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Dean and I were working at his dining room table last week in between spurts of conversation about the future. Erica walks in, listens for a sec and then contributes a thought that went something like this: In the past computers were large and the goal was to make them smaller. [...]

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The Birth of Human Machines
Rodney Brooks, professor of computer science and director of the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT, writes that within the next fifty years, we will adopt robot technology, silicon and steel into our bodies not to fix something but to improve it.

This is a massive, galaxy-quaking shift [...]

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I’ve been writing a series called “The Next Fifty Years” based on my readings in a book by the same title. Recently, I delivered a speech on the topic of how to think about the future. I suggested three windows through which we could peer into possible tomorrows: the trajectory of [...]

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Paul Davies, theoretical physicist and a visiting professor at Imperial College London, suggests that within 50 years manned trips to Mars will answer the question: is there life and, if so, did life begin separately on the red planet?

In other words, was there a second genesis of life emerging from nonlife [...]

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“What we need is theory of moral development,” writes Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University. He predicts that within the next fifty years, however, psychology will still NOT be able to explain moral development.

That’s right. Not.

Naturalist Charles Darwin suggested that moral development was a function of evolved intelligence. Psychologist William James suggested [...]

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Within the next fifty years we’ll be able to “swap minds” across species and experience what animals feel, according to Marc Hauser, cognitive neuroscientist and professor in the department of Psychology and the Program in neurosciences at Harvard.

He offers two current oddities. A chicken with a shred of quail brain acts like a quail [...]

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By 2050, a typical medical exam will provide for us the full text of our genetic structure including a precise prediction of our natural end. That’s right, we will be able to know the “when” and “how” of our natural deaths (i.e. barring accidents).

What do you think? Is this information you would want to [...]

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In 1946, only 8,000 homes, all of which were in the USA, had television.

As a child growing up in El Salvador, I remember anticipating the afternoon Disney cartoons. My younger brother, Erwin, and I would sit behind TV trays, eating corn tamales “con crema”, faithfully waiting for the “snow” to stop and the [...]

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I’m reading an article titled, Cosmological Challenges: Are we alone, and Where? The author is Martin Rees, former professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge.

The next frontier for the next fifty years in science, he claims, is to “seek firm evidence for, or against, the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Are we alone in [...]