Comments on: The Singularity is nearer than we might think

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:18:54 +0000

Now I know why I thought the 2000s lack the number of quality sci-fi shows like in the 90s. Come to think of it, near future scifi shows like Viper (a high tech transforming vehicle that fire rockets and changes colour) are not really ‘Science-fiction’ now but only ‘fiction’… and Babylon 5.. set in the middle of 23rd century, is way past the supposed singularity.

I’m still skeptical on the conclusion drawn from the name change of Sci-fi channel, but to me it seems to be a good time to conduct a research on various scifi genres nowadays to confirm if there is such a trend.

By: FrankGW

FrankGW — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:21:39 +0000

Even Oprah Winfrey is having a Show about “Extreme Life Extension”
It’s coming up on Tuesday March 24. The show airs at 4 p.m. on ABC.

“The show is about extreme life extension, including all the latest technologies and new ways that people are extending their lives,” spokesperson Don Halcombe said. “Often people thought that one couldn’t extend one’s life to 120 or 150, but new advances are showing that may indeed be the case.”

Details can be found on SalisburyPost.com in an article titled “Oprah to feature Murdock, Research Campus March 24?.

By: Carmen Tschofen

Carmen Tschofen — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:25:21 +0000

I’m intrigued by this. Certainly, we’ve always used our imaginations daily in understanding things like others’ state of mind, for example (a critical social skill), but the idea that rapid change keeps our imaginations tethered to the present as a coping mechanism has some pretty serious implications.

Wonder if there’s literature on this anywhere…?

By: John Moravec

John Moravec — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:39:24 +0000

It seems to me that we’re trending toward focusing a greater portion of our imagination on interpreting the present (i.e., “what is going on in the world?”) than focusing on how we will design tomorrow. I suspect this started at the end of the Cold War, where we moved from a view of the present that was binary (us vs. them) and easy to understand. From 1989 onward, our views of the present world seem to have become far more diverse and complex, and the rates of social and technological change have increased. I think a lot of people (and institutions) are simply overwhelmed with trying to catch up with understanding the present than imagining the future…

By: Carmen Tschofen

Carmen Tschofen — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:17:37 +0000

So are we hitting an absolute limit to human imagination, or is the lack of rapid (or any) imaginative ability a cultural or social phenomenon? (And then there are those “SciFi-ish” things that are already reality but that are often inadvertently or deliberately unacknowledged…)