With yet another film in the Jurassic Park franchise released this past summer, the ethics of bringing extinct species back to life continues to capture the popular imagination. But as students in my online science fiction class ("Who We Are & What We Dream: Comparative Science Fiction") come to realize, the bridge between science fiction and actual science can be a short one. Earlier this month, Russia announced a new $5.9 million research center in Siberia to study the genetics of extinct Ice Age species native to Siberia, including woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, cave lions, and extinct species of horse, with the explicit goal of restoring some of these animals to the 21st century. siberiantimes.com/science/others/news/investment-sought-for-59-million-cloning-centre-to-bring-back-mammoths-and-other-extinct-species/
0 Comments
One of the students in my online science fiction class ("Who We Are & What We Dream: Comparative Science Fiction") shared this amazingly cool site that tracks cyberattacks in real-time: map.norsecorp.com/#/
This article on human-robot relationships caught my attention because it tied in perfectly with a discussion my online science fiction class ("Who We Are & What We Dream: Comparative Science Fiction") was having in response to one of the short stories we'd read.
Would "relationships with robots would be fake and illusory: perceptual tricks, foisted on us by commercially driven corporations"? Or are we just deluded into thinking "biological tissue is magic" and that "there is little reason to doubt that a robot that is behaviourally and functionally equivalent to a human cannot sustain a meaningful relationship[?] There is, after all, every reason to suspect that we are programmed, by evolution and culture, to develop loving attachments to one another. It might be difficult to reverse-engineer our programming, but this is increasingly true of robots too, particularly when they are programmed with learning rules that help them to develop their own responses to the world." aeon.co/essays/programmed-to-love-is-a-human-robot-relationship-wrong This caught my eye because my online high school lit class ("Who We Are & What We Dream: Comparative Science Fiction") recently finished its discussion of Frankenstein: Arizona State has teamed up with the National Science Foundation to create Frankenstein200, an online game to teach middle schoolers (and the general public) about bioengineering, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, scientific ethics, and robotics, among other topics. frankenstein200.org/
|
Blog sharing news about geography, philosophy, world affairs, and outside-the-box learning
Archives
December 2023
Categories
All
|