the physics department yesterday. It is based on a paper we are writing together that analyses how much... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Sweden looked set to abandon the law making sterilization mandatory for transgendered people, until a last minute effort of the Christian Democrats managed to derail the change. In today's Svenska Dagbladet one of their ideologists, Lennart Sacrédeus, argues their position:... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se Human development

Another practical ethics blog, Experimenting with oversight with more bite? I blog about the issue of whether there is a need for some mandatory international oversight of potentially dangerous biotechnology. It is a tricky issue, and my view is that... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

(This started as a post on the Extropians list) On 2012-01-01 12:55, Stefano Vaj wrote: > I do think that utilitarian ethical systems can be consistent, that is > that they need not be intrinsically contradictory, but certainly most of... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se Ethics

The Future of Identity, a report by me and Nick Bostrom commissioned for the UK Office for Science. We are not dealing with a very far future (just the next 15 years or so), so the challenges to identity are... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

I just remembered today that my colleague Toby Ord a while ago gave an excellent talk about the question whether there is overpopulation or underpopulation in the world, and the talk is online. Very worth watching. Another talk I enjoyed... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

The list of beneficial effects of intelligence is pretty long: childhood IQ predicts health, longevity, education, salary, and protects against suicide, homicide and a variety of ills like divorce. Cognitive ability also makes people better at handling economic games, thinking... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

I have been having fun plotting bifurcations and crises in the Ikeda map. It all started when I did an entry on Wikipedia for crises in dynamical systems, and then I realized I needed an illustration. The Ikeda map is... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

On Practical Ethics I blog about the ethics of evolving pandemic flu viruses for research.... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

www.Visual6502.org has one of the most impressive electronics archeology projects I have ever seen. They took a 6502 processor, exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface and substrate at high resolution, generated polygon models of the individual components, used the... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Here is a recording of Eric Drexler's opening lecture at our impact of future technology programme: Eric Drexler Launch of Future Tech: See my previous post for a description and some comments on the talk.... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

I'm not much of a poetry person; I have a far more visual mindset. But here is a beautiful way of combining poetry and image: Heliotropes, a poem by Brian Christian and film by Michael Langan. There is a lovely... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Cabs, censorship and cutting tools - my celebration of Censorship Day. Take home message: tools that limit the information flow in society are probably more dangerous than tools that add more information flows. This is why if you think it... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

This Thursday Eric Drexler held the inaugural lecture for the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. I am happy to be a research associate of the program. Eric's talk covered an important issue: how can we figure... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se Nanotechnology

Holier and happier than thou? - blog on Practical Ethics about a study claiming ethical people are happier. The problem is that the measure of being 'ethical' in the study seems more like giving strong lip service to strict deontological... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se