Excerpted from DarkReading ‘Stone’s movie also hit on the biggest legal vulnerability threatening our constitutional rights: secret laws being written that avoid the critical checks and balances of the American system of balance of powers. One key source of these secret threats is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court system, which issues secret rulings […]

The point of literature: a search engine for equity I’ve been conducting a rather intense and thoroughgoing review of the principal themes of literature in the last couple of years, at least as it shows up in television and movies.  It seems to me the point of most of our literature is to explore the […]

The recent disclosure by Edward Snowden of some of  the extent of the NSA’s information collection system has drawn unwelcome attention to the scope of governmental disinformation policy. I think a case can be made for the notion that this outrage is an example of society evolving in a healthy direction, away from secrets and […]

As we get closer to creating a true thinking machine, with projects like OpenCog, it seems expedient to re-examine what protections, like Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, we ought to contemplate. What has gone somewhat unnoticed in previous considerations of superintelligences, including gods, is their entirely different motivational context.  Gods were imagined as interbreeding with us, […]

Could life be described as simply as: structures or patterns capable of diverting energy flows from their normal entropy destinations into replications of their patterns (including copying error mutations)? Under this definition we should expect to see life in many more circumstances than ones whose chemistry resembles our own, maybe even as cloud formations in […]