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Orion's Arm
Orion's Arm (also called the Orion's Arm Universe Project, OAUP, or simply OA and formerly known as the Orion's Arm Worldbuilding Group) is a multi-authored online science fiction world-building project, first established in 2000 by M. Alan Kazlev, Donna Malcolm Hirsekorn, Bernd Helfert and Anders Sandberg and further co-authored by many people since. Anyone can contribute articles, stories, artwork, or music to the website. A large mailing list exists, in which members debate aspects of the world they are creating, discussing additions, modifications, issues arising, and work to be done. A computer game and a tabletop role-playing game are being developed by the community, within the OA milieu. There is an ezine for Orion's Arm fiction, art, and commentary, called ''Voices: Future Tense'', add-ons for the Celestia program to displaying Orion's Arm planets, spacecraft and other objects, and additional transhumanist flavored SF illustrations. The first published Orion's Arm b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anders Sandberg
Anders Sandberg (born 11 July 1972) is a Swedish researcher, futurist and transhumanist. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow at Reuben College. Work Sandberg's research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as on assessing the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. His research includes work on cognitive enhancement (methods, impacts, and policy analysis); a technical roadmap on whole brain emulation; on neuroethics; and on global catastrophic risks, particularly on the question of how to take into account the subjective uncertainty in risk estimates of low-likelihood, high-consequence risk. Sandberg is a commentator and participant in the public debate about human enhancement, as well as for his academic publications in neuroscience, ethics, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial General Intelligence
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fiction and futures studies. AGI is also called strong AI,: Kurzweil describes strong AI as "machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence." full AI, or general intelligent action, although some academic sources reserve the term "strong AI" for computer programs that experience sentience or consciousness. Strong AI contrasts with '' weak AI'' (or ''narrow AI''), which is not intended to have general cognitive abilities; rather, weak AI is any program that is designed to solve exactly one problem. (Academic sources reserve "weak AI" for programs that do not experience consciousness or do not have a mind in the same sense people do.) A 2020 survey identified 72 active AGI R&D projects spread across 37 countries. Characteristics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Right To Bear Arms
The right to keep and bear arms (often referred to as the right to bear arms) is a right for people to possess weapons (arms) for the preservation of life, liberty, and property. The purpose of gun rights is for self-defense, including security against tyranny, as well as hunting and sporting activities. Countries that guarantee the right to keep and bear arms include the Czech Republic, Guatemala, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United States, and Yemen. Background The Bill of Rights 1689 allowed Protestant citizens of England to "have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law" and restricted the ability of the English Crown to have a standing army or to interfere with Protestants' right to bear arms "when Papists were both Armed and Imployed contrary to Law" and established that Parliament, not the Crown, could regulate the right to bear arms. Sir William Blackstone wrote in the 18th century that the right to have arms was auxiliary to the "n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utility Fog
Utility fog (also referred to as foglets) is a hypothetical collection of tiny nanobots that can replicate a physical structure.LEGOs (TM) to the Stars The Assembler, Volume 4, Number 3 Third Quarter, 1996, Tihamer Toth-Fejel As such, it is a form of self-reconfiguring modular robotics. Conception The term was coined by John Storrs Hall in 1989 Hall thought of it as a nanotechnological replacement for car seatbelts. The ro ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mass Surveillance
Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, such as organizations like the NSA, but it may also be carried out by corporations (either on behalf of governments or at their own initiative). Depending on each nation's laws and judicial systems, the legality of and the permission required to engage in mass surveillance varies. It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes. It is also often distinguished from targeted surveillance. Mass surveillance has often been cited as necessary to fight terrorism, prevent crime and social unrest, protect national security, and control the population. At the same time, mass surveillance has equally often been criticized for violating privacy rights, limiting civil and political rights and freedoms, and being i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subroutine
In computer programming, a function or subroutine is a sequence of program instructions that performs a specific task, packaged as a unit. This unit can then be used in programs wherever that particular task should be performed. Functions may be defined within programs, or separately in libraries that can be used by many programs. In different programming languages, a function may be called a routine, subprogram, subroutine, method, or procedure. Technically, these terms all have different definitions, and the nomenclature varies from language to language. The generic umbrella term ''callable unit'' is sometimes used. A function is often coded so that it can be started several times and from several places during one execution of the program, including from other functions, and then branch back (''return'') to the next instruction after the ''call'', once the function's task is done. The idea of a subroutine was initially conceived by John Mauchly during his work on EN ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Life
Artificial life (often abbreviated ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American theoretical biologist, in 1986. In 1987 Langton organized the first conference on the field, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: ''soft'', from software; ''hard'', from hardware; and '' wet'', from biochemistry. Artificial life researchers study traditional biology by trying to recreate aspects of biological phenomena. Overview Artificial life studies the fundamental processes of living systems in artificial environments in order to gain a deeper understanding of the complex information processing that define such systems. These topics are broad, but often include evolutionary dynamics, emergent properties of colle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' of Oxford University Press defines artificial intelligence as: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and G ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kabbalah
Kabbalah ( he, קַבָּלָה ''Qabbālā'', literally "reception, tradition") is an esoteric method, discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. A traditional Kabbalist is called a Mekubbal ( ''Məqūbbāl'' "receiver"). The definition of Kabbalah varies according to the tradition and aims of those following it, from its origin in medieval Judaism to its later adaptations in Western esotericism (Christian Kabbalah and Hermetic Qabalah). Jewish Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings meant to explain the relationship between the unchanging, eternal God—the mysterious ''Ein Sof'' (, ''"The Infinite"'')—and the mortal, finite universe (God's creation). It forms the foundation of mystical religious interpretations within Judaism. Jewish Kabbalists originally developed their own transmission of sacred texts within the realm of Jewish tradition and often use classical Jewish scriptures to explain and demonstrate its mystical teachings. These teachings are held by K ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mind Uploading
Mind uploading is a speculative process of whole brain emulation in which a brain scan is used to completely emulate the mental state of the individual in a digital computer. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain and experience having a sentient conscious mind. Substantial mainstream research in related areas is being conducted in animal brain mapping and simulation, development of faster supercomputers, virtual reality, brain–computer interfaces, connectomics, and information extraction from dynamically functioning brains. According to supporters, many of the tools and ideas needed to achieve mind uploading already exist or are currently under active development; however, they will admit that others are, as yet, very speculative, but say they are still in the realm of engineering possibility. Mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sophont
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. Intelligence is most often studied in humans but has also been observed in both non-human animals and in plants despite controversy as to whether some of these forms of life exhibit intelligence. Intelligence in computers or other machines is called artificial intelligence. Etymology The word ''intelligence'' derives from the Latin nouns '' intelligentia'' or '' intellēctus'', which in turn stem from the verb '' intelligere'', to comprehend or perceive. In the Middle Ages, the word ''intellectus'' became the scholarly technical term for understanding, and a translation for t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sentience
Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations. The word was first coined by philosophers in the 1630s for the concept of an ability to feel, derived from Latin '' sentientem'' (a feeling), to distinguish it from the ability to think (''reason''). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations. In different Asian religions, the word 'sentience' has been used to translate a variety of concepts. In science fiction, the word "sentience" is sometimes used interchangeably with "sapience", " self-awareness", or "consciousness". Some writers differentiate between the mere ability to perceive sensations, such as light or pain, and the ability to perceive emotions, such as fear or grief. The subjective awareness of experiences by a conscious individual are known as qualia in Western philosophy. Philosophy and sentience In philosophy, different authors draw different distinctions between ''consciousness'' and sentience. According to An ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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